Selected Poems

This selection aims to provide an introduction to the poetry of Rupert Brooke, spanning the years 1910 to 1915.

The Hill, The Fish and Dining Room Tea all date from his happiest Cambridge years, when he lived first at The Orchard, and then at The Old Vicarage in Grantchester.

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester was written after the troubled period which followed the publication of Poems, 1911 and his affair with Ka Cox. It expresses not just longing for his home in England, but also nostalgia for a period of his life which was gone forever.

The Great Lover and Tiare Tahiti were written in early 1914 when he had regained his happiness, travelling and living in the South Pacific.

The five sonnets which make up 1914 were produced in the autumn of 1914. It was the reading of The Soldier by the Dean of St Paul's at the Easter Sunday service in April 1915 which secured Brooke's immortality.

Fragment was written in early April 1915, shortly before Brooke's death. It suggests a style more like that of later WWI poets, one which Brooke might have developed had he lived.