Rupert had other friends of this mind, but as the months went by and the youth grew to the full stature of his manhood, the longing to win fuller power as a poet grew with him. More than ever it seemed the one gift he would have. Not as others had sung, but a new song for a new age would he sing. He could never be merely “an idle singer of an empty day.”
In the meantime he carried off the prize of a fellowship at King’s College, which gave him means to go on with his study and writing. Just as scholarship helps a student with his college expenses, so a fellowship gives a graduate an income to enable him to carry forward some special work for which he has proved particular fitness, and which bids fair to be of value to the world.
The fellowship allowed Rupert Brooke to study where he would. He spent a year in Germany—in Munich and Berlin—but he learned there, above everything else, a new appreciation of his own England. In his charming, whimsical poem “Grantchester,” written in Berlin in May, 1912, he pictures his home by the river Cam in lilac time, and nothing in the perfectly regulated, efficient German world that surrounds him can compare with that place his heart knows.
... there the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose; ...
... I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of that district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
Once again at home in the cozy vicarage at Grantchester, when he tired of his book-littered study he could walk through the shadowy green tunnel that the great chestnut trees made beside the river and dream of the poems that he would some day have power to call into being. More than anything else he loved to swim in the laving waters of “Byron’s Pool,” at night or in the magic half-light of dawn. Then it seemed as if the past and the present were one, and as if the shades of those other poets who had found refreshment and inspiration near that same fair stream came again to linger lovingly by its waters.
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by....
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night.
He felt himself in a very real sense “heir of all the ages” as his body cut and darted through the water; the life of the past no less than the life of the present surrounded him, buoyed him