Poetry
1914 & Other Poems
Rupert Brooke · 1915
Opening lines
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Five sonnets written in the autumn of 1914 open the volume and give it its title. The first thanks God for matching a generation with its hour; the second finds safety in what does not die, even in death; the third salutes the dead, whom it calls rich, who have poured out the red wine of their youth; the fourth remembers their lives, halted like water caught by frost. The fifth imagines a corner of a foreign field that will forever be English. Poems of the South Seas and other pieces follow.
Context
The fifth sonnet was read from the pulpit of St Paul's on Easter Sunday, 4 April 1915, nineteen days before its author's death, and a literary supplement had printed two of them in full on 11 March. He was therefore already famous when he died, on the way to the Dardanelles; an obituary signed by a future prime minister completed his making into a national figure. The volume appeared in June 1915. The poets who knew the trenches then wrote against this image: Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are among them, and their books are read against this one.
Who it is for
A slim collection opening with five sonnets, translated in full into French in 2003 in a bilingual edition.
Prizes and reception
Printed in a run of a thousand copies in June 1915, it went through eleven further printings within the year and stood at twenty-one by 1917.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.