RUPERT BROOKE Poet and Soldier

With a portrait—never before published — by Eugene Hutchinson. This was taken in Chicago five months before his departure for the trenches at A ntwerp and one year before his death at the age of twenty-seven—i n the Dardanelles.

THE SOLDIER

Written En Route to the Dardanelles

IF I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever 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.

SONG

OH! Love," they said, "is King of Kings,

And Triumph is his crown.

Earth fades in flame before his wings,

And Sun and Moon bow down."

But that, I knew, would never do;

And Heaven is all too high.

So whenever I meet a Queen, I said,

I will not catch her eye.

"Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said, "The gift of Love is this;

A crown of thorns about thy head,

And vinegar to thy kiss!"

But Tragedy is not for me;

And I'm content to be gay.

So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady I went another way.

And so I never feared to see You wander down the street,

Or come across the fields to me On ordinary feet.

For what they'd never told me of,

And what I never knew;

It was that all the time, my love,

Love would be merely you.

RUPERT BROOKE IN AMERICA

By one who knew him. (R.H.L.)

UPERT BROOKE had acquired in the twenty-seven intense years of his life— a fine sense of irony. The extraordinary demand here for his collected poems these last few weeks would have been amusing to him, in the light of his chilly interviews with certain of our publishers. Recognition and popularity too, in a measure, he had had in England. In the circle of his university he was admired if not idolized for his gifts, his beauty, his friendliness and his charming modesty.

More than once, indeed, he had left England to escape the idolizing atmosphere, to live in Germany or France or Italy, where he might work undisturbed by admiration. But he was not widely known, and only his early death in the war, as a type of England's sacrifice, has extended and made secure his poetic fame.

It is now timely to recall that on Decoration Day, 1913, unheralded and unknown, alone and "rather forlorn," he landed from the Celtic to discover America. He had been elected, just a little while before, to a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, with no obligation to teach for a year; and feeling a desire for rest and a change, he made arrangements with a students' tourist bureau for a tour of "the States" and Canada. This provided him with transportation at reduced rates and with information supposedly helpful to the frugal traveller (Continued on page 102) en gar ion. He was to further the scope of his travels by writing a series of letters to the Westminster Gazette; but the tourist bureau was the "blind chance" (or was it the Comic Muse?) which brought him to stay at the Broadway Central Hotel. His letters from America will be reprinted soon in book form, and if they do not have the lasting value of his brilliant verse, at least they contain keen, amusing and pungent observations on our outward aspects. Two or three quotations will serve.

For permission to reprint the poems on this Page we are indebted to the John Lane Company, the publishers of "The Poems of Rupert Brooke"

SONNET

OH! Death will find me, long before I tire Of watching you; and swing me suddenly Into the shade and loneliness and mire Of the last land! There, waiting patiently,

One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing,

See a slow light across the Stygian tide,

And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,

And tremble. And I shall know that you have died,

And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host, Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam—

(Most individual and bewildering ghost)

And turn, and toss your brown, delightful head Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.

DUST

WHEN the white flame in us is gone.

And we that lost the world's delight Stiffen in darkness, left alone To crumble in our separate night;

When your swift hair is quiet in death,

And through the lips corruption thrust Has stilled the labor of my breath—

When we are dust, when we are dust!—

Not dead, not undesirous yet,

Still sentient, still unsatisfied,

We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit, Around the places where we died,

And dance as dust before the sun,

And light of foot, and unconfined,

Hurry from road to road, and run About the errands of the wind.

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,

Till, beyond thinking, out of view,

One mote of all the dust that's I Shall meet one atom that was you.

Let us go back to the pier for his first impressions. "I landed, rather forlorn, that first morning, on the immense covered wharf where the Customs mysteries were to be celebrated. The place was dominated by a large, dirty, vociferous man, coatless, in a black shirt and black apron. His mouth and jaw were huge; he looked like a caricaturist's Roosevelt. 'Express Company' was written on his forehead; labels of a thousand colors, printed slips, pencils and pieces of string, hung from his pockets and his hands, and were even held behind his ears and in his mouth. I laid my situation and my incompetence before him, and learned where to go and when to go there. Then he flung a vast, dingy arm round my shoulder, and bellowed, 'VVe'll have your baggage right along to your hotel in two hours!' It was a lie, but kindly. That grimy and generous embrace left me startled, but an initiate into Democracy." . . .

THE hotel into which the workings of blind chance

have thrown me is given over to commercial travelers. Its life is theirs, and the few English tourists creep in and out with the shy, bewildered dignity of their race and class. These American commercial travelers are called 'drummers'; drummers in the most endless and pointless and extraordinary of wars. They have the air and appearance of devotees, men set aside, roaming preachers of a jehad whose meaning they have forgotten. They seem to be invariably of the short, dark type. The larger, fair-haired, long-headed men are common in business, but not in 'drumming.' The 'drummer's' eyes have a hard, rapt expression. He is not interested in the romance of the road, like an English commercial traveler; only in its ever changing end. These people are forever sending off and receiving telegrams, messages and cablegrams; they are continually telephoning; stenographers are in waiting to

record their inspirations. In the intervals of activity they relapse into a curious trance, husbanding their vitality for the next crisis. I have watched them with terror and fascination. All day there are numbers of them sitting, immote and vacant, in rows and circles on the hard chairs in the hall. They are never smoking, never reading a paper, never even chewing. The expressions of their faces never change. It is impossible to guess what, or if anything, is in their minds. Hour upon hour they remain. Occasionally one will rise, in obedience to some call or revelation incomprehensible to us, and move out through the door into the clang and confusion of Broadway."

RUPERT Brooke did not much frequent our smart circles. Though sometimes reclaimed by friends from his stuffy surroundings and refreshed by country weekends, he was intent on discovering for himself the essence of America and he liked to be in the thick of crowds, in city streets, shops and theaters, or at Coney Island, rubbing shoulders and studying the active or idle ways of men.

He found that New York excelled in jokes, fish, drinks and children's clothes. He strove conscientiously to find the "typical" American face, but family resemblances are not often recognizable wdthin the family. However, here are his words:

"Any sculptor seeking to figure this Republic in stone, must carve, in future, a young man in shirtsleeves, open-faced, pleasant, and rather vulgar, straw hat on the back of his head, his trousers full and sloppy, his coat over his arm. The motto written beneath it will be, of course, 'This is some country.' The philosophic gazer on such a monument might get some way towards understanding the making of the Panama Canal, that exploit that no European nation could have carried out. What facial type the sculptor would give the youth is harder to determine and very hard to describe. The American race seems to have developed two classes, and only two, the upper-middle and the lower-middle. Their faces are very distinct. The upper-class head is long, often fine about the forehead and eyes, and very cleanly outlined. The eyes have an odd tired pathos in them—mixed with the friendliness that is so admirable— as if of a perpetual, never quite successful effort to understand something.

"The women's faces are more indeterminate, not very feminine; many of them wear those 'invisible' pince-nez which center glitteringly about the bridge of the nose. They get from them a curious air of intelligence. Handsome people of both sexes are very common; beautiful and pretty ones very rare. . . ."

OF the "Great White Way" of our metropolis, he has given a cheerful satire, in the mock-heroic vein, and this is worth quoting at length, if the Westminster Gazette will forgive us for doing so:

"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night. In the evening the lights come out up-town, and the New York of theaters and vaudevilles and restaurants begins to roar and flare. The merciless lights throw a mask of unradiant glare on the human beings in the streets, making each face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue. The chorus of voices becomes shriller. The buildings tower away into obscurity, looking strangely theatrical, because lit from below. And beyond them soars the purple roof of the night. A stranger of another race, loitering here, might cast his eyes up, in a vague wonder what powers, kind or maleficent, controlled or observed this whirlpool. He would find only this unresponsive canopy of black, unpierced even, if the seeker stood near a center of lights, by any star. But while he looks, away up in the sky, out of the gulfs of night, spring two vast fiery tooth-brushes, erect, leaning towards each other, and hanging on to the bristles of them there is a little Devil, little but gigantic, who kicks and wriggles and glares. After a few moments the Devil, baffled by the firmness of the bristles, stops, hangs still, rolls his eyes, moonlarge, and, in a fury of disappointment, goes out, leaving the night blacker. Turning with terrified relief from this exhibition of diabolic impotence, the stranger finds a divine hand writing slowly across the opposite quarter of the heavens its igneous message of warning to the nations, 'Wear Blank's Underwear for Youths and Men-Boys." And close by this message come forth a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear. They box a short round, vanish, reappear for another round, and again disappear. Night after night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and indecisively over New York is not for our knowledge; whether it be Thor and Odin, or Zeus and Kronos, or Michael and Lucifer, or Ormuzd and Ahriman, or Good-as-a-means and Good-as-anend. The ways of our lords were ever riddling and obscure. To the right a celestial bottle, stretching from the horizon to the zenith, appears, is uncorked, and scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have been within. Beyond, a Spanish goddess, some minor deity in the Dionysian Theogony, dances continually, rapt and mysterious, to the music of the spheres, her head in Cassiopeia and her twinkling feet among the Pleiades. And near her, Orion, archer no longer, releases himself from his strange posture to drive a sidereal golf-ball out of sight through the meadows of Paradise; then poses, addresses, and drives again.

(Continued on page 104)

(Continued from page 102)

'O Nineveh, are these thy gods,

Thine also, mighty Nineveh?'

WHY this theophany, or how the gods have got out to perform their various 'stunts' on theflammantia Moenia mundi, is not asked by their incurious devotees. Through Broadway the dingily glittering tide spreads itself over the sands of 'amusement.' Theaters and movies are aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the Elevated clangs and curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their obscure challenges to one another, 'I should worry!' or 'She's some Daisy!' or 'Good-night, Nurse!' In houses off the streets around, children are being bom, lovers are kissing, people are dying. Above, in the midst of those coruscating divinities, sits one older and greater than any. Most colossal of all, it flashes momently out, a woman's head, all flame against the darkness. It is beautiful, passionless; in its simplicity and conventional representation queerly like an archaic Greek or early Egyptian figure. Queen of the night behind, and of the gods around, and of the city below—here, if at all, you think, may one find the answer to the riddle. Her ostensible message, burning in the firmanent beside her, is that we should buy pepsin chewing gum. But there is more, not to be given in words, ineffable. Suddenly, when she has surveyed mankind, she closes her left eye. Three times she winks, and then vanishes. No ordinary winks these, but portentous, terrifyingly steady, obliterating a great tract of the sky. Hour by hour she does this, night by night, year by year. That enigmatic obscuration of light, that answer that there is no answer, is, perhaps, the first thing in this world that a child bom near here will see, and the last that a dying man will have to take for a message to the curious dead. She is immortal. Men have worshipped her as Isis and as Ashtaroth, as Venus, as Cybele, Mother of the Gods, and as Maiy. There is a statue of her by the steps of the British Museum. Here, above the fantastic civilization she observes, she has no name. She is older than the skyscrapers amongst which she sits; and one, certainly, of her eyelids is a trifle weary. And the only answer to our cries, the only comment upon our cities, is that divine stare, the wink; once, twice, thrice. And then darkness."

BROOKE took a special interest in the theater. Our vaudeville "sketch" had for him the possibilities of a real "art form" and he studied it here and there with an eye to adapting it to his own uses. The modern drift of the drama, the ideas of Gordon Craig and of Granville Barker, the effects of staging, scenery, costume and ballet, and the Little Theater movement, all attracted him, for he wanted to write plays. Everything he saw was grist to his mill, and it was a strenuous month of June for him, seeing and pondering. For change, on some late afternoons he played tennis on the courts of the Richmond County Country Club. On the tennis lawn his astonishing physical beauty showed at its best; not even Wilding's quick skill and panther grace were more splendid to watch than Rupert Brooke, with his face flushed and radiant, his long golden brown hair tossed back, playing with the expressive, unwearied joy of a child.

He left New York early in July, visited Montreal, Quebec, which had "the radiance and repose of an immortal," and Ottawa, where he had lunch with Laurier: and Winnepeg, where he spent some weeks on a nearby ranch. He continued on to Vancouver, and in September came down to San Francisco.

In October he took a steamer to Honolulu, rode with delight in the surf and ate pineapples; and voyaged on to Tahiti, where for some time he lived with a native chief while waiting for funds to arrive. Here he foundgreat content, and wrote several sonnets, two idyls of the South Seas and the "Great Lover," which are among his finest poems. He went on to the Fijis and New Zealand, returning to San Francisco in the Spring of 19x4. On his way East, he visited the Grand Canyon, Chicago and Washington, Boston, Providence and New Haven, and concluded with ten days in New York. On the twenty-ninth of May he sailed for England.

THE rest of his career is now well known. He had hardly settled himself in England before the war broke out. He enlisted as a sub-lieutenant in the Naval Reserve, was sent to Antwerp in September, returned safely and completed his training, and on February 28, 1915, sailed with the Dardanelles expedition. Before the field of battle was reached, in which so many of his division have since fallen, he had a sunstroke from which he seemed to recover. But he soon afterwards developed blood-poisoning, and died on a French hospital ship on April twenty-third. He was buried that night, by his fellow officers, on the Greek Island of Scyros, in an olive grove, at a spot which he had admired only a few days before.