Unfortunately, Brooke himself had but a few weeks to live, and would be dead within a month (from an infected mosquito bite), dying on St George’s Day 1915 aboard a French ship moored off the coast of the Greek island of Skyros.
By this time, thousands of men had already been killed in action and Brooke’s poem struck the perfect patriotic chord for the time. But what is less well-known is that the most famous of these, ‘The Soldier’, was read aloud during the Easter Sunday service at St. He became popular when one of his poems was recited in St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s one of the more famous facts about Rupert Brooke’s life – that he wrote a number of war sonnets shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. Brooke’s good looks were often remarked upon, and while he was at Cambridge he was well-liked as a charming and handsome man, as well as a promising young poet.ĥ. Yeats as ‘the handsomest young man in England’.
