golden-haired
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.
Although she later rather regretted having written it, Brooke himself confessed to not minding the Apollo image. Those two words of hers, ‘young Apollo’, were to change people’s perception of Rupert for decades. In 1953, thirty-eight years after his death she wrote:
Certainly there was something legendary about Rupert Brooke’s appearance. He might have been born a youth in any century. It was easy to see him as one of Socrates’ young men, listening and frowning in the Athenian sun. Again he would have been entirely happy with Chaucer, noticing everything about the Canterbury Pilgrims, in that English mood of laughing at what you care about most. He would have been especially at home in Elizabethan times as a young poet about Court.
Frances saw Brooke as the pivotal figure in their circle of friends, which in effect he had become, having learned the knack of how to be the centre of attention and the central attraction. Bizarrely, he made all those associated with
Comus
solemnly promise that they wouldn’t get engaged or married during or within six months of the production – nonsense, of course, and impossible to impose upon anyone. In fact, Frances Darwin and Francis Cornford were the first to break the so-called pact by getting engaged.
Comus
, using the original music by Lawes, was repeated at a public matinee on the following day at the New Theatre, Cambridge. Ticket prices ranged from one to three shillings. The reviews for the first night were mixed, though Lytton Strachey, writing kindly of it in
The Spectator
, felt that it was ‘happily devoid of those jarring elements of theatricality and false taste which too often counterbalance the inherent merits of a dramatic revival’.
Scott and Wilkinson, photographers who were based at Camden Studio adjoining the New Theatre, Cambridge, wrote to Rupert asking him to ‘make an appointment with us to be photographed in your character in Milton’s
Comus
’. They added that the photographer would ‘consider it a personal favour’ if Brooke would be willing to pose for them. He posed. The production of
Comus
was a major feather in Brooke’s cap: the Milton tercentenary celebration was attended by such luminaries as the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, Robert Bridges, who was to become Laureate after Austin’s death five years later, the author Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey and Thomas Hardy. The production was followed by a dance at Newnham Grange with the whole cast in costume, including Rupert in a rather short, spangled, sky-blue tunic that was far too skimpy to sit down in.
The only shadow cast over the success of
Comus
was the death, during the dress rehearsals, of Brooke’s friend and mentor at King’s, Walter Headlam. who had encouraged him to undertake a production of the play. Headlam had been taken ill while watching a cricket match at Lord’s and later died in hospital of strangulation of the bowels. Rupert was devastated, pouring out his feelings to his mother: ‘[I]t made me feel quite miserable and ill for days … he was the one classic I really admired and liked … what I loved so in him was his extraordinary and loving appreciation of all English poetry.’
In the summer of 1908, Brooke and several of his Cambridge friends, including Hugh Dalton, Noel’s sister Margery, Ben Keeling,Dudley Ward and James Strachey, attended a Fabian summer school on the Welsh coast, in Merionethshire, some 3 miles south of Harlech. The first of the Society’s summer schools in Llanbedr had taken place the year before, following a suggestion by Fabian member Mabel Atkinson after she had been inspired by a German summer school. At the same time, a similar suggestion had arisen, and Frank Lawson Dodd had devised a scheme by which a large house could be procured for the education and recreation of Fabians during the holidays. The Society put
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.
Although she later rather regretted having written it, Brooke himself confessed to not minding the Apollo image. Those two words of hers, ‘young Apollo’, were to change people’s perception of Rupert for decades. In 1953, thirty-eight years after his death she wrote:
Certainly there was something legendary about Rupert Brooke’s appearance. He might have been born a youth in any century. It was easy to see him as one of Socrates’ young men, listening and frowning in the Athenian sun. Again he would have been entirely happy with Chaucer, noticing everything about the Canterbury Pilgrims, in that English mood of laughing at what you care about most. He would have been especially at home in Elizabethan times as a young poet about Court.
Frances saw Brooke as the pivotal figure in their circle of friends, which in effect he had become, having learned the knack of how to be the centre of attention and the central attraction. Bizarrely, he made all those associated with
Comus
solemnly promise that they wouldn’t get engaged or married during or within six months of the production – nonsense, of course, and impossible to impose upon anyone. In fact, Frances Darwin and Francis Cornford were the first to break the so-called pact by getting engaged.
Comus
, using the original music by Lawes, was repeated at a public matinee on the following day at the New Theatre, Cambridge. Ticket prices ranged from one to three shillings. The reviews for the first night were mixed, though Lytton Strachey, writing kindly of it in
The Spectator
, felt that it was ‘happily devoid of those jarring elements of theatricality and false taste which too often counterbalance the inherent merits of a dramatic revival’.
Scott and Wilkinson, photographers who were based at Camden Studio adjoining the New Theatre, Cambridge, wrote to Rupert asking him to ‘make an appointment with us to be photographed in your character in Milton’s
Comus
’. They added that the photographer would ‘consider it a personal favour’ if Brooke would be willing to pose for them. He posed. The production of
Comus
was a major feather in Brooke’s cap: the Milton tercentenary celebration was attended by such luminaries as the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, Robert Bridges, who was to become Laureate after Austin’s death five years later, the author Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey and Thomas Hardy. The production was followed by a dance at Newnham Grange with the whole cast in costume, including Rupert in a rather short, spangled, sky-blue tunic that was far too skimpy to sit down in.
The only shadow cast over the success of
Comus
was the death, during the dress rehearsals, of Brooke’s friend and mentor at King’s, Walter Headlam. who had encouraged him to undertake a production of the play. Headlam had been taken ill while watching a cricket match at Lord’s and later died in hospital of strangulation of the bowels. Rupert was devastated, pouring out his feelings to his mother: ‘[I]t made me feel quite miserable and ill for days … he was the one classic I really admired and liked … what I loved so in him was his extraordinary and loving appreciation of all English poetry.’
In the summer of 1908, Brooke and several of his Cambridge friends, including Hugh Dalton, Noel’s sister Margery, Ben Keeling,Dudley Ward and James Strachey, attended a Fabian summer school on the Welsh coast, in Merionethshire, some 3 miles south of Harlech. The first of the Society’s summer schools in Llanbedr had taken place the year before, following a suggestion by Fabian member Mabel Atkinson after she had been inspired by a German summer school. At the same time, a similar suggestion had arisen, and Frank Lawson Dodd had devised a scheme by which a large house could be procured for the education and recreation of Fabians during the holidays. The Society put
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