Rupert Brooke and to his poetry. His surely was the intellectual imagination possessed in a rare degree. Nothing in his work is more conspicuous than its preoccupation with actual experience, its adventurousness, its daring, its keen curiosity and interest in ideas, its life-giving youthfulness. Nothing in his work is more conspicuous by its absence than reverie, a deep still broodingness. The children in his poems are few. They are all seen objectively, from without; though a wistful childlike longing for peace and home and mother dwells in such a poem as "Retrospect" or "A Memory." I am not sure that the word 'dream' occurs in them at all.[1]
"Don't give away one of the first poets in England," he says in one of his letters, "but there is in him still a very, very small portion that's just a little childish." Surely it was the boy in him that boasted in that jolly, easy fashion, the boy in him that was a little shamefaced to confess to that faint vestige of childishness.
- ↑ To my shame and consternation my friend Mr Edward Marsh has pointed out to me, since this paper was read, that the word 'dream' occurs in no less than fifteen of Brooke's poems. This, I hope, will be one more salutary lesson that general impressions are none the worse for being put to a close test. Still, the fact that that peculiar, dreamlike quality and atmosphere which is so conspicuous in the poetry of the visionaries is very rarely, if ever, present in that of Brooke will not, I think, be gainsaid.
