An Evensong at Rugby School Chapel
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
The service is devoted to Saint John
The Baptist. Then when prayer comes, “Lord, now let,”
I think of peace and one plain tomb upon
Crosses on the Greek island of Skyros marking the grave of the English poet, Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), where he was buried having died at sea, having contracted septicaemia from an infected mosquito bite. He had joined the Royal Naval Division. The Sketch magazine, which published this photograph quoted his most famous, and as it turned out, prescient, lines, ‘If I should die, think only this of me. That there’s some corner of a foreign field. That is for ever England.’ Date: 1918
An island . . . and the boys he loved to pet,
The ones he slicked, those long before a girl.
He licked the soft breasts, too, but after he
Had touched the nubby nipples with no curl
Upon them at his school. He sensed their plea
That felt so much like prayer that he must kiss
It into holiness as sacred as
A relic treasured in a whispered hiss,
More cherished than that Christian razzmatazz.
..That corner of an English schoolboy’s chest
….Was Rupert’s field of gold forever best.
~ Phillip Whidden