Rupert Brooke
This post is to celebrate the centenary of when Rupert Brooke visited Samoa. This post is to celebrate the beautiful and unspoilt islands of Samoa.
Rupert Brooke is best known as a WWI poet who wrote the poignant poem The Soldier and Grantchester, in the shire of Cambridge.
The Soldier
IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke loved England and the shire of Cambridge (Grantchester), and with next year commemorating the centenary of the beginning of World War I, this poem is going to be right out there in the public eye again.
Rupert Brooke also loved travelling and learning about other cultures and countries. In 1913 he arrived in Samoa, and what did he think of the islands?
“Sheer beauty, so pure that it is difficult to breathe it in”
“The loveliest people in the world, moving and dancing like gods and goddesses, very quietly and mysteriously, and utterly content”
Sinalei
What he experienced remains as true today as it was then, one hundred years ago. Samoa is the sacred centre of the Polynesian Islands, Samoa is Paradise.
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