Georgian Poetry

By Keith Hale

* A compilation of the Georgian Poetry anthologies published by Edward Marsh from 1911-22.
* Edited and with a new introduction by Keith Hale
*The Georgians in their day were acclaimed as bold, fresh, and realistic in their use of language. D.H. Lawrence, a contributor to the anthologies, said the first collection was “like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams." Lawrence reviewed the first anthology in John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm, proclaiming: “I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. [...] I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in the Anthology of Georgian Poetry.” (Please note that this volume has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of Georgia or the country of Georgia.)

Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Watersgreen House
• Release date: Nov 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311150820

Keith Hale

Keith Hale grew up in central Arkansas and Waco, Texas. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Following a five-year career as a journalist in Austin, Amsterdam, and Little Rock, Hale earned a Ph.D. in literature from Purdue and took a position teaching British and Philippine literature at the University of Guam. Hale writes both fiction and scholarly works including his groundbreaking novel Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada (Cody), first published in the Netherlands, and Friends and Apostles, his edition of Rupert Brooke's letters published by Yale University Press, London.

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Georgian Poetry

A Compilation of Georgian Poetry 1911-22

Poems by D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon,

Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, & others

Originally compiled in five volumes

By Edward Marsh

Here presented in one volume

With an introduction by editor Keith Hale

© 2014 Keith Hale

Watersgreen House

All rights reserved.

Cover art: Henry Scott Tuke, A Cadet on Newporth Beach, near Falmouth,

with Another Boy in the Sea

BISAC: Poetry / English

BISAC: Poetry / LGBT

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Purchase only authorized editions.

Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative.

Watersgreen House, Publishers.

International copyright secured.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Keith Hale: Rupert Brooke and The Georgians

Georgian Poetry 1911-12

Prefatory Note by Edward Marsh

Lascelles Abercrombie: The Sale of Saint Thomas

Gordon Bottomley: The End of the World, Babel: The Gate of God

Rupert Brooke: The Old Vicarage, Grantchester; Dust; The Fish; Town and Country; Dining Room Tea

Gilbert K. Chesterton: The Song of Elf

William H. Davies: The Child and the Mariner, Days too Short, In May, The Heap of Rags, The Kingfisher

Walter de la Mare: Arabia, The Sleeper, Winter Dusk, Miss Loo, The Listeners

John Drinkwater: The Fires of God

James Elroy Flecker: Joseph and Mary, The Queen’s Song

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: The Hare, Geraniums, Devil’s Edge

D.H. Lawrence: The Snapdragon

John Masefield: Biography

Harold Monro: Child of Dawn, Lake Leman

T. Surge Moore: A Sicilian Idyll (first part)

Ronald Ross: Hesperus

Edmund Beale Sargant: The Cuckoo Wood

James Stephens: In the Poppy Field, In the Cool of the Evening, The Lonely God

Robert Calverley Trevelyan: Dirge

Georgian Poetry 1913-15

Prefatory Note by Edward Marsh

Gordon Bottomley: King Lear’s Wife

Rupert Brooke: Tiare Tahiti, The Great Lover, Beauty and Beauty, Heaven, Clouds, Sonnet, The Soldier

William H. Davies: Thunderstorms, The Mind’s Liberty, The Moon, When on a Summer’s Morn, A Great Time, The Hawk, Sweet Stay-at-Home, A Fleeting Passion, The Bird of Paradise

Walter de la Mare: Music, Wanderers, Melmillo, Alexander, The Mocking Fairy, Full Moon, Off the Ground

John Drinkwater: A Town Window, Of Greatham, The Carver in Stone

James Elroy Flecker: The Old Ships, A Fragment, Santorin, Yasmin, Gates of Damascus, The Dying Patriot

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: The Gorse, Hoops, The Going

Ralph Hodgson: The Bull, The Song of Honour

D.H. Lawrence: Service of all the Dead, Meeting among the Mountains, Cruelty and Love

Francis Ledwidge: The Wife of Llew, A Rainy Day in April, The Lost Ones

John Masefield: The Wanderer

Harold Monro: Milk for the Cat, Overheard on a Saltmarsh, Children of Love

James Stephens: The Rivals, The Goatpaths, The Snare, In Woods and Meadows, Deirdre

Lascelles Abercrombie: The End of the World

Georgian Poetry 1916-17

Prefatory Note by Edward Marsh

W.J. Turner: Romance, Ecstasy, Magic, The Hunter, The Sky-sent Death, The Caves of Auvergne

James Stephens: The Fifteen Acres, Check, Westland Row, The Turn of the Road, A Visit from Abroad

J.C. Squire: A House, To a Bull-dog, The Lily of Malud

Siegfried Sassoon: A Letter Home, The Kiss, The Dragon and the Undying, To Victory, ‘They’, ‘In the Pink’, Haunted, The Death Bed

I. Rosenberg: ‘Ah, Koelue…’

Robert Nichols: To -----, The Assault, Fulfilment, The Philosopher’s Oration, The Naiads’ Music, The Prophetic Bard’s Oration, The Tower

Harold Monro: Two Poems, Every Thing, Solitude, Week-End, The Bird at Dawn

John Masefield: Seven Poems

Ralph Hodgson: The Gipsy Girl, The Bells of Heaven, Babylon

Robert Graves: It’s a Queer Time, David and Goliath, A Pinch of Salt, Star Talk, In the Wilderness, The Boy in Church, The Lady Visitor, Not Dead

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Rupert Brooke, Tenants, For G., Sea-Change, Battle, The Return, The Dancers, Hit, Lament

John Freeman: Music Comes, November Skies, Discovery, ‘It was the Lovely Moon’, Stone Trees, The Pigeons, Happy is England Now

John Drinkwater: May Garden, The Midlands, The Cotswold Farmers, In Woods and Meadows, Reciprocity, Birthright, Olton Pools

Walter de la Mare: The Scribe, The Romonstrance, The Ghost, The Fool rings his Bells

William H. Davies: The White Cascade, Easter, Rapture, Cowslips and Larks

Gordon Bottomley: Atlantis; New Year’s Eve, 1913; In Memoriam, A.M.W

Maurice Baring: In Memoriam, A.H.

Herbert Asquith: The Volunteer

Georgian Poetry 1918-19

Prefatory Note by Edward Marsh

Lascelles Abercrombie: Witchcraft: New Style

Gordon Bottomley: Littleholme

Francis Brett Young: Invocation, Prothalamion, February, Lochanilaun, Lettermore, Song, The Leaning Elm

William H. Davies: Lovely Dames; When Yon Full Moon; On Hearing Mrs. Woodhouse Play the Harpsichord; Birds; Oh, Sweet Content!; A Child’s Pet; England; The Bell

Walter de la Mare: The Sunken Garden, Moonlight, The Tryst, The Linnet, The Veil, The Three Strangers, The Old Men, Fare Well

John Drinkwater: Deer, Moonlit Apples, Southampton Bells, Chorus, Habitation, Passage

John Freeman: O Muse Divine, The Wakers, The Body, Ten O’clock No More, The Fugitive, The Alde, Nearness, Night and Night, The Herd

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Wings, The Parrots, The Cakewalk; Driftwood; Quiet; Reveille

Robert Graves: A Ballad of Nursery Rhyme, A Frosty Night, True Johnny, The Voice of Beauty Drowned, Rocky Acres

D.H. Lawrence: Seven Seals

Harold Monro: Gravity, Goldfish, Dog, The Nightingale Near the House, Many Carrying Bale

Thomas Moult: For Bessie in the Garden, ‘Truly he hath a Sweet Bed’, Lovers’ Lane

Robert Nichols: The Sprig of Lime, Seventeen, The Stranger, ‘O Nightingale my Heart’, The Pilgrim

J.D.C. Fellow: The Temple

Siegfried Sassoon: Sick Leave, Banishment, Repression of War Experience, Does it Matter, Concert Party, Songbooks of the War, The Portrait, Thrushes, Everyone Sang

Edward Shanks: A Night-Piece, In Absence, The Glow-worm, The Cataclysm, A Hollow Elm, Fête Galante, Song

Fredegond Shove: A Dream in Early Spring, The World, The New Ghost, A Man Dreams that he is the Creator

J.C. Squire: Rivers, Epitaph in Old Mode, Sonnet, The Birds

W.J. Turner: Silence, Kent in War, Talking with Soldiers, Song, The Princess, Peace, Death

Georgian Poetry 1920-22

Prefatory Note by Edward Marsh

Lascelles Abercrombie: Ryton Firs

Martin Armstrong: The Buzzards, Honey Harvest, Miss Thompson Goes Shopping

Edmund Blunden: The Poor Man’s Pig, Almswomen, Perch-fishing, The Giant Puffball, The Child’s Grave, April Byeway

William H. Davies: The Captive Lion, A Bird’s Anger, The Villain, Love’s Caution, Wasted Hours, The Truth

Walter de la Mare: The Moth, Sotto Voce, Sephina, Titmouse, Suppose, The Corner Stone

John Drinkwater: Persuasion

John Freeman: I Will Ask, The Evening Sky, The Caves, Moon-Bathers, In Those Old Days, Caterpillars, Change

Wilfrid Gibson: Fire, Barbara Fell, Philip and Phoebe Ware, By the Weir, Worlds

Robert Graves: Lost Love, Morning Phoenix, A Lover Since Childhood, Sullen Moods, The Pier-Glass, The Troll’s Nosegay, Fox’s Dingle, The General Elliott, The Patchwork Bonnet

Richard Hughes: The Singing Furies; Moonstruck; Vagrancy; Poets, Painters, Puddings

William Kerr: In Memoriam D.O.M., Past and Present, The Audit, The Apple Tree, Her New Year Posy, Counting Sheep, The Trees at Night, The Dead

D.H. Lawrence: Snake

Harold Monro: Thistledown, Real Property, Unknown Country

Robert Nichols: Night Rhapsody, November

J.D.C. Fellow: After London, On a Friend who died suddenly upon the Seashore, Tenebrae, When All is Said

Frank Prewett: To my Mother in Canada, Voices of Women, The Somme Valley, Burial Stones, Snow-Buntings, The Kelso Road, Baldon Lane, Come Girl and Embrace

Peter Quennell: Procne, A Man to a Sunflower, Perception, Pursuit

V. Sackville-West: A Saxon Song, Mariana in the North, Full Moon, Sailing Ships, Trio, Bitterness, Evening

Edward Shanks: The Rock Pool, The Glade, Memory, Woman’s Song, The Wind, A Lonely Place

J.C. Squire: Elegy, Meditation in Lamplight, Late Snow

Francis Brett Young: Seascape, Scirocco, The Quails, Song at Santa Cruz

Rupert Brooke and The Georgians

by Keith Hale

Open practically any anthology of modern British literature and you will likely find Rupert Brooke listed among the war poets, often represented by one poem, The Soldier, which is often used as a sort of foil with which to compare the more serious war poets, Owen and Sassoon. Certainly, the war poems of Owen and Sassoon are better—considerably better--than The Soldier, but just as certainly, by being included as a war poet and being represented by that poem, Brooke is being miscast and misrepresented. Brooke was regarded by his contemporary poets as a metaphysical poet, he was regarded by the public as a Georgian poet, he exhibited many of the characteristics of an Edwardian poet, and yes, during the war because of five miserable poems, he was regarded as something of a war poet. Unlike Owen, however, the body of his work did not deal with war, nor were his best poems written during the war. Brooke properly should be classified as a Georgian, and the anthologies that now ignore Georgianism--moving from the Edwardians to the war as if nothing happened in between--should correct both mistakes by including a section on Georgianism, even if it is represented by only the one poet, Brooke.

Rupert Brooke was the face of Georgian literature. It was through the introductions of his good friend Edward Marsh, the editor of the Georgian anthologies, that Brooke became acquainted with other young poets serious about being part of a new movement in literature. And it was largely due to Marsh’s devotion to him that he came to be a leading figure in what he and Marsh decided to call the Georgians. Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary and a patron of the arts, was in love with Brooke, as one clearly can see when reading Marsh’s biography of the poet. Marsh’s decision to compile and edit the Georgian poetry anthologies was largely due to his wish to further Brooke’s reputation.

To some extent, the decision of modern anthology editors to exclude Georgianism can be understood. The Georgians were an ill-defined group, with youth, energy, and a dedication to the new apparently the only qualifications for membership. The poets were too diverse to share many distinguishing characteristics, and it is probably permissible to say that Georgianism was never so much a movement as a label used to draw attention to a number of talented and semi-talented young English poets writing during the same period. However, despite their lack of cohesion, the Georgians did, in fact, represent something new when the movement first coalesced, and it is unfortunate that they have come to be thought of by some as nostalgic and irrelevant, not unlike the Edwardian poets who preceded them.

From its inception, the Georgian movement was in danger of being eclipsed by the far more iconoclastic Imagist/Vorticist movement. But the eclipse was delayed until after World War I, when attention quickly shifted from the Georgians to modern poets such as Pound and Eliot. Soon, much abuse was being heaped upon the Georgians, and by the 1920’s they were being called week-end poets. Among those critics especially hard on them was Edith Sitwell, who described the Georgians as a school of poets, rather loosely held together by their sub-Wordsworthian ideals. To these men rhetoric and formalism were abhorrent, partly, no doubt, because to manage either quality in verse, the writer must have a certain gift of poetry (qtd. in Ross 174). C. Day Lewis dismissed the Georgians as a sadly pedestrian rabble and Stephen Spender said his generation was not attracted to the Georgians because their writings did not seem to touch our lives at any point (Banerjee 8). This was clearly the majority opinion of Spender’s generation, and it is probably the majority critical opinion even now. But if one evaluates Georgianism in its historical context, one comes to realize that the movement was far from pedestrian, and that it touched many lives.

Although the reaction against Georgianism was so strong that many people came to believe that poets such as Sassoon and Owen were writing in opposition to Georgians like Brooke, this is not true. Robert Ross notes that from 1912 to1915, Georgianism was synonymous with realism (125); therefore, it is not surprising that the principal war poets allied themselves not with the new avant-garde of Eliot and Pound and Imagism, but with the Georgians (Hynes 202). Bernard Bergonzi says, The Georgian poets know everything there is to know about war, and they come back and report it to us as an unspeakable horror, maiming and paralysing the very soul of man (40). Wilfred Owen, who died before he could properly be acknowledged as a Georgian, nevertheless proudly associated himself with the movement. He wrote to his mother after meeting Sassoon, whose work had appeared in Marsh’s anthologies, I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet’s poet (Owen 521).

Samuel Hynes believes there was a war taking place in England prior to the war: "It was partly an art-war, and some of its weapons were works of art; but it was more than that. It was a war declared by a violently adversarial avant-garde against all English institutions and traditions (8). In poetry, the leading figures in this war against established traditions--and especially those traditions associated with the Victorians--were the Georgians, most of whom were young, idealistic, dedicated Socialists (Ross 12). Marsh, of course, was not a Socialist, but Brooke was, and so were many of the other Georgian poets. Bergonzi says, It has been customary to regard [the Georgians] as no more than the fag-end of late-Victorian romanticism, a poetic nadir before the advent of the triumphant modernists, Eliot and Pound" (38). He goes on, however, to note that in C. K. Stead’s The New Poetic, Stead argues that no matter how remote and old-fashioned the Georgians may seem now, at the time they regarded themselves, and were regarded, as somewhat revolutionary. Their comparative bluntness of language, and liking for ‘ordinary’, unpretentious subjects, was not to everyone’s taste (38). Marsh’s introductory note to the first anthology was certainly bold, postulating that the Georgian period might take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past. Robert Ross says Marsh was expressing a conviction which, in his time and place, was being subscribed to on every side (4). Julian Symons says the Georgians in their day were acclaimed as bold, fresh and realistic in their use of language and notes that D. H. Lawrence, a contributor to the anthologies, said the first collection was like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams (17). Lawrence reviewed the first anthology in John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm, proclaiming: I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. [...] I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in the Anthology of Georgian Poetry. (xx)

The exuberance and rebellious spirit that marked the beginning stages of Georgianism was, unfortunately, short-lived. The taming of the Georgians had everything to do with the fact that Marsh was himself hardly a radical, nor was he--being employed by Winston Churchill--in a position to be. Julian Symons notes that although Marsh published Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg in his third anthology, he avoided their sharper and fiercer poems because Marsh’s literary tastes were those of an entirely conventional man, well-read and intelligent but intellectually hide-bound and emotionally timid (19-20). The beginning of the end for the Georgian movement can best be placed in 1917 with Marsh’s decision to include in the third anthology a poem by J. C. Squire, the self-appointed defender of the Right (Ross 184). Robert Ross says, Perhaps no single action of Marsh so completely alienated most of the young poets of the postwar era as [Marsh’s] inclusion of the poets of ‘the Squirearchy’ (185). Marsh eventually angered Lawrence, as well, who accused him of being a bit of a policeman in poetry (Ross 90).

Ironically, the end of the movement from the poets’ perspective coincided with the height of the Georgians’ popularity among the English public. Despite the critical approval for the first anthology, the public did not take much notice of the Georgians until around 1916. Ross says the sudden interest occurred, in fact, largely as a result of the emotional impact upon the British public of the death of Rupert Brooke in the Aegean (14). Still, it was the early volumes containing Brooke’s work that the public wanted to buy, and the later Georgian anthologies were poorly received by both the critics and the public alike.

For most Englishmen, Georgian poetry had become synonymous with the name Rupert Brooke. Naturally, when he died Brooke considered himself a Georgian poet and had no idea he would come to be remembered as a war poet. Too, Brooke unquestionably would have kept his reputation as a Georgian rather than a war poet if he had not written the five war sonnets for which he is now famous or infamous, depending on the critic. A close reading of even these poems, however, reveals that the poet is writing more about selfish interests including a wish to die rather than about patriotism and heroic sacrifice, the themes often assigned to the poems.

Brooke’s death-wish had been with him for some time. We find it in his letters from Rugby days, though at that time it was probably more an affectation of his devotion to the Decadents than any serious desire to end his life. But a portentous ennui is evident at least as early as his twentieth birthday, when he wrote to his friend, the poet St. John Lucas-Lucas, I am now in the depths of despondency because of my age. I am filled with a hysterical despair to think of fifty dull years more (Brooke, Letters 98).

This death-wish became more pronounced in Brooke’s later years, probably due to his despair at the thought of growing old along with an increasing self-loathing that is evident in his letters. He came to believe that he would never again be happy. Even when first arriving in America, he immediately sent a note to Cathleen Nesbitt saying he knew he was going to be miserable and I want to die (31 May 1913). He wrote the same year: A stray bullet or the cholera [might be] the best solution all around.

Arthur Waugh says Brooke was obsessed by melancholy. Fired by that love of English life and English scenery which is the hall-mark of the public school and University man, bubbling over with delight in life and love and sweet companionship, he could nevertheless rarely escape, even for an hour, from the depressing conviction of the transient quality of all beauty and all human enjoyment, even indeed of love itself (25-26).

These obsessions were not only the hallmarks of the public school and University man, they were the representative hallmarks of Georgian poetry. Brooke’s pre-war state of mind explains why the tone of his war sonnets is not patriotic zeal for England but rather a zest for an early death, war as a cure for ennui. The war gave Brooke the perfect excuse to die. He once told James Strachey, jokingly, it appears, and in answer to a questionnaire from James’ brother Lytton, that he favored war at any cost because It kills off the unnecessary (Brooke, Friends 23). He likely had been thinking of himself as unnecessary for several years, at least since leaving Cambridge and possibly since leaving Rugby. The death-wish can also be seen as a lingering effect of Brooke’s fascination with the Decadents, which he never entirely outgrew, for, as Dominic Hibberd points out, death was strangely attractive [to the Decadents] as the most intense of all experiences, and martyrdom was a subject of obsessive interest (32). According to Hibberd, Rupert Brooke was true to his antecedents as a young Decadent and Socialist when he greeted the war as a glorious chance not only for martyrdom but also for radical social change" (55).

In letters written while he was preparing for war, Brooke hinted that his reason for wanting to go was his wish to die. He wrote to Katherine Cox, I’ve only one remedy for anything. I’m afraid you’ll guess it (10 Jan. 1915). He obviously meant enlistment or death or both. He remarked that some men of England apparently did not want to die, and this I cannot understand, and that large numbers of male people don’t want to die; which is odd (Brooke, Letters 637). He wrote to Andrew Gow, My brother & Frank Birch are each signing a similar document and want to die with me (24 Aug. 1914). After enlisting, he wrote to John Drinkwater, I’d not be able to exist, for torment, if I weren’t doing it. Not a bad place and time to die, Belgium, 1915? [...] Come and die. It’ll be great fun (Jan. 1915), which shows his immature attitude toward the matter with its Peter Pan reference (Peter Pan was Brooke’s favorite play; he saw it repeatedly in London before the war) and also reminds one of Jenny Wren exhorting Riah to Come up and be Dead in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, or even of the melancholy retainer’s imagined invitation to Come down and be poisoned, ye unhappy children of men, from the same book.

In her posthumous review of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke in Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe maintained that Brooke was in love with death long before the war came; his poems are full of this hunger and desire for death as the consummation and preserver of beauty [...] Brooke ran toward death as toward the consummation which life had not given, perhaps could not have given to one of his temperament (263).

There was a second reason Brooke wished to enlist: He wanted to partake in a great campaign with his chums. Like his death-wish, this, too, was a desire to escape his present life. But it was more than that: it was a longing to return to the camaraderie of his Rugby days. Brooke began to feel left behind as friend after friend joined the ranks, and he soon enlisted in the first branch that would take him, though he found his first assignment less than satisfactory. Douglas Jerrold recalls that there was some excitement among the men in his battalion when they learned that Brooke was to join them, but that soon after Brooke arrived he told Jerrold that he had insisted on being transferred from my battalion because there was no one in it to whom he could possibly talk (120). Edward Marsh pulled strings and Brooke got his transfer to a unit containing several of his friends. Brooke wrote to Cathleen Nesbitt that he was rather happy, really, in this new battalion and went on to give a description of every soldier in the unit, ending with, "there’s a very charming and beautiful American youth, infinitely industrious and simple beyond belief. And finally there’s a very hard bitter man, a poet, very strong and silent, called Rupert Brooke" (5 Dec. 1914). It is interesting that the attraction to a beautiful, uncomplicated, and unspoiled youth, which was chronicled by quite a few other World War I writers after the war--perhaps most famously in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises--Brooke was feeling before the war.

Clearly, then, it was not patriotism itself that made Brooke enlist. In the past, he had often been critical of England and often liked his country better when he was living in another. Grantchester was written while he lived in Germany, and Brooke’s anti-English sentiments show up in many of his letters. Even after writing his war sonnets, Brooke wrote to Jacques Raverat that he was largely dissatisfied with the English, just now and that he had been praying for a German raid on England (3 Dec. 1914).

At the time Brooke wrote his war sonnets, he had seen little action. His unit had been sent to Belgium but arrived after the fighting had ended. Brooke spent less than twenty-four hours in the Belgian war zone, and this was all the action he was destined to see. Once back in England, he penned the sonnets and sent them to New Numbers for publication. These five sonnets do not simply show death as patriotic sacrifice. Instead, each--and especially Peace--suggests that death is not a sacrifice at all, for the world is a miserable place, gladly left behind.

Brooke himself did not much care for the sonnets. He wrote to Sybil Pye: "Did you like them? I’m glad. I thought 4 and 5 good: the rest poor, but not worthless (21 March 1915). The two he liked are The Dead (II) and The Soldier. It is reassuring that he did not think much of the two that his future detractors would use to murder his reputation: Peace, with its Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, and its sick hearts that honor could not moveand The Dead (I), with its red / Sweet wine of youth. Not that The Soldier isn’t almost as ridiculous. In any case, whether Brooke liked them or not, he wrote them. In spirit, they are certainly a departure from the verse of the youthful Brooke who once asked the question in his To a Cadet Officer what the most ridiculous thing about the officer might be and answered:

‘Tis naught wherewith the mere civilians taunt you.

‘Tis not your frown, more mocked, alas, than feared--

Not even your ghastly hat (though that, I grant you,

Is more than weird).

It is ironic for a man who spent much of life at odds with religion and especially the Church of England, that Brooke’s legend was first made by Dean Inge of St. Paul’s in an Easter sermon, when he read aloud The Soldier and then told his congregation that the enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism had never found a nobler expression (Hassall 502). But others interpreted them differently. The poet Lascelles Abercrombie, a friend of Brooke’s, wrote of them in the Morning Post: Rupert Brooke had told the world once more how the passion for beautiful life may reach its highest passion and most radiant beauty when it is the determination to die.

The sonnets were representative works of their time: that period from the outbreak of war up until the Battle of the Somme in 1916. In this early period, the poets, like the mass of noncombatants [...] believed in a simple, heroic vision of a struggle for the right, of noble sacrifice for an ideal of patriotism and country (Lehmann 8). Later, poets were writing realistically of the suffering of war. Still, Dominic Hibberd reminds us that the notion that Brooke-like gladness was never expressed after the Somme, especially by men who knew what the front was like, is manifestly inaccurate (172). As an example, he quotes from Herbert Read’s The Contrary Experience, written in April 1917: If I die, it’s for the salvation of my own soul, cleansing it of all its little egotisms by one last supreme egotistical act. Hibberd says Read’s comments remind us that at the core of Brooke’s feelings was something much more like egotism than patriotism (172). Others agree. Arthur Lane says the great flaw of Brooke’s war poems was his seeing the war in personal terms: [Brooke] saw it as a means of escape from involvements he was unable to control (68).

The majority view in England, however, was approval. Even Samuel Hynes, who does not think much of Brooke, recognizes that Brooke’s sonnets seemed to confront and acknowledge the suffering that war would bring to the nation, and to give that suffering value (13). He goes on to say, "There was never a moment of the war after 1914 appeared when Brooke wasn’t the most popular war poet, and never a moment when, to the majority of Englishmen, including those in the trenches, his rhetoric did not seem the most appropriate way of speaking and writing about the ideals of the war--at least to those back home in England" (108-09).

John Lehmann says many of Brooke’s friends believed only a passing uncharacteristic mood produced the war sonnets, and that if he had lived his later poems would have been much more in tune with his earlier work (25). Bergonzi tackles the unfairness of comparing Brooke with Owen, saying one might as well attempt to compare the year 1914 and the year 1918, and adding, Had Brooke survived and undergone the experiences of later war poets on the Western Front [...] it is very probable that he would have tried to respond as they did to those experiences and achieved a correspondingly more profound mode of expression (44). This sentiment is shared by Patric Dickenson, who criticizes the critics for expecting Brooke to know as much in 1914 about the war as Pound knew safely afterwards. Dickenson says, Confusion about time seems to me to bedevil much criticism of this period (qtd. in Banerjee 17). This certainly has been the case, with most critics failing to realize that in the early days of the war when Brooke wrote his sonnets, the only poet in England writing a dissenting view was Charles Sorley; all the others, including Owen, fell in line with Brooke. And there is strong evidence that Brooke’s thinking was changing along the same lines as that of his fellow poets. Frank Field points out that before his death Brooke already was showing disdain for English civilians, identifying instead the real England with the soldiers, as did Owen (120).

The fault of much of Brooke’s poetry lies in the vague references, the artificial over-blown generalities, the occasional lapses into cliché, and the frequent sentimentality. The war poems, in particular, are over-blown and maudlin. If Brooke did not care much for them at the time he wrote them, it is safe to presume he would have found them embarrassing, if not humiliating, had he survived the war. Yet many critics, including those who edit the majority of our British literature anthologies, still limit their consideration of his canon to the five war sonnets as if when he began The Soldier with If I should die, think only this of me, he was referring to the sonnets themselves. As Michael Hastings wrote, And if he is to be judged as a war poet alone, God help his image and his worth!ﾝ

So yes, perhaps it is useful in a British literature anthology to include The Soldier as an example of the patriotic poetry being written at the war’s beginning, so long as one presents it in context, but Brooke’s work as a whole should not be represented by this poem, nor should he himself be labeled a war poet. He was a Georgian, and the Georgians deserve their due. A unit on Georgian poetry would provide a much smoother transition into the poetry of World War I then the current leap from the Edwardians.

Works Cited

Abercrombie, Lascelles. A Friend’s Tribute. Morning Post. 27 Apr. 1915.

Banerjee, A. Spirit Above Wars: A Study of the English Poetry of the Two World Wars. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1976.

Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. London: Constable, 1965.

Brooke, Rupert. Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914. Ed. Keith Hale. London: Yale UP, 1998.

---. The Letters of Rupert Brooke. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Harcourt, 1968.

Hassall, Christopher. Rupert Brooke: A Biography. 1964. London: Faber Paperbacks, 1972.

Hastings, Michael. Rupert Brooke: The Handsomest Young Man in England. London: Michael Joseph, 1967.

Hibberd, Dominic. The First World War. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.

Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. New York: Atheneum, 1991.

Lane, Arthur E. An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen & Siegfried Sassoon. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1972.

Lawrence, D. H. The Georgian Renaissance. Rhythm March 1913: xvii-xx.

Lehmann, John. The English Poets of the First World War. London: Thames, 1982.

Owen, Wilfred. Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen and John Bell. London: Oxford UP, 1967.

Ross, Robert. The Georgian Revolt: 1910-1912, Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1965.

Symons, Julian. Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature, 1912-1939. New York, Random, 1987.

Waugh, Arthur. Tradition and Change: Studies in Contemporary Literature. London: Chapman, 1919.

Georgian Poetry

1911-12

edited by

Sir Edward Marsh

1913

Dedicated to Robert Bridges

by the writers

and the editor.

Of all materials for labour, dreams are the hardest; and the artificer in ideas is the chief of workers, who out of nothing will make a piece of work that may stop a child from crying or lead nations to higher things. For what is it to be a poet? It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one's own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God.

Dunsany

Prefatory Note

This volume is issued in the belief that English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty.

Few readers have the leisure or the zeal to investigate each volume as it appears; and the process of recognition is often slow. This collection, drawn entirely from the publications of the past two years, may if it is fortunate help the lovers of poetry to realize that we are at the beginning of another Georgian period which may take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past.

It has no pretension to cover the field. Every reader will notice the absence of poets whose work would be a necessary ornament of any anthology not limited by a definite aim. Two years ago some of the writers represented had published nothing; and only a very few of the others were known except to the eagerest watchers of the skies. Those few are here because within the chosen period their work seemed to have gained some accession of power.

My grateful thanks are due to the writers who have lent me their poems, and to the publishers (Messrs Elkin Mathews, Sidgwick and Jackson, Methuen, Fifield, Constable, Nutt, Dent, Duckworth, Longmans, and Maunsel, and the Editors of Basileon, Rhythm, and the English Review) under whose imprint they have appeared.

E.M.

Oct. 1912. 

Lascelles Abercrombie

The Sale of Saint Thomas

A quay with vessels moored

Thomas: To India! Yea, here I may take ship;

From here the courses go over the seas,

Along which the intent prows wonderfully

Nose like lean hounds, and track their journeys out,

Making for harbours as some sleuth was laid

For them to follow on their shifting road.

Again I front my appointed ministry. — 

But why the Indian lot to me? Why mine

Such fearful gospelling? For the Lord knew

What a frail soul He gave me, and a heart

Lame and unlikely for the large events. — 

And this is worse than Baghdad! though that was

A fearful brink of travel. But if the lots,

That gave to me the Indian duty, were

Shuffled by the unseen skill of Heaven, surely

That fear of mine in Baghdad was the same

Marvellous Hand working again, to guard

The landward gate of India from me. There

I stood, waiting in the weak early dawn

To start my journey; the great caravan's

Strange cattle with their snoring breaths made steam

Upon the air, and (as I thought) sadly

The beasts at market-booths and awnings gay

Of shops, the city's comfortable trade,

Lookt, and then into months of plodding lookt.

And swiftly on my brain there came a wind

Of vision; and I saw the road mapt out

Along the desert with a chalk of bones;

I saw a famine and the Afghan greed

Waiting for us, spears at our throats, all we

Made women by our hunger; and I saw

Gigantic thirst grieving our mouths with dust,

Scattering up against our breathing salt

Of blown dried dung, till the taste eat like fires

Of a wild vinegar into our sheathèd marrows;

And a sudden decay thicken'd all our bloods

As rotten leaves in fall will baulk a stream;

Then my kill'd life the muncht food of jackals. — 

The wind of vision died in my brain; and lo,

The jangling of the caravan's long gait

Was small as the luting of a breeze in grass

Upon my ears. Into the waiting thirst 

Camels and merchants all were gone, while I

Had been in my amazement. Was this not

A sign? God with a vision tript me, lest

Those tall fiends that ken for my approach

In middle Asia, Thirst and his grisly band

Of plagues, should with their brigand fingers stop

His message in my mouth. Therefore I said,

If India is the place where I must preach,

I am to go by ship, not overland.

And here my ship is berthed. But worse, far worse

Than Baghdad, is this roadstead, the brown sails,

All the enginery of going on sea,

The tackle and the rigging, tholes and sweeps,

The prows built to put by the waves, the masts

Stayed for a hurricane; and lo, that line

Of gilded water there! the sun has drawn

In a long narrow band of shining oil

His light over the sea; how evilly move

Ripples along that golden skin! — the gleam

Works like a muscular thing! like the half-gorged

Sleepy swallowing of a serpent's neck.

The sea lives, surely! My eyes swear to it;

And, like a murderous smile that glimpses through

A villain's courtesy, that twitching dazzle

Parts the kind mood of weather to bewray

The feasted waters of the sea, stretched out

In lazy gluttony, expecting prey.

How fearful is this trade of sailing! Worse

Than all land-evils is the water-way

Before me now. — What, cowardice? Nay, why

Trouble myself with ugly words? 'Tis prudence,

And prudence is an admirable thing.

Yet here's much cost — these packages piled up,

Ivory doubtless, emeralds, gums, and silks,

All these they trust on shipboard? Ah, but I,

I who have seen God, I to put myself

Amid the heathen outrage of the sea

In a deal-wood box! It were plain folly.

There is naught more precious in the world than I:

I carry God in me, to give to men.

And when has the sea been friendly unto man?

Let it but guess my errand, it will call

The dangers of the air to wreak upon me,

Winds to juggle the puny boat and pinch

The water into unbelievable creases.

And shall my soul, and God in my soul, drown?

Or venture drowning? — But no, no; I am safe.

Smooth as believing souls over their deaths

And over agonies shall slide henceforth

To God, so shall my way be blest amid

The quiet crouching terrors of the sea,

Like panthers when a fire weakens their hearts;

Ay, this huge sin of nature, the salt sea,

Shall be afraid of me, and of the mind

Within me, that with gesture, speech and eyes

Of the Messiah flames. What element

Dare snarl against my going, what incubus dare

Remember to be fiendish, when I light

My whole being with memory of Him?

The malice of the sea will slink from me,

And the air be harmless as a muzzled wolf;

For I am a torch, and the flame of me is God.

A Ship's Captain: You are my man, my passenger?

Thomas: I am.

I go to India with you.

Captain: Well, I hope so.

There's threatening in the weather. Have you a mind

To hug your belly to the slanted deck,

Like a louse on a whip-top, when the boat

Spins on an axle in the hissing gales?

Thomas: Fear not. 'Tis likely indeed that storms are now

Plotting against our voyage; ay, no doubt

The very bottom of the sea prepares

To stand up mountainous or reach a limb

Out of his night of water and huge shingles,

That he and the waves may break our keel. Fear not;

Like those who manage horses, I've a word

Will fasten up within their evil natures

The meanings of the winds and waves and reefs.

Captain: You have a talisman? I have one too;

I know not if the storms think much of it.

I may be shark's meat yet. And would your spell

Be daunting to a cuttle, think you now?

We had a bout with one on our way here;

It had green lidless eyes like lanterns, arms

As many as the branches of a tree,

But limber, and each one of them wise as a snake.

It laid hold of our bulwarks, and with three

Long knowing arms, slimy, and of a flesh

So tough they'ld fool a hatchet, searcht the ship,

And stole out of the midst of us all a man;

Yes, and he the proudest man upon the seas

For the rare powerful talisman he'd got.

And would yours have done better?

Thomas: I am one

Not easily frightened. I'm for India.

You will not put me from my way with talk.

Captain: My heart, I never thought of frightening you. — 

Well, here's both tide and wind, and we may not start.

Thomas: Not start? I pray you, do.

Captain: It's no use praying;

I dare not. I've not half my cargo yet.

Thomas: What do you wait for, then?

Captain: A carpenter.

Thomas: You are talking strangely.

Captain: But not idly.

I might as well broach all my blood at once

Here as I