LVIII THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



youth to the future. The contrast is known when we placç Brooke's 

 sonnet "Blow Out Ye Bugle Over the Rich Dead," beside Owen's, 

 "Apologia". The first glows with a sort of mediaeval ecstasy, the 

 second throbs with immediate sincerity and ironic truth. It is the 

 voice of a tortured human soul. There has been agony before in 

 English poetry, but none like unto this agony. How far removed is 

 it from echoes of the drums and trumpets of old time valour, how far 

 away from such a classic as "The Burial of Sir John Moore"? Here 

 is an accent new to English poetry. There is the old power of courage, 

 the indomitable spirit of the forlorn hope, but the anaesthetic of 

 glory is absent, and the pain of all this futile sacrifice based on human 

 error and perversity is suffered by the bare nerve without mitigation. 

 Rupert Brooke's admiration of that bare technique, fitted to 

 that strange and candescent intellect of Donne's was forgotten when 

 he touched those incomparable sonnets of his. In them the intensity 

 of feeling takes on a breadth and movement which is an amalgam 

 of many traditions in English poetry, traditions of the best with the 

 informing sense of a new genius added, the genius of Rupert Brooke. 

 In his case, as in the case of all careers pre.maturely closed, it is idle 

 to speculate upon the future course of his genius. It may be said, 

 however, that his prose criticism, his study of Webster and his letters 

 show that his mind was philosophic and that his poetic faculty was 

 firmly rooted in that subsoil and had no mere surface contact with 

 life. Our faith that Keats would have developed had he lived, takes 

 rise from our knowledge of the quality of his mind, as shown in his 

 criticism and in his wonderful letters. We can say confidently that 

 a poetic faculty based on such strong masculine foundation, with 

 such breadth of sympathy, would have continued to produce poetry 

 of the highest, informed with new beauty and with a constant reference 

 to human life and aspirations. With due qualifications the same 

 confidence may be felt in the potential power of Rupert Brooke. 

 He had not Keats' exquisite gift, but he was even more a creature of 

 his time, bathed in the current of youthful feeling that was freshening 

 the life of those days, and he would have been able to lead that freshet 

 of feeling into new and deep channels of expression. Close association 

 for a week with so eager a mind served to create and enforce such 

 opinions. He seemed, so far as his talk went, more interested in 

 life than art, and there was a total absence of the kind of literary 

 gossip that so often annoys. His loyalty to his friends and confreres 

 was admirable, and he had greater pleasure in telling what they had 

 done than in recounting his own achievements,- — ^what their hopes were 

 rather than his own. I remember his saying that he intended to 



