13 Quotes & Sayings By Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the eldest of four children. His father, Commander John Sidney Brooke, Royal Navy, had just retired from the sea and was struggling to make a living at farming when he met Mona Binnie, a schoolteacher. She was very beautiful and had an uncanny knack of turning heads. They married in 1894 on the Isle of Wight. Brooke had what his biographer calls "a lively sense of self-dramatisation" Read more

But he was also sensitive to his own need for affection and approval; after his parents' deaths he found it hard to cope with life alone. He had some happy experiences with women but his intense feelings were mostly expressed in poetry. He was educated at Eton (1897-1902) and Oxford (1903-06), where he developed a lifelong passion for the classical texts of Homer and Sophocles.

He became known for exceptional skill in Latin verse, particularly the elegiac couplets of Ovid. Brooke's first volume of verse appeared in 1899, when he was eighteen; it contained two poems called "The Last Post" and "The Unknown Quantity". The reviewers were not unkind but they did not take him seriously.

Undaunted by their cool reception, Brooke continued to write verse until 1913; during that time he produced more than three hundred poems of varying quality. His father paid him £20 per year for use of the family name on title-pages without any work done on them; but his mother provided little financial support, and she expected him to have a serious job as soon as possible to earn money to support her. Brooke continued to write poetry intermittently until 1922 when he gave it up as a job that didn't pay anything.

He spent most of his last decade as a private tutor in London where he befriended a number of poets whose work later became popular among the reading public: Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke's patron JH Hopkins, Paul Claudel and Louis MacNeice. In 1910 Brooke met Roger Fry who became an early admirer as well as close friend until Fry's death in 1927. In 1909 Blake called upon him as one who would be able to write "an English Homer".

In September 1911 Brooke received a letter from Lady Ottoline Morrell inviting him to teach at her school at Hammersmith, which she had founded after resigning from her husband's charge as Chairman of the London County

1
Spend the glittering moonlight there Pursuing down the soundless deep Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair, Or floating lazy, half-asleep. Dive and double and follow after, Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call, With lips that fade, and human laughter And faces individual, Well this side of Paradise! .. .There's little comfort in the wise. Rupert Brooke
2
Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea? Rupert Brooke
3
Ah God! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester! To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River-smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees. Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land? The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic stream Is dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold? And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley? And after, ere the night is born, Do hares come out about the corn? Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool? And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill? Say, is there Beauty yet to find? And Certainty? and Quiet kind? 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? . Rupert Brooke
4
My night shall be remembered for a star That outshone all the suns of all men's days Rupert Brooke
5
...in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.( I'm flogging a dead horse w/ this one but this is the 1st time I've even seen this quotes feature! I just wanted to post something.) Rupert Brooke
6
Canada is a live country - live but not like the States kicking. Rupert Brooke
7
If I should die think only this of me that there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England. Rupert Brooke
8
If I should die think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. Rupert Brooke
9
I know what things are good: friendship and work and conversation. Rupert Brooke
10
I have been so great a lover: filled my days So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise The pain the calm and the astonishment Desire illimitable and silent content And all dear names men use to cheat despair For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear Our hearts at random down the dark of life. Rupert Brooke
11
A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years. Rupert Brooke
12
Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. Rupert Brooke