Sonnet: Now, God Be Thanked Who Has Matched Us With His Hour
by Rupert Brooke

English poet. His two best-known poems are The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (1912), published in Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 by his friend, Edward Marsh, and The Soldier (1914), a war-inspired sonnet. Other fine poems he wrote include Retrospect (1913) and Tiare Tahiti (1913). He also wrote a one-act play, Lithuania (1915), and Letters from America, for which Henry James wrote a preface in 1916. As a war poet, his work is more idealistic than those of other war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

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Sonnet: Now, God Be Thanked Who Has Matched Us With His Hour
by Rupert Brooke

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Nought broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

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Sonnet: Now, God Be Thanked Who Has Matched Us With His Hour by Rupert Brooke