the death of Rupert Brooke. "Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger."
He died in April of 1915, and is buried at Scyros, "amid the white and pinkish marble of the isle, the wild thyme and the poppies, near the green and blue waters," and though his resting place is known only by a little wooden cross, with his name, and the date of his birth and death, marked on it in black, he has left sure and unquestioned evidences of great genius, to live after him.
Strong, courageous, beautiful, vital, in love with life, but brave and ready to face death in the beloved cause, we find every characteristic of spirit and soul brought within the scope of our understanding and appreciation in these beautiful last words of his:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns at home."
We love to think that immortality will bring him all he craved and all he lost when he went so bravely out of life, in the very fulness of living.
Where I'll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
Musing upon them; as a mother, who
Has watched her children all the rich day through
Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,
When children sleep, ere night."
