THE GOSPEL OF LOVE
And where Friendship sweeps into love who shall tell, or where the dividing line is? But while Brooks lived he forgot not love. His was a throbbing, beating love whose light was a beacon night and day; a beacon of which he was not ashamed. He set the fires of romantic love burning and when he went away he left them burning so that their light might light the way for other poets and other lovers and other travelers when they came. He believed, like Noyes, that love should not be weak; that that was the great hope. Noyes said:
"But one thing is needful, and ye shall be true
To yourselves and the goal and the God that ye seek;
Yea, the day and the night shall requite it to you
If ye love one another if your love be not weak."
From Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes.
Now I do not mean to suggest that the love that Brooke sang was exactly the type that Noyes sang in these four lines. In fact, one feels a difference as he reads the two English poets, but they are alike in that each agreed that Love should not be weak, whatever it was. Brooke sang of romantic love, high and holy as that is; love of Youth for Maiden, lad for lass, and man for woman; and thank God for the high clean song that he gave to it in such lines as in "The Great Lover":
"Love is a flame;—we have beaconed the world's night.
A city:—and we have built it, these and I.
An emperor:—we have taught the world to die."
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
And again in that same great poem:
"—Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what's left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers…."
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.