Thought Dying.

Suggested by last phrases in Rupert
Brooke's hand, quoted in the Memoir by E.N.
“Nothing remains,” he wrote, and yet we hear
How like spread grain those volumes multiply,
Those slender tokens of his empyry
Among the dawn-crowned of this latter year.
His written canon holds. It need not fear
Oblivion's courtesy. He shall not die.
In those young hearts that seed shall fructify.
Day that he loved to them shall be most dear;
But we to whom his legend brings the thought
Of other broken shafts, of books unwrit
Of senates unaddressed, of suits unfought,
Con those authentic phrases all unknit
To any fabric, and the breath is caught,
As if the Aegean sighed “The waste of it.”

—C. R. Allen.

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