The Collected Poems of Rupert BrookeBrooke, Rupert
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The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke
Brooke, Rupert
Brooke, Rupert, 1887-1915; English poetry; Poets, English -- 20th century -- Biography
He cannot forego his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets".
He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering
through the night, "alone". So the faith that broke its chrysalis
in the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best",
beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphant
with the spirit still unsubdued. --
"Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet
Death as a friend."
So go, "with unreluctant tread". But in the disillusionment of beauty
and of love there is an older tone. With what bitter savor, with what
grossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elements
in his culture, he spends anger in words! He reacts, he rebels, he storms.
A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall. It is not merely
that beauty and joy and love are transient, now, but in their going
they are corrupted into their opposites, -- ugliness, pain, indifference.
And his anger once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows!
Life, in this volume, is hardly less evident by its ecstasy
than by its collapse. It is a book of youth, sensitive, vigorous, sound;
but it is the fruit of intensity, and bears the traits.
The search for solitude, the relief from crowds, the open door into nature;
the sense of flight and escape; the repeated thought of safety,
the insistent fatigue, the cry for sleep; -- all these bear confession
in their faces. "Flight", "Town and Country", "The Voice", are eloquent
of what they leave untold; and the climax of "Retrospect", --
"And I should sleep, and I should sleep," --
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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