by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | BR, CH, LA, LO, RU
Squares and Triangles “male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics” ~ Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolfe A cloistered room can be concocted in An ordinary bedsit. Cambridge rooms Are not required. You sit and rest your chin On loneliness. Love’s...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | AU, BR, GO, RU
So What? “a Rugby athlete” “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” ~ Oscar Wilde If we reduce the man to what he was On Rugby playing fields, back when a lad Who might have...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | BR, RU, VI, WO
Skinny Dipping with Rupert Brooke, Sturdy as a Marlowe Stanza or Miltonic Ones, in a Night-time Cambridgeshire Pool Virginia Woolf had seen him. She had seen Him whole. She saw his soul, good-hearted, kind, Substantial. She had seen him leaping, clean, More clean...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | AE, BR, EC, RU, SE
Rupert Wanted Surrender “Love is a breach in the walls, a broken gate. Love sells the proud heart’s citadel to fate.”~ Rupert Brooke Would women be as likely as a man To write such sentiments, to think of love As breaching...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | BR, CH, GA, LA, LO, RU, UN
Rugby Love Reduced to Black and White in Cambridge Love That love continued into Cambridge days. One Rugby beauty took another in A frame and kept him in his room to gaze At eyes, at stalwart auburn hair, and chin, Not just in daytime, either, but in nights Of...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | BR, PH, PO, RU
Poetry Saved by Photographs and Words of Memory It hardly matters if his verse is great, Carved lines, bronze poetry, immortal stuff, Or not. Brooke’s like a surfer on the spate Of swollen wave tops. Killing beauty’s tough. It lingers on in culture’s core. His face...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | BE, BR, GA, LA, LO, MA, RO, RU, UN
On the Rubbish Heap of Time . . . The one he loved the most was Charles Lascelles. We have to take Brooke’s word for it that he Was beautiful. As Rugby tower bells Rang out the hours, a passion rhymed with glee Pumped hard inside the future poet, hard...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2022 | BR, DE, IN, RU, SA, ST
Not Religion but Death At first church fame held up his lines to heights Near immortality. Saint Paul’s robed Dean Had read “The Soldier” in the lectern rites Of Christ’s domed space before the altar screen. It seems that Brooke knew this. ...
