English Poetry. Rupert Chawner Brooke. The Jolly Company. Руперт Брук.

Rupert Chawner Brooke (Руперт Брук)

The Jolly Company

   The stars, a jolly company,
    I envied, straying late and lonely;
   And cried upon their revelry:
    "O white companionship!  You only
   In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
   Friends radiant and inseparable!"

   Light-heart and glad they seemed to me
    And merry comrades (EVEN SO
   GOD OUT OF HEAVEN MAY LAUGH TO SEE
    THE HAPPY CROWDS; AND NEVER KNOW
   THAT IN HIS LONE OBSCURE DISTRESS
   EACH WALKETH IN A WILDERNESS).

   But I, remembering, pitied well
    And loved them, who, with lonely light,
   In empty infinite spaces dwell,
    Disconsolate.  For, all the night,
   I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
   Star to faint star, across the sky.

Rupert Chawner Brooke’s other poems:

1. The One Before the Last
2. The Way That Lovers Use
3. Song (The way of love was thus)
4. The True Beatitude
5. On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess

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