travel books: at Rugby, Brooke was educated there and at King's College, Cambridge. After an interval of study and travel he was appointed a Fellow of King's- his own college-and might have led the uneventful life of a scholar but for the outbreak of war. He obtained a commission in the R.N.V.K., and took part in the expedition to Antwerp. On active service in the Dardanelles he was stung by a poisonous fly, and died a few days later aboard the French hospital ship Duquay-Trouin. Though he is best known by his admirable sonnet The Soldier, much of Brooke's earlier work is teeming with high promise. Grantchester, Dining-room Tea, Day I have Loved, Dust, and The Fish, to name only a few, gave ample evidence of immature but fresh and vivid genius. Many critics believe that in Rupert Brooke's grave on the little marble isle of Scyros is buried the dust of one who might have been numbered among the greates books

Books > Old Books > A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (1914)

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CHAPTER XIII
THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

at Rugby, Brooke was educated there and at King's College, Cambridge. After an interval of study and travel he was appointed a Fellow of King's- his own college-and might have led the uneventful life of a scholar but for the outbreak of war. He obtained a commission in the R.N.V.K., and took part in the expedition to Antwerp. On active service in the Dardanelles he was stung by a poisonous fly, and died a few days later aboard the French hospital ship Duquay-Trouin. Though he is best known by his admirable sonnet The Soldier, much of Brooke's earlier work is teeming with high promise. Grantchester, Dining-room Tea, Day I have Loved, Dust, and The Fish, to name only a few, gave ample evidence of immature but fresh and vivid genius. Many critics believe that in Rupert Brooke's grave on the little marble isle of Scyros is buried the dust of one who might have been numbered among the greatest singers of his generation.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

The " foreign field " is a craggy slope in the eEgean Sea, and the " corner " is marked by an international memorial, but it is, as Brooke wished it to be, "for ever England." Of his poetry Mr Winston Churchill said: "A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms, than any other."
Among the War poems which have endured is In Flanders Fields, by Colonel John McCrae, 1872-1918, a Canadian Scot who was all un wittingly the originator of the 'Flanders Poppy,' worn