The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke

Choriambics — II

   Here the flame that was ash, shrine that was void,
     lost in the haunted wood,
   I have tended and loved, year upon year, I in the solitude
   Waiting, quiet and glad-eyed in the dark, knowing that once a gleam
   Glowed and went through the wood.  Still I abode strong in a golden dream,
   Unrecaptured.
                  For I, I that had faith, knew that a face would glance
   One day, white in the dim woods, and a voice call, and a radiance
   Fill the grove, and the fire suddenly leap . . . and, in the heart of it,
   End of labouring, you!  Therefore I kept ready the altar, lit
   The flame, burning apart.
                              Face of my dreams vainly in vision white
   Gleaming down to me, lo! hopeless I rise now.  For about midnight
   Whispers grew through the wood suddenly, strange cries in the boughs above
   Grated, cries like a laugh.  Silent and black then through the sacred grove
   Great birds flew, as a dream, troubling the leaves, passing at length.
                                                                        I knew
   Long expected and long loved, that afar, God of the dim wood, you
   Somewhere lay, as a child sleeping, a child suddenly reft from mirth,
   White and wonderful yet, white in your youth, stretched upon foreign earth,
   God, immortal and dead!
                            Therefore I go; never to rest, or win
   Peace, and worship of you more, and the dumb wood and the shrine therein.