Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whom W. B. Yeats called “the handsomest young man in England,” endures in our cultural imagination as poster boy for the generation of poets lost to the First World War. Brooke’s own death, of blood poisoning in the aftermath of an insect bite, is hardly less horrific in its utter wastefulness than are the battlefield deaths of his contemporaries Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. Dying early in the war, en route to what would become the catastrophe of the Dardanelles campaign, Brooke was spared the horrors that would come to define Owens’s poetry, particularly. Instead, he could write, lyrically and innocently, of the English soldier’s death and burial far from home — in his case, on the Greek island of Skyros — as the foundation of a spot that is “for ever England.”   

Just as Brooke, in photographs, looks as though he might have starred in his own biopic, after the style of “Chariots of Fire,” his poems, too, tend to shine with a golden-hour light of something not quite real, only longed for. Although the Grantchester of his famous poem is in fact an idyllic village, set in river meadows just south of Cambridge, no sun can burnish it quite as Brooke has done, stopping its clock for an eternal teatime.

In today’s Poem of the Day, however, we find the poet indulging in a little sardonic realism. If he was naive about the war, and idealistic about England, he could be nevertheless an astute observer of human beings in their social habitat. Here he has turned the Shakespearean sonnet upside-down. The poem begins with what is ordinarily the closing couplet, marking the brief starry-eyed apotheosis of a wedding. From there, the future proceeds to unravel into a disappointing ordinariness.  

Sonnet Reversed 
by Rupert Brooke 

Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights 
Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights. 

Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon! 
Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures, 
Settled at Balham by the end of June. 
Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures, 
And in Antofagastas. Still he went 
Cityward daily; still she did abide 
At home. And both were really quite content 
With work and social pleasures. Then they died. 
They left three children (besides George, who drank): 
The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell, 
William, the head-clerk in the County Bank, 
And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.