by Mike Read
On dreams of men and men’s desire.
Then only in the empty spaces,
Death, walking very silently,
Shall fear the glory of our faces
Through all the dark infinity.
So, clothed about with perfect love,
The eternal end shall find us one,
Alone above the Night, above
The dust of the dead gods, alone.
Having found his feet and many new friends, and established his popularity, the Brooke of 1907 was a quantum leap from the freshman of 1906 who had written to St John Lucas on his arrival, ‘this place is rather funny to watch; and a little wearying. It is full of very young people, and my blear eyes look dolefully at them from the lofty window where I sit and moan … my room is a gaunt yellow wilderness.’
On top of Rupert’s dramatic commitment and studies, he was writing poetry and reviewing it. He confessed to St John Lucas, ‘in my “literary life” I have taken the last step of infamy and become – a reviewer! I have undertaken to “do” great slabs of minor poetry for the Cambridge Review … Cambridge is terrible, slushy and full of un-Whistlerian mists.’
Rupert’s increasing enthusiasm for exploring England took him along the South Downs of Sussex through the sleepy villages of Amberley, Arundel, Duncton and Petworth and along the River Arun in a walking tour with Hugh Russell-Smith, which he picturesquely embellished in a letter to St John Lucas: ‘[W]e slew a million dragons and wandered on unknown hills. We met many knights and I made indelicate songs about them.’ This was the heart of Hilaire Belloc country: Belloc had started many of his own walking tours from his house, Kings Land at Shipley. It must have crossed Brooke’s mind to call unsolicited; even though he did not, the two were to meet within a couple of months. The marathon ramble ended at the Green Dragon, Market Lavington, over the Easter weekend of 1907, during which time Rupert was proclaiming himself, through Hugh Dalton’s influence, a committed Fabian and was allegedly trying to write Fabian hymns, although one suspects they were more fancy than fact, as Rupert had little musical talent. For one who was so taken with the image and character of Belloc – who would write many songs while walking the downs and the Arun Valley, through which Brooke had just travelled – if he were trying to compose, it would undoubtedly be in Belloc style. Possibly something in the vein of Belloc’s ‘On Sussex Hills’.
On Sussex Hills
On Sussex hills where I was bred,
When lanes in Autumn rains are red,
When Arun tumbles in his bed,
And busy great gusts go by;
When branch is bare in Burton Glen
And Bury Hill is a-whitening, then,
I drink strong ale with gentlemen…
Brooke and Belloc eventually met at King’s in the spring of 1907:
[L]ast night I went to a private small society in Pembroke where Hilaire Belloc came and read a paper and talked and drank beer – all in great measure. He was vastly entertaining. Afterwards Gow [Andrew Gow, who had been at Rugby with Rupert, and was now at Trinity] and I walked home with him about a mile. He was wonderfully drunk and talked all the way … you can tell Ma if you see her; but for God’s sake don’t say he was drunk, or she’ll never read him again.
During May, Brooke played many games for King’s Cricket XI, under the captaincy of H. F. P. Hearson, returning bowling figures of three wickets for sixteen runs against Queen’s on 16 May, one of thirteen matches played during a four-week period. The following month the King’s College magazine Basileon printed three of Brooke’s poems: ‘Dawn’, ‘The Wayfarers’ and ‘My Song’.
My Song
They are unworthy, these sad whining moods.
Shall I not make of Love some glorious thing? –
A song – and shout it through the dripping woods,
Till all the woods shall burgeon into Spring?
Because I’ve a mad longing for your eyes,
And once our eager lips met wonderfully,
Men shall find new delight in morning skies,
And all the stars will dance more merrily.
Yes, in the wonder of the last day-break,
God’s Mother, on the threshold of His house,
Shall welcome in your white and perfect soul,
Kissing your brown hair softly for my sake;
And God’s own hand will lay, as aureole,
My song, a flame of scarlet, on your brows.
At the beginning of June, while knee-deep in exams and late nights, Brooke was informed by the Chapel Clerk that he had to read in chapel every morning that week, at the un-student-like hour of 8.00 a.m. However, a respite from duties came in the shape of the summer vacation, which ran from June to October. Chapel, drama, studies and his new life were put on hold while he went to stay at Grantchester Dene in Bournemouth, with his aunts Lizzy and Fanny. The latter was at one time the honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society for the parish, and insisted on Rupert accompanying her and her sister to the local Holy Trinity Church when he stayed with them. While at his aunts’ house, he pored over maps to find somewhere suitable to go off to with friends for a few days, and was captivated by the name of the Mupe Rocks near Lulworth Cove, Dorset. Later that month he wrote to his old schoolfriend Hugh Russell-Smith, ‘You know I always like to keep you au fait (as our Gallic neighbours would have it) with my latest literary activity. This came to me as I was sitting by the sea the other day I don’t know what it was – perhaps it was the rhythm of the waves. But I felt I must sing. So I sang:
I love a scrabbly epithet
The sort you can’t ever forget,
That blooms, a lonely violet
In the eleventh line of a sonnet.
I know one such; I’m proud to know him.
I’ll put him in my next GREAT POIM.
He plays the psack-butt very well:
And his Aunt was a Polysyllable.
The night is purple with a weariness older than the stars;
And there is a sound of eventual tears.
A week or two later Brooke dashed off a few flippant lines of verse to Andrew Gow:
Things are a brute,
And I am sad and sick;
Oh! You are a Spondee in the Fourth Foot
And I am a final cretic
(I hope the technical terms are right.)
Things are beasts:
Alas! and Alack!
If life is a succession of Choreic Anapaests,
When, O When shall we arrive at the Paroemiac?
Later in June, he described the atmosphere at Grantchester Dene to St John Lucas:
Here in the south it is hot. In the mornings I bathe, in the afternoons lie out in a hammock among the rose-beds and watch them [his aunts] playing croquet (pronounced kröky) … My evangelical aunts always talk at meals like people in Ibsen. They make vast symbolic remarks about Doors and Houses and Food. My one aim is to keep the conversations on Foreign Missions, lest I scream suddenly. At lunch no one spoke for ten minutes! Then the First Aunt said, ‘The Sea? … The Sea! …’ And an Old Lady Visitor replied, ‘Ah!’
The intriguingly named Mupe Rocks hadn’t been forgotten. It transpired that they were at Bacon Hole, a little east of Lulworth Cove. Rupert informed Hugh Russell-Smith, who was to holiday with him,
Mrs Chaffey, of the Post Office, West Lulworth, thanks me for my card and will reserve rooms ‘as agreeded’. (She thinks my name is Brooks, and therefore she is P. P. [puce Pig]. She is no Woman of Business, for she doesn’t say what is agreeded (Doric for agreeded) and I don’t know … The effort of conducting a correspondence in the Arcadian variety of the Doric dialect, with Mrs Chaffey, P. P. is exhausting.
Unbeknown to Rupert, Emily Jane Chaffey was barely able to read or write, so her communications with him about the holiday arrangements were, in the light of that knowledge, highly commendable. She had been so illiterate at the time of her wedding to Henry J. Chaffey that she had signed her marriage certificate with a cross.
>
Rupert and Russell-Smith were joined there by a new friend who was also studying at Cambridge, Dudley Ward. In his excitement Brooke exclaimed to a friend: ‘In a week I’m going to the most beautiful place in England, Lulworth Cove.’ Brooke, of course, wasn’t the first wordsmith to wax lyrical about the village of West Lulworth. John Leland, the earliest chronicler of Lulworth and chaplain, librarian and antiquary to Henry VIII, wrote:
I saw the shore
A little fisher town
Caulled Lilleworth
Sumtyme longgings to the Newborows
Now to Poynings
Wher a gut or crek
Out it the se into the land
And is a socour for small shippes
The area is one of natural beauty; the rocks which form the cove, Stair Hole, and the surrounding coastline are over 150 million years old, fossils having been found there that predate the evolution of reptiles and birds. To the east is the Isle of Purbeck, a spectacular ridge of chalk hills that were once continuous with the Isle of Wight, while to the west are rugged cliffs, including Durdle Door, the more inaccessible crags providing ideal nesting grounds for puffins and guillemots. Not surprisingly, the natural beauty and idyllic charm of Lulworth has attracted its fair share of artists and writers, including John O’Keefe, who stayed at the Red Lion, now Churchfield House, for six weeks in 1791, Sir John Everett Millais, who is reputed to have painted his Departure of the Romans from Britain at Oswald’s Wall, and John Keats, who is believed to have written his sonnet ‘Bright Star’ while berthed in the cove. Thomas Hardy, who lived at Bockhampton and Dorchester from 1890 to 1928, used a thinly disguised Lulworth in several of his novels; Bertrand Russell often stayed at Newlands Farm between 1916 and 1934; and actor Laurence Olivier would spend his first honeymoon there at a house called Weston. Brooke was yet to meet and fall in love with Olivier’s cousin, Noel.
On 21 July 1907 Rupert wrote to his mother from the Chaffeys’ post office at Albion Villas, West Lulworth:
Sometimes we go in a boat in the Cove, or outside, for exercise, and sometimes walk on the downs or ramble about the cliffs and rocks. This last pastime is extremely destructive to shoes. Where we are is really Lulworth Cove, West Lulworth being half a mile further up from the sea, East Lulworth 3 miles to the NE … The sea is always different colours, and sometimes there are good sunsets … The lodgings are quite nice but rather free and easy!
The lines written to his mother differ wildly from the contents of a letter the same day to Geoffrey Keynes, written with deliberate affectation:
Lulworth is a tiresomely backward and old-fashioned place. There are no promenades, nor lifts, nor piers, nor a band; only downs and rocks and green waters; and we sit and bathe and read dead and decaying languages. Very dull … on Tuesday we sat on seagirt rocks and read J. Keats. When I leapt from rock to rock J. K. fell from pocket into swirling flood beneath; and, ere aught could be done, was borne from reach on swift current. We rushed to the harbour, chartered a boat, and rowed frantically along the rocky coast in search of it. The sea was —. At length we spied it close in, by treacherous rocks – in a boat we could not get to it alive. We beached our barque (at vast risk) half a mile down the coast and leapt lightly over vast boulders to the spot … I cast off my garb, and plunged wholly naked into that ‘fury of black waters and white foam’ – Enough. J. K. was rescued, in a damaged condition.
Four years later he discovered that Lulworth was the last place in England that Keats had been to, before going to Italy. Brooke’s stay at Lulworth inspired five untitled verses, which feel as if they should be sung. Again one feels the influence of Belloc creeping in.
Verse I
Oh give our love to Lulworth Cove
And Lulworth Cliffs and sea
Oh! Lulworth Down! Oh! Lulworth Down!
(The name appeals to me)
If we were with you today in Lulworth
How happy we should be!
Verse II
The Lulworth Downs are large and high
And honourable things
There we should lie (old Hugh and I!)
On the tombs of the old sea kings;
If you lie up there, with your face on the grass
You can hear their whisperings
Verse III
And each will sigh for the good day light
And for all his ancient bliss
Red wine, and the fight, song by night
Are the things they chiefly miss
And one, I know (for he told me so)
Is sick for a dead lad’s kiss
Verse IV
Ah! they’re fair to be back or many things
But mainly (they whisper) these;
England and April (the poor dead kings!)
And the purple touch of the trees
And the women of England, and English springs
And the scent of English seas
Verse V
But a lad like you, what has he to do
With the dead, be they living or dead
And their whims and tears for what can’t be theirs?
Live you in their silly stead
With a smile and a song for the live and strong
And a sigh for the poor old dead
Verses VI to LX
Still simmering
On 8 July he wrote ‘Pine Trees and the Sky: Evening’, while at Lulworth.
Pine Trees and the Sky: Evening
I’d watched the sorrow of the evening sky,
And smelt the sea, and earth, and the warm clover,
And heard the waves, and the seagull’s mocking cry.
And in them all was only the old cry,
That song they always sing – ‘The best is over!
You may remember now, and think, and sigh,
O silly lover!’
And I was tired and sick that all was over,
And because I,
For all my thinking, never could recover
One moment of the good hours that were over.
And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.
Then from the sad west turning wearily,
I saw the pines against the white north sky,
Very beautiful, and still, and bending over,
Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.
And there was peace in them; and I
Was happy, and forgot to play the lover,
And laughed, and did no longer wish to die;
Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!
After Lulworth, Rupert headed up to the Russell-Smiths at Brockenhurst, writing from there to St John Lucas, on 4 August. He again affected a different stance and writing style, attempting to convey a world-weariness beyond his years. He clearly adored the Russell-Smiths, but wrote with obvious exaggeration and suitable embellishment:
Now I am staying with this foolish family again till about next Saturday. They are delightful, and exactly as they were last year … A few days ago they found I was exactly twenty; and congratulated me on my birthday, giving me a birthday cake, and such things. I hated them, and lost my temper. 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. I hate myself and everyone. I have written almost no verse for ages; I shall never write any more … The rest are coming back from church. They want to tell me what the sermon was about.
Rupert was spared the fifty dull years, as within eight, he, Hugh and Hugh’s brother Denham, would all be dead, and Brockenhurst church where the Russell-Smiths worshipped would fill rapidly with First World War graves. For now, though, no shadow cast itself over the exuberant years of youth, where the summers seemed longer than the winters, and the countryside was there for the taking.
His travels around the south of England during the summer of 1907 included a stay with the Cotterills at Godalming. In his bedroom there he found a copy of William Morris’s Utopian classic, News From Nowhere or an Epoch of Rest, a book which he
had never read, but which had been on his list to track down ever since fellow student Ben Keeling had told him that a poster in his rooms at Cambridge had been inspired by it. The poster depicted a worker with clenched fist and the legend, ‘Forward the Day is Breaking’. Morris’s book and the piece of vivid artwork and slogan were to inspire Brooke to write in 1908 his only socialist poem, ‘Second Best’.
Second Best
Here in the dark, O heart;
Alone with the enduring Earth, and Night,
And Silence, and the warm strange smell of clover;
Clear-visioned, though it break you; far apart
From the dead best, the dear and old delight;
Throw down your dreams of immortality,
O faithful, O foolish lover!
Here’s peace for you, and surety; here the one
Wisdom – the truth – ‘All day the good glad sun
Showers love and labour on you, wine and song;
The greenwood laughs, the wind blows, all day long
Till night.’ And night ends all things.
Then shall be
No lamp relumed in heaven, no voices crying,
Or changing lights, or dreams and forms that hover!
(And, heart, for all your sighing,
That gladness and those tears are over, over…)
And has the truth brought no new hope at all,
Heart, that you’re weeping yet for Paradise?
Do they still whisper, the old weary cries?
‘’Mid youth and song, feasting and carnival,
Through laughter, through the roses, as of old
Comes Death, on shadowy and relentless feet,
Death, unappeasable by prayer or gold;
Death is the end, the end!’