A Romantic Love Letter written by Rupert Brooke (1887 to 1915) to Noel Olivier

This romantic love letter was written on October 2, 1911

I have a thousand images of you in an hour; all different and all coming back to the same… And we love. And we've got the most amazing secrets and understandings. Noel, whom I love, who is so beautiful and wonderful. I think of you eating omelette on the ground. I think of you once against a sky line: and on the hill that Sunday morning.

And that night was wonderfullest of all. The light and the shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. You are so beautiful and wonderful that I daren't write to you… And kinder than God.
Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice - you.

Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke was an English poet. He won his first Major award for poetry writing at the age of eighteen just before going to Cambridge University Brooke had a troubled love life. Between 1908 and 1912 he fell in love with three women: Noel Olivier, youngest daughter of the governor of Jamaica; Ka Cox, who preceded him as president of the Fabian Society; and Cathleen Nesbitt, a British actress. None of the relationships were long lasting. In 1912, after his third romance failed, Brooke left England to travel in France and Germany for several months before going to the USA and Canada to further his research.

On hte outbreak of World War I he returned to the UK to enlist in the British navy. His most famous work, the sonnet sequence 1914 and Other Poems, appeared in 1915. Later that year, after taking part in the Antwerp Expedition, he died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite while en route to Gallipoli with the Navy. He was buried on the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.

Following his death, Brooke, who was already famous, became a symbol in England of the tragic loss of talented youth during the war. His best known work is quoted regularly at Rememberance Day gatherings to honour the dead of the past world wars.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever 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 suns of home.