“We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here. 
      Life is our cry.  We have kept the faith!” we said: 
      “We shall go down with unreluctant tread
    Rose-crowned into the darkness!” ...  Proud we were
    And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. 
    —­And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the “1914” sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been separately issued.  The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of “1914 and Other Poems,” containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the complete edition.  As there were only twenty-five copies of this first American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought after by collectors.  But for one who is interested to trace the growth of Brooke’s power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study.  From the perfected brutality of Jealousy or Menelaus and Helen or A Channel Passage (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the form.  What could better the wit and beauty of this song: 

    “Oh!  Love,” they said, “is King of Kings,
      And Triumph is his crown. 
    Earth fades in flame before his wings,
      And Sun and Moon bow down.” 
    But that, I knew, would never do;
      And Heaven is all too high. 
    So whenever I meet a Queen, I said,
      I will not catch her eye.

    “Oh!  Love,” they said, and “Love,” they said,
      “The Gift of Love is this;
    A crown of thorns about thy head,
      And vinegar to thy kiss!”—­
    But Tragedy is not for me;
      And I’m content to be gay. 
    So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady,
      I went another way.

    And so I never feared to see
      You wander down the street,
    Or come across the fields to me
      On ordinary feet. 
    For what they’d never told me of,
      And what I never knew;
    It was that all the time, my love,
      Love would be merely you.

We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War.  Let us be sparing of clumsy comment.  They are the living heart of young England; the throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of doubt.  All the hot yearnings of “1905-08” and “1908-11” are gone; here is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to England of all that she had given.  See his favourite metaphor (that of the swimmer) recur—­what pictures it brings of “Parson’s Pleasure” on the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam.  How one recalls those white Greek bodies against the green!