Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

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Rupert Brooke

Your face was lifted to the golden sky

Ablaze beyond the black roofs of the square,

As flame on flame leapt, flourishing in air

Its tumult of red stars exultantly,

To the cold constellations dim and high;

And as we neared the roaring ruddy flare

Kindled to gold your throat and brow and hair

Until you burned, a flame of ecstasy.

The golden head goes down into the night

Quenched in cold gloom -- and yet again you stand

Beside me now with lifted face alight,

As, flame to flame, and fire to fire you burn . . .

Then, recollecting, laughingly you turn,

And look into my eyes and take my hand.

Tenants

Suddenly, out of dark and leafy ways,

We came upon the little house asleep

In cold blind stillness, shadowless and deep,

In the white magic of the full moon-blaze.

Strangers without the gate, we stood agaze,

Fearful to break that quiet, and to creep

Into the home that had been ours to keep

Through a long year of happy nights and days.

So unfamiliar in the white moon-gleam,

So old and ghostly like a house of dream

It seemed, that over us there stole the dread

That even as we watched it, side, by side,

The ghosts of lovers, who had lived and died

Within its walls, were sleeping in our bed.

For G.

All night under the moon

Plovers are flying

Over the dreaming meadows of silvery light,

Over the meadows of June,

Flying and crying --

Wandering voices of love in the hush of the night.

All night under the moon,

Love, though we're lying

Quietly under the thatch, in silvery light

Over the meadows of June

Together we're flying --

Rapturous voices of love in the hush of the night ?

Sea Change

Wind-flicked and ruddy her young body glowed

In sunny shallows, splashing them to spray;

But when on rippled, silver sand she lay,

And over her the little green waves flowed,

Coldly translucent and moon-coloured showed

Her frail young beauty, as if rapt away

From all the light and laughter of the day

To some twilit, forlorn sea-god's abode.

Again into the sun with happy cry

She leapt alive and sparkling from the sea,

Sprinkling white spray against the hot blue sky,

A laughing girl . . . and yet, I see her lie

Under a deeper tide eternally

In cold moon-coloured immortality.

Battle

                I

        The Return

He went, and he was gay to go:

And I smiled on him as he went.

My boy! 'Twas well he couldn't know

My darkest dread, or what it meant --

Just what it meant to smile and smile

And let my son go cheerily --

My son . . . and wondering all the while

What stranger would come back to me.




                II

        The Dancers

All day beneath the hurtling shells

Before my burning eyes

Hover the dainty demoiselles --

The peacock dragon-flies.

Unceasingly they dart and glance

Above the stagnant stream --

And I am fighting here in France

As in a senseless dream.

A dream of shattering black shells

That hurtle overhead,

And dainty dancing demoiselles

Above the dreamless dead.




                III

        Hit

Out of the sparkling sea

I drew my tingling body clear, and lay

On a low ledge the livelong summer day,

Basking, and watching lazily

White sails in Falmouth Bay.

My body seemed to burn

Salt in the sun that drenched it through and through

Til every particle glowed clean and new

And slowly seemed to turn

To lucent amber in the world of blue. . . .

I felt a sudden wrench --

A trickle of warm blood --

And found that I was sprawling in the mud

Among the dead men in the trench.

Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again

Happily on the sun or feel the rain

Without remembering how they who went

Ungrudgingly and spent

Their lives for us loved, too; the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings --

But we, how shall we turn to little things

And listen to the birds and winds and streams

Made holy by their dreams,

Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

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