1914, and Other Poems

“All the day I held the memory of you, and woveIts laughter with the dancing light o' the spray,And sowed the sky with tiny clouds of love...””

— Rupert Brooke

“Love is a flame; - we have beaconed the world's night.A city: - and we have built it, these and I.An emperor: - we have taught the world to die.””

— Rupert Brooke

“That night, how could I sleep?I lay and watched the lonely gloom;And watched the moonlight creepFrom wall to basin, round the room.All night I could not sleep.””

— Rupert Brooke

“If I should die, think only this of me:That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England.””

— Rupert Brooke

“I would think of a thousand things, Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly, One after one, like tasting sweet food. I have need to busy my heart with quietude.- ””

— Rupert Brooke

“Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality””

— Rupert Brooke

“Mamua, when our laughter ends, And hearts and bodies, brown as white, Are dust about the doors of friends, Or scent ablowing down the night, Then, oh! then, the wise agree, Comes our immortality. Mamua, there waits a land Hard for us to understand. Out of time, beyond the sun, All are one in Paradise, You and Pupure are one, And Taü, and the ungainly wise. There the Eternals are, and there The Good, the Lovely, and the True, And Types, whose earthly copies were The foolish broken things we knew; There is the Face, whose ghosts we are; The real, the never-setting Star; And the Flower, of which we love Faint and fading shadows here; Never a tear, but only Grief; Dance, but not the limbs that move; Songs in Song shall disappear; Instead of lovers, Love shall be; For hearts, Immutability; And there, on the Ideal Reef, Thunders the Everlasting Sea!””

— Rupert Brooke