Question

I want summary of the poem Heaven by Rupert Brooke​

Answer 1

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Rupert Brooke’s ‘Heaven’, composed in 1913, uses fish in a stream, brook, or pond to comment on human piety, and specifically the reasons mankind offers for a belief in something more than one’s immediate surroundings: ‘Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond; / But is there anything Beyond?’

Why do we believe in an afterlife? So many of us want to believe there is something Beyond, too: that this life is not the only one. Fish almost certainly don’t spend their time wondering such things. By using the simple fish to draw a parallel with human emotions and aspirations, Brooke (aptly named given the watery setting of this poem) comments on humankind’s determination to believe in something existing beyond this life, despite the lack of concrete evidence in favour of such a proposition. ‘Each secret fishy hope or fear’ is a particularly good line, since ‘fishy’ here both refers to the subjects of the poem while also implying something suspect about our own ‘fishy’ or suspicious beliefs and drives.

Brooke’s couplet strikes at the heart of the vain (perhaps in both senses of the word) belief that humans nurture that there is ‘anything Beyond’ this world: ‘This life cannot be All, they swear, / For how unpleasant, if it were!’ Such a belief is driven by a longing for it to be true, rather than a more rationally or empirically based hunch that it is true. In the last analysis, ‘Heaven’ is Rupert Brooke’s great satirical poem, and deserves to be placed alongside his patriotic war poems and his poem idealising Edwardian England shortly before the outbreak of the Great War.