Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915). Collected Poems. 1916.

II. 1908–1911

7. The Fish

IN a cool curving world he lies

And ripples with dark ecstasies.

The kind luxurious lapse and steal

Shapes all his universe to feel

And know and be; the clinging stream

Closes his memory, glooms his dream,

Who lips the roots o’ the shore, and glides

Superb on unreturning tides.

Those silent waters weave for him

A fluctuant mutable world and dim,

Where wavering masses bulge and gape

Mysterious, and shape to shape

Dies momently through whorl and hollow,

And form and line and solid follow

Solid and line and form to dream

Fantastic 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.

There 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

The hyaline of drifting glooms;

The strange soft-handed depth subdues

Drowned colour there, but black to hues,

As death to living, decomposes—

Red darkness of the heart of roses,

Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,

And gold that lies behind the eyes,

The unknown unnameable sightless white

That is the essential flame of night,

Lustreless purple, hooded green,

The myriad hues that lie between

Darkness and darkness!…

And all’s one.

Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,

The world he rests in, world he knows,

Perpetual curving. Only—grows

An eddy in that ordered falling,

A knowledge from the gloom, a calling

Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud—

The dark fire leaps along his blood;

Dateless 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,

Fades 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 cries

That drift along the wave and rise

Thin 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 singing

Blown by the wind, a flame of sound,

The gleam, the flowers, and vast around

The horizon, and the heights above—

You know the sigh, the song of love!

But there the night is close, and there

Darkness is cold and strange and bare;

And the seered deeps are whisperless;

And rhythm is all deliciousness;

And joy is in the throbbing tide,

Whose intricate fingers beat and glide

In felt bewildering harmonies

Of trembling touch; and music is

The exquisite knocking of the blood.

Space is no more, under the mud;

His bliss is older than the sun.

Silent and straight the waters run.

The lights, the cries, the willows dim,

And the dark tide are one with him.