TIARE TAHITI
by: Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
- AMUA,
when our laughter ends,
- And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
- Are dust about the doors of friends,
- Or scent ablowing down the night,
- Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
- Comes our immortality.
- Mamua, there waits a land
- Hard for us to understand.
- Out of time, beyond the sun,
- All are one in Paradise,
- You and Pupure are one,
- And Taü, and the ungainly wise.
- There the Eternals are, and there
- The Good, the Lovely, and the True,
- And Types, whose earthly copies were
- The foolish broken things we knew;
- There is the Face, whose ghosts we are;
- The real, the never-setting Star;
- And the Flower, of which we love
- Faint and fading shadows here;
- Never a tear, but only Grief;
- Dance, but not the limbs that move;
- Songs in Song shall disappear;
- Instead of lovers, Love shall be;
- For hearts, Immutability;
- And there, on the Ideal Reef,
- Thunders the Everlasting Sea!
-
- And my laughter, and my pain,
- Shall home to the Eternal Brain.
- And all lovely things, they say,
- Meet in Loveliness again;
- Miri's laugh, Teipo's feet,
- And the hands of Matua,
- Stars and sunlight there shall meet
- Coral's hues and rainbows there,
- And Teüra's braided hair;
- And with the starred tiare's white,
- And white birds in the dark ravine,
- And flamboyants ablaze at night,
- And jewels, and evening's after-green,
- And dawns of pearl and gold and red,
- Mamua, your lovelier head!
- And there'll no more be one who dreams
- Under the ferns, of crumbling stuff,
- Eyes of illusion, mouth that seems,
- All time-entangled human love.
- And you'll no longer swing and sway
- Divinely down the scented 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?
- Oh, Heaven's Heaven! -- but we'll be missing
- The palms, and sunlight, and the south;
- And there's an end, I think, of kissing,
- When our mouths are one with Mouth ...
-
- Taü here, Mamua,
- Crown the hair, and come away!
- Hear the calling of the moon,
- And the whispering scents that stray
- About the idle warm lagoon.
- Hasten, hand in human hand,
- Down the dark, the flowered way,
- Along the whiteness of the sand,
- And in the water's soft caress,
- Wash the mind of foolishness,
- Mamua, until the day.
- Spend the glittering moonlight there
- Pursuing down the soundless deep
- Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair,
- Or floating lazy, half-asleep.
- Dive and double and follow after,
- Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,
- With lips that fade, and human laughter
- And faces individual,
- Well this side of Paradise! ...
- There's little comfort in the wise.
"Tiare Tahiti" is reprinted
from 1914 and Other Poems. Rupert Brooke. London: Sidgwick
& Jackson, 1915. |
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POEMS BY RUPERT BROOKE |
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