The poet who welcomed war

Today, 23 April, the world celebrates the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s presumed birth (and marks with less joy the date of the Bard’s death in 1616). That double date obscures another: the 99th anniversary of the death of a less celebrated Warwickshire-born literary lad, the poet Rupert Brooke.

Brooke, like many of his friends and contemporaries, died in the First World War. But unlike most of them, he perished not in action, but as a result of septicaemia from an infected insect bite to his upper lip. En route to the bloody beaches of Gallipoli, he fell ill in Egypt, died on a French hospital ship moored off the Greek island of Skyros, and – fittingly for a classically educated poet – lies buried in an isolated olive grove overlooking the wine-dark waters of the Aegean.

Eulogised in the Times by an admiring Winston Churchill as ‘one of England’s noblest sons’ and made a poster boy for the self-sacrifice of the generation of 1914, Brooke’s most famous poem, ‘The Soldier’, speaks of his coming death with the longing language of ‘The Great Lover’ that Brooke saw himself as embodying:

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