Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

To Rupert Brooke

Arthur Davison Ficke

YOU too, “superb on unreturning tides,”

Pass; and the brightness dies out of the air.

Our life itself seems dreamlike, waiting where

The desert of no paths forever hides

Your hates and longings, your revolts and prides,

The secret miracle that your songs declare—

As these few reliques to our eager care

And long delight your stricken hand confides.

Beautiful lover of beauty!—child of the sea,

Sunlight, and mysteries of the evening foam!

Though sleep shall heal the feet too far a-roam,

Are you at peace now as you longed to be?—

Or beauty-hungered does your soul go free

Out of the harbor of its mortal home.

It was enough, that common men had died

In this vast horror of the shaken world

Where life’s primeval hate broadcast is hurled

To crush the age’s generous youth and pride

In flame and anguish; proving how we lied

Who dreamed a nobler banner now unfurled

Over mankind—while bitter smoke-wreaths curled

Up from the Moloch-lips we had denied!

But you not as this age’s sacrifice

Should have gone down; you were foredoomed to be

Not of the age, but of all time a light.

This hour has grief—too much!—but you are price

That the race pays for its apostasy,

Its hour of madness in the abysmal night.

Song lingered at your lips—delicate song,

Whose flowing waters in the golden day

Bore from the hill-lands of the far-away

The dews of rarer heights for which men long.

But when the tawdry baseness of the throng

Opposed to that fair stream its dull delay,

Your words leaped skyward into stinging spray,

A scornful challenge to the powers of wrong.

When you sang of beauty, Beauty’s self came down,

Blue-robed and shining, to the courts you laid

Where the heart walks at evening, hushed and free.

But when you touched the dullard and the clown,

The jangled keys of your tense spirit made

Discords, that were your prayer to harmony.

Clear level light across the English hills

Where garden-shadows track the afternoon;

Dusk under willows where a summer moon

Its long cascades of ghostly silver spills

Down pools of silence; a refrain that fills

The heart with sense of some forgotten tune;

The trembling white limbs of youth’s night of June

When life’s whole perfume up the wind distils:

These drift out of the regions that enfold you,

And from my memory almost smooth away

The picture of your known and mortal face,—

As though the lineaments could no longer hold you

Their prisoner, nor the earthen lamp betray

With dust the flame that there had dwelling-place.

The song is ended, but the years have set

No boundary to your memory; you have done

A young man’s miracles; your dreams have won

Some little of fadeless wonder from the fret

And torture of the days; your eyes have met

The eyes of the Archangel of the Sun;

And your lips cried, in brief last orison,

A gleam and glory men will not forget.

The rest is silence … your smile of swift delight

Shall flash to ours no more, nor shall the hand

Bring the heart’s greeting as you come again.

Only an echo from the silent land—

Only a gleam sometimes through summer rain—

“A width, a shining peace under the night.”