Poem by Rupert Chawner Brooke

Mummia

   As those of old drank mummia
    To fire their limbs of lead,
   Making dead kings from Africa
    Stand pandar to their bed;

   Drunk on the dead, and medicined
    With spiced imperial dust,
   In a short night they reeled to find
    Ten centuries of lust.

   So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,
    Stuffed love's infinity,
   And sucked all lovers of all time
    To rarify ecstasy.

   Helen's the hair shuts out from me
    Verona's livid skies;
   Gypsy the lips I press; and see
    Two Antonys in your eyes.

   The unheard invisible lovely dead
    Lie with us in this place,
   And ghostly hands above my head
    Close face to straining face;

   Their blood is wine along our limbs;
    Their whispering voices wreathe
   Savage forgotten drowsy hymns
    Under the names we breathe;

   Woven from their tomb, and one with it,
    The night wherein we press;
   Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit
    Your flaming nakedness.

   For the uttermost years have cried and clung
    To kiss your mouth to mine;
   And hair long dust was caught, was flung,
    Hand shaken to hand divine,

   And Life has fired, and Death not shaded,
    All Time's uncounted bliss,
   And the height o' the world has flamed and faded,
    Love, that our love be this!

1. The Great Lover
2. The One Before the Last
3. Fragment on Painters
4. Song (All suddenly the wind comes soft)
5. The Funeral of Youth: Threnody

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