The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke

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 secret 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.