"We can, like the Keatsian ‘Light-winged dryad of the trees’ keep fluttering and dancing to the tunes of our own happy beats!"

Rupert Brooke | & his Aura! 

#onhisbirthdaytoday ❤️

John Keats, considered the very ‘efflorescence of the Romantic Age’, [as noted critic Scupin Richard rightly calls him], died when he was just 25 years of age.

Rupert Brooke, considered the ‘quintessential war sonneteer’, [as noted critic Scupin Richard rightly calls him], also died when he was just 28 years of age.

Brooke too, like his predecessor – John Keats, loved experimenting with the sonnet form!

Quite interestingly, while John Keats first started writing poetry from the year 1814 onwards, Rupert Brooke started writing his first war poems - exactly a hundred years later - in 1914, when the world war erupted, beginning with the assassination of Austro-Hungarian arch duke Franz Ferdinand in 1914!

Brooke’s brave optimism that adorns his war poems, remind us of Viktor Frankl’s The Will to Meaning -touted as a ‘classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust!’

The incorrigible optimist and the hopeless idealist in Rupert Brooke made the man and his poetry a buzz word among both soldiers and the lay, who were weary of the war!

Poetry energized his very being! 

So much so that he once had this to say –

“There are only three things in the world, one is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.”

Sample the sprightly optimism and the joie de vivre of the poet in these lines -

These I have loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;

Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust

Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,

Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;

The good smell of old clothes; and other such—

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers!

Well, ain’t you reminded of the lines in the lovely number titled, ‘My Favourite Things’ in the evergreen 1965 musical - Sound of Music? 😊

Raindrops on roses

And whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things

Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels

Doorbells and sleigh bells

And schnitzel with noodles

Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things!

So yes! Our rich takeaway from Rupert Brooke, for today, on his birthday, would be this –

When we start counting our blessings, like the free-spirited Maria, or the incorrigible optimist Rupert Brooke, chances are - we can, like the Keatsian ‘Light-winged dryad of the trees’ keep fluttering and dancing to the tunes of our own happy beats!

And yes! connecting it with a book I’m reading now, from Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny, where he says,

The world grieves the many talented hosts destroyed by the parasite within them, the one that needed to be fed and fed and fed but was never full.

The cost is not just personal but shared by us all –

in symphonies never written,

feats never accomplished,

in good never done,

the potential of an ordinary day never fulfilled.

Slavery, we have to remember, was a deeply inefficient and inferior economic system.

Why would you choose to be one?

Especially to something that increasingly feels less good to do?

Everyone, no matter, how powerful, has some bad habit they’re wrestling with, but also that it’s never too late to come back and beat it.

What counts is what we do about the bad habit today.

That we choose to stop being a slave.

We choose freedom!

We save ourselves so we can save (and keep saving) the world.  

So true, ain’t it? 😊