Honey Still for Tea?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 368, 12 July 1946, Page 15

Honey Still for Tea?

HAT is it that accounts for the deep and continuing affection felt for the poetry of Rupert Brooke, recently presented from 3YA in a BBC Chapter and Verse study? The intrinsic merits of his verse do not, I think, altogether account for it; full of charm and entertainment, they never really ‘say anything final about the poet’s attitude to life. They are rather incidentals arising from the spirit of a divine amateur; and those who argue, probably justly, that Brooke died young and that the powers would have matured, miss the point that it is that spirit of the amateur (in the best sense of the word), innocent and untouched by bitterness, or, it must be added, any very profound sort of experience, that his admirers love in Brooke’s work. "This singularly ° fortunate young man," a modern commentator’ has‘ called him, and part of his abiding popularity is thus to be accounted for, He is the poet of the pre-1914 world on which two generations have learnt to look back with nostalgia as on a world of, security and comfort and freedom from the constant, pesterings and responsibilities of to-day. In 1909 Brooke could sit in Berlin and wish he was in Grantchester; thirty years later dwellers in Grantchester were wondering how to keep Berlin out of their back gardens.