Delphi Complete Works of Rupert Brooke (Illustrated) E-Book

Rupert Brooke

• Herausgeber: Delphi Classics
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Delphi Poets Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 348

Beschreibung

The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature's finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents the complete poetical works of Rupert Brooke, with beautiful illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Brooke's life and works
* A concise introduction to the life and poetry of this important war poet
* Excellent formatting of the poems, with line numbers ñ ideal for students
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry
* Easily locate the poems you want to read
* Even includes Brooke's rare play LITHUANIA - first time in digital print
* Brooke's travel notes from America
* Features three biographies - discover Brooke's literary life
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres

Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles

CONTENTS:

The Poetry of Rupert Brooke
BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Rupert Brooke

The Poems
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Play
LITHUANIA: A DRAMA IN ONE ACT

The Non-Fiction
LETTERS FROM AMERICA

The Biographies
Rupert Brooke: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE by Margaret Lavington
Rupert Brooke: by Henry James
INTRODUCTION TO Rupert Brooke by George Edward Woodberry

Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles

Leseprobe

RUPERT BROOKE

(1887-1915)

Contents

The Poetry of Rupert Brooke

BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RUPERT BROOKE

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Play

LITHUANIA: A DRAMA IN ONE ACT

The Non-Fiction

LETTERS FROM AMERICA

The Biographies

RUPERT BROOKE: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE by Margaret Lavington

RUPERT BROOKE by Henry James

INTRODUCTION TO RUPERT BROOKE by George Edward Woodberry

© Delphi Classics 2013

Version 1

RUPERT BROOKE

By Delphi Classics, 2013

NOTE

When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.

Also available:

Other War Poets in This Series

For the first time in publishing history, readers can explore all the poems, rare fragments and the poets’ letters.

www.delphiclassics.com

The Poetry of Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke was born at 5 Hillmorton Road, in Rugby, Warwickshire, the son of William Parker Brooke, a Rugby schoolmaster, and Ruth Mary Brooke, née Cotterill.

Brooke as a child

BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RUPERT BROOKE

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was born the second of three sons of William Parker Brooke, a Rugby schoolmaster, and Ruth Mary Brooke, née Cotterill. He was educated at two independent schools in the market town of Rugby, Warwickshire; Hillbrow School and Rugby School, where the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold had also attended.  From an early age Brooke showed great interest in literature and while travelling in Europe he prepared a thesis entitled John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama, which went on to win him a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles.  At Cambridge he helped found the Marlowe Society drama club and acted in plays including the Cambridge Greek Play.

Brooke was blessed with good looks, easily endearing him to the Bloomsbury group of writers he socialised with during his university days. Virginia Woolf is reported to have boasted to Vita Sackville-West of once going skinny-dipping with the poet in a moonlit pool when they were at Cambridge together. Later on, W. B. Yeats was so taken by Brooke’s boyish good looks that he famously called him ‘the handsomest man in England’.

Brooke belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets and he also became one of the most important members of the Dymock poets, who were associated with the Gloucestershire village where he stayed just before the war. The ‘Dymock Poets’ are generally held to have also comprised Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and John Drinkwater, some of whom lived near the village in the period between 1911 and 1914. They published their own quarterly, entitled New Numbers, containing poems such as Brooke’s now-celebrated poem The Soldier.

In 1912 Brooke suffered a severe emotional crisis, caused by sexual confusion and jealousy, resulting in the breakdown of his long-term relationship with Katherine Laird Cox. Brooke became paranoid that his friend Lytton Strachey had schemed to destroy his relationship with Cox by encouraging her to see Henry Lamb, therefore precipitating his break with the Bloomsbury Group.  Following his nervous collapse, he pursued his rehabilitation by trips to Germany. Also as part of his recuperation, Brooke toured the United States and Canada, writing travel diaries for the Westminster Gazette. He toured the long way home, sailing across the Pacific and staying some months in the South Seas. It was later revealed that Brooke may have fathered a daughter with a Tahitian woman he met at this time named Taatamata.

Brooke came to public attention as a war poet in 1915 when The Times Literary Supplement quoted two of his five sonnets, IV: The Dead and V: The Soldier, on 11 March and the latter sonnet was read from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday of that year. 1914 & Other Poems, which would become Brooke’s most famous collection of poetry, was first published in May 1915 and, in testament to his popularity, ran to eleven further impressions that year. By June 1918 the collection had reached its 24th impression, undoubtedly aided by posthumous interest.

Brooke’s poetry gained many admirers and he was taken up by Edward Marsh who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914. He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915, though he developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died at 4:46 pm on 23 April 1915 in a French hospital ship moored in a bay off the island of Skyros in the Aegean on his way to the landing at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried at 11pm in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece. The site was chosen by his close friend, William Denis Browne, who wrote of the poet’s death:

“At four o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.”

Brooke’s poetry depicts the unbounded optimism of the opening months of the First World War.  His wartime poems, most of which were published after his death, express an idealism about the conflict that contrasts strongly with the poetry published later in the war. Unlike the works of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Brooke’s poems depict war from a sentimental viewpoint, clothed with youthful vigour and idealised heroism.

Brooke, 1905

Rupert Brooke by Clara Ewald, 1911

Brooke, 1913

CONTENTS

I. 1905–1908

The Bastille

Second Best

Day That I Have Loved

Sleeping Out: Full Moon

In Examination

Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening

Wagner

The Vision of the Archangels

Seaside

On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess

The Song of the Pilgrims

The Song of the Beasts

Failure

Ante Aram

Dawn

The Call

The Wayfarers

The Beginning

II. 1908–1912

Sonnet: Oh! Death Will Find Me, Long Before I Tire

Sonnet: I Said I Splendidly Loved You; It’s Not True

Success

Dust

Kindliness

Mummia

The Fish

Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body

Flight

The Hill

The One Before the Last

The Jolly Company

The Life Beyond

Lines Written in the Belief That the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead Was Called Ambarvalia

Dead Men’s Love

Town and Country

Paralysis

Menelaus and Helen

Libido

Jealousy

Blue Evening

The Charm

Finding

Song

The Voice

Dining-Room Tea

The Goddess in the Wood

A Channel Passage

Victory

Day and Night

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

III. Experiments

Choriambics — I

Choriambics — II

Desertion

IV. 1914

Peace (I)

Safety (II)

The Dead (III)

The Dead (IV)

The Soldier (V)

The Treasure (VI)

V. The South Seas

Fafaïa

Tiare Tahiti

Retrospect

The Great Lover

Heaven

Doubts

There’s Wisdom in Women

He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her

A Memory

One Day

Waikiki

Hauntings

Sonnet

Clouds

Mutability

VI. Other Poems

It’s not going to happen again

The Busy Heart

Love

Unfortunate

The Chilterns

Home

The Night Journey

Song

Beauty and Beauty

The Way That Lovers Use

Mary and Gabriel

The Funeral of Youth: Threnody

Katherine Laird Cox in later years

Brooke, 1913

Noel Olivier, Maitland Radford, Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke, 1911

I. 1905–1908

The Bastille

A PRIZE POEM

RECITED IN RUGBY SCHOOL, JUNE 24, 1905.

RUGBY:A. J. LAWRENCE, PRINTER TO THE SCHOOL.1905.

ENGLISH POEM.1905.

“THE BASTILLE.”

“QUOD SPIRO ET PLACEO, SI PLACEO, TUUM EST.”

“THE BASTILLE.”

I.

SULLEN athwart the freedom of the skiesIt frowned, and mocked the sun’s high pageantry, — Dawn of the cloudy hair and pleading eyes,And the green sunset-light, — With the dark threat of its immensity,And sinister portent of all-shrouding night.Round it the dead innumerable daysClung, and the wraiths of years and seasons past, — Spring, dancing young-eyed down the woodland ways;Summer, the fragrant queen of long delight,Languid with roses; Autumn, old and wan,Wearily creeping graveward; and at lastWinter’s oblivion.So, while the silent feet of Time sped on,It loomed tremendous, hateful in men’s eyes,Tyranny’s presence. For in fear firm-setStood all the towers; of sorrow-laden gloomThe walls were built, and fluttering, pale, sighs;And, darkening every life-enfolding tomb,Passion and wild regretAnd all captivity’s unavailing cries.

II.

There, through the grey monotony of years,The grim walls held their secret. None might tellWho drank therein the tainted cup of tears,Blinded with memories intolerable,Bereft of hopes and fears.For them no passionate Spring-tide, as of yore,Regal with hue and scent,Flashed through the startled woods; not, ere night fell,Blossomed the budding West to rose of flame,And robed the plains in purple; and no moreFair Dawn was tremulous in the Orient.But, in the darkening cell,Silent, upon pale feet, the shadows came;And the wan twilight died; and there was night.Then on the darkness to the sleepless eyesGlimmered sad memories,Old dreams of love, old heavens forfeited,Poignant as those dear visions of our lightThat mock the shadowy unforgetful Dead.Night-long with bitter heart each dreamt his dream;One, how the firelight-gleamPlayed redly on a loved face far away;Another, it may be,Of the seething wave, the shrill-exulting gale,And irresistable thunder of the sea.

• • • • •

Till the gloom quivered, and the black grew pale,And lo! the dawn was grey.

III.

Never to them comes Death as to the free, — The swift unbearable horror, and the nightThat shrouds the horror; no stern mystery,Veiled in the old impenetrable gloom,Quenches their faltering light.Nor theirs the fear those revellers know, to whomSudden across Life’s clamorous laughing routThe clear inexorable voices call,Bidding them from this luminous festivalTo the dim Unknown without.Not so look these toward our Lady Death,But as a well-loved friend in gentle wiseShe seeks them; for her cool hand comforteth,And in the shadowy purple of her eyesDwells quiet healing, as an even-tideThat soothes with sleepy breathThe odorous murmur of some garden-sideTill all the roses slumber. To the brainSick with the gloom and silence and old pain,Calm-eyed and thrice-desired she comes, to bringBalm for the wound, rest for each weary thing,To every prisoner the Great Release,Death after life, joy after sorrowing,And, after striving, peace.

IV.

Huge over Paris, grey and motionless,Its shadow brooded, while, swift year on year,Faded four centuries;Beneath that old immutable lonelinessMen swarmed and toiled, and all their dreary criesMoaned up unheeded; vast and unseen a FearGloomed like a darkness over every heart,And chilled their inarticulate murmurings.Only the gay court, revelling apart,From poverty far, and all grey-tinted things,Wanton, and fair, and gay,Sported like moths on glittering careless wingsAmong life’s fragrant buds and moon-kissed flowers,Nor feared the slow inevitable day.But, through the sunless hours,France, as a sleeper, dumb, unheeding, lay;Till a swift thunder thrilled the heavy air,The purple gloom grew pallid; and at lengthShe from her slumber stirred, and woke to greetLiberty, young and fair, — Fair as a god, triumphant in his strength,Shades of the night still clinging about his feet,But the glory of the sunrise on his hair.

V.

Strong as great winters in autumnal flood,Wave after wave insurgent, every whence,New-armed in Freedom’s high magnificence,The people gathered. To the red hearts aflameAll the pale streets cried wantonly for blood,And all the resonant heavens clanged one name,“To the Bastille!” and lo! — Clamour of many feet on paven ways,And voices distant-thundering, that grow,And mount, and ring sonorous as the sea,To break in a frenzy round the keep’s dumb face,The towers’ funereal immobility.Ever more near the tossing myriad sways;The fire-ring narrows slowly; gate by gate,Wall after wall, escarpment, bastion,Bow to the tide that sweeps triumphant on,Ravenous, hoarse, dark-menacing as Fate,......... — Till a great cry goes crashing heavenward,And the Bastille is won!Then, as the sun-forsaken drowsy airWelcometh night, beneficent, dreamy-starred,No hand may rest till stone be torn from stone,Each infamy laid bare,And tyranny’s ancient stronghold overthrown.Freedom is gained! The exultant paeans rise,Noise of great ruining, and a sudden glare,As fire victorious storms the trembling skies.

VI.

How the bright glory of that early faithIs faded now, and tarnished; for we knowNot by one sudden blowAre peace and freedom won; nay, even yetGrey Poverty, and Sin that poisoneth,Eat out men’s hearts, and tyrannous Wealth is strong,And almost we forgetBecause the night of sorrowing is longWeary and faint we climb; still the road seemsBitter with gloom and sorrow; still we grope,Blind in the utter night; yet dimly gleamsThe star of an infinite tremendous hopeThat there shall come an ending, that at last,Somewhere beyond our dreams,The eternal day, the ultimate goal shall be,All mystery revealed, the old made new;Where, the quest over, sin and bondage past,Men shall be Gods, and every vision true,And Time Eternity.

R. C. B.

1.

Second Best

HERE in the dark, O heart;Alone with the enduring Earth, and Night,And Silence, and the warm strange smell of clover;Clear-visioned, though it break you; far apartFrom the dead best, the dear and old delight;   5Throw down your dreams of immortality,O faithful, O foolish lover!Here’s peace for you, and surety; here the oneWisdom — the truth!— “All day the good glad sunShowers love and labour on you, wine and song;   10The greenwood laughs, the wind blows, all day longTill night.” And night ends all things.  Then shall beNo lamp relumed in heaven, no voices crying,Or changing lights, or dreams and forms that hover!   15(And, heart, for all your sighing,That gladness and those tears are over, over.…)

And has the truth brought no new hope at all,Heart, that you’re weeping yet for Paradise?Do they still whisper, the old weary cries?   20“ ‘Mid youth and song, feasting and carnival,Through laughter, through the roses, as of oldComes Death, on shadowy and relentless feet,Death, unappeasable by prayer or gold;Death is the end, the end!”   25Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greetDeath as a friend!

Exile of immortality, strongly wise,Strain through the dark with undesirous eyesTo what may lie beyond it. Sets your star,   30O heart, for ever! Yet, behind the night,Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar,Some white tremendous daybreak. And the light,Returning, shall give back the golden hours,Ocean a windless level, Earth a lawn   35Spacious and full of sunlit dancing-places,And laughter, and music, and, among the flowers,The gay child-hearts of men, and the child-facesO heart, in the great dawn!

2.

Day That I Have Loved

TENDERLY, day that I have loved, I close your eyes,  And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands.The grey veils of the half-light deepen; colour dies.  I bear you, a light burden, to the shrouded sands,

Where lies your waiting boat, by wreaths of the sea’s making   5  Mist-garlanded, with all grey weeds of the water crowned.There you’ll be laid, past fear of sleep or hope of waking;  And over the unmoving sea, without a sound,

Faint hands will row you outward, out beyond our sight,  Us with stretched arms and empty eyes on the fargleaming   10And marble sand.… Beyond the shifting cold twilight,  Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming,There’ll be no port, no dawn-lit islands! But the drear  Waste darkening, and, at length, flame ultimate on the deep.Oh, the last fire — and you, unkissed, unfriended there!   15  Oh, the lone way’s red ending, and we not there to weep!

(We found you pale and quiet, and strangely crowned with flowers,  Lovely and secret as a child. You came with us,Come happily, hand in hand with the young dancing hours,  High on the downs at dawn!) Void now and tenebrous,   20

The grey sands curve before me.… From the inland meadows,  Fragrant of June and clover, floats the dark, and fillsThe hollow sea’s dead face with little creeping shadows,  And the white silence brims the hollow of the hills.

Close in the nest is folded every weary wing,   25  Hushed all the joyful voices; and we, who held you dear,Eastward we turn and homeward, alone, remembering…  Day that I loved, day that I loved, the Night is here!

3.

Sleeping Out: Full Moon

THEY sleep within.…I cower to the earth, I waking, I only.High and cold thou dreamest, O queen, high-dreaming and lonely.

We have slept too long, who can hardly winThe white one flame, and the night-long crying;   5The viewless passers; the world’s low sighingWith desire, with yearning,To the fire unburning,To the heatless fire, to the flameless ecstasy!.…

Helpless I lie.   10And around me the feet of thy watchers tread.There is a rumour and a radiance of wings above my head,An intolerable radiance of wings.…

All the earth grows fire,White lips of desire   15Brushing cool on the forehead, croon slumbrous things.Earth fades; and the air is thrilled with ways,Dewy paths full of comfort. And radiant bands,The gracious presence of friendly hands,Help the blind one, the glad one, who stumbles and strays,   20Stretching wavering hands, up, up, through the praiseOf a myriad silver trumpets, through cries,To all glory, to all gladness, to the infinite height,To the gracious, the unmoving, the mother eyes,And the laughter, and the lips, of light.   25

4.

In Examination

LO! from quiet skiesIn through the window my Lord the Sun!And my eyesWere dazzled and drunk with the misty gold,The golden glory that drowned and crowned me   5Eddied and swayed through the room…  Around me,To left and to right,Hunched figures and old,Dull blear-eyed scribbling fools, grew fair,   10Ringed round and haloed with holy light.Flame lit on their hair,And their burning eyes grew young and wise,Each as a God, or King of kings,White-robed and bright   15(Still scribbling all);And a full tumultuous murmur of wingsGrew through the hall;And I knew the white undying Fire,And, through open portals,   20Gyre on gyre,Archangels and angels, adoring, bowing,And a Face unshaded…Till the light faded;And they were but fools again, fools unknowing,   25Still scribbling, blear-eyed and stolid immortals.

5.

Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening

I’D watched the sorrow of the evening sky,And smelt the sea, and earth, and the warm clover,And heard the waves, and the seagull’s mocking cry.

And in them all was only the old cry,That song they always sing— “The best is over!   5You may remember now, and think, and sigh,O silly lover!”And I was tired and sick that all was over,And because I,For all my thinking, never could recover   10One moment of the good hours that were over.And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.

Then from the sad west turning wearily,I saw the pines against the white north sky,Very beautiful, and still, and bending over   15Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.And there was peace in them; and IWas happy, and forgot to play the lover,And laughed, and did no longer wish to die;Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!   20

6.

Wagner

CREEPS in half wanton, half asleep,  One with a fat wide hairless face.He likes love-music that is cheap;  Likes women in a crowded place;And wants to hear the noise they’re making.   5

His heavy eyelids droop half-over,  Great pouches swing beneath his eyes.He listens, thinks himself the lover,  Heaves from his stomach wheezy sighs;He likes to feel his heart’s a-breaking.   10

The music swells. His gross legs quiver.  His little lips are bright with slime.The music swells. The women shiver.  And all the while, in perfect time,His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking.   15

7.

The Vision of the Archangels

SLOWLY up silent peaks, the white edge of the world,  Trod four archangels, clear against the unheeding sky,Bearing, with quiet even steps, and great wings furled,  A little dingy coffin; where a child must lie,It was so tiny. (Yet, you had fancied, God could never   5  Have bidden a child turn from the spring and the sunlight,And shut him in that lonely shell, to drop for ever  Into the emptiness and silence, into the night.…)

They then from the sheer summit cast, and watched it fall,  Through unknown glooms, that frail black coffin — and therein   10  God’s little pitiful Body lying, worn and thin,And curled up like some crumpled, lonely flowerpetal — Till it was no more visible; then turned againWith sorrowful quiet faces downward to the plain.

8.

Seaside

SWIFTLY out from the friendly lilt of the band,  The crowd’s good laughter, the loved eyes of men,  I am drawn nightward; I must turn againWhere, down beyond the low untrodden strand,There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown   5  The old unquiet ocean. All the shadeIs rife with magic and movement. I stray alone  Here on the edge of silence, half afraid,

Waiting a sign. In the deep heart of meThe sullen waters swell towards the moon,   10And all my tides set seaward.  From inlandLeaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune,That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,And dies between the seawall and the sea.   15

9.

On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess

SONG OF A TRIBE OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

(The Priests within the Temple)

SHE was wrinkled and huge and hideous? She was our Mother.She was lustful and lewd? — but a God; we had none other.In the day She was hidden and dumb, but at nightfall moaned in the shade;We shuddered and gave Her Her will in the darkness; we were afraid.

(The People without)

She sent us pain,   5And we bowed before Her;She smiled againAnd bade us adore Her.She solaced our woeAnd soothed our sighing;   10And what shall we doNow God is dying?

(The Priests within)

She was hungry and ate our children; — how should we stay Her?She took our young men and our maidens; — ours to obey Her.We were loathèd and mocked and reviled of all nations; that was our pride.   15She fed us, protected us, loved us, and killed us; now She has died.

(The People without)

She was so strong;But death is stronger.She ruled us long;But Time is longer.   20She solaced our woeAnd soothed our sighing;And what shall we do

10.

The Song of the Pilgrims

(Halted around the fire by night, after moon-set, they sing this beneath the trees.)

WHAT light of unremembered skiesHast thou relumed within our eyes,Thou whom we seek, whom we shall find?…A certain odour on the wind,Thy hidden face beyond the west,   5These things have called us; on a questOlder than any road we trod,More endless than desire.…  Far God,Sigh with thy cruel voice, that fills   10The soul with longing for dim hillsAnd faint horizons! For there comeGrey moments of the antient dumbSickness of travel, when no songCan cheer us; but the way seems long;   15And one remembers.…  Ah! the beatOf weary unreturning feet,And songs of pilgrims unreturning!…The fires we left are always burning   20On the old shrines of home. Our kinHave built them temples, and thereinPray to the Gods we know; and dwellIn little houses lovable,Being happy (we remember how!)   25And peaceful even to death.…  O Thou,God of all long desirous roaming,Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing,And crying after lost desire.   30Hearten us onward! as with fireConsuming dreams of other bliss.The best Thou givest, giving thisSufficient thing — to travel stillOver the plain, beyond the hill,   35Unhesitating through the shade,Amid the silence unafraid,Till, at some sudden turn, one seesAgainst the black and muttering treesThine altar, wonderfully white,   40

11.

The Song of the Beasts

(Sung, on one night, in the cities, in the darkness.)

COME away! Come away!Ye are sober and dull through the common day,But now it is night!It is shameful night, and God is asleep!(Have you not felt the quick fires that creep   5Through the hungry flesh, and the lust of delight,And hot secrets of dreams that day cannot say?).  The house is dumb;The night calls out to you. — Come, ah, come!Down the dim stairs, through the creaking door,   10Naked, crawling on hands and feet — It is meet! it is meet!Ye are men no longer, but less and more,Beast and God.… Down the lampless street,By little black ways, and secret places,   15In the darkness and mire,Faint laughter around, and evil facesBy the star-glint seen — ah! follow with us!For the darkness whispers a blind desire,And the fingers of night are amorous.…   20Keep close as we speed,Though mad whispers woo you, and hot hands cling,And the touch and the smell of bare flesh sting,Soft flank by your flank, and side brushing side — To-night never heed!   25Unswerving and silent follow with me,Till the city ends sheer,And the crook’d lanes open wide,Out of the voices of night,Beyond lust and fear,   30To the level waters of moonlight,To the level waters, quiet and clear,

12.

Failure

BECAUSE God put His adamantine fate  Between my sullen heart and its desire,I swore that I would burst the Iron Gate,  Rise up, and curse Him on His throne of fire.Earth shuddered at my crown of blasphemy,   5  But Love was as a flame about my feet;  Proud up the Golden Stair I strode; and beatThrice on the Gate, and entered with a cry —

All the great courts were quiet in the sun,  And full of vacant echoes: moss had grown   10Over the glassy pavement, and begun  To creep within the dusty council-halls.An idle wind blew round an empty throne  And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls.

13.

Ante Aram

BEFORE thy shrine I kneel, an unknown worshipper,  Chanting strange hymns to thee and sorrowful litanies,Incense of dirges, prayers that are as holy myrrh.

Ah, goddess, on thy throne of tears and faint low sighs,  Weary at last to theeward come the feet that err,   5And empty hearts grown tired of the world’s vanities.

How fair this cool deep silence to a wanderer  Deaf with the roar of winds along the open skies!Sweet, after sting and bitter kiss of sea-water,

The pale Lethean wine within thy chalices!   10I come before thee, I, too tired wanderer,To heed the horror of the shrine, the distant cries,

And evil whispers in the gloom, or the swift whirrOf terrible wings — I, least of all thy votaries,With a faint hope to see the scented darkness stir,   15

And, parting, frame within its quiet mysteries  One face, with lips than autumn-lilies tenderer,And voice more sweet than the far plaint of viols is,

Or the soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player.

14.

Dawn

(From the train between Bologna and Milan, second class.)

OPPOSITE me two Germans snore and sweat.  Through sullen swirling gloom we jolt and roar.We have been here for ever: even yet  A dim watch tells two hours, two aeons, more.The windows are tight-shut and slimy-wet   5  With a night’s fœtor. There are two hours more;Two hours to dawn and Milan; two hours yet.Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.…

One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again.  The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain   10Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere  A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air  Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before.…Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.

15.

The Call

OUT of the nothingness of sleep,  The slow dreams of Eternity,There was a thunder on the deep:  I came, because you called to me.

I broke the Night’s primeval bars,   5  I dared the old abysmal curse,And flashed through ranks of frightened stars  Suddenly on the universe!

The eternal silences were broken;  Hell became Heaven as I passed. — 10What shall I give you as a token,  A sign that we have met, at last?

I’ll break and forge the stars anew,  Shatter the heavens with a song;Immortal in my love for you,   15  Because I love you, very strong.

Your mouth shall mock the old and wise,  Your laugh shall fill the world with flame,I’ll write upon the shrinking skies  The scarlet splendour of your name,   20Till Heaven cracks, and Hell thereunder  Dies in her ultimate mad fire,And darkness falls, with scornful thunder,  On dreams of men and men’s desire.

Then only in the empty spaces,   25  Death, walking very silently,Shall fear the glory of our faces  Through all the dark infinity.

So, clothed about with perfect love,  The eternal end shall find us one,   30Alone above the Night, above  The dust of the dead gods, alone.

16.

The Wayfarers

IS it the hour? We leave this resting-place  Made fair by one another for a while.Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;  The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.Ah! the long road! and you so far away!   5Oh, I’ll remember! but … each crawling dayWill pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile  Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

…Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,  The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,   10  Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,  In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll goTogether, hand in hand again, out there,  Into the waste we know not, into the night?

17.

The Beginning

SOME day I shall rise and leave my friendsAnd seek you again through the world’s far ends,You whom I found so fair(Touch of your hands and smell of your hair!),My only god in the days that were.   5My eager feet shall find you again,Though the sullen years and the mark of painHave changed you wholly; for I shall know(How could I forget having loved you so?),In the sad half-light of evening,   10The face that was all my sunrising.So then at the ends of the earth I’ll standAnd hold you fiercely be either hand,And seeing your age and ashen hairI’ll curse the thing that once you were,   15Because it is changed and pale and old(Lips that were scarlet, hair that was gold!),And I loved you before you were old and wise,When the flame of youth was strong in your eyes, — And my heart is sick with memories.   20

II. 1908–1912

1.

Sonnet: Oh! Death Will Find Me, Long Before I Tire

OH! Death will find me, long before I tire  Of watching you; and swing me suddenlyInto the shade and loneliness and mire  Of the last land! There, waiting patiently,

One day, I think, I’ll feel a cool wind blowing,   5  See a slow light across the Stygian tide,And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,  And tremble. And Ishall know that you have died,

And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,  Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host,   10Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam —   Most individual and bewildering ghost! —

And turn, and toss your brown delightful headAmusedly, among the ancient Dead.

2.

Sonnet: I Said I Splendidly Loved You; It’s Not True

I SAID I splendidly loved you; it’s not true.  Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea.On gods or fools the high risk falls — on you —   The clean clear bitter-sweet that’s not for me.Love soars from earth to ecstasies unwist.   5  Love is flung Lucifer-like from Heaven to Hell.But — there are wanderers in the middle mist,  Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tellWhether they love at all, or, loving, whom:  An old song’s lady, a fool in fancy dress,   10Or phantoms, or their own face on the gloom;  For love of Love, or from heart’s loneliness.Pleasure’s not theirs, nor pain. They doubt, and sigh,  And do not love at all. Of these am I.

3.

Success

I THINK if you had loved me when I wanted;  If I’d looked up one day, and seen your eyes,And found my wild sick blasphemous prayer granted,  And your brown face, that’s full of pity and wise,Flushed suddenly; the white godhead in new fear   5  Intolerably so struggling, and so shamed;Most holy and far, if you’d come all too near,  If earth had seen Earth’s lordliest wild limbs tamed,Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for My touch —   Myself should I have slain? or that foul you?   10But this the strange gods, who had given so much,  To have seen and known you, this they might not do.One last shame’s spared me, one black word’s unspoken;  And I’m alone; and you have not awoken.

4.

Dust

WHEN the white flame in us in gone,  And we that lost the world’s delightStiffen in darkness, left alone  To crumble in our separate night;

When your swift hair is quiet in death,   5  And through the lips corruption thrustHas stilled the labour of my breath —   When we are dust, when we are dust! —

Not dead, not undesirous yet,  Still sentient, still unsatisfied,   10We’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,  Around the places where we died,

And dance as dust before the sun,  And light of foot, and unconfined,Hurry from road to road, and run   15  About the errands of the wind.

And every mote, on earth or air,  Will speed and gleam, down later days,And like a secret pilgrim fare  By eager and invisible ways,   20

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,  Till, beyond thinking, out of view,One mote of all the dust that’s I  Shall meet one atom that was you.

Then in some garden hushed from wind,   25  Warm in a sunset’s afterglow,The lovers in the flowers will find  A sweet and strange unquiet grow

Upon the peace; and, past desiring,  So high a beauty in the air,   30And such a light, and such a quiring,  And such a radiant ecstasy there,

They’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew,  Or out of earth, or in the height,Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,   35  Or two that pass, in light, to light,

Out of the garden, higher, higher.…  But in that instant they shall learnThe shattering ecstasy of our fire,  And the weak passionless hearts will burn   40

And faint in that amazing glow,  Until the darkness close above;And they will know — poor fools, they’ll know! —   One moment, what it is to love.

5.

Kindliness

WHEN love has changed to kindliness — Oh, love, our hungry lips, that pressSo tight that Time’s an old god’s dreamNodding in heaven, and whisper stuffSeven million years were not enough   5To think on after, make it seemLess than the breath of children playing,A blasphemy scarce worth the saying,A sorry jest, “When love has grownTo kindliness — to kindliness!”…   10And yet — the best that either’s knownWill change, and wither, and be less,At last, than comfort, or its ownRemembrance. And when some caressTendered in habit (once a flame   15All heaven sang out to) wakes the shameUnworded, in the steady eyesWe’ll have, — that day, what shall we do?Being so noble, kill the twoWho’ve reached their second-best? Being wise,   20Break cleanly off, and get away.Follow down other windier skiesNew lures, alone? Or shall we stay,Since this is all we’ve known, contentIn the lean twilight of such day,   25And not remember, not lament?That time when all is over, andHand never flinches, brushing hand;And blood lies quiet, for all you’re near;And it’s but spoken words we hear,   30Where trumpets sang; when the mere skiesAre stranger and nobler than your eyes;And flesh is flesh, was flame before;And infinite hungers leap no moreIn the chance swaying of your dress;   35

6.

Mummia

AS those of old drank mummia  To fire their limbs of lead,Making dead kings from Africa  Stand pandar to their bed;

Drunk on the dead, and medicined   5  With spiced imperial dust,In a short night they reeled to find  Ten centuries of lust.

So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,  Stuffed love’s infinity,   10And sucked all lovers of all time  To rarify ecstasy.

Helen’s the hair shuts out from me  Verona’s livid skies;Gypsy the lips I press; and see   15  Two Antonys in your eyes.

The unheard invisible lovely dead  Lie with us in this place,And ghostly hands above my head  Close face to straining face;   20

Their blood is wine along our limbs;  Their whispering voices wreatheSavage forgotten drowsy hymns  Under the names we breathe;

Woven from their tomb, and one with it,   25  The night wherein we press;Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit  Your flaming nakedness.

For the uttermost years have cried and clung  To kiss your mouth to mine;   30And hair long dust was caught, was flung,  Hand shaken to hand divine,

And Life has fired, and Death not shaded,  All Time’s uncounted bliss,And the height o’ the world has flamed and faded,   35

7.

The Fish

IN a cool curving world he liesAnd ripples with dark ecstasies.The kind luxurious lapse and stealShapes all his universe to feelAnd know and be; the clinging stream   5Closes his memory, glooms his dream,Who lips the roots o’ the shore, and glidesSuperb on unreturning tides.Those silent waters weave for himA fluctuant mutable world and dim,   10Where wavering masses bulge and gapeMysterious, and shape to shapeDies momently through whorl and hollow,And form and line and solid followSolid and line and form to dream   15Fantastic 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.   20There 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   25The hyaline of drifting glooms;The strange soft-handed depth subduesDrowned colour there, but black to hues,As death to living, decomposes — Red darkness of the heart of roses,   30Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,And gold that lies behind the eyes,The unknown unnameable sightless whiteThat is the essential flame of night,Lustreless purple, hooded green,   35The myriad hues that lie betweenDarkness and darkness!…

  And all’s one.Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,The world he rests in, world he knows,   40Perpetual curving. Only — growsAn eddy in that ordered falling,A knowledge from the gloom, a callingWeed in the wave, gleam in the mud — The dark fire leaps along his blood;   45Dateless 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,   50Fades 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 criesThat drift along the wave and rise   55Thin 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 singingBlown by the wind, a flame of sound,   60The gleam, the flowers, and vast aroundThe horizon, and the heights above — You know the sigh, the song of love!

But there the night is close, and there