e passion and shapely zest
that are in his work will pass safely to the memory of posterity."
Mr. Wilfrid Gibson's tribute took the form of a short poem
called "The Going":

He's gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That, as he turned to go
And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow --
And he was gone.

Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, now perhaps the greatest of our younger poets
and a warm personal friend of Brooke's, wrote at greater length:

"'And the worst friend and enemy is but Death' . . . 'And if these
poor limbs die, safest of all.' So ended two of the five sonnets,
with the common title '1914', which Rupert Brooke wrote
while he was in training, between the Antwerp expedition and sailing
for the Aegean. These sonnets are incomparably the finest utterance
of English poetry concerning the Great War. We knew the splendid promise
of Rupert Brooke's earlier poetry; these sonnets are the brief perfection
of his achievement. They are much more than that: they are among
the few supreme utterances of English patriotism. It was natural, perhaps,
that they should leave all else that has been written about the war
so far behind. It is not so much that they are the work of a talent
scarcely, in its own way, to be equalled to-day; it was much more
that they were the work of a poet who had for his material the feeling
that he was giving up everything to fight for England --
the feeling, I think, that he was giving his life for England.
Reading these five sonnets now, it seems as if he had in them written
his own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said
in my last talk with him makes me believe that -- now. At any rate,
the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies,
has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time
more beautifully appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke's
noble sonnet-sequence, '1914', a few swift weeks before the death
they had imagined, and had already made lovely. Each one of these
five sonnets faces, in a quiet exultation, the thought of death,
of death for England; and understands, as seldom even English poetry
has understood, the unspeakable beauty of the thought:

"These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
That men call age; and tho