Most of the admirers of this poet have seen only in his last pieces the singular identity of his spirit with the spirit of his country. And that is so noble a concord that it cannot be missed. For when England plunged into the greatest war of history, she flung off in the act several centuries of her age. Priceless things, slowly and patiently acquired, went overboard as mere impedimenta; but in the relapse, the slipping backward to an earlier time and consequent recovery of youth, with its ardour and passion, its recklessness and generosity and courage, the optimist saw a reward for all that was lost. So with the poetry of Rupert Brooke. Those few last sonnets, as it were the soul of rejuvenated England, seem to the same hopeful eye a complete compensation, not only for the wasted individual life, but for the beauty and significance of the age for which he stood, now irrevocably lost. Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage. Before that renunciation one can only stand with bowed head, realizing perhaps more clearly than the giver did, the splendour of the gift. But he too, this representative of his age, knew the value of the life that he was casting away. It was indeed to him a "red sweet wine," precious for the "work and joy" it promised, and the sacred seed of immortality. It is this, above all, that his poetry signifies: a rich and exuberant life, keenly conscious of itself, and fully aware of the realities by which it is surrounded. Its nature grows from that--sensuous and _spirituelle_, passionate and intellectual, ingenuous and ironic, tragic and gay. Never before--no, not even in Donne, as some one has suggested--was such intensity of feeling coupled with such merciless clarity of sight: mental honesty so absolute, piercing so fierce a flame of ardour.