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The Jolly Company

By Rupert Brooke

Topics: classic

The stars, a jolly company,     I envied, straying late and lonely;     And cried upon their revelry:     "O white companionship! You only     In love, in faith unbroken dwell,     Friends radiant and inseparable!"     Light-heart and glad they seemed to me     And merry comrades (EVEN SO     GOD OUT OF HEAVEN MAY LAUGH TO SEE     THE HAPPY CROWDS; AND NEVER KNOW     THAT IN HIS LONE OBSCURE DISTRESS     EACH WALKETH IN A WILDERNESS).     But I, remembering, pitied well     And loved them, who, with lonely light,     In empty infinite spaces dwell,     Disconsolate. For, all the night,     I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,     Star to faint star, across the sky.

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"The Text is taken from Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. i. p. 71, 'given from two MS. copies, transmitted from Scotland.' Herd had a very similar bal"

Rupert Brooke

About Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) was an English war poet whose sonnets—including "The Soldier" ("If I should die, think only this of me")—idealized the sacrifice of war. He died of sepsis en route to Gallipoli and became a symbol of the lost generation of WWI.

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