RUPERT BROOKE


Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born
of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin,
golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham,
in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at
Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church.

In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge,
England, issued a little anthology called _Cambridge Poems 1900-1913_.
This volume was my first introduction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at
Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to
time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own
small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing.
His poem _The Old Vicarage, Grantchester_, reprinted in Heffer's
_Cambridge Poems_, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14.

Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows
along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the
Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country
is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields
bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard
willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of
the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top
with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the