Youth was in our hands

Rupert Brooke, 1913, by Sherril Schell
National Portrait Gallery NPG P101

In August of 1915, just months after Rupert Brooke’s death, his friend and literary executor Edward Marsh wrote a memoir, intending to publish it with Brooke’s collected poems. Marsh wrote that “Circumstances prevented this,” and Rupert Brooke: A Memoir wasn’t published until 1918. The delay allowed Marsh to include excerpts from Brooke’s letters. 

Aboard a troopship bound for Gallipoli, shortly before his death from “acute blood poisoning,”* Brooke wrote to his friend and fellow poet Lascelles Abercrombie:

I know now what a campaign is .... It is continual crossing from one place to another, and back, over dreamlike seas: anchoring, or halting, in the oddest places, for no one knows or quite cares how long: drifting on, at last, to some other equally unexpected, equally out of the way, equally odd spot: for all the world like a bottle in some corner of the bay at a seaside resort. Somewhere, sometimes, there is fighting. Not for us. In the end, no doubt, our apparently aimless course will drift us through, or anchor us in, a blaze of war, quite suddenly; and as suddenly swirl us out again .... One just hasn’t, though, the time and detachment  to write, I find. But I’ve been collecting a few words, detaching lines from the ambient air, collaring one or two of the golden phrases that a certain wind blows from (will the Censor let me say?) Olympus, across the purple seas.**

Noel Olivier,  Maitland Radford,
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen),
and  Rupert Brooke
Aug 1911 (unknown photographer)
NPG x13124)

Marsh’s memoir includes several of the words, lines, and “golden phrases” that Brooke recorded in his notebook. These fragments of half-finished poems offer enigmatic hints of what could have been. The following is from Brooke's draft of a sonnet:

The poor scrap of a song that some man tried
Down in the troop-decks forrard, brought again
The day you sang it first, on a hill-side,
With April in the wind and in the brain.
And the woods were gold; and youth was in our hands. 

Brooke died on the island of Skyros on April 23, 1915; the news appeared in the London Times on April 26th, and Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty of the British Navy, praised the young poet and his “simple force of genius” that communicated “the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit.” Churchill wrote, “The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and memory remain; but they will linger.”***

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*From Marsh’s memoir; other contemporary accounts attribute his death to sunstroke. Modern historians believe he died of septicemia from an infected mosquito bite.

** Rupert Brooke, in Rupert Brooke: A Memoir, by Edward Marsh, Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1918, pp. 173–174. 

***Winston Churchill, “Death of Mr. Rupert Brooke: Sunstroke at Lemnos,” London Times, 26 April 1915.