Rupert Brooke's "Gathered Radiance"

DALLAS PRATT

A mile or two north of Linaria Cove, on the Aegean island of
Skyros, the main road branches to the east. A sign, lettered
in Greek and English, reads: "We Sell Honey." We were
many hundreds of miles from the Old 'Vicarage at Rupert Brooke's
Grantchester:

. . .oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

but the coincidence struck me as our party of six, in two taxis, set
out for the poet's Greek island grave. After a few miles the road lost
its paving, and on this rough red dirt surface edged with tumbled
marble boulders, we drove for half an hour to reach our destina¬
tion. At first there were occasional white-washed houses, then
these disappeared, and we were in a treeless mountain landscape,
intersected by shallow ravines, some of them overflowing with
masses of pink oleanders. The ground cover was chiefly dwarfish
Kermes oak, its tough, prickly bushes bent by the wind and chewed
into grotesque shapes by the many goats which wander over these
slopes. From a thousand feet up we looked down on the sea spread
out in two bays. The farther one was Port Trebuki—in Greek, Tris
Boukes—with two guardian islands. About a mile from its shore, in
an olive grove, lies the grave of Rubert Brooke.

Three days before his death from an insect bite causing blood
poisoning, on April 23, 1915, the poet, then a sub-lieutenant in the
British Navy, had visited the place with several fellow officers. They
were on maneuvers with the fleet en route to Gallipoli. They had
rested in the shade of the olive trees, and Brooke had remarked on
the peace and beauty of the valley. In the seventy-two years since
his death, the only change in the surroundings is the new dirt road,
which now runs past the gravesite. On the long drive out and back
we met just two vehicles, farm trucks carrying goats. The place is