Poem of the Day: ‘Sonnet Reversed’

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whom W. B. Yeats called “the handsomest young man in England,” endures in our cultural imagination as poster boy for the generation of poets lost to the First World War. Brooke’s own death, of blood poisoning in the aftermath of an insect bite, is hardly less horrific in its utter wastefulness than are the battlefield deaths of his contemporaries Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. Dying early in the war, en route to what would become the catastrophe of the Dardanelles campaign, Brooke was spared the horrors that would come to define Owens’s poetry, particularly. Instead, he could write, lyrically and innocently, of the English soldier’s death and burial far from home — in his case, on the Greek island of Skyros — as the foundation of a spot that is “for ever England.”