Rupert Brooke to Noel Olivier

Rupert Brooke, 1887-1915

"A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life."

These lines were written by Frances Cornford for Brooke, called by W. B. Yeats, "The most handsome man in England."

Rupert Brooke was born into a well-to-do, academic family; his father was a housemaster at Rugby School, where Rupert was educated before going on to King's College, Cambridge. He was a good student and athlete, and--in part because of his strikingly handsome looks--a popular young man who eventually numbered among his friends E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, and Edward Thomas.

Even as a student he was familiar in literary circles and came to know many important political, literary and social figures before the war. He was killed in World War One. Brooke actually saw little combat during the war; he contracted blood-poisoning from a small neglected injury and died in April, 1915, in the Aegean.

Rupert wrote this love letter to Noel Olivier.

October 2, 1911

I have a thousand images of you in an hour; all different and all coming back to the same... And we love. And we've got the most amazing secrets and understandings. Noel, whom I love, who is so beautiful and wonderful. I think of you eating omlette on the ground. I think of you once against a sky line: and on the hill that Sunday morning.

And that night was wonderfullest of all. The light and the shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. You are so beautiful and wonderful that I daren't write to you... And kinder than God.
Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice - you.

Rupert Brooke