Rupert Brooke

©  Copyright 2001  Richard Brodie


Rupert Brooke has been called the last of the English romantic poets. His most famous poem is 

The Soldier

     If I should die, think only this of me:
     That there's some corner of a foreign field
     That is for ever England. There shall be
     In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
     A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
     Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
     A body of England's, breathing English air,
     Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
     And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
     A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
     Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
     Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
     And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
     In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

He died tragically, at the age of 27 from an illness contracted during a tour of duty in the WWI campaign to free Contantinople from the Turks. He died on a ship anchored in a bay off the Isle of Skyros in the Aegean sea. This is the island where the legendary king Theseus, whose principal exploit was the rescue of Ariadne from a Minotaur, was killed by being thrown over a cliff.

Brooke's coffin was carried by a company of 12 Australian petty officers quite a distance up from the beach to an olive grove, where he was buried, literally in "some corner of a foreign field". A short time later, just two days before his own death at Gallipoli Brooke's fellow officer Dennis Browne wrote the following very moving tribute:

Prior to composing this epitaph, I had not read Rupert's poem, "The Great Lover", which contains the following lines:
 

     My night shall be remembered as a star
     That outshone all the sums of all men's days.
 
 
Coming from Alexandria yesterday, we passed Rupert's island at sunset. The sea and sky in the East were grey and misty; but it stood out in the West, black and immense, with a crimson glowing halo around it. Every colour had come into the sea and sky to do him honour; and it seemed that the island must ever be shining with the glory that we buried there.

  Rupert Brooke Gravesite

  O set my marker in the sylvan stand,
  Under the limbs that calmly weep and sway
  Beside the somnolent Aegean strand,
  Whereunder did my dust mix in with clay
  That hid his bones who menaced Minotaurs.
  Ye too on this white island coast did die;
  Aye, let our fame grow to outshine the stars!
  To Theseus, thou great Grecian king, and I!