Today’s Poem: Sonnet Reversed
Rupert Brooke’s surprising realism
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 horrific in its utter wastefulness than are the battlefield deaths of his contemporaries Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen, both of whose poems have appeared recently at Poems Ancient and Modern. Dying early in the war, en route to what would become the catastrophe of the Dardanelles campaign, Brooke was spared the horrors that would come to define Owens’s poetry.
Instead, he could write, lyrically and innocently, of the English soldier’s death and burial far from home — in his case, on the Greek island of Skyros — as the foundation of a spot that is “for ever England.” Photographs of Brooke show us a young man who might have starred in his own biopic, after the style of “Chariots of Fire.” His poems, too, tend to shine with the cinematic golden-hour light of something not quite real, only longed for. Although the Grantchester of his most famous poem is in fact an idyllic village, set in river meadows just south of Cambridge, no sun can burnish it quite as Brooke has done, stopping its clock for an eternal teatime.
In Today’s Poem, however, we find the poet indulging in a little sardonic realism. If he was naive about the war, and idealistic about England, he could nevertheless be an astute observer of human beings in their social habitat. Here he has turned the Shakespearean sonnet upside-down (a neat formal trick also employed by the contemporary poet Caitlin Doyle). The poem begins with what is ordinarily the closing couplet, set apart from the rest of the poem and marking the brief starry-eyed apotheosis of a wedding. From there, the future proceeds to unravel into ordinariness, and the backhanded disowning, in what has become their joint obituary, of a disappointing third son, “George, who drank.”
Sonnet Reversed
by Rupert Brooke
Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights. Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon! Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures, Settled at Balham by the end of June. Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures, And in Antofagastas. Still he went Cityward daily; still she did abide At home. And both were really quite content With work and social pleasures. Then they died. They left three children (besides George, who drank): The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell, William, the head-clerk in the County Bank, And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.
Aside from the rhyming, it might well have been an obituary.