High on an olive grove
overlooking Aegean blue
rests a punctuated thought
a life caught, media caesura
a breath | paused | eternally
Hover above a whistle
memory's wind, it blows
sunburnt reminiscence
where the gods sequestered
Muses interment softly glow
Why the folly, in this--
sending a poet to war
Before charging the shore
struck a fatal kiss in Gaul
felled by a bullet of fate.
How does one farewell
a flame thus whisked away
or have the deities misruled
a more gallant death for him
on the shores of Gallipoli
Perhaps it is as it should be
your life as brief as poetry
on breeze kissed Skyros *****
under shady windows and
fragrance of sage and thyme
In memoriam, Rupert C Brooke, 100 years after his demise.
He returned to England at the outbreak of World War I and enlisted in the Royal Naval Division. His most famous work, the sonnet sequence 1914 and Other Poems, appeared in 1915. On April 23, 1915, after taking part in the Antwerp Expedition, he died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite while en route to Gallipoli with the Navy. He was buried on the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.
Following his death, Brooke, who was already famous, became a symbol in England of the tragic loss of talented youth during the war.