Today’s Poem: Sonnet Reversed

Rupert Brooke’s surprising realism

Wedding portrait, 1910s (Wikimedia Commons)

W. B. Yeats once called Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) “the handsomest young man in England.” And it’s true that Brooke endures in our cultural imagination as poster boy for that generation of poets lost to the First World War. Brooke’s own death, of blood poisoning in the aftermath of an insect bite, is hardly less…