shakespeare and the great war unlike that visionaryCivitasDei, which is the only home of mankind’s aspirations
and inspirations’.^31
Osborn’s political hopes are impractical and utopian, largely driven by the guilt
which he acknowledges he feels as a middle-aged onlooker at the war; the political
aspects of his Elizabethan analogy, however, are shared by many. They have already
been seen in Drinkwater’s hope that the present sacrifice will be for a properly
Shakespearean future. Rupert Brooke has a similarly backward-looking hope. In
‘Peace’, one of the sonnets in1914 and Other Poems,hetalksofyoungmenturning
gladly ‘from a world grown old and cold and weary’ filled with ‘half-men, and their
dirty songs and dreary’, while in ‘The Dead’ the speaker talks of how ‘holiness’ has
returned, and ‘Honour has come back, as a king, to earth’.^32 Brooke’s own style was
consciously Elizabethan, as might be expected from a man who won a Cambridge
fellowship with a dissertation on John Webster and Elizabethan drama.^33 Yet
perhaps the poet most bound up in what might be termed the Elizabethan myth
is Ivor Gurney. Gurney saw not only the period, but other soldiers and himself,
in Elizabethan terms, thus, in a way, offering a poetic parallel to Osborn’s prose
accounts. In ‘Poets’ he lamented that of the ‘hundred poets stood to welcome
in day|In a Company’s front’, only he—excepting those ‘put past wonder by
pain’ and those others who ‘died in dreadfullest brute thunder’—has refused ‘the
immemorial tame set decrees|Of bed-and-breakfast, office and life by degrees’, and
has instead followed Ben Jonson’s example.^34 The collection from which the poem
comes,Rewards of Wonder, is packed full of Gurney’s musical, historical, and literary
heroes, the latter two categories being predominantly Elizabethan. It becomes clear
that the fault of the present is its lack of communion with the Elizabethan past.
In ‘If Ben Jonson Were Back’, modern poets are at fault as they ‘Never talk of
Elizabethans [and] follow not his ways’,^35 while ‘Friendly Are Meadows’ worries
over an England which has begun to be the ‘admirer of the strange false thing’, to an
extent that threatens the possibility that Elizabethans will ‘be no more remembered
for plain truth and glory’.^36
BythetimeofRewards of Wonder, Gurney’s schizophrenia had resulted in
his being institutionalized, and the density and degree to which his powers live
in the Elizabethan past, imagining pub conversations with dramatists, claiming
brotherhood particularly with Ben Jonson—on the particular grounds that he,
(^31) Ibid. 7.
(^32) Rupert Brooke, ‘Peace’ and ‘The Dead’, inPoetical Works of Rupert Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Keynes
(London: Faber, 1960), 19 and 21.
(^33) Adrian Caesar suggests that the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had an important influence
on various areas of Brooke’s life and work. SeeTaking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War
Poets(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), ch. 2. The sonnets of1914 and Other Poems
ask to be read with John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’ in mind.
(^34) Ivor Gurney, ‘Poets’, inRewards of Wonder: Poems of Cotswold, France, London, ed. George
Walter (Ashington and Manchester: MidNag/Carcanet, 2000), 74. 35
Gurney,‘IfBenJonsonWereBack’,ibid.70.^36 Gurney, ‘Friendly Are Meadows’, ibid. 94.