His “Collected Poems” as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in 1911.  That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of 24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21.  These last are thoroughly youthful in formula.  We all go through the old familiar cycle, and Brooke did not take his youth at second hand.  Socialism, vegetarianism, bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not—­it is all a part of the grand game.  We can only ask that the man really see what he says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster.

And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise.  Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one.  But even Brooke’s undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of sophomore song.  So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his introduction to the “Collected Poems” is so good that lesser hands may well pause) finds in them “more of the intoxication of the god” than in the later rounder work.  They include the dreaming tenderness of Day That I Have Loved; they include such neat little pictures of the gross and sordid as the two poems Wagner and Dawn, written on a trip in Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke’s poems occurs when he writes from Germany.  One finds it again, wittily put, in Grantchester.)

This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and there in Brooke’s work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible.  Like all young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our humanity and found in it food for purging laughter.  There was never a young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his day; we may surmise that Brooke’s peers at King’s would recall many vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand.  The few touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke’s part of being merely pretty in his verse.  In his young thirst for reality he did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors.  Just as his poems of 1905-08 are of the cliche period where all lips are “scarlet,” and lamps are “relumed,” so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in the Shropshire Lad stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet The Hill: 

    Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
      Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
      You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
    Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
    When we are old, are old....”  “And when we die
      All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
    Through other lovers, other lips,” said I,
    —­“Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!”