, the open door into nature;
the sense of flight and escape; the repeated thought of safety,
the insistent fatigue, the cry for sleep; -- all these bear confession
in their faces. "Flight", "Town and Country", "The Voice", are eloquent
of what they leave untold; and the climax of "Retrospect", --

"And I should sleep, and I should sleep," --

or the sestet of "Waikiki", or the whole fainting sonnet
entitled "A Memory", belong to the nadir of vitality. At moments
weariness set in like a spiritual tide. I associate, too, with such moods,
psychologically at least, his visions of the "arrested moment", as in
"Dining-Room Tea", -- a sort of trance state -- or in the pendant sonnet.
Analogous moods are not infrequent in the great poets. Rupert Brooke
seems to have faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfully
such moments. But even when the image of life, imaginative or real,
falters so, how essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisite
body of words like the traditional "rainbow hues of the dying fish"!
For I cannot express too strongly my admiration of the literary sense
of this young poet, and my delight in it. "All these have been my loves,"
he says, if I may repeat the phrase; but he seems to have loved the words,
as much as the things, -- "dear names", he adds. The born man of letters
speaks there. So, when his pulse is at its lowest,
he cannot forget the beautiful surface of his South Sea idyls
or of versified English gardens and lanes. He cared as much
for the expression as for the thing, which is what makes a man of letters.
So fixed is this habit that his art, truly, is independent
of his bodily state. In his poems of "collapse" as in those of "ecstasy"
he seems to me equally master of his mood, -- like those poets who are
"for all time". His literary skill in verse was ripe, how long so ever
he might have to live.

II

To come, then, to art, which is above personality, what of that? Art is,
at most, but the mortal relic of genius; yet it is true of it that,
like Ozymandias' statue, "nothing beside remains". Rupert Brooke was
already perfected in verbal and stylistic execution. He might have grown
in variety, richness and significance, in scope and in detail, no doubt;
but as an artisan in metrical words and pauses, he was past apprenticeship.
He was still a restless experimenter, but in much he was a master.
In the brief stroke of description, which he inherited f