BYRON AND RUPERT BROOKE

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 80, 28 December 1929, Page 8

BYRON AND RUPERT BROOKE

“Rupert Brooke is regarded in Greece as another Byron.” This cabled statement at once challenges our sense of values. Probably it is not strictly true. Greece can hardly care much for Brooke or place him in the special niche reserved for Byron. Nor, excepting coincidence, are there many points of comparison between the two. The coincidences are superficially striking. Both died in the cause of freedom and both are buried in Greece. During the Great War, Rupert Brooke was affectionately regarded as a national hero, a sort of Grand Chevalier or the Sir Philip Sidney of the time. And, despite the ugly life of Byron and his many offences against public taste, the manner of his death gave him some sort of halo. In both cases lives of great promise were cut short by war. Apart from these facts, the comparison cannot proceed much further. As a personality, Brooke is but a candle, to the electric brilliance of Byron. When, five years ago, the critics were busy with the centenary of Byron, their examination dealt less with his poetry and more with his character. Here was a figure and a mind and a spirit, an enigmatic being, who crowded his own versa off the stage. The drama of Byron’s life remains vivid and ahve. His intensity, his wit, the generosity and fire of him, still command attention after a hundred years. There is, moreover, the darker background to this hectic play of the spoiled darling. But not much of his poetry is seriously considered nowadays. Yet it must be admitted that, like Scott, his verse is read by thousands who know little of the poetry of his greater contemporaries, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge. J . The personality of Rupert Brooke will never engage the perennial interest stimulated by Byron the man. It is also much too soon to estimate his worth as a poet. In the reaction from the war, his place is probably lower to-day than it should be. There are fashions in literature and Brooke is out of fashion. . He is blamed for falling away from his early revolt into and sentimentalism.

Most of us, however, are little concerned with the intellectual pundits. Poetry is generally esteemed by its emotional value to we less critical beings. It is because Burns plays on our heart-strings that we love him. That is why we care little about Brooke’s early realism and a very great deal about those sweet sonnets of “1914.” It does not matter to the many that they are written down as “false romanticism.” They have the sharp, salt taste of .blood and tears, the ring of sincerity, and very real beauty. Brooke may not be “another Byron,” but he will have a place of his own.