“The worst of slaves is he whom passion rules.”
TRQ: Rupert Brooke, Born August 3, 1887
Poet Rupert Brooke, most known for his war poem “The Soldier,” was born in Rugby, Warwickshire in England on August 3, 1887. Born to upperclass parents who worked as educators, Brooke had two brothers and a sister.
After attending a prep school from the age 8 to 13, Brooke enrolled at the Rugby School, where his father worked as Master of School Field House. The school was brutal in its emphasis on discipline, but Brooke, who was interested in verse and literature, won a school poetry prize in 1905.
At Rugby, Brooke befriended St. John Lucas and Geoffrey Keynes, the younger brother of John Maynard Keynes. He had affairs with boys at the school, and once wrote to his childhood friend James Strachey of his sexual adventures with fellow student Denham Russell-Smith:
“His skin was always very smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my room: and lay in bed thinking – my head full of tiredness and my mouth of the taste of tea and whales, as usual. Next evening, we talked long in front of the sitting room fire. My head was on his knees, after a bit. We discussed sodomy. He said he, finally, thought it was wrong . . . Again we went up to his room. He got into bed. I sat on it and talked. Then I lay on it. Then we put the light out and talked in the dark. I complained of the cold: and so got under the eiderdown. My brain was, I remember, almost all through, absolutely calm and indifferent, observing progress, and mapping out the next step. Of course, I planned the general scheme beforehand.
I was still cold. He wasn’t. “Of course not, you’re in bed!” “Well then, you get right in, too.” – I made him ask me – oh! without difficulty! I got right in. Our arms were round each other. “An adventure!” I kept thinking: and was horribly detached.
We stirred and pressed. The tides seemed to wax. At the right moment I, as planned, said “come into my room, it’s better there . . .” I suppose he knew what I meant. Anyhow he followed me. In the large bed it was cold; we clung together. Intentions became plain; but still nothing was said. I broke away a second, as the dance began, to slip my pyjamas. His was the woman’s part throughout. I had to make him take his off – do it for him. Then it was purely body to body – my first, you know! I was still a little frightened of his, at any sudden step, bolting; and he, I suppose, was shy. We kissed very little, as far as I can remember, face to face. And I only rarely handled his penis. Mine he touched once with his fingers; and that made me shiver so much that I think he was frightened. But with alternate stirrings, and still pressures, we mounted. My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of the sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to and fro over each other, in the excitement. Quite calm things, I remember, were passing through my brain. “The Elizabethan joke `The Dance of the Sheets’ has, then, something in it.” “I hope his erection is all right” – and so on. I thought of him entirely in the third person. At length the waves grew more terrific; my control of the situation was over; I treated him with the utmost violence, to which he more quietly, but incessantly, responded. Half under him and half over, I came off. I think he came off at the same time, but of that I have never been sure. A silent moment: and then he slipped away to his room, carrying his pyjamas. We wished each other “Good-night.” It was between 4 and 5 in the morning. I lit a candle after he had gone. There was a dreadful mess on the bed. I wiped it clear as I could, and left the place exposed in the air, to dry. I sat on the lower part of the bed, a blanket round me, and stared at the wall, and thought. I thought of innumerable things, that this was all; that the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge seemed a very tiny affair, after all; that I hoped Denham, for whom I felt great tenderness, was sleeping. My thoughts went backward and forward. I unexcitedly reviewed my whole life, and indeed the whole universe. I was tired, and rather pleased with myself, and a little bleak. “
With blond hair and blue eyes, Brooke was known for his striking looks and winning charm when he enrolled at King’s College, Cambridge in 1906. There, for the first time, he became interested in acting. He lead the Fabian Society and started the Marlowe Dramatic Society. It was during these years at Cambridge that Strachey fell deeply in love with Brooke.
In 1909 he started publishing his poems. In 1911, Brooke published his first book, Poems, which is filled with subtle references to homosexuality. He became friends with politicians like Winston Churchill, and writers like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Brooke’s beauty continued to attract men and women. Leonard Woolf once described him as “…exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite.”
Yeats described Brooke as “the handsomest young man in England.”
Describing himself as both heterosexual and homosexual, Brooke felt confined by social standards. Soon after his sexual experience with Russell-Smith, he fell in love with Noel Oliver, who was also involved with Henry Lamb. Brooke went on to have affairs with Arthur Hobhouse, boyfriend of both Keynes and Strachey. In 1911, he became involved with Ka Cox, and pursued actress Cathleen Nesbitt.
However, these sexual and romantic entanglements began to take their toll. Brooke began to suffer fits of jealousy, and in 1912, he suffered a traumatic breakdown.
Brooke went into psychiatric care for six weeks, and began to write James Strachey, brother of Lytton. Brooke felt himself to be beautiful on the outside but broken and rotten inside. He rejected his sexual identity, withdrew from the Bloomsbury Group and started touring America and Canada.
Brooke returned to England at the start of World War I, and in 1914 he joined the Royal Naval Division. When The Times Literary Supplement began publishing his war sonnets, Brooke’s popularity grew.
In “The Soldier,” one of Brooke’s most popular poems, he writes, “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.”
Brooke died on April 23, 1915 from blood poisoning caused by a mosquito bite. He had been sailing with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force for only a few months. He was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.
In May 1915, a month after his death, Brooke’s most well-known collection of poems was published under the title 1914 and Other Poems.
His work during this period reveals that he considered war to be a opportunity for moral purification. In “Peace” he writes of military recruits as “swimmers into cleanness leaping.” Biographers have noted that lines such as these parallel Brooke’s fondness for swimming naked with friends. Biographers have also noted that Brooke never saw any combat, and had very little experience with war. His notion that military experience would be a moral purification was pure idealism.
Nevertheless, it was easy to enshrine Brooke into a heroic narrative of the Adonis-like poet patriot who sacrificed his life for the sake the war effort.
As Winston Churchill himself said of Brooke, “Joyous, fearless, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.”
Brooke’s transformation into a patriotic hero erased biography and fabricated a new one. His mother played a role in this by refusing to hire Brooke’s own choice of literary executor, but instead chose Geoffrey Keynes who suppressed anything that would contradict Brooke the legend. Keynes suppressed any hint of homosexuality in Brooke’s own work, and he refused the publication of the Brooke-Strachey letters.
Keynes removed Brooke’s reference to his own bisexuality in a letter to Katherine Cox. In a letter to Erica Cotterill, Keynes removed Brooke’s question in which he asks his cousin, “Do you understand about loving people of the same sex? It is the question people here discuss most, in all its aspects. And of course most of the sensible people would permit it.”
Keynes was unable to edit Brooke’s letters to Russell-Smith and other boys from Rugby. Nor was Keynes able to remove all of the homoerotic tones within Brooke’s published work. Brooke’s essays written during his tour of America were collected in the somewhat homoerotic Letters from America (1916) and published a year after his death. While in New York, Brooke writes of a half- dressed mechanic who “seemed like a Greek god.”
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