EIGHTY FIVE years ago exactly this month, in May 1912, a young man sat in a restaurant in Berlin and another sat in his cottage in Meath; and both wrote poems of the place they loved best in the world.
The former, Rupert Brooke penned his homage to the old vicarage in Grantchester, and the latter, Francis Ledwidge, to his home village of Slane. Both poets works ring with a sense of place, with a love of the particular, the eccentric, the unexpected.
Rupert Brooke's poem is one of the best loved in the English language, combining both an affection for and a wry derision at the peculiarities of that part of Cambridgeshire, and some of his expressions have entered the broader language itself: "an unofficial rose", "being urban, squat and packed with guile", and, of course, "And is there honey still for tea?"
Rupert Brooke was the son of a Rugby schoolmaster and was educated at the school and at Cambridge. Francis Ledwidge was born in Rural District Council cottage No. 1116 in Slane, to Patrick, a migrant labourer, and a local woman, Anne Lynch. Rupert's birth occurred on August 3rd, 1887, Francis's just 16 days later.
Fortune and poverty
Proximity of birth date was at first all they had in common. Rupert's life was blessed with radiant good fortune. His youth was kissed with the sunlight of privilege and an eerie beauty; Francis's childhood was blighted by poverty. His father died when the boy was four, and his mother Anne, with eight children to support, was obliged to work as a casual farm labourer for just 2s6d a day.
She was a determined woman and gave her sons as much education as was possible.
Francis left school in 1901 at the age of 14 and worked in local farms at almost slave rates, Just as Rupert entered Rugby.
"I had been happier at Rugby," he was to write later, "than I can find words to say. As I looked back at five years, I seemed to see almost every hour golden and radiant and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious; and I could not and cannot hope for or even imagine such happiness else where."
Confident, beautiful, athletic, a homosexual perfectly at ease with his inclinations, Rupert was utterly different from Francis, who was shy, sensitive, socially awkward and lacking in virtually all those natural graces which were to propel Rupert to national and international fame.
They had three features in common. Each had an acute eye for nature; each loved the landscape of his homeplace; and each loved the language and structures of poetry. Two poets, born within days of each other and rising simultaneously in neighbouring lands; one who knew nothing but privilege and the pleasures of golden youth, another who experienced the grinding poverty and humiliation of agricultural serfdom.
Similar verse
Yet uncannily each was to produce exceedingly similar verse
"Where Aegean cliffs with bristling menace front/ The Threatening splendour of the ilsey seal Lighted by Troy's last shadow, where the first/ Hero kept watch and the last Mystery/ Shook with dark thunder, hark the battle brunt!" is from one. The other wrote: "Hot through Troy's ruin Menelaus broke/ To Priam's palace, sword in hand, to sate/ On that adulterous whore ten years' hate/ And a king's honour."
Neither is great poetry: the first by the humble Ledwidge, the second by the pampered Brooke. The latter lived in the vicarage at Grantchester in 1911, the same year that Ledwidge was sacked for trying to improve the workers' conditions at the Beauparc Copper Mine.
And while Rupert was in Berlin, dreaming of Grantchester, Francis was in Slane, writing of his love of Meath, doing his best to promote the GAA, seeking help from Lord Dunsany, and having the occasional poem published in the Drogheda Independent.
Both were witty men - Brooke the more evidently so in his poetry, but Francis was much courted by the workmen of Slane for his entertaining tales, and he was to write comic verse in the years before his death. He was badly served by his literary executor, Alice Curtayne, who thought those poems too frivolous for inclusion in the ill named Complete Poems, and they now, alas, appear to have been lost.
It is unlikely Francis would have been acerbic or insensitive enough to local pride to have written those lines which Rupert wrote in Berlin 85 years ago this month: "And Royston men in the far South/ Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;/ At Over they fling oaths at one,/ And worse than oaths at Trumpington,/ And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,/ And there's none in Harston under thirty ... And things are done you'd not believe/ At Madingly, on Christmas Eve."
Companions in verse
The two men wrote of willows and tresses, of flowers and grasses, of naiads and fauns.
They would, I feel sure, have liked each other and, though in life they never met, they achieved companionship in Edward March's collection of Georgian Poetry, published in 1915, and in the similarity of their verse about death in a foreign battlefield: "Let Ireland weep but not for sorrow. Weep/ That by her sons a land is sanctified"; and: "If I should die, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England."
Rupert Brooke died in the Great War in 1915. His sole surviving brother was killed two months later. Francis Ledwidge was killed in July 1917, 80 years ago. Neither had yet qualified for residence in Harston. And the Old Vicarage at Grantchester, immortalised 85 years ago by that wondrous, witty anthem, is now the home of Jeffrey Archer.