The Complete Poems of Rupert Brooke

So he was certainly a talented writer. However, upon doing some googling, I have discovered that he was an anti-semite and a misogynist amongst other grimace-inducing labels. As much as I want to separate the artist from the art, it definitely put a sour taste in my mouth as I finished reading the collection, so don't think I can give it more than thr This collections includes one of my favourite ever poems, The Soldier, and several other of Brooke's poems which made me sit back and think "wow". As much as I want to separate the artist from the art, it definitely put a sour taste in my mouth as I finished reading the collection, so don't think I can give it more than three stars, purely because he was an arsehole.

Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea? I always thought these lines were written by John Betjeman, well that shows you that I really don't know anything about poetry! I enjoyed the language and style of the poems, but very few have stayed with me now that I've finished.

There's one entitled 'Jealousy' that I liked, mainly for its honesty, bitterness and rye humour.

Brooke's poems are Stands the Church clock at ten to three? Brooke's poems are predominantly romantic - love that promises much and then disappoints. It's not surprising from what I've read about him; a good looking young man, women and men were constantly throwing themselves at him! As the war approaches, the poems alter in tone. At this point, there is one true stand out and it's the poem he's most famous for: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England It's especially poignant as he died during the opening months of WW1.

Apr 30, Ricky rated it really liked it.

These are wonderful poems that cover a wide range of subjects which includes love, war, nature and much more. Brooke is a talented poet and an intelligent thinker, he deserve his status as a true great. Mar 14, ivan rated it really liked it Shelves: Breathless classical poetry that gets darker and more radical toward the end. Rupert Brooke, born of a high English family, likely queer, emotionally destabilized by Virginia Woolf, enlisted in the British navy for Gallipoli but died of a mosquito bite -- there was a lot to inspire him. Feb 05, Angi M rated it liked it Shelves: I like Rupert Brooke mainly for one line in 'the Soldier' that says "in that rich earth a richer dust concealed".

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The spring of these emotions is the natural body, but it sends pulsations far into the spirit. The feeling rises in direct observation, but it is soon aware of the "outlets of the sky. When the process is complete, the thought suggests the picture and is its origin. Then the Great Lover revisits the bottom of the monstrous world, and imaginatively and thoughtfully recreates that strange under-sea, whose glooms and gleams and muds are well known to him as a strong and delighted swimmer; or, at the last, drifts through the dream of a South Sea lagoon, still with a philosophical question in his mouth.

Yet one can hardly speak of "completion. What we have in this volume is not so much a work of art as an artist in his birth trying the wings of genius. The poet loves his new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete,—let the abstract "go pack! But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, in college air? Intellectual primacy showed itself to him in many wandering "loves," fine lover that he was; but in the end he was an intellectual lover, and the magnet seems to have been especially powerful in the ghosts of the men of "wit," Donne , Marvell —erudite lords of language, poets in another world than ours, a less "ample ether," a less "divine air," our fathers thought, but poets of "eternity.

How Platonism fascinates the poets, like a shining bait! Rupert Brooke will have none of it; but at a turn of the verse he is back at it, examining, tasting, refusing. In those alternate drives of the thought in his South Sea idyl clever as tennis play how he slips from phenomenon to idea and reverses, happy with either, it seems, "were t'other dear charmer away.

His muse knew only earthly tongues,—so far as he understood.

Why this persistent cling to mortality,—with its quick-coming cry against death and its heaped anathemas on the transformations of decay? It is the old story once more: The reflective mind of Arnold meditated it,—. Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. He cannot forego his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets. So go, " with unreluctant tread. 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.

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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. At moments weariness set in like a spiritual tide. I associate, too, with such moods, psychologically at least, his visions of the "arrested moment," as in " Dining Room Tea ,"—a sort of trance state—or in the pendant sonnet.

Analogous moods are not infrequent in the great poets. Rupert Brooke seems to have faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfully such moments. But even when the image of life, imaginative or real, falters so, how essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisite body of words like the traditional "rainbow hues of the dying fish! The born man of letters speaks there. So, when his pulse is at its lowest, he cannot forget the beautiful surface of his South Sea idyls or of versified English gardens and lanes.

He cared as much for the expression as for the thing, which is what makes a man of letters. So fixed is this habit that his art, truly, is independent of his bodily state. In his poems of "collapse" as in those of "ecstasy" he seems to me equally master of his mood,—like those poets who are "for all time.

To come, then, to art, which is above personality, what of that? Art is, at most, but the mortal relic of genius; yet it is true of it that, like Ozymandias' statue, "nothing beside remains. He might have grown in variety, richness and significance, in scope and in detail, no doubt; but as an artisan in metrical words and pauses, he was past apprenticeship.

He was still a restless experimenter, but in much he was a master. In the brief stroke of description, which he inherited from his early attachment to the concrete; in the rush of words, especially verbs; in the concatenation of objects, the flow of things en masse through his verse, still with the impulse of "the bright speed" he had at the source; in his theatrical impersonation of abstractions, as in " The Funeral of Youth ," where for once the abstract and the concrete are happily fused;—in all these there are the elements, and in the last there is the perfection, of mastery.

For one thing, he knew how to end. It is with him a dramatic secret. The brief stroke does this work time and time again in his verse, nowhere better than in "at dead Youth's funeral: The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging; but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk.

And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had left his short breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come into the long sweep and open water of great style: Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways he was conspicuously successful in his art.

The first of these—they are all in the larger forms of art—is the dramatic sonnet, by which I do not mean merely a sonnet in dialogue or advancing by simple contrast; but one in which there may be these things, but also there is a tragic reversal or its equivalent. Not to consider it too curiously, take " The Hill.