They live not long of thy pure fire composed;
Earth asks but mud of those that will endure.
[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. Emily Brontë.]
Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness.
Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death
Far from the trembling throng
Whose souls are never to the tempest given.
[Footnote: Adonais.]
With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong for a poet … to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming shells to hear … and the bright face of danger to dream about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his article on Joyce Kilmer in The Bookman, Richard LeGallienne speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less wild-winged."
It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to retract his superlative claims for his protégé's promise.
More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In Alexander Smith's Life Drama, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic muses,
He died—'twas shrewd:
And came with all his youth and unblown hopes
On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.
In Sordello, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's Keats:
I have seen more glory in sunrise
Than in the deepening of azure noon,
or in Francis Thompson's The Cloud's Swan Song: