Peace -- Rupert Brooke

(Poem #1762) Peace Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love! Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there, Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending, Naught broken save this body, lost but breath; Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there But only agony, and that has ending; And the worst friend and enemy is but Death. -- Rupert Brooke

        (1914)

Note: The first sonnet in Brooke's 1914 sequence

Today's poem - challengingly titled "Peace" - marks the first of Brooke's
sequence of five World War I sonnets, commonly called the "1914 sequence".
("The Soldier", perhaps his best known poem, is Sonnet V in that sequence.)
Back when I ran "The Soldier", I noted that the patriotic tone, filtered
through the sensibilities of a post-World-Wars mind, makes these sonnets
seem old-fashioned at best, badly dated at worst. "The Soldier" tended
towards the former end of the spectrum; "Peace", despite is poetic merits,
tends definitely to the latter.

Which is not to say that I dislike the poem - indeed, I found the images of
renewal and cleansing, the almost palpable feeling of a skin being shed,
both finely crafted and powerful. But it would be naive to pretend that a
sentiment like "leave the sick hearts that honour could not move" sounds
anything but misguided today.

An excellent summary from http://www.sonnets.org/wwi.htm captures both sides
of the matter perfectly:

  Although Rupert Brooke's 1914 sonnets received an enthusiastic reception
  at the time of their publication and the author's death (of blood
  poisoning), disenchantment with the ever-lengthening war meant a backlash
  against Brooke's work. These sonnets have been lauded as being "among the
  supreme expressions of English patriotism and among the few notable poems
  produced by the Great War" (Houston Peterson), while according to Patrick
  Cruttwell, "I suspect that these unfortunate poems, through their great
  vogue at first and the bitter reaction against them later, did more than
  anything else to put the traditional sonnet virtually out of action for a
  generation or more of vital poetry in English." But, as you can see here,
  some writers of the period adapted the sonnet to their war experience, and
  it is interesting to speculate on whether Brooke's writing would have
  become as bitter and disillusioned as that of his contemporaries had he
  lived a few years more. See Harry Rusche's Rupert Brooke page, part of his
  Lost Poets of the Great War.

Also, I feel an essential step towards fully appreciating today's poem is to
note its significant personal component - several of the attitudes expressed
are thrown into clearer focus when viewed against Brooke's biography.

martin

[Links]

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/brooke3.html has a few footnotes

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/brooke2.html has more on the Brooke of the 1914
sonnets

Poem #280, "The Soldier", has some more discussion of Brooke's war poetry.