Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, and Homer

I have blogged separately about Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell. They were the earliest fatalities of all the War's significant poets, and despite the immense popularity of their work for many decades, in recent times their reputations have suffered because they discomfort us with truths about war which we would rather not acknowledge. Brooke, in particular, has become a byword for naivety, his example counterblasted by Owen's and Sassoon's bitter voices of experience. If Brooke had lived longer, the argument goes, he would have learnt better. The recent anthologist who condemns Brooke's 'life-diminishing ideas' and 'sick philosophy' articulates opinions which are regularly heard in schoolrooms and beyond.

Far from being a foolish innocent, Brooke in 1914 knew more about war than almost any of his contemporaries. Granted a commission in the Royal Naval Division---a new amphibious unit of Winston Churchill's devising---he had been helpless at the siege and fall of Antwerp as what he later called 'one of the greatest crimes in history' played out: 'Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows and hand-carts and perambulators and wagons... the old men mostly weeping, the women with hard drawn faces... That's what Belgium is now: the country where three civilians have been killed to every one soldier.' Brooke understood the  nature of modern conflict, foreseeing the 'incessant mechanical slaughter'. Nevertheless, appalling as it was, the sacrifice must be made, not only to protect England from a similar fate, but for compelling humanitarian reasons: 'I've seen the half million refugees in the night'.

Back in England, Brooke wrote the five sonnets of '1914' as a 'rallying cry' to a nation which didn't yet realise what 'sacrifices --- active or passive' would be required of its citizens. The Dean of St Paul's read the last of these ('The Soldier') from the pulpit on Easter Sunday, 4 April 1915. Less than three weeks later, on St. George's Day, Brooke was dead, having succumbed to septicaemia following a mosquito bite. Winston Churchill, in his obituary for Brooke published on 26 April, celebrated a man who 'was all that one could wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable'. The apotheosis was complete: tens of thousands of copies of Brooke's poetry were sold every year until well into the 1960s, and every subsequent soldier-poet was obliged to wrestle with Brooke's legacy.

The first to do so was Julian Grenfell. Grenfell was Eton and Oxford, Brooke Rugby and Cambridge; Grenfell was a hearty in extremis (boxing, hunting), Brooke an aesthete. Yet the two men had friends in common, such as Patrick Shaw Stewart, and Grenfell would soon have known Brooke's fate. On 29 April 1915, six days after Brooke's death, Grenfell wrote his most famous poem, 'Into Battle'. Its opening stanza makes extraordinary claims:

The naked earth is warm with spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's kiss glorying,
And quivers in the loving breeze;
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.

What starts like a gorgeous invocation of spring's renewal becomes suddenly strange and disturbing. Readers carried along by rhyme and anaphora ('And... And... And... And... And...') will find themselves assenting to statements which are, at best, controversial: 'And he is dead who will not fight; / And who dies fighting has increase.' Elizabeth Vandiver, the poem's most perceptive critic, points out that Grenfell's debt is not to Christian but to classical tradition, especially to Homer's Iliad with its belief that the reputational glory gained through a brave death in battle provides 'increase'. As a demonstration, Vandiver quotes Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus in Iliad 12: 'My dear friend, if the two of us could flee this war and be forever ageless and immortal, I would not fight on among the foremost warriors nor would I send you into the battle that brings a man glory. But as it is, since thousands of death spirits crowd upon us, which no mortal can flee nor ward off, let us go; either we will yield glory to another, or someone will yield it to us.'

Without challenging Vandiver's belief in the poem's Homeric perspective, it is possible to see that, in the days after Brooke's death, Grenfell was also influenced by something closer to hand: Brooke's '1914'. The line 'And he is dead who will not fight' --- a concise expression of the paradox that we are only truly alive when we dare to risk our lives --- comes close to Brooke's opening sonnet, 'Peace', with its dismissal of those who will not fight as 'sick hearts that honour could not move, / And half-men'. As for Sarpedon's speech, it is mediated through the octave of Brooke's third sonnet, 'The Dead':

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
      There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
      But, dying, had 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.

Sarpedon tells Glaucus that they may as well sacrifice themselves, as one day they will die anyway; if they could achieve immortality by fleeing the battle, they should do so. Brooke makes the sacrifice of the War's early victims more complete. These men outdo even Homeric heroes. In Grenfell's terms, they 'ha[ve] increase', being 'rich'. At the same time, they (unlike Sarpedon) have been prepared to sacrifice their 'immortality'; that is, they give those never-to-be-conceived 'sons' when they give themselves. This is the ultimate sacrifice, all the richer for losing far more than mere life.

Harry Ricketts: Strange Meetings

Strange Meetings, by Harry Ricketts, was part of my holiday reading this summer. My expectations were low, the reviews having been lukewarm. Such praise as the book attracted had been hedged with caveats and cavils. And I hadn't yet seen the Friends of the Dymock Poets Newsletter which was awaiting my return to England: in a long article, Lynn Parker was so perplexed by this 'ingenious but infuriating book' that she wondered 'how it came to be commissioned'.

It is possible to acknowledge the justice of the criticisms while still celebrating the book's achievement. Admittedly, some of the selections and omissions seem bizarre. A study which is structured around meetings between war poets ought not to devote a chapter to imaginary conversations between Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; the occlusion of the Dymock Poets---even to the point of claiming (wrongly) that the Frosts and Thomases had 'holidayed' together in the 'West Midlands'---is a crude strategy to hide distracting stories from view; there is virtually no analysis of poetry, and what little that survives is untrustworthy (for example, Ricketts argues that the 'enemy soldier' of Owen's 'Strange Meeting' had not only been killed by the speaker, but had 'also killed him'); perhaps at the publisher's insistence, a single woman poet (Vera Brittain) has been accommodated, although she breaks all the book's principles of focusing exclusively on soldier poets, and is barely a poet at all; the canard that Gurney was homosexual, based on nothing more than a horrible misreading of 'To His Love', is cited uncritically; photographs are included which have no bearing on the book's subject; poets who were not part of prestigious literary networks receive less attention than they deserve. And so on.

Yet in one respect, reviewers have seemed disingenuous. Several have claimed that the book merely repackages familiar stories. Either those reviewers are more knowledgeable than me, or they are bluffing. Some relationships, especially between Sassoon and Owen, seem like roads well trodden, but many others (such as Nichols and Sassoon, or Thomas and Brooke) are insufficiently known or studied. Ricketts writes refreshingly about all his subjects, but the polish of his prose should not disguise his thorough research. This may not be a book for an academic market, but it has things to teach all its readers.

The heroes of Ricketts' study are Brooke and Sassoon. They loom large, partly because they knew more poets than the others, and partly (I suspect) because Ricketts values their work so highly. (A third and less predictable hero is Robert Nichols, whose Ardours and Endurances, now entirely forgotten, was 'the poetic hit' of 1917.) Brooke appears as a force of nature: Ricketts quotes Virginia Woolf's account of the skinny-dipping poet who dives into a pool at Grantchester and surfaces with 'an instant erection'. No study of First World War poetry makes sense without Brooke, whose influence on his successors was incalculable. Loved or loathed, his five war sonnets could not be escaped: what Ricketts calls Ivor Gurney's 'complicated mixture of tribute and riposte' was repeated in the works of almost all the War's significant poets.

This fact points towards the most valuable aspect of Ricketts' work. He illustrates, entertainingly and sensitively, the extraordinary extent to which the war poets were reading each other, virtually from the start. Their personal relationships are merely props for the more important and intimate relationship between their works. So Ricketts is right, for example, to devote a chapter to the 'strange meeting' between Brooke and Gurney, even though the two men never actually met; Gurney's encounter with Brooke's poetry inspired some of his finest work. Biographies matter because they help us to appreciate the profound indebtedness even of such astonishing originality as Gurney's.

Rupert Brooke: 'Peace'

Away on a research trip, I missed Rupert Brooke's birthday on 3 August, so I offer belatedly his sonnet, 'Peace', by way of recompense. At his best, Brooke was a superb poet, despite the common travesty of his work as foolishly innocent. This was a man who, after all, had fought in the defeat at Antwerp, and witnessed the devastating effects on the civilian population. His sense of duty was born out of experience of suffering and of watching others suffer, not out of ignorance.

Brooke's five sonnets titled '1914', beginning with 'Peace' and ending with 'The Soldier', are acts of persuasion and explication, and as such, their first audience is Brooke himself. More powerfully than any of his fellow soldier-poets, Brooke accounts for his decision to enlist. Compare, on a similar theme, Edward Thomas's revealingly muddled 'This is no case of petty right or wrong', or Wilfred Owen's grand (and nonsensical) self-portrayal as a 'conscientious objector with a very seared conscience'. Brooke's own verse is also marred by rhetorical afflatus, but we hear its faults clearly because we are unwilling to share its assumptions. The vast majority of his contemporaries had no such problem. Brooke's poems were far more popular among soldiers, throughout the war and for decades afterwards, than were those of dissenters like Owen and Sassoon.

Brooke wrote 'Peace' in late 1914 after the evacuation of Antwerp.

Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
  Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
  And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
  Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
    Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
  But only agony, and that has ending;
    And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Richard Nixon on the Moon

The worst poetic allusion of all time? A newly released document reveals how Nixon planned to address the American nation in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin got stranded on the moon. Nixon's speech would have ended with a rewriting of Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier': 'For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.'