Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening

I'd watched the sorrow of the evening sky,
And smelt the sea, and earth, and the warm clover,
And heard the waves, and the seagull's mocking cry.

And in them all was only the old cry,
That song they always sing - 'The best is over!
You may remember now, and think, and sigh,
O silly lover!'
And I was tired and sick that all was over,
And because I,
For all my thinking, never could recover
One moment of the good hours that were over.
And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.

Then from the sad west turning wearily,
I saw the pines against the white north sky,
Very beautiful, and still, and bending over
Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.
And there was peace in them; and I
Was happy, and forgot to play the lover,
And laughed, and did no longer wish to die;
Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!

-1907 July 8
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Seaside

Swiftly out from the friendly lilt of the band,
The crowd's good laugher, the loved eyes of men
I am drawn nightward; I must turn again
Where, down beyond the low untrodden strand,
There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown
The old unquiet ocean.  All the shade
Is rife with magic and movement.  I stray alone
Here on the edge of silence, half afraid,

Waiting a sign.  In the deep heart of me
The sullen waters swell towards the moon,
And all my tides set seaward.

From inland
Leaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune,
That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,
And dies between the seawall and the sea.

____________________________


Sonnet

I said I splendidly loved you; it's not true
Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea.
On gods or fools the high risk falls - on you -
The clean clear bitter-sweet that's not for me.
Love soars from earth to ecstacies unwist.
Love is flung Lucifer-like from Heaven to Hell.
But - there are wanderers in the middle mist,
Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tell
Whether they love at all, or loving, whom:
An old song's lady, a fool in fancy dress,
Or phantoms, or their own face on the gloom;
For love of Love, or from heart's loneliness.
Pleasure not theirs, nor pain.  They doubt, and sigh
And do not love at all.  Of these am I.

-January 1910

-Rupert Brooke