Many of the English public were captivated by the poetry of Rupert Brooke at the outset of World War I. Brooke’s poetry reflected the country’s mood of patriotism and idealism and followed on the heels of the Romantic period. Brooke’s sonnets were almost used as a rallying cry for the war effort, reprinted in newspapers as recruiting aids for the services. Vera Brittain, like many of her contemporaries, was deeply influenced and motivated by Brooke’s and in her writings she often mentioned the poetry of Rupert Brooke, having initially been deeply moved by the striking of sacrifice and romanticized of death that Brooke wrote. Brittain explains “For the young to whom Rupert Brooke’s poems are now familiar as classics, it must be impossible to imagine how it felt to hear them for the first time just after they were written.” The best known of Brooke’s poems, The Soldier, reads:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.For Brittain, her fiancee Roland Leighton’s death took any sense of romanticism out of dying and sacrifice writing, “Roland, I reflected bitterly, was now part of the corrupt clay into which war had transformed the fertile soil of France; he would never again know the smell of a wet spring evening in the early spring.” The contrast from Burke’s “a rich earth a richer dust concealed” to Brittain’s “a corrupt clay” was a part of Brittain having “been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory”. The desolation of the loss was all encompassing “I wonder…if ever, ever I shall get over this feeling of bland hopelessness….Resistance requires an energy which I haven’t any of…hardly seems worth while.” Brittain’s writings at this time reflect the general erosion of her idealism and patriotism as she is confronted with the horrors and personal losses of the war, to the point where she writes, “Truly, the War had made masochists of us all.” In her sorrow Brittain published a poem Verses of a V.A.D. of which the last two stanzas read:
“And I am worn with tears, for he I loved
Lies cold beneath the stricken sod of France;
Home has forsaken me, by death removed,
And Love that seemed so strong and gay has proved,
A poor crushed thing, the toy of cruel chance.
Often I wonder, as I grieve in vain,
If when the long, long future years creep slow,
And War and tears alike have ceased to reign,
I shall ever recapture, one again,
The mood of that May Morning, long ago.”
Almost twenty years after writing the poem, Brittain wrote “The concluding speculation is answered now-not only for me but for all of my generation. We never have recaptured that mood; and we never shall. (Brittain 270)
