Page:Collected poems of Rupert Brooke.djvu/19

INTRODUCTION secret. The brief stroke does this work time and time again in his verse, nowhere better than in "at dead Youth's funeral:" all were there,—

The poem is like a vision of an old time Masque:—

How vivid! The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging; but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk. And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had left his short breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come into the long sweep and open water of great style:—

Or;—

Or, more briefly,—

And this,—

Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways he was conspicuously successful in his art. xi