The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
THE GOSPEL OF ONE GOD
Then sweeping upward, although one must admit, with groping, reaching eagerness, this young poet tried to find, and at last did find, the one God. He mentions this God that he found more than any other one thing about which he wrote, so far as I can find. In one slender volume are more than a dozen striking references. Take for example the last fifteen lines of "The Song of the Pilgrims":
"O Thou,
God of all long desirous roaming,
Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing,
And crying after lost desire.
Hearten us onward! as with fire
Consuming dreams of other bliss.
The best Thou givest, giving this
Sufficient thing—to travel still
Over the plain, beyond the hill,
Unhesitating through the shade,
Amid the silence unafraid,
Till, at some hidden turn, one sees
Against the black and muttering trees
Thine altar, wonderfully white,
Among the Forests of the Night."
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
Or again, from "Ambarvalia":
"But laughing and half-way up to heaven,
With wind and hill and star,
I yet shall keep before I sleep,
Your Ambarvalia."
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
Immortality, which goes hand in hand with the God of immortality, the God of the "Everlasting Arms," is voiced in "Dining-Room Tea," a poem addressed to one whom he loved:
"For suddenly, and other whence,
I looked on your magnificence.
I saw the stillness and the light,
And you, august, immortal, white,
Holy and strange; and every glint,
Posture and jest and thought and tint
Freed from the mask of transiency,
Triumphant in eternity,
Immote, immortal."