Rupert Brooke

Now that spring is segueing into summer, there is a lot of fun stuff to read that matches the season. The sweet illustration, a part of "Girls and Eggs", is by the famous Austrian Raphael Kirchner [1876-1917]; more here.

Here's a great old Elizabethan song lyric, from Bullen's collection of them here:

From William Byrd’s Psalms, Songs, and Sonnets, 1611.

CROWNÈD with flowers I saw fair Amaryllis

By Thyrsis sit, hard by a fount of crystal,And with her hand more white than snow or lilies,On sand she wrote My faith shall be immortal:And suddenly a storm of wind and weatherBlew all her faith and sand away together.

I also want to focus on a poem by the British Rupert Brooke [1887-1915], one that's not on World War I but on a more odd subject; you can read more of his work here:

The Fish

   In a cool curving world he lies
   And ripples with dark ecstasies.
   The kind luxurious lapse and steal
   Shapes all his universe to feel
   And know and be; the clinging stream
   Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
   Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides
   Superb on unreturning tides.
   Those silent waters weave for him
   A fluctuant mutable world and dim,
   Where wavering masses bulge and gape
   Mysterious, and shape to shape
   Dies momently through whorl and hollow,
   And form and line and solid follow
   Solid and line and form to dream
   Fantastic down the eternal stream;
   An obscure world, a shifting world,
   Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,
   Or serpentine, or driving arrows,
   Or serene slidings, or March narrows.
   There slipping wave and shore are one,
   And weed and mud.  No ray of sun,
   But glow to glow fades down the deep
   (As dream to unknown dream in sleep);
   Shaken translucency illumes
   The hyaline of drifting glooms;
   The strange soft-handed depth subdues
   Drowned colour there, but black to hues,
   As death to living, decomposes —
   Red darkness of the heart of roses,
   Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,
   And gold that lies behind the eyes,
   The unknown unnameable sightless white
   That is the essential flame of night,
   Lustreless purple, hooded green,
   The myriad hues that lie between
   Darkness and darkness! . . .

                                 And all's one.
   Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,
   The world he rests in, world he knows,
   Perpetual curving.  Only — grows
   An eddy in that ordered falling,
   A knowledge from the gloom, a calling
   Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud —
   The dark fire leaps along his blood;
   Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
   The intricate impulse works its will;
   His woven world drops back; and he,
   Sans providence, sans memory,
   Unconscious and directly driven,
   Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.

[...]