When Rupert Brooke sailed from Liverpool to America in 1913 there was
Story★★★★When Rupert Brooke sailed from Liverpool to America in 1913 there was nobody to see him off. So he gave sixpence to a little urchin playing around the docks and asked him to wave his handkerchief to him till the vessel was in midstream. The ache of loneliness was behind that request. When everybody else had friends to wish them Godspeed, the one man who was alone could not escape his loneliness and clutched at the mercenary friendship of a ragged boy, who kept the contact by straining his eyes over the widening water and waving till his new-found friend was out of sight. The last comment made by the lonely man on the ship was “I had my sixpennyworth.”
The point
Poet Rupert Brooke pays a dock boy to wave a handkerchief as his ship sails, unable to bear sailing without farewell. He gets his 'sixpennyworth' of farewell contact.