"He's gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That, as he turned to go
And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow—
And he was gone,"
Thanks, Wilfred Gibson, you who have made articulate the voice of the downtrodden of the world, the poetic "Fires" which have lighted up with sudden glow the slums, the slag heaps, the factories, the coal mines, and hidden common ways of folks who toil; thanks that you have also beautifully lighted up the "End of the Trail" of your friend and our friend, Poet Rupert Brooke; lighted it with the light that shines from eternity. We owe you debt unpayable for that.
And you yourself, war-dead poet, you sang your end, full knowing that it would come, as it did on foreign soil, far from the England that you loved and voiced so wondrously. And now these lines that you wrote of your own possible passing have new meaning for us who remain to mourn your going:
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's breathing, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home."
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
And so here, even in this hymn of your passing, you have given a striking illustration off one of your strongest characteristics, love of homeland. Poet of Youth who left us so early in life, take your place along with Byron, and Shelley, and our own Seeger—a quartette of immortals, whose voices were heard, but, like the horns of Elfland, "faintly blowing" when they were hushed. Though you were but a youthful voice, yet left you poetry worth listening to, and preached a gospel that will make a better world, though it had not gone far enough to save the world.
THE GOSPEL OF FRIENDSHIP
Among the few definite, outstanding gospels that Brooke preached is seen the gospel of friendship. In "The Jolly Company" he says:
"O white companionship! You only
In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
Friends, radiant and inseparable!"
"Light-hearted and glad they seemed to me
And merry comrades, even so
God out of heaven may laugh to see.—"