'This Does Not Flatter Us'

“Ah, pitiful / The twisted memories of an ancient fool / And sweet the silence of a young man dead!”

There’s a tendency to romanticize, sometimes extravagantly, the gifted young who die early. Think of Chatterton, Keats and Wilfred Owen. Granted longer lives, what might they have accomplished? Ironically, with Keats, there’s probably less reason to mourn, given the brilliance of his sonnets, odes and letters. He died at twenty-five and the quality of much of his work exceeds that of most poets who survive into their dotage. The lines quoted above were written by Edward Shanks (1892-1953) in his poem “The Dead Poet” (Poems, 1916) about his friend Rupert Brooke. Shanks worked as a literary journalist and university lecturer, and wrote books about Shaw, Kipling and Poe.   

 

I learned of Shanks from Theodore Dalrymple’s book chronicle Not for Ambition or Bread (Mirabeau Press, 2025). Shanks served in France with the British Army during the Great War but was invalided out in 1915 and never saw combat. “The Dead Poet” begins:

 

“When I grow old they’ll come to me and say:

Did you then know him in that distant day?

Did you speak with him, touch his hand, observe

The proud eyes’ fire, soft voice and light lips’ curve?

And I shall answer: This man was my friend;

Call to my memory, add, improve, amend

And count up all the meetings that we had

And note his good and touch upon his bad.”

 

Brooke (b. 1887) graduated from Cambridge in 1909. After the start of the Great War, he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. In February 1915, he sailed to the Dardanelles in preparation for the Gallipoli campaign. He contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite and died on April 23, age twenty-seven. Brooke was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Dalrymple writes: "Shanks almost makes Brooke’s early death seem like a benefit received—it sealed his reputation for ever—but foolish as it may seem, one knows what he, Shanks, means.” Here are the closing lines of “The Dead Poet”: “Whose limbs shall never waste, eyes never fall, / And whose clear brain shall not be dimmed at all.” Dalrymple’s gloss on them:

 

“How extraordinarily romantic, written at a time when 20,000 young men or more were being mown down daily before or not long after their age of majority! It’s absurd, or wrong, or totally irrational, but yet we know what Shanks means and are moved by it. We tend to remember people as they last were, just before they died, not as they once were. This does not flatter us, those of us who live to be old.”