‘THE HANDSOMEST YOUNG MAN IN ENGLAND’
Aside.

Whilst MTL was choosing a poem for Valentine’s Day I noticed an old book of tooled leather embossed with gold. It was a poetry book by Rupert Brooke. MTL’s mother had passed it on to him but originally it had belonged to his great aunt, who was Matron at a hospital in Edinburgh. The book was inscribed to Miss ------- with best wishes from --------- who apparently was a famous surgeon. This captured my imagination. I suppose it wouldn’t very odd for a surgeon to give a Matron a book, but a poetry book by Rupert Brooke? I fantasised about a hopeless love affair.

I have always been fascinated by Rupert Brooke– a golden boy with his floppy hair and aesthetic good looks, tragically cut down in his prime in the Great War by an infected mosquito whilst crossing the Aegean Sea. He was buried in Skyros. Yeats described him as ‘the handsomest young man in England.’
He was born at Rugby in 1887 where his father was a housemaster and his mother was quite domineering. He won a fellowship to King’s College Cambridge. At one time he lived in Grantchester at The old Vicarage, now the home of the novelist Jeffrey Archer and his wife, the ‘fragrant’ Mary.

He was friendly with the Bloomsbury set and, with his boyish good looks, was confused about his sexuality. When he met Henry James in 1909 he said ‘I pulled my fresh boyish stunt’ and bewitched the novelist. He travelled for the Westminster Gazette and whilst on his travels, was said to have fathered a child by a Tahitian woman. He died en route to Gallipoli, during the war, and Winston Churchill spoke at his funeral.

He was remembered as a war poet but was more of a pre-war poet. Blake described his work as ‘Songs of Innocence’ in contrast to the works of the actual war poets, Sassoon and Owen, which he described as ‘Songs of Experience’
The Great War started the day after his 27th birthday and the publication of his sonnets coincided with his death on Easter Sunday 1915.

A young Apollo, golden haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife.
Magnificently unprepared,
For the long littleness of life.’
Frances Cornford

Going back to my fantasy: what did the Matron think when she read;-

Love awakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver
And suddenly the mad victory I planned
Flashed real, in your burning bending head…
My conqueror’s blood was cool as a deep river
In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand
Quieter than a dead man on a bed.

Odd that Brooke should write in 1914:-

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

And finally the lines that will forever be associated with him, from the old Vicarage, Grantchester:-

Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?...oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

Footnote:-
MTL pointed out that the clock actually was stopped, not at ten to three but at twenty past four. There’s poetic license for you!