Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes.

These lines come from Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Great Lover,” written in the years just before the First World War and published in his 1914 collection *1914 and Other Poems*. The poem is structured as an intimate catalogue of things the speaker has loved—sensations, textures, smells, and ordinary comforts—set against an awareness of mortality. Brooke (1887–1915), associated with the Georgian poets, often blended lyrical sensuality with elegiac reflection; here, the domestic and bodily details (sheets, blankets, hot water, old clothes) are elevated into a kind of secular litany, as if the speaker is taking stock of life’s tangible blessings before loss or death.

The passage celebrates the physical world’s consolations: the “cool kindliness of sheets” that “smooth away trouble,” the “rough male kiss” of blankets, the “benison of hot water,” and even the “good smell of old clothes.” Brooke turns commonplace objects into agents of comfort and grace, using religious diction (“benison”) to suggest that everyday pleasures can function like blessings. The list also implies a philosophy of attention—love expressed not through grand abstractions but through sensory gratitude. Read within the poem’s larger frame, the tenderness toward these ordinary textures carries an undertone of transience: the speaker’s inventory of beloved things becomes a poignant affirmation of life’s immediacy in the face of impermanence.