Poems

This selection gathers the short lyrics Brooke wrote in the years before and at the opening of the First World War. Early pieces treat friendship, love, swimming, and particular English places, among them the Cambridgeshire village of Grantchester. Later sonnets of 1914 address enlistment, death, and an idealized England as a body to which the soldier returns. The manner is Georgian: regular stanzas, clear images, and a speaking voice close to conversation. There is no long narrative poem and no continuous story. The book is a slim body of songs and sonnets, not a war diary and not a collected edition of every fragment.

Quarter-bound in blue leather with pink cloth covers. Two different dust-jackets -glassine printed in black or white printed in blue and black. Later reprints issued with a transparent plastic dust-jacket and blue slipcase.