"Peace"

• Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, 
• And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, 
• With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, 
• To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, 
• Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, 
• Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move, 
• And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, 
• And all the little emptiness of love!
• Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
• Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
• Naught broken save this body, lost but breath; 
• Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there 
• But only agony, and that has ending; 
• And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) was an English poet most famous for his war sonnets written during World War I (“If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England…” etc.). Strikingly handsome, Brooke epitomized the youthful English flower mowed down by the cruelty of the so-called “Great War.” Ironically, although Brooke enlisted in the British Army to fight in the war, he died before seeing action, succumbing to an infected mosquito bite. Brooke was a representative of the Georgian poets and a member of the Bloomsbury group of writers. While some of his poetry is dated, other works have transcended their day — especially those like “Peace,” which appears in his most popular book, 1914 & Other Poems.