Rupert Brooke was beginning to be known both as a poet and for rare personal beauty when his death at the age of twenty-eight, on his way out to the Dardanelles, set him beside Sir Philip Sidney as scholar, soldier, poet and patriot.
There was a factitious element in this burst of acclamation, something we can hope the man himself would have responded less and less to. Though the beauty of his person and the daintiness of his verse and the gentleness of his manners made worldlings eager to spoil him, he was not averse to hard work, and maintained a certain reserve which augured a better future for him than that of a darling of fashion. He and his young Cambridge friends of both sexes seem to have cherished an ideal of free comradeship, and to have realised it in an uncommon degree without paying toll in scandals to the censorious world. In like manner his verse, though playful and ornamental, so toys with philosophical inquiries as to hint at latent resources of graver power. Such problems as whether any communions are possible, whether I can know you or you me, and whether existence is absolutely conditioned by time and space, are whimsically put and illustrated in such instances as a fish, or a single moment of one particular tea in a dining-room.
"Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish."
