Selected Poems

by Rupert Brooke

II

So far the poet. How should he behold

That journey home, the long connubial years?

He does not tell you how white Helen bears

Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,

Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold

Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys

'Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice

Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.

Often he wonders why on earth he went

Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.

Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;

Her dry shanks twitch at Paris' mumbled name.

So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;

And Paris slept on by Scamander side.

The Jolly Company

The stars, a jolly company,

I envied, straying late and lonely;

And cried upon their revelry:

"O white companionship! You only

In love, in faith unbroken dwell,

Friends radiant and inseparable!"

Light-heart and glad they seemed to me

And merry comrades (even so

God out of Heaven may laugh to see

The happy crowds; and never know

That in his lone obscure distress

Each walketh in a wilderness).

But I, remembering, pitied well

And loved them, who, with lonely light,

In empty infinite spaces dwell,

Disconsolate. For, all the night,

I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,

Star to faint star, across the sky.

Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body

How can we find? how can we rest? how can

We, being gods, win joy, or peace, being man?

We, the gaunt zanies of a witless Fate,

Who love the unloving, and the lover hate,

Forget the moment ere the moment slips,

Kiss with blind lips that seek beyond the lips,

Who want, and know not what we want, and cry

With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by.

Love's for completeness! No perfection grows

'Twixt leg, and arm, elbow, and ear, and nose,

And joint, and socket; but unsatisfied

Sprawling desires, shapeless, perverse, denied.

Finger with finger wreathes; we love, and gape,

Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape,

Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed,

Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost

By crescive paths and strange protuberant ways

From sanity and from wholeness and from grace.

How can love triumph, how can solace be,

Where fever turns toward fever, knee toward knee?

Could we but fill to harmony, and dwell

Simple as our thought and as perfectible,

Rise disentangled from humanity

Strange whole and new into simplicity,

Grow to a radiant round love, and bear

Unfluctuant passion for some perfect sphere,

Love moon to moon unquestioning, and be

Like the star Lunisequa, steadfastly

Following the round clear orb of her delight,

Patiently ever, through the eternal night!

Town and Country

Here, where love's stuff is body, arm and side

Are stabbing-sweet 'gainst chair and lamp and wall.

In every touch more intimate meanings hide;

And flaming brains are the white heart of all

Here, million pulses to one centre beat:

Closed in by men's vast friendliness, alone,

Two can be drunk with solitude, and meet

On the sheer point where sense with knowing's one.

Here the green-purple clanging royal night,

And the straight lines and silent walls of town,

And roar, and glare, and dust, and myriad white

Undying passers, pinnacle and crown

Intensest heavens between close-lying faces

By the lamp's airless fierce ecstatic fire;

And we've found love in little hidden places,

Under great shades, between the mist and mire.

Stay! though the woods are quiet, and you've heard

Night creep along the hedges. Never go

Where tangled foliage shrouds the crying bird,

And the remote winds sigh, and waters flow!

Lest—as our words fall dumb on windless noons,

Or hearts grow hushed and solitary, beneath

Unheeding stars and unfamiliar moons,

Or boughs bend over, close and quiet as death,—

Unconscious and unpassionate and still,

Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare,

And gradually along the stranger hill

Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air,

And suddenly there's no meaning in our kiss,

And your lit upward face grows, where we lie

Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is,

And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky.

The Fish

In a cool curving world he lies

And ripples with dark ecstasies.

The kind luxurious lapse and steal

Shapes all his universe to feel

And know and be; the clinging stream

Closes his memory, glooms his dream,

Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides

Superb on unreturning tides.

Those silent waters weave for him

A fluctuant mutable world and dim,

Where wavering masses bulge and gape

Mysterious, and shape to shape

Dies momently through whorl and hollow,

And form and line and solid follow

Solid and line and form to dream

Fantastic down the eternal stream;

An obscure world, a shifting world,

Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,

Or serpentine, or driving arrows,

Or serene slidings, or March narrows.

There slipping wave and shore are one,

And weed and mud. No ray of sun,

But glow to glow fades down the deep

(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);

Shaken translucency illumes

The hyaline of drifting glooms;

The strange soft-handed depth subdues

Drowned colour there, but black to hues,

As death to living, decomposes—

Red darkness of the heart of roses,

Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,

And gold that lies behind the eyes,

The unknown unnameable sightless white

That is the essential flame of night,

Lustreless purple, hooded green,

The myriad hues that lie between

Darkness and darkness!...

And all's one,

Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,

The world he rests in, world he knows,

Perpetual curving. Only—grows

An eddy in that ordered falling,

A knowledge from the gloom, a calling

Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud—

The dark fire leaps along his blood;

Dateless and deathless, blind and still,

The intricate impulse works its will;

His woven world drops back; and he,

Sans providence, sans memory,

Unconscious and directly driven,

Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.

O world of lips, O world of laughter,

Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,

Of lights in the clear night, of cries

That drift along the wave and rise

Thin to the glittering stars above,

You know the hands, the eyes of love!

The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,

The infinite distance, and the singing

Blown by the wind, a flame of sound,

The gleam, the flowers, and vast around

The horizon, and the heights above—

You know the sigh, the song of love!

But there the night is close, and there

Darkness is cold and strange and bare;

And the secret deeps are whisperless;

And rhythm is all deliciousness;

And joy is in the throbbing tide,

Whose intricate fingers beat and glide

In felt bewildering harmonies

Of trembling touch; and music is

The exquisite knocking of the blood.

Space is no more, under the mud;

His bliss is older than the sun.

Silent and straight the waters run.

The lights, the cries, the willows dim,

And the dark tide are one with him.