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Rupert Brooke and the intellectual imagination
Rupert Brooke and the intellectual imagination Author:Walter De la Mare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: kind of wistful mockery, at the thought of an immortality where all is typical and nothing real: And you'll no longer swing and sway Divinely down the scented... more » shade, Where feet to Ambulation fade, And moons are lost in endless Day. How shall we wind these wreaths of ours, Where there are neither heads nor flowers? . . . Next, he momentarily wafts himself into the being of a Shade: So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams, Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams, Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men, Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible, And light on waving grass, he knows not when; And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell. Next, he deprecates the possibility of a future life even as tenuous and nebulous as this: Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, Cling, and are borne into the night apart. The laugh dies with the lips, " Love " with the lover. And, again, he is lost in rapture at the possibility which he mocked at in the first poem, sighed at in chapter{Section 4the second, belittled in the third, and denied in the fourth: Not dead, not undesirous yet, Still sentient, still unsatisfied, We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit, Around the places where we died, And dance as dust before the sun, And light of foot, and unconfmed, Hurry from road to road, and run About the errands of the wind. And every mote, on earth or air, Will speed and gleam, down later days, And like a secret pilgrim fare By eager and invisible ways, Nor ever rest, nor ever lie, Till, beyond thinking, out of view, One mote of all the dust that's I Shall meet one atom that was you. Then in some garden hushed from wind, Warm in a sunset's afterglow, The lovers in the flowers will find A sweet and strange...« less