But here lay the problem. The five sonnets certainly captured the mood of the autumn of 1914, when the young manhood of a great imperial power rushed to join the colours. The metaphors in them are of a catharsis brought by the martyrdom of death in the noblest of causes, and of a rebirth into eternal glory. It was a feeling that was already wearing off by the time of Brooke's death, and had well and truly vanished in the aftermath of Gallipoli and the first Battle of Ypres. By the time of the Somme it had become a sick joke. This is a shame, because in sheer poetic terms the five sonnets are among the best of Brooke's work, much of which is self-indulgent and second-rate, rocking with pretentiousness and very much young man's music.

Writing exactly a century after Keats and Shelley, and sharing their premature end, he did not quite have their talent. One imagines that, had he lived, he would have gone down the Sassoon route of writing some rather good memoirs and have become a fixture in the salons of Bloomsbury with his other friends; and as an old man appeared in television interviews in the Fifties and Sixties. Whether he would ever have written any poetry better than we already have must be highly doubtful. There are one or two flashes of brilliance in his work-note his poem "Dining Room Tea", in which he imagines a moment frozen in time-but they are out of the ordinary.

My grandfather lived in Grant-chester, a few houses away from Rupert Brooke, just before the Great War, and I was brought up on him as a consequence of the tenuous connection. I have never seen him so much as a war poet as a poet of the nostalgia that swamped the Edwardians in their garden paradise, in the supposedly eternal summer before 1914; and nowhere on earth was summer more eternal than in that Cambridgeshire village. "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" may be known now just for its concluding couplet ("Stands the church clock at ten to three?/And is there honey still for tea?"), but amid the self-conscious and rather laboured humour of much of the rest of the poem there are some moments that suggest Brooke should be taken seriously as a poetic talent. After all, a man who can write

 

Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?

cannot have been all bad.