The War Memorial Gardens at Island Bridge are one of the most famous gardens in Europe. They are dedicated to the memory of 49,000 Irish soldiers who died in the 1914-18 war.

The Memorial Park was designed by the distinguished British architect and landscape designer Sir Edward Lutyens and is considered outstanding among the many war memorials he created. The setting here is unique on the southern slopes of the Liffey on a site that once formed part of the Phoenix Park.

As you enter the main gate you approach the Trinity Boathouse and just beyond stands a dome-shaped temple. At the base of the temple are the words of Rupert Brooke’s famous war sonnet ‘Safety’:

We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.

Rupert Brooke was born in 1877 in the same year as Francis Ledgwidge. He attended Rugby school and was a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His first volume of poems was published in 1911 and the five famous war sonnets were written in the last months of 1914. They were widely acclaimed and caught the imagination of the nation.

Brooke’s interests went beyond poetry and he joined the Fabian Society where he met left-wing intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf. His hectic social life and popularity gave him iconic status.

Endowed with dashing good looks and charm, beautiful women adored him. W.B. Yeats remarked “he is the handsomest man in England and he wears the most beautiful shirts.”

When Brooke moved from Cambridge to nearby Grantchester to live in the vicarage, now owned by Sir Jeffrey Archer, he was the centre of attraction at the famous Orchard-tree garden. The gardens remain a big tourist attraction. It was this location that inspired him to write his famous poem ‘The Old Vicarage Grantchester 1912’, which captures the atmosphere and character of a typical English village. The much quoted final lines immortalise afternoon tea in the orchard:

Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

Rupert Brook served in the war and died in 1915 on the Greek Island of Skyros from septicaemia, which he contracted on a military journey to the Dardanelles. He was widely mourned and tributes came in volumes.

W. B. Yeats believed he would have been the greatest poet of the 20th century had he survived the war. Today Rupert Brooke’s poetry retains all its charm and appeal.