I recently stayed for a few days in the charming village of Redmarley d’Abitot in Gloucestershire and when researching the local area was pleasantly surprised to find that the nearby village of Dymock was significant in poetry circles for being the home of the eponymous Dymock Poets (as well as being the home of the Dymock Red cider apple and also Stinking Bishop cheese!). A visit ensued and in its church of St Mary’s I found a display about the Dymock Poets and learnt a bit more.
They were a literary group of poets who lived in or around Dymock, or visited often, and were active in the period from 1911 to the First World War. Centred around Lascelles Abercrombie’s house The Gallows, in nearby Ryton (that I subsequently visited and had a nice chat with the current owner who told me she gets plenty of American and Chinese literary tourists), the group comprised Abercrombie, Robert Frost (whose poem The Road Not Taken I wrote about here), Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and John Drinkwater.
The group published their own quarterly, titled New Numbers, and it was in this that we first saw Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier published: a poem which was to gain worldwide fame for its simple and affecting ‘noble fallen soldier’ motif, and be recited in a thousand-fold war memorials. Whilst a lot of war poetry such as Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (also blogged about, here) had a discernibly realistic view of war, Brooke’s The Soldier was diametrically opposite: a romanticised and sentimental view, speaking in unabashed tones of pride, courage, and sacrifice. It was written near the start of the First World War, perhaps before Brookes had time to sample the brutal realities of battle.
Indeed, he never would: sailing with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on its way to the Gallipoli landings in 1915, he developed streptococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite and, whilst moored off the Greek island of Skyros, died of septicaemia on 23rd April . As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried in an simple olive grove on Skyros. It makes the opening lines of his poem all the more poignant.
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.
