Written as an elegy for the English poet Rupert Brooke, this poem refuses to linger on sorrow. The speaker acknowledges that Brooke’s body lies buried in foreign ground, his youth cut short and his songs unfinished. Instead of mourning, however, he asks us to see a lyre hanging on that grave—a sign that Brooke’s art outlasts his death. We still hear his “golden tongue,” his verse, and still see the chivalric courage with which he fought. The mood is reverent and quietly triumphant, not tearful.
That vision expands in the second stanza, where Kilmer compares Brooke to King David: a warrior who also made music for God. Now, the speaker imagines, the heavens echo with a soldier’s psalms, and Brooke rests like David—song on his lips, sword in his hand—under eternal protection. The poem becomes a calm, assured celebration of a life where poetry and combat were twin devotions, and where death has no final word.