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"Death is the end, the end!"
-Rupert Brooke, "Second Best" (1908)
Ever since 26 April 1915, when Winston Churchill in the London Times solemnly announced that "Rupert Brooke is dead," it has proved hard to avoid discussing the poet's sustained interest in mortality inde- pendently of the impassioned mourning that one of his last sonnets, "The Soldier," inspired in the nation.1 Most modem critical accounts of Brooke's poetic career recall, with some skepticism, Churchill's strategic depiction of a handsome twenty-seven-year-old "poet-soldier" who had, in recent months, "told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die,"2 As Churchill knew, only three weeks earlier the poignant sentiments expressed in Brooke's poetry had already caught the publics attention. On Easter Sunday that year, the Dean of St. Paul's, having begun his sermon with Isaiah 26:19 ("The dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise"), proceeded to quote in full "The Soldier," which the Dymock poets' New Numbers had published in December 1914. "If I should die," Brooke's poem famously begins, "think only this of me: / That there's some comer of a foreign field / That is forever England,"2 Churchill, without doubt, exploited the poets passing as exactly the kind of heroic sacrifice that the country had to make the day after Britain's military forces plunged into the much-criticized Battle of Gallipoli; a long-drawn-out campaign in which Brooke had not unreasonably expected that he might lose his life. During the weeks he spent waiting for the command to disembark and fight the Turkish military, Brooke informed his close friend Jacques Rave rat: "I've only two decent reasons for being sorry for dying-(several against)-I want to destroy some evils, and to cherish some goods,"4 That he charged Rave rat in the same letter to "fk]eep innumerable flags flying" shows that Brooke held the convic- tion that his death would be dedicated to a just war.5 On the face of it, Churchills obituary simply fulfills what 'The Soldier" prophesied about Brooke. Given that Churchill's commentary built on the Deans sermon to transform the young poet into a national legend, Brookes perished body came to stand for indomitable patriotic values, ones in which the sons of the soil would remain "forever England," no matter how...