Details
BROOKE, Rupert (1887-1915). AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT OF HIS POEM The One before the Last, SIGNED 'R' at the end and comprising seven quatrains beginning:
'I dreamt I was in love again
With the One before the Last.
I smiled to greet that pleasant pain
of the innocent young past.
But I jumped to feel how sharp the pain
Had been when it did live,
How the faded dreams of nineteen-ten
Were Hell in nineteen five ... '
written at end of a long AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED ('Rupert') to an unidentified correspondent (his Cambridge friend, Dudley Ward), School Field, Rugby, 18 January 1910, giving a painful account of his father's illness which is preventing his own return to Cambridge, 'My gloom has in part increased. As it may relieve me: I shall pour it solemnly out. You may read and ponder. But better leave it all unread', dwelling on his mother's and his own feelings, his family's bleak financial prospects, also recounting a story about Noel Olivier who has 'on her own responsibility bought a dog. Which immediately slew 12 sheep, value ¨22. So that she is in debt for the rest of her life, and dependent on relations and friends for the slightest luxuries', and hinting at his affection for her, finally showing despondency about his plans to travel with his friends, 'The worst Hell of it is - if this goes on through the summer, for me; what of our Caravan?', the letter comprising 10 pages, 8°, and the poem 28 lines written on 2 pages, 8°, together 12 pages, 8° (on 3 bifolia).
A revealing and tortured letter, written within days of his father's death. Rupert Brooke, himself recovering from illness, was detained at home in order to carry out his father's duties as housemaster at Rugby, and concludes 'There's just a silly flicker of hope. But there's a choice of three things, gradual blindness, gradual madness, and death. And the last, I'm afraid, is rather distant', continuing wretchedly that it is 'terrible and pitiful to watch him groping about and it is more terrible and pitiful to see Mother's agony'.
The news of Noel Olivier, to whom he became secretly engaged later in the year (she was still at Bedales school, and only seventeen) evidently affords him some light relief. 'I spent the night in dreaming interminable dreams of Noel's dog, which is sufficiently ignominious. With trouble around I laugh whenever I think of it', and the mock-anger of his reference about her sister Margery ('that she devil') and an apparent change in the Oliviers' plans, suggests his impatience to see Noel. He describes the bitter-sweet poem with which the letter ends as 'Lately written' while he was in bed with suspected typhoid fever, advising Ward to 'Read and laugh'.
Published in The Letters (1968), with the omission of 11 lines.
'I dreamt I was in love again
With the One before the Last.
I smiled to greet that pleasant pain
of the innocent young past.
But I jumped to feel how sharp the pain
Had been when it did live,
How the faded dreams of nineteen-ten
Were Hell in nineteen five ... '
written at end of a long AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED ('Rupert') to an unidentified correspondent (his Cambridge friend, Dudley Ward), School Field, Rugby, 18 January 1910, giving a painful account of his father's illness which is preventing his own return to Cambridge, 'My gloom has in part increased. As it may relieve me: I shall pour it solemnly out. You may read and ponder. But better leave it all unread', dwelling on his mother's and his own feelings, his family's bleak financial prospects, also recounting a story about Noel Olivier who has 'on her own responsibility bought a dog. Which immediately slew 12 sheep, value ¨22. So that she is in debt for the rest of her life, and dependent on relations and friends for the slightest luxuries', and hinting at his affection for her, finally showing despondency about his plans to travel with his friends, 'The worst Hell of it is - if this goes on through the summer, for me; what of our Caravan?', the letter comprising 10 pages, 8°, and the poem 28 lines written on 2 pages, 8°, together 12 pages, 8° (on 3 bifolia).
A revealing and tortured letter, written within days of his father's death. Rupert Brooke, himself recovering from illness, was detained at home in order to carry out his father's duties as housemaster at Rugby, and concludes 'There's just a silly flicker of hope. But there's a choice of three things, gradual blindness, gradual madness, and death. And the last, I'm afraid, is rather distant', continuing wretchedly that it is 'terrible and pitiful to watch him groping about and it is more terrible and pitiful to see Mother's agony'.
The news of Noel Olivier, to whom he became secretly engaged later in the year (she was still at Bedales school, and only seventeen) evidently affords him some light relief. 'I spent the night in dreaming interminable dreams of Noel's dog, which is sufficiently ignominious. With trouble around I laugh whenever I think of it', and the mock-anger of his reference about her sister Margery ('that she devil') and an apparent change in the Oliviers' plans, suggests his impatience to see Noel. He describes the bitter-sweet poem with which the letter ends as 'Lately written' while he was in bed with suspected typhoid fever, advising Ward to 'Read and laugh'.
Published in The Letters (1968), with the omission of 11 lines.