Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam—
Most individual and bewildering ghost!—
And turn, and toss your brown delightful head
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
There are about eighteen words in this one sonnet chosen with infinite pains; and yet the effect of the whole is quite unlabored—an effect of spontaneity reduced to its simplest terms.
Perhaps the point can be made more emphatically by a miscellaneous quotation of single lines, because the poignancy of Rupert Brooke’s phrasing leaves me in a torment of inexpressiveness, forced to quote him rather than talk about him. Here are a few: “Like hills at noon or sunlight on a tree”; “And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky”; “The soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player”; “Some gaunt eventual limit of our light”; “Red darkness of the heart of roses”; “And long noon in the hot calm places”; “My wild sick blasphemous prayer”; “Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming”; “Against the black and muttering trees”; “And quietness crept up the hill”; “When your swift hair is quiet in death”; “Savage forgotten drowsy hymns”; “And dance as dust before the sun”; “The swift whir of terrible wings”; “Like flies on the cold flesh”; “Clear against the unheeding sky”; “So high a beauty in the air”; “Amazed with sorrow”; “Haggard with virtue”; “Frozen smoke”; “Mist-garlanded,” and a thousand other things that somehow have a fashion of striking twelve. There’s a long poem about a fish, beginning
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
that flashes through every tone of the stream’s “drowned colour” from “blue brilliant from dead starless skies” to “the myriad hues that lie between darkness and darkness.” And there’s one about Menelaus and Helen containing this description:
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.