t is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of
24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly
youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and
Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism,
bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot
on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not--it is all a
part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he
says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster.

And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise.
Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's
undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of
sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his
introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may
well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in
the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of _Day
That I Have Loved_; they include such neat little pictures of the gross
and sordid as the two poems _Wagner_ and _Dawn_, written on a trip in
Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke's
poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily
put, in _Grantchester_.)

This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and
there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all
young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our
humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a
young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his
day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many
vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few
touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part
of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he
did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his
poems of 1905-08 are of the cliche period where all lips are "scarlet,"
and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in
the _Shropshire Lad_ stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and
yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet _The Hill_:

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
You said, "Through glory an