Rupert Brooke & The Romance of War (WWI Mini-Series)

In the opening episode of Season 2 of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, hosts Joe and Maiya launch into a three-part mini-series on First World War poets. 

The episode dives into the patriotic and idealistic poetry of Rupert Brooke, highlighting his early contributions before and at the onset of the war in 1914; Joe and Maiya explore Brooke’s background, his life as part of the Bloomsbury Group, and his literary works which capture the national mood of optimism and patriotism during the early months of WWI.

The episode covers a broader historical context, explaining the major battles and the unprecedented scale of loss during WWI. They discuss Brooke's celebrated poem, 'The Soldier,' and critique its heavy patriotic overtones, the glorification of England, and the troubling colonial implications inherent in its verses. Ultimately, the episode explores how Brooke's untimely death in 1915 shaped his legacy, marking him as a symbol of pre-war idealism that contrasts starkly with the later, more cynical war poetry of figures like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Joe and Maiya also delve into Brooke’s poem 'The Dead,' comparing its treatment of youth and sacrifice to the later poetry of Wilfred Owen, who offered a more visceral and critical view of war. The hosts emphasize the importance of understanding Brooke’s work within the context of his time while recognizing his unintentional role in framing the early 20th-century perception of war. 

As always, Poetry+ users can get exclusive access to analysis, content, and PDFs, including the following that relates to this episode:

• Rupert Brooke PDF Guide
• 'The Solider': 
  • Poem PDF Guide
  • Poetry Snapshot PDF
  • Poem Printable PDF
    • with Meter
    • with Rhyme Scheme
    • with Both Meter and Rhyme Scheme
• `The Dead':
  • Poem PDF Guide
    • Poetry Snapsh

Transcript

Rupert Brooke & The Romance of War (WWI Mini-Series) (Transcript)
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[00:00:00] 

Joe: Welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by the team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+. I'm Joe and I'm here with my co host Maiya and we are delighted to welcome you to season two of Beyond the Verse. Quick thank you to everybody who supported the podcast across season one with your many downloads, likes, reviews, comments, and questions.

If you want to give us more questions for this series, if you want to suggest poems or poets we should be discussing, please email beyondtheverse at poemanalysis.com. Remember to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you get them. We are delighted to be kicking off season two with a three part mini series on the First World War poets, and Maiya is going to tell us a little bit more about it now. 

Maiya: Well, thank you so much, Joe, and what a way to kick off our second series. I, for one, am very, very excited, because over the next three episodes, we are going to be doing a deep dive into some of World War [00:01:00] I's most preeminent poets. And today, we're kicking off with Rupert Brooke, whose patriotic work really sets the tone.

for the start of the war, and it's something I cannot wait to explore a little bit more with you today. That said As a little sneak preview, over the next two episodes, we are also going to be exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

As we progress through these works, you as a reader will come to understand that these poets were also hugely influential and absolutely responsible for changing the attitudes towards war. Let's not forget,

world War I was not known as that at the time. It was the Great War. This is a period of history that was never before seen.completely unprecedented. And one of the amazing things about the poets we're going to be looking at is that they are writing in the very midst of the action. Some of the accounts are violent and immediate. But what we see with Brooke's poetry, who we'll be talking about [00:02:00] today, is a level of idealism that really catches the national mood in the first few weeks, months into this war.

You know, I would even go as far as to say that Brooke, in many ways, was really a pre war poet. The war began in the latter part of 1914 and actually much of the work that we're looking at today was published prior to that and in the lead up to the war.

Joe: Thanks, Maiya. So, I'm sure many of our listeners will be aware of the broad strokes of the First World War in terms of its chronology, but just as a quick refresher to anyone who's forgotten or isn't familiar, the First World War refers to a global conflict, but largely situated in Western Europe, that took place between 1914 and 1918.

So, on the one hand, you have the Allied forces, typically, Britain, France, later the United States, against, Germany primarily, but there are other nations involved, of course. We're going to be focusing today's episode, as Maiya said, on the early years of the war, and indeed the pre war era, and we're going to be doing that because Brooke's poetry really exemplifies the [00:03:00] attitudes, particularly attitudes in Britain in those early months of the war. Now, as a quick run through of the way this conflict worked, it was largely defined by trench warfare, very stationary front lines.

didn't move a huge amount. Most of the fighting took place in France and Belgium, and there were a couple of key battles that are important to be aware of. 1916, so midway point of the war, there was the very famous bloody Battle of the Somme, which continues to inform the public consciousness around violence and suffering to this day.

Later, you have the Battle of Passchendaele at Ypres in 1917 in Belgium, and the war came to an end in November 11th. 1918 so over that four year period you have a couple of really pivotal battles and again, this is a conflict defined by scale of loss a level of bloodshed that was hitherto unseen this is the first modern war in many senses modern mechanical engineering modern weaponry and that's why I think that the poets from this conflict really continue to shape our [00:04:00] perception of what mankind can do to one another

so Maiya, I'm really interested that when we look back at these poets with the benefit of a hundred years or more than a hundred years as we do now, we often think of them as a kind of homogenous group. They're the first World War poets. They're defined by this conflict. And sometimes I think thinking of them in those terms can lose the nuance of who these poets were as individuals.

'cause they didn't all go into the war with the same reputation, the same ambitions, the same beliefs. Can we focus a little bit on Rupert Brooke's life before the war? 

What kind of a man was he? What kind of poetry had he been publishing up to this point? 

Maiya: So Rupert Brooke was born in 1887 into a relatively affluent family. His father was a schoolteacher at a relatively prestigious school in the UK.

A school Brookehimself attended. However, what I really want to focus on is Brook's latter teenage years and early twenties. He attended Cambridge University, which to this day is one of the UK's most prestigious universities but here is where he became most involved in the literary world, becoming a [00:05:00] part of the Bloomsbury Group.

Now for listeners who aren't aware of what the Bloomsbury Group is, it was an incredibly influential circle of writers, artists, intellectuals, 

and the reason they were called the Bloomsbury group is because they were based in the Bloomsbury area of London. It was here that Rupert Brooke was engaging with the intellectually elite.

Now we are looking at fellow writers, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, we're looking at art critics, designers, painters,

it is absolutely vital that we don't ignore the influence of this group on Brooke’s writing. This was undoubtedly a group who were setting trends. They were creating modern, fresh art.

Now,

Joe is absolutely right. It's very easy for us to kind of lump all of these poets together into one group when we talk about the World War I poets. However, Brooke's poetry really is quite singular in that respect. It was almost exclusively written in 1914, in the first year [00:06:00] of war. And you will absolutely notice the critical differences between The patriotic, the national ideals that are reflected in Brooke's work, as compared to someone like Wilfred Owen Sassoon, who have experienced the horrors of war itself and have evidently a much bleaker outlook.

But what I really want listeners to recognize here is that time is so critical when it comes to discussing these poets. 

You know, when we talk about Rupert Brooke and why he was so influential, we're really focusing on effectively two years, 

1914 in which the main body of his work was written, into 1915 where this work was published.

Which of course explains why Brooke’s poetry only really captures those early moments of this war.

The reason why is because he only lived a few months into the war, he saw little to no major conflict, and he was dead by 1915. 

Joe: I mean, we will never know what kind of a poet Brooke would have gone on to be had he [00:07:00] experienced the kind of close up, visceral violence that the likes of Owen and Sassoon went on to experience later in the war, but I think your point earlier in the introduction about him almost being a pre war poet is a really interesting one because.

In many ways, Brooke exemplifies an attitude that existed in the months leading up to the declaration of war, Britain joined the war in August 1914, where there was this great patriotic fervor, this great desire to embrace the journey that this war would provide. And of course, we know in retrospect that the war was catastrophic and horrific and claimed the lives of millions of young men, and they were primarily men.

I think Brooke really is an archetype for that British young man. He was 27 at the moment in which the war broke out. He was very quick to sign up, which actually, we'll talk about this in the next two episodes, is a little bit different to Owen and Sassoon, who were a little bit more reticent.

Brooke had no doubt, he was determined to go, he believed in this story that was being told to the people of Britain and beyond, that this was going to be a quick war, this was [00:08:00] going to be an honourable war, this was going to be something worthwhile. And it's so fascinating in retrospect, because I think the space that World War I occupies in the public consciousness today is so different to that.

I don't think it is regarded as a worthwhile conflict, and I use that word in inverted commas as much as any conflict is worthwhile. But there isn't this sense in history that the First World War was a battle against some kind of evil in the way that we often frame the Second World War against fighting fascism.

The First World War in many ways is viewed as a kind of catastrophic accident. And, a wasteful loss of life, and Brooke is, to us, this outlying voice, but actually it's really important to remember that his voice was the voice of the consensus at the time. We look back at it and think, oh my goodness, how could anybody think this was going to be an honourable or worthwhile conflict?

And yet actually that was the dominant view in Britain in 1914. 

Maiya: And there's a few poems today that we're going to talk about [00:09:00] that now, with hindsight at least, there is a slightly unsettling feeling to them.

When we talk about patriotism and nationalism, of course, in many ways, The start of a war, this is a call to arms, , it feels quite solidifying and, and reassuring. But now we look back on, the utter, wasted young lives and the devastation it caused, you can almost view some of Brooke's poems with, a slightly colonial perspective.

There is really a bit of a sense that, you know, the romantic pastoral that we see carried through into some of these poems, the way that the countryside England is talked about. The emphasis is placed on, you know, beautiful England, lovely England, this sense of ownership and a national pride, really, that kind of oversteps the boundaries, I want to say.

And, one of the poems we're talking about today, The Soldier, , is a sonnet, which is a 14 line poem. And in it, he mentions England six times. 

It's heavy handed, to say the [00:10:00] least. And the reverence that Brooke shows for England really sits in contrast to poets that come later, like Wilfred Owen, like Sassoon, who actually experienced conflict. Because you understand that instead of trying to glorify the homeland, the place that they came from, the place that they're fighting for, Owen and Sassoon are instead critiquing the homeland.

And the fact that they feel that this is a senseless war. So I think for us today at least, Brooke is a really interesting one to start with and I would massively recommend For any listeners who are interested in the war poems, to really look at Brooke as a comparative, because he offers such a nuanced perspective.

Because of course, yes, we can take Wilfred Owen's poetry, yes, we can take Siegfried Sassoon's poetry and say, objectively, yes, this war was horrible, we have this proof. But it is made that much worse by the fact that you have someone who is openly glorifying it before.

Everything by contrast is just made heavier. That's one of the things I'm sure we'll dive more deeply into as we actually look at the content of these poems. But It's such a fascinating dichotomy [00:11:00] that takes place not over tens of years, but it takes place over the course of, what, a few months? 

Joe: 100 percent and I think we're going to talk a lot in the second episode about how Wilfred Owen's writing is in many ways responding to and writing back against the legacy of Rupert Brooke. And I think if readers in 2025 look back and only think about the conclusions at the end of the war, which are largely anti war, which are largely cynical, the likes of Wilfred Owen's poetry, that would be remiss, because ultimately, in order to understand the way in which the poet's perception of war changed during this period, we have to know what they were like at the beginning.

And ultimately, Wilfred Owens and Sassoon's much more cynical, much more satirical, much more damning poetry about the war has to be read in the context framed by Brooke. And that's why I think it's so important we started this series with him, because his work is fascinating. I mean, there are things about it that are troubling and unsettling, especially to modern readers because of [00:12:00] what we know happened about the war. And I think it's one of the reasons that I'm excited to do this miniseries, because I think more than most periods of history, , the First World War is an example of artists shaping the perception of a moment in time.

And, you know, Maiya and I have talked a lot on this podcast about how a particular poem reflects a period of time. And actually, maybe we're doing the poets there a disservice. It is naive to think that art is a rational response to circumstance. 

It's actually artists who do quite a lot of the framing for the way a period of time will go on to be interpreted. Brooke's ability to capture the mood of a nation is in itself shaping the mood of the nation. 

It is actually giving voice to that feeling and therefore enshrining it. And the relationship between historical events and artistic renderings of those events is not one way, it is completely symbiotic. The events inform the poetry, but the poetry ultimately changes the perception of the events. And I think 

the First World War offers a fascinating insight into the relationship between [00:13:00] the events and the work that depicts them. So just moving forward to think about Brooke during the war itself, and it is a relatively short involvement as Maiya mentioned.

So to get our dates right, August 1914, Britain officially joins the war. Brooke signed up very, very quickly and was commissioned into the Navy. And shortly after signing up in 1914, Brooke began to write the sonnets that went on to be featured in his collection, 1914 Sonnets and Other Poems, that was published the following year.

He had a brief involvement in the Siege of Antwerp, in October 1914, but as Maiya mentioned earlier, he saw very little actual conflict, and many of the poems that went on to feature in that collection, these war poems, as they're often thought of, were written before the Siege of Antwerp anyway. So, in March of 1915, Rupert Brooke has two poems published in the Times Literary Supplement, the TLS, in the UK. Those two poems were The Dead and The Soldier, that we're going to be talking about a little bit later on in this episode. Hugely influential [00:14:00] and very popular right off the bat.

The following month he dies of sepsis at sea. He doesn't die of a war wound, he dies of an infected mosquito bite. The collection 1914 Sonnets and Other Poems is published the following month. So this three month spell, you have the publication of two poems in March, he dies in April, the full collection comes out in May.

To enormous success. By the end of the first world war, there had been 24 reprints of that collection. So it is enormously resonant with the audience, the reading audience in Britain. It's only post war that we truly get the sense of this war as having been a failure of foreign policy, a failure militarily, and ultimately a waste of life.

so I'd like to just focus in now on one of those poems that I mentioned was first published in the TLS and it's undoubtedly Brooke’s most famous poem, one of the most famous poems that came out of the entire conflict, and it is The Soldier. So Maiya, would you mind reading The Soldier for us?

Maiya: The Soldier by Rupert Brooke If I should die, [00:15:00] think only this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed, A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways 

To roam, A body of England's breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, Blessed by suns of home.

And think this heart all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less, Give somewhere back the thoughts by England kept. Her sights and sounds, dreams happy as her day, And laughter learned to friends, and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

I mean, there's so much I want to say about this poem, but I do briefly want to root back to One of the points I was making earlier about the kind of underlying colonial tendencies in this poem. Now, for anyone that's been a [00:16:00] fan of our show since the first season, we'll know that in my education, I specialized in post colonial literature, so I find it very hard to read a poem like this and not look at those nuances. When I read a poem now, like this one, that uses those terms, foreign fields, forever England, it really sits quite heavily with me, because of course, here, we're not talking about an English poet writing about countries miles and miles and miles away.

This was a war that was fought primarily on European soil. When we're talking about a corner of a foreign field, as Brooke notes in our second line we're talking about a war that was fought, a stone's throw away from England. So when you then take this idea that Brooke is

trying to leave a mark of England in foreign soil, it offers a slightly warped sense of self worth, I think. But, Jo, I'd love to know what you think about this poem.

Joe: Well, it's a completely fascinating poem. Like lots of readers I first encountered at school, you know It's very [00:17:00] popular subject on the British curriculum around sort of early teens to study the First World War poets and I think this is So iconic because of what I said earlier it captures a moment in time It captures the public mood at a specific time there are things, about this poem that are quite troubling to read, especially in 2025. I mean, I don't think this poem could be written in the way it was this century. I don't think this poem fits in the 21st century. And let me just flesh that point out a little bit more.

Maiya was talking to me before this episode recording, and she, you know, made the very good point that, despite the fact that we call this a world war, there is only one country. that is mentioned in this poem, and it's not even Great Britain or the United Kingdom, and it's only England.

Brooke's focus on England is really interesting to me, and I think in order to understand why that matters, we have to understand where Brooke came from. So Brooke is, widely regarded as a Georgian poet. He published in the anthology known as the Georgian Poets in sort of the 19 teens before this war, and Georgian poetry is a kind of [00:18:00] slightly odd moment in time. We're talking about people like D. H. Lawrence, Brooke, fellow war poet Robert Graves and the like, and it's kind of a slightly odd period in time because it comes after this Victorian ideal of poetry, but it's pre modernism. So there's a kind of a small 10 to 15 year period post the death of Queen Victoria, but before, you know, the great birth of modernism in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

It's so important for us to remember that Britain and England are still a major colonial power in this period. We know that there are soldiers from all over the world, all over the Commonwealth, fighting in this conflict. There were Indian soldiers, there were Australian soldiers, New Zealand, Canadian, and yet Brook's conception of it is distinctly English, and that sense of British and indeed English superiority, I think, is quite troubling to modern readers, that sense that this is a conflict that is going to be won and lost by the English.

Now that is not accurate, that is not the way that history has told the [00:19:00] story, but it really represents kind of Brooke's worldview at this period. Brooke had traveled around the world in what was then still the British Empire.

He had visited Canada. He had visited the South Sea Islands. His view is distinctly one of colonialism and I think that line about the corner of the foreign field that is forever England, yes, it's very striking, and yes, it's very memorable, but it actually speaks to a world view that is really inconsistent with our modern conception of I mean, the idea that you can stake a claim to a foreign field because of fighting in it.

There's no sense that this war is about liberating France or Belgium or about saving foreign people. This is almost about imposing British superiority abroad. I think the way that this poem speaks to a British worldview in 1914 15 compared to a British worldview in 2025, but even going back earlier in the 21st century, I mean, the way that this poem would directly contravene some of the dialogue [00:20:00] around. , British and American wars in the Middle East and the early noughties, for example, I think , would show how far the world has changed. And just finally, I think the thing that really struck me about that corner of a foreign field that is forever England is, there is somehow this divine right to It's almost sort of reminiscent of a kind of crusade, a religious crusade.

It is the thing that the English do, is to go abroad and fight, not for the benefit of those people abroad, but for the glory of the country back home.

Maiya: Well, in my preparation for this episode, I was, you know, rereading this poem, and two of the lines that really stand out to me are the end of that first stanza. Where he talks about a body of England's breathing English air, washed by the rivers, blessed by suns of home. Now of course, here suns is spelled S U N S, obviously talking about the sun in the sky.

We've talked about this before in our Chinua Achebe episode, so for listeners who haven't checked that out, please do. . Because it'll offer some really interesting post colonial context to [00:21:00] what the sun means in literature.

But when you look at it in a poem like this, that is ultimately pastoral, and we say pastoral because it talks about the English countryside, we have land, we have rivers, we have this sense of kind of expansive peace, and England almost as a sort of caretaker figure here. So when the sun comes up, it's a very basic assumption to assume that maybe here we will have something that provides light, and warmth, and an opportunity for growth, let's say. But there's a duality, because of course, when we hear the phrase read aloud, blessed by suns of home. What does that sound like? It sounds like the young men, the sons of English mothers, or the English motherland, who are going out to fight, these conflicts on, non English soil.

And what I really find quite What's disturbing, really, here is that Brooke transmutes every soldier's body into a body of England's. Not a body of England, not talking about the physical [00:22:00] land, but each body of these young men, of these soldiers, belongs to England. And not only that. But the fact that they breathe English air has purified them, they are washed in the rivers.

They are entering this space as something completely clean. And obviously, as we go on to understand, as we look at later periods of the war, cleanliness, purity were absolutely non existent.

Joe: I love that point and I just want to build on it by just going back to a few lines earlier when we get this description of a dust whom England bore. And effectively what Brookeis doing here is he's talking about one day when these bodies are decayed and and, you know. Become dust effectively that they will be different because they were born by England and again that word bore is really crucial here because what you the image that's Conjured there is the idea that Britannia is some kind of feminine presence that brings these men into the world, almost births these men, and [00:23:00] this notion of the nation as this female presence that needs to be protected goes right the way back to the classical world, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, but it's a distinctly Victorian outlook, I think, that notion of rule Britannia.

Britannia is this divine feminine presence that has the right to rule the waves. Not only does that speak to the colonial point that I mentioned earlier about Britain's right to rule, but I think,

I am struck by how this line subverts the mother son dynamic that is going to go on to shape other poems in this conflict. Millions of sons, young men largely, were sent away to war, often bidden goodbye by their mothers and fathers. And those are real people. Real soldiers, real mothers, real fathers. And the amount of war poetry that focuses on the sadness of saying goodbye and of course the misery of receiving the news of a child's death are incredibly moving.

The thing I find about this, when Brooke casts that mother saying goodbye to her son it's not an individual mother with an individual soldier, it's [00:24:00] Britannia saying goodbye to her sons in the kind of much more abstract sense. And I think that brilliantly captures the way in which Brooke's poetry is different to that which came after it, because we didn't know yet that those mothers saying goodbye to their sons were going to receive the news of their death six months a year, two years later.

It is very abstracted. It is very impersonal because Brooke is thinking in those terms. He's not currently thinking about an individual soldier who's going to be killed or maimed or traumatized. He's thinking about millions of people at once. This poem is titled ‘The Soldier’ in the singular. But actually, it is not preoccupied with any individual person. It's not about Brooke. It's not about any individual that Brooke knew. It's about archetypes. It's about representations of individuals. Not individuals themselves.

So I don't know about you, Maiya. I don't know about [00:25:00] our listeners, but when I'm reading a poem, there's nothing better for me than working with it on physical paper. So whether I'm teaching a poem to my students or just reading it for my own pleasure, I love to have the tactile piece of paper in front of me.

Listeners who subscribe to. Poetry+ can go to Poemanalysis.com and print off literally thousands of poem printable PDFs. Now that means you can get the entire poem of any work that is out of copyright on our website, of which, as I've said, there are thousands. You can get it with syllables attached, you can get it with rhyme scheme, or you can fill in those details yourself.

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Maiya: I mean, I really love that point about Brooke's poetry being representations of individuals, because actually, [00:26:00] one of the strengths of, I think, those later poems by Owen, by Sassoon, are the fact that they have this incredible ability to not only speak to an individual experience, and a very real experience at that, the way that they can kind of cast their net over their fellow soldiers.

And you could believe so easily that it would be every single one of them.

one of the parallels that I think is really interesting to focus on is by comparing and contrasting some of these poems. One of the lines that stands out to me in The Soldier is, Brooke's creation of this English heaven.

Now, heaven in many ways in literature we understand to be , a religious abstract. We don't often see it physically manifested. Here, those colonial overtones actually see Brooke create a very physical English heaven,

Not only does it have these sensory qualities, you know, the laughter of happy people, sights, sounds, but he really manifests this, sense of peace and happiness that we absolutely don't [00:27:00] see in later poems. And it's fascinating to me here, that he talks about friends in heaven. You know, almost preempting the fact that death is, is due. But he doesn't really focus on the negative connotations of that.

He doesn't focus on the loss of life. He is really much more preoccupied by the sense that it is right. to go to war.

That death is not meaningless, but that it means so much more because of the glory that they attain on their way there. Now actually a poem I'd love to contrast this with is Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen.

Of which there's a line that I actually believe is Owen directly reflecting on the work of Brooke and criticizing him because instead of at that moment of death ascending to heaven, here we have a narrative of a soldier who dies and instead descends to hell directly from the trench that he has passed in. And I'm just going to read the opening of that poem so listeners can come to understand what this [00:28:00] truly means.

It seems that out of that battle, I escaped down some profound, dull tunnel, long since scooped through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there, encumbered sleepers groaned, too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared with piteous recognition in fixed eyes, lifting distressful hands as if to bless, and by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.

By his dead smile, I knew we stood in hell. Now what we see here is a certainty, not dissimilar to that that Brooke showed in The Soldier. However here this certainty is layered with the experience of war. This is a much heavier voice. This is one that has seen the horrors of war, seen the destruction,

seen the thousands dead. And I find the opening of this poem completely inescapable. I [00:29:00] mean the disruption of that religious messaging, the image of the dead man. Lifting distressful hands as if to bless. The iconography of the priest being changed into something much more macabre, much more terrifying.

I think Owen does a fantastic job of really answering some of the questions that Brooke is unable to even fathom of,

and he writes back so successfully against the manifestation of that physical heaven that he creates in a poem like The Soldier.

But I mean, Jo, what is your take on the way that, you know, religious language and, and the idea of heaven is kind of interpolated into Brooke's poem?

Joe: I'm just fascinated by your point about the physicality of that heaven. I hadn't really thought about that, but you're right, and it really brings to mind to me those kind of William Blake renderings of heaven, you know, could Jerusalem be here that sense of building a kind of a kingdom worthy of heaven and again, a lot of the times that is about expansionism.[00:30:00] 

It is about looking to fields further abroad and thinking, could I bring something English to those places? Which again, as you said, is very troubling for modern readers. 

There's this sense that Brooke feels that when a British or an English soldier bleeds abroad They are imparting some of that British superiority onto that land and the act of dying the act of bleeding the act of giving those things away Almost cleanses them and prepares them for this heaven. It's a really quite unsettling relationship the idea that war especially this war, is going to prepare these souls for this divine afterlife.

This is somehow a moral imperative. You must fight, you must die, because it is good for you, you're more likely to get to heaven, you're more likely to be pure, but perhaps the most unsettling thing is it is somehow good for the country in which you bleed. I mean, this is really different to anything we would consider to be appropriate language in the 21st century.

Maiya: You're absolutely right. And I mean, the [00:31:00] glorification of death is one of the many things that I find kind of unsettling about some of Brooke's poetry.

You know, I think it's imperative that listeners understand that. When we talked a little bit in this podcast about young men going off to war, the emphasis is really on their youth. There were boys signing up for this war that weren't even 16. They were lying about their age to be included in what seemed like this great national project, almost.

One of those things that does disturb me in Brook's poetry is that he has this inordinate focus on youth because he himself was young.

I'm thinking here of his poem piece that was also written in 1914. And it opens with the lines, Now God be thanked who has matched us with his hour, And caught our youth, and awakened us from sleeping.

Joe and I often talk on this podcast about how when you read a poem's title it can often give you an impression of a poem before you even read the content of it. And [00:32:00] peace is one of those poems that I actually really formed an impression about before even entering the poem.

Because when you read the word peace, especially when you're contrasting it to a poem that is written about war or in the midst of wartime, I think most readers would generally assume that you're going to be discussing something that is much softer, much more gentle, Now again, this is one of these lines that I find really quite troubling in hindsight, because, one, thanking God for a war that, of course, Brooke had no idea what would What the war would go on to cause, the destruction, the devastation, but there is not one poet I guarantee who would write how thankful they were that God matched them with this war., the words that really catch me in this opening line is, Caught our youth. And there is no way that Brooke could have known how ironic this was. Because one of the key things that we will discuss time and time again throughout this miniseries is that the [00:33:00] majority of the lives lost were young men. Their youth was quite literally caught so when we talk about the suffering of World War I and we use Brooke as kind of a jumping off point, it really just cements that awful feeling that accompanies, at least for me, The general mood of World War I poetry, I think, when you see the positivity and the patriotism and the nationalism and the general happy mood of being willing to walk into this fight, of which you have no idea what's going to happen, the scale of it, really sits quite uncomfortably with me now, to kind of explore those,

those thankful moments and the blessings that Brooks saw this war as, because, as you said, Joe, he is kind of the voice of a generation here.

Joe: I'm really glad you brought up that point about youth and we're gonna discuss it as you say a lot throughout this miniseries in particular I want to come back to it when we [00:34:00] talk about one of Brooke’s other poems The Dead Just on those two lines at the beginning of that piece for me There was a really strong evocation here of the day of judgment It's the kind of Christian day of judgment and for listeners who aren't aware That's this moment foretold in the Bible where Jesus will raise all of the dead from human history and gather them before him for the final judgment.

Now, when we read those first two lines of peace, which as Maia said were, Now God be thanked who has matched us with this hour and caught our youth and wakened us from sleeping. I think Brooke is suggesting he is kind of making a comparison between the call to arms and the final day of judgment. Now,

the reason this really struck me was twofold. The first, because. Again, he is presenting the war as something that is not only Epic in scale, but kind of morally important. The second thing, though, is it really reminded me of a poem that Maiya and I talked about in the last series, which was William Butler Yeats The Second Coming.

[00:35:00] Because that poem also draws upon this kind of final day of judgment imagery, and yet it is utterly true. sort of apocalyptic in its outlook. There is no sense of salvation. There is no sense that this day of judgment will yield good results in Yeats's poem. Now Yeats's poem was written in 1919.

So you're talking about only four or five years between Brooke's poem, Peace, and Yeats's poem, The Second Coming. And yet the contrasting way in which those two poems draw upon the same biblical story. Where Brooks is a hopeful and impassioned one and Yeats is a cynical, pessimistic one.

Demonstrates just how much the world changed in this war. And again, we're going to emphasise it again and again, that this conflict is an inflection point. There is a before the First World War and there is an after. And no conflict, even the Second World War, which is, you know, occupies so much of the public imagination.

Not Vietnam, not the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No single conflict changed our perception of [00:36:00] suffering on the battlefield, like the First World War did. And Brooke's poem, compared to Yeats's, I think is a real representation of just how much the world changed in those four or five years.

Maiya: Well, thanks, Jo, for mentioning Rupert Brooke's poem, The Dead, because it's actually one that I'd really like to touch on. So, would you like to read it for us?

Joe: The poem The Dead refers to kind of two separate poems that were published in his collection, 1914, and other poems. I'm just going to read the opening stanza. Blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead. There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But dying has 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

I find this poem to be more moving than The Soldier personally. I mean, there are still things about it that I think express a worldview that I think the First [00:37:00] World War ultimately shattered.

But there is something, I think, more beautiful in the language, in my opinion. But, Maiya mentioned youth earlier on as a key theme of Brooke’s poetry, but also the poetry of all the works we're going to look at in this mini series. And I think the way that youth is rendered in this stanza is really important and really interesting.

First of all, there is a sense here that youth is about excess, about pleasure, the sweet wine of youth. Maiya has already talked about the significance of youth. Imagery that is associated with value like gold. You have the sense here that these young men are leaving behind a life of pleasure, a life of luxury.

That's the first thing. The second thing I think is fascinating is that line about immortality. I find this to be one of Brook's best lines because it's, it works on many levels. On the one hand, That immortality refers to the feeling of being young, that feeling that your youth and your vitality is going to last forever.

It's a, it's a false sense of immortality because ultimately everybody grows old so on the one hand there's [00:38:00] that sense of youthful irony about the fact that when you're young you think it's going to last forever and it doesn't. On this other hand however, Is, it's kind of bitterly ironic, and Brooke is not really considered to be one of those poets that is very satirical in his war poetry.

It tends to be sort of very straight, very direct. He is a patriotic poet. But we could look at that line as one of these rare moments of satire. Because he's saying, actually, they didn't give their immortality. What they did do is gave their mortality, and they gave it in spades. You know, millions of young men gave their lives, nothing immortal about it.

Their mortality was actually never more apparent than in this conflict. But the final thing I really like about this line, this is something that Brooke couldn't possibly have known when he wrote it, he didn't know he was going to die, is there's a level of irony because millions of people died in this war and the vast, vast, vast majority are nameless.

Of course, if you have relatives who died in the war, you might know their names, but we don't know most of the people who died in this war by name. We know a select few. And actually, they didn't give their immortality by dying in Brooke's case. [00:39:00] He gained it because his war poetry means that his name survives.

His name has become, in some ways, immortal. And there is a lovely sort of multifaceted nature of that line that I think is Brooke at his best, in my opinion. But what do you think, Maiya, about that opening stanza?

Maiya: I mean, you're absolutely right. It's a fascinating thing to bring up immortality when so many of these young soldiers are absolutely nameless, regardless of, you know, memorials and monuments that we've built to them, even just, in England, there's no way that you can have a complete understanding of how many lives are lost. There's no way that we as modern readers, modern people can even begin to quantify The number of deaths, I mean, just from a quick statistic, around 880,000 British men died in World War I.

That's not even counting the thousands of other troops that served that at the time was 6% of the adult male population in Britain [00:40:00] and around 13% of the people who were actively serving. Statistics across the board vary. But it's estimated that between nine and 15 million people died in this war.

Of course, Brooke wasn't to know what was going to happen in the following few years after his death, after his poems were published. But when you read poems like The Dead, it's unsurprising that it sits so heavy on your conscience as a modern reader because you can't help but look at these poems with hindsight.

So when I read lines in the dead such as, Dying has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away, poured out the red sweet wine of youth. All I can think about is the families that were left behind. It's not rarer than gold to have a telegraph, or barely any belongings of a loved one who happened to serve for whether it was a few weeks, a few months, or a few years, the volume of casualty is, is just unimaginable.

You know, Joe and I were talking at the start of this [00:41:00] episode about why it's important to read World War I poetry, it's so important to see The vast amount of differing opinion because when you explore a poet like Brooke who really encapsulates national pride, you can understand how far they had to fall.

Joe: I think that's really interesting. And you're right. I mean, The scale of conflict that we have, we have the statistics, we have the context. These are things that Brooke did not have and I think that's a really important thing to remember. And I think it's important to try to be sympathetic to this.

I think, sometimes we can look back at these kind of poems by people like Brooke and almost feel a sense of bitterness about, you know, they, they should have known better. I mean, that's perhaps an unfair assessment to have of an individual poet, given that this was the prevailing wisdom of this period was that this war would not be devastating, it would not be catastrophic, and actually, you know, Brooke isn't responsible for the failures of foreign policy and the failures [00:42:00] militarily that led to those deaths, and yet often I think there is a tendency to sort of group him in with the kind of officer class, the ruling class, that people like Owen would go on to criticize in their poems

Maiya: it actually brings me back to something you said earlier in the podcast, Jo, which is That when you talk about someone like Owen, he is very often responding almost directly to Brooke, so when we look at shared motifs, one of the ones that always comes to mind for me is Frost. Now, in the second part of Brooke's poem, The Dead,

he has a line that beautifies again this moment of death, the passing of these people, glorifies again the moment of death. The lines go as follows, There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter and lit by the rich skies all day. And after frost with a gesture stays the waves that dance and wandering loveliness.

Now, in itself, this is an absolutely beautiful line. The construction is one that [00:43:00] creates beauty and serenity and peace. However, Wilfred Owen, again, he responds directly to this. He uses Frost and absolutely turns it on its head in his poem, Exposure. And these lines are lifted from the final stanzas of Exposure. Therefore, not loathe, we lie out Were born, for love of God seems dying. Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us, shriveling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp. Now the absolute stark difference between these two poems, not only to talk again about God and changing attitudes towards Whether this is, as Joe mentioned earlier, a sort of biblical crusade, or one that actually shakes faith in God, owen here responds so directly to Brooke by using a motif that was originally seen as something quite romantic, and changing it into something that causes that chill, that death, that sense of aging, that deterioration. So when we talk about these [00:44:00] poets being in conversation, it's impossible to look at Owen without looking at responses to Brooks, so I can't wait to talk about him in our next episode.

Joe: I can't wait to discuss,, Exposure and Owen's other poems in the next episode, but if listeners cannot wait and they want to get their fix of Owen, Sassoon, or read more about Rupert Brooke, they can subscribe for a Poetry+ membership at poemanalysis.com now, because we have PDFs on each of those poets, as well as a PDF about the First World War poets in their entirety, including the three we're talking about in this miniseries, plus others like Robert Graves and John McRae. In the PDF learning library exclusively available to Poetry+ subscribers But just before we end this episode on brooke I want to touch a little bit on kind of what he embodies as an individual because Unlike owen and sassoon and graves and other voices that got to grow cynical and got to grow bitter with their experiences of the war Brooke is kind of a bit of an outlier.

He's almost alone in that voice that he represents and I don't want listeners to get the [00:45:00] wrong impression of what that means. There were millions and millions of people, not just from England, but from around the world, who actually shared in Brook's philosophy the idea that war was an honourable thing, because war up to the First World War was different.

It was not as destructive, it was not as brutal. , the type of weaponry, the type of warfare fundamentally changed. The amount of suffering, the scale of suffering, and the people back home's access to that suffering. Now, I'm going to touch upon something I wouldn't normally touch about with regard to the poet, which is Brooke's physical appearance.

Brooke, we know, was a very, very beautiful young man. In fact, a poet I've already mentioned, William Butler Yeats, called him the handsomest young man in England. And a lot of the things we know about his life before the war are very boyish, are very kind of archetypally youthful and vibrant. For example, there are stories about Virginia Woolf, the great novelist of the 1920s, who she remembers going skinny dipping with him while they were students at Cambridge.

There is this [00:46:00] sense of Teenage , adolescent, young adulthood, vitality, energy, beauty. And I think that those things contribute to the position he currently holds, which is that he represents the death of naivety, the death of a post Victorian ideal of what Britain is, what England is, what England's place in the world is.

We can look at Brookeand see a hangover. of the 19th century. That England is green and vibrant and beautiful, that life is to be enjoyed, that wine is to be drunk, that gold is to be discovered, that war is to be fought. And I don't think there is somebody like Brooke after Brooke. I think he, not only for an English context and an English speaking context, but even beyond that, because his work has been translated, I think he is, in many ways, the final embodiment Of that 19th century view of the world.

I don't think it is possible to conceive of war like Brookedid after [00:47:00] brook

Maiya: I think that is a really beautiful way to end our first episode of the new season and our first one of this mini series. Now, next time we are talking about Wilfred Owen and changing attitudes, and as Jo said, we are really looking at a significant shift in attitudes from Brooke to Owen, and I for one can't wait to have that conversation, but for now, it's goodbye from me, 

Joe: and goodbye from me and the whole team at poemanalysis.com and Poetry+