Now, God be thanked, Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.

These lines come from Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Peace,” written at the outbreak of the First World War (1914) and published in his 1914 sequence “1914.” Brooke, then a young poet associated with the Georgian circle, responded to the war’s beginning with a mood of idealistic exaltation shared by many early volunteers. The poem frames the war as a providential summons that rescues youth from complacency and spiritual fatigue, casting enlistment as a cleansing, awakening experience. Brooke himself joined the Royal Naval Division and died in 1915 en route to Gallipoli, a biography that later complicated readings of the poem’s early-war confidence.

The speaker offers thanks that a divine timing (“His hour”) has aligned with their generation, presenting war not as catastrophe but as a moment of moral clarification. “Caught our youth” suggests youthfulness being seized and directed toward purpose; “wakened us from sleeping” implies that prewar life was dull, self-absorbed, or spiritually inert. The lines exemplify Brooke’s early-war rhetoric of purification and renewal, where sacrifice promises meaning and unity. Later war poetry would often reject this idealization, but Brooke’s phrasing remains significant as a document of the initial, quasi-religious enthusiasm with which some educated young Britons greeted the conflict.