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Beauty and Beauty

1887 –

1915

When Beauty and Beauty meet
   All naked, fair to fair,
The earth is crying-sweet,
   And scattering-bright the air,
Eddying, dizzying, closing round,
   With soft and drunken laughter;
Veiling all that may befall
   After—after—

Where Beauty and Beauty met,
   Earth’s still a-tremble there,
And winds are scented yet,
   And memory-soft the air,
Bosoming, folding glints of light,
   And shreds of shadowy laughter;
Not the tears that fill the years
   After—after—

This poem is in the public domain.

English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke was born on August 3, 1887. The son of the Rugby School’s housemaster, Brooke excelled in both academics and athletics. He entered his father’s school at the age of fourteen. A lover of verse since the age of nine, he won the school poetry prize in 1905.

Themes

About this Poem

“Beauty and Beauty” was published in The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (John Lane Company, 1915).

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Victory

All night the ways of Heaven were desolate,
    Long roads across a gleaming empty sky.
    Outcast and doomed and driven, you and I,
Alone, serene beyond all love or hate,
Terror or triumph, were content to wait,
    We, silent and all-knowing. Suddenly
    Swept through the heaven low-crouching from on high,
One horseman, downward to the earth’s low gate.

Oh, perfect from the ultimate height of living,
    Lightly we turned, through wet woods blossom-hung,
Into the open.

Rupert Brooke

2018

Lines Written in Belief That the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead Was Called Ambarvalia

Swings the way still by hollow and hill,
    And all the world’s a song;
‘She’s far,’ it sings me, ‘but fair,’ it rings me.
    ‘Quiet,’ it laughs, ‘and strong!’

Oh!

Rupert Brooke

2018

The Life Beyond

He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
    Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long living 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.

Rupert Brooke

2018

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Beauty and Beauty

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