December 2006
Along the shore of the North Sea
The Town's World War I memorial
The church memorial
gave up the years to be of work and joy and that unhoped serene that men call age."
Please see note at bottom for this quotation from Rupert Brooke.)
There is also a smaller memorial (left) to the dead of World War I, and reminders aplenty that
Aldeburgh is on the sea.
The Town Hall
The Red House
The Britten-Pears Library is to the right
The wary visitor, camera in hand, approaches through the garden behind the house, the chimneys just visible
The inscription on the church war memorial is taken from Rupert Brooke's third 1914 sonnet, "The Dead":
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
It is found on more than a few memorials, as one might expect, including an online memorial to a man who died in the Iraq War in 2005.