BROOKE, Rupert.

£27,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

"For Mildred's Urn", autograph manuscript poem. The original manuscript for Brooke's sardonic poem, unpublished until 80 years after his death. Scrawled while Brooke was en route to America, the poem was inspired by the eccentric decadent poet Richard Le Gallienne, who always carried with him the urn containing the ashes of his first wife, Mildred, even after his remarriage. Autograph manuscripts of Brooke's poems are rare: we trace just three examples in auction records.Brooke met Le Gallienne (1866-1947), a contributor to The Yellow Book and an erstwhile lover of Oscar Wilde, on board the ocean liner SS Cedric, which set sail from Liverpool to New York in May 1913. Brooke, who had been a youthful admirer of the decadent poets of the 1890s, described his fellow passenger disparagingly in an animated letter to his friend Eddie Marsh: "Oh Eddie, he is a nasty man. He mouches about with grizzled hair and a bleary eye... He eyes me suspiciously - he scents a rival, I think. We've not spoken yet. His shoulders are bent. His mouth is ugly and small and mean. His eyes are glazed. His manner is furtive... Is it to this we come[?]... I have started a ballade, in imitation of Villon: but it may not be printed" (quoted in Read, pp. 186-7). Brooke's resulting "ballade" mixes satirical sting and lyrical pathos: "in some happy hour / The God, whose strange alchemic power / Wrought her of dust, again may turn / To woman, this immortal urn; / May take this dust and breathe thereon, / And gi

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