Rupert Brooke and Mysticism

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 her rivers, blest by suns of home.

Ebullient, loved, the poet Rupert Brooke was twenty-eight when he died in 1915 in the Aegean. His poetry, which I've been reading from an ancient volume found in Otawa's main library, is a celebration of life which he already felt slipping from his grasp. ( He refers to himself in a letter to a friend as "middle-aged".) For Rupert, life was awash in beauty, and his mysticism which he said had nothing to do with religion, was his secret defense against despair. He wrote to a friend:

"(Mysticism) is just looking at people and things as themselves -- neither useful nor moral nor ugly nor anything else; but just as being....What happens is that I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see....
when the mood is on me, I roam about places ...and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet.... I tell you that a Birmingham gouty Tariff Reform fifth-rate business man is splendid and immortal....
"It's the same about things of ordinary life. Half an hour's roaming about a street or village or railway station shows so much beauty that it's impossible to be anything but wild with suppressed exhilaration. And it's not only beauty and beautiful things. In a flicker of sunlight on a blank wall, or a reach of muddy pavement or smoke from an engine at night, there's a sudden significance and importance and inspiration that makes the breath stop with a gulp of certainty and happiness."

This man whom I did not know, who died before even my mother was born, has touched my life. When I regret the passing of time, I think of his short life, which he lived to the hilt, and know that we have both been offered the same gift: this now, these eyes, this openness to see the beauty and wonder all around us. We have no more than this. But we need no more than this sacred moment.