Rupert Brooke’s patriotism offers an antidote to Ukip

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/24/rupert-brooke-poet-patriotism-ukip-englishness

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“That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England”. It is one of the most recognisable passages in English poetry, published in March 1915, and exactly a century ago this week the author of The Soldier was dead – one of the first victims of the Dardanelles campaign.

Rupert Brooke’s death was not exactly heroic. He died from blood poisoning following a mosquito bite in Egypt. But he was by then very famous, lionised by politicians and uncritical in his support for going to war, which he described as “swimmers into cleanness leaping”.

Virginia Woolf witnessed his bizarre trick of diving naked into river and emerging with an erection

“Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body,” wrote Churchill in his fearsome Times obituary. “He was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable.”

But Brooke was, as it turned out, perhaps the last prominent poet if not of the glory of war (the foreign field was about death rather than glory), then not yet of the pity of war either.

His relief about going off to fight may have owed more to the chance of escape from his complex love life, though he did become very cross about the invasion of Belgium. He also nurtured a horror of getting old; he always had a penchant for dying young.

Even so, he might have an unexpected importance today. Brooke is a half-remembered poet of Englishness, but not just that – because he was at least as interested in politics as he was in poetry. And there is a hidden politics in his best-known poems.

Virginia Woolf knew him (and witnessed his bizarre trick of diving naked into a river and emerging with an erection) and said he would have been a great Labour politician – presumably in cabinet with his friend Hugh Dalton in 1945.

He may actually have become a Liberal. He had turned against his Cambridge Fabian friends before he died, and become involved with the Asquiths (Violet wanted to marry him). In fact, he finished the draft of The Soldier staying with them at Walmer Castle in Kent over the new year – the very place and moment when the Dardanelles campaign was decided.

The historian Arnold Toynbee (whose wife knew Brooke) said he was more like Lawrence of Arabia, both of them tortured by prudery and indecision, both of them “tormented neurotics” and “brave egotists”. This implies that, had he lived, he might have come back a disillusioned recluse and perhaps flirted with fascism, before being killed in a motorbike accident, as Lawrence was.

Related: Love letters expose the patriot poet

But despite the military edge to his poems, Brooke was always a radical. He remains in the nation’s cupboard of half-remembered verses mainly for the “foreign field” line and the nostalgia of The Old Vicarage, Grantchester – a poem that evoked the capacity of one place to heal his breakdown. He was a patriotic poet who was emphatically never a Conservative, but he may have another importance now. He was a writer who – without really intending to – managed to articulate something about England, when the English lack a clear idea of what their nation means, unlike the Scots and Welsh.

Yes, he was a bit too bucolic to encompass Wolverhampton or Worthing. (In fact, Brooke was downright rude about urban people.) His work doesn’t have the spiritual power of Blake, nor is it really significant that Brooke died on the same day of the year as Shakespeare. But it may be significant that it was the English national day.

Grantchester manages to express something of the nostalgia, enjoyably melancholic – and infuriating for most politicians, right and left – that seems to be at the heart of the English soul. “Stands the church clock at ten to three,” we still say to ourselves, wondering vaguely whether anyone still has honey for tea. Or whether they still have tea at all.

An exhibition of the work of the artist Eric Ravilious has just opened at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and he seems to have pulled off a similar trick: a vision of a gentle, polite kind of Englishness. A sort of antidote to Ukip. Brooke’s Grantchester, his second most famous poem, is also a hymn of praise to a very particular place. It is a kind of patriotism of the particular, a celebration of the ordinary. Which is also very English.