Rupert Brooke and 'The Soldier'[for an unfisnished book on poetical manuscripts]

'Your favourite actress' was the irreverent reception given by his Cambridge friends to the portrait of Rupert Brooke reproduced here, taken in 1913 by the American photographer Sherril Schell. The pose was one Brooke 'himself suggested, his face in profile showing his bare neck and shoulders. For this he stripped to the waist, revealing a torso that recalled the young Hermes'. Brooke thought the photograph rather silly, but added that at least it did not make him 'look like an amateur popular preacher -- as in those others.' More perhaps than any other portrait it emphasises the physical attractiveness of, in Yeats's words, 'the most beautiful young man in England'; of Frances Cornford's 'the young Apollo, golden haired.' It was destined to be the visual focus of the legend that was created around Brooke.

If the portrait was to be the image most associated with the legend of Brooke as the sacrificial soldier-poet, his sonnet 'The Soldier' became its real centre-piece after Dean Inge read it out in St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915, stating that 'the enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism had never found a nobler expression.' Nineteen days later, Rupert Brooke died, aged 27, at 4.46 p.m on St. George's Day (the same day as Shakespeare) on board the French hospital ship the Franconia off Skyros at the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign. He had succombed to septicaemia contracted from a gnat's bite on the left side of his upper lip, a sadly un-hero-like end explained by his well-documented history of poor resistance to infection.

In England, the issue of New Numbers for December 1914 in which the cycle of five war sonnets was first printed sold out and three days after Rupert Brooke's death Winston Churchill published his orotund obituary in The Times, claiming Brooke and the sonnets as the inspiration of the national cause:

'Rupert Brooke is dead...A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in the present war, than any other -- more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watched them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled...During the last few months of his life...the poet-soldier told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country's cause, and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men. The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruellest and the least rewarded of all wars that men have ever fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself...he was all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.'

A welter of similar sentiments followed in other newspapers. Brooke's death was compared to that of Philip Sidney at Zutphen in 1586. His works went on to sell 300,000 copies by 1926; an estimated 700,000 by 1967.

'The Soldier', the last and best-known of the five war sonnets, was initially perhaps called 'Content' and then definitely 'The Recruit', as can be seen in the terrifyingly realistic facsimiles of two drafts of the poem reproduced by the Scolar Press in 1974, a caution to all collectors. To the fair copy illustrated here Brooke evidently added the final title and number after copying out the whole series of sonnets. He had written them mainly between the Antwerp expedition (October 1914) and the departure for the Dardanelles (February 1915) more or less in order, letting them take their own forms like 'developing photographs' as he put it. 'The Soldier' was still being written in the Naval Brigade's camp at Blandford late at night at the end of the Christmas celebrations and after he had got the last of the drunken stokers under his command into their bunks.

The demolition of Rupert Brooke's reputation began soon after his death. The down-to-earth observations of Charles Sorley are seen as the most hard-hitting because he was Brooke's exact contemporary as a poet and himself critical of the war, and because he lost his own life at Loos later the same year:e is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances...He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude

While a charge of self-indulgence is perhaps unavoidable, the degree of sentimentality registered will depend on each reader's threshold. It seems fair to say that the war sonnets have suffered in part from being inflated beyond their achievements by other people for their own ends, from being taken out of the context of Brooke's own life and personality and from being treated anacronistically by many of his critics -- the full horrors of the First World War only became really apparent after his death, and he had himself only experienced one day of war in Antwerp. Even Wilfred Owen at the outset felt a sense of 'new crusade and modern knightliness.' Timothy Rogers rightly concludes that the sonnets 'were poems, not of war, but of preparation for war.' 'The Soldier' has also suffered to some extent from being in context with the other sonnets in the group: its patriotism is less political or jingoistic than theirs, being more personal and an expression of his always exaggerated love of England. Moreover, it shares with parts of 'The Old Vicarage, Granchester' the singular merit of being highly memorable, and like Kipling's 'If' it has entered the national consciousness. Perhaps, therefore, after fifty years of peace we can feel less self-critical about being stirred by the poem, as by military music, because we do not have to confront the reality of war itself. His friends claimed that 'Brooke never glorified war, but celebrated in exultation the discovery of a moral purpose.' He was enough of a realist to know that he was very likely to die.

Brooke's school friend and bibliographer Geoffrey Keynes and Virginia Woolf both commented on his working methods:

...Over the years I saw Brooke many times in the act of composition. He would be sitting in an uncomfortable position on the floor of his room or cross-legged on the lawn at the Old Vicarage, Granchester. A well-known photograph shows him actually seated on a chair beside a table on the lawn, with bare feet extended awkwardly beyond the end of the table. He evidently did not have to be comfortable when in action, and he usually, as I remember, was biting the stump of a lead pencil...(Keynes) ...It seemed natural to turn his poetry over and say nothing about it, save perhaps to remark upon his habit of leaving spaces for unforthcoming words which gave his manuscript the look of a puzzle with a number of pieces missing...(Woolf)

Jacques Raverat was, as usual, more direct: 'Have you seen Rupert's notebooks, with all the first drafts of sonnets with blanks left for the Oh God's?'

On 28 March 1919 a memorial plaque to Rupert Brooke was unveiled at Rugby School, where he had been born and educated. The medallion portrait on it sculpted by Harvard Thomas was based on Schell's profile photograph (which had also been the frontispiece of 1914 and Other Poems). Eric Gill, whom Brooke had greatly admired, cut the lettering below Thomas's portrait, including the text of 'The Soldier'.

Bibliography: The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, introduction by Gavin Ewart, 1987; The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, 1947; Rupert Brooke: Four Poems (facsimiles), foreword and introductions by Geoffrey Keynes, 1974; Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography, 1964; John Lehmann, Rupert Brooke: his Life and his Legend, 1980; The Letters of Rupert Brooke, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, 1968; Robert B. Pearsall, Rupert Brooke: the Man and Poet, 1974; Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection, edited by Timothy Rogers, 1971; Michael Hastings, The Handsomest Young Man in England, 1967; Geoffrey Keynes, The Gates of Memory, 1981; Hugo Williams, 'At the Grave of Rupert Brooke', Freelancing, 1995; Virginia Woolf, 'Rupert Brooke', Books and Portraits, 1977

Handwriting: In drafts, which are often in pencil, Brooke's handwriting tends to be upright, rather than sloping, and less crisply incised on the paper -- he mixes these angles in some manuscripts. It can take a degree of acclimatising before the eye can reconcile the two styles as both being by Brooke, especially when one is roughly written or a draft. Irregular gaps are common between words particularly for punctuation marks which are frequently placed towards or in the middle of those spaces. Letters are often left unjoined to others, particularly in fair copies. Brooke employed varying formations for some letters: d can be upright or curved back, and the second can sometimes look like a D; the letter e is indiscriminately 'Greek' (with the crossbar formed either continuously or after a lift of the pen) or rounded Italic. When writing rapidly words like of and to tend to be linked to the following word and the crossing of t can be so elongated and high as to make the letter appear to be T.