He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
I thought when love for you died, I should die.
Who held the end was
Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the
strange eyeless heavens.
He lies;
And waits; and once in
timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is
a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an
Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly
Fast-stuck in grey sweat
on a corpse's neck.
It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I
live on.
Back to Rupert Brooke poems: 1908-1911...
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