by Rupert Brooke
This poem was written during the voyage to Gallipoli in April 1915. Brooke died of septicaemia in a French hospital ship on the twenty-third of that month. He was in his twenty-eighth year. He is buried on the Greek island of Skyros: that 'corner of a foreign field that is forever England'.
ALL things are written in the mind.
There the sure hills have station; and the wind
Blows in that placeless air.
And there the white and golden birds go flying;
And the stars wheel and shine; and woods are fair;
The light upon the snow is there;
and in that nowhere move
The trees and hands and waters that we love.And she for whom we die, she the undying
Mother of men
England!In Avons of the heart her rivers run.
She is with all we have loved and found and known,
Closed in the little nowhere of the brain.
Only, of all our dreams,
Not the poor heap of ... dust and stone,
This local earth, set in terrestrial streams,
Not this man, giving all for gold,
Nor that who has found evil good, nor these
Blind millions, bought and sold ...
She is not here, or now --
She is here, and now, yet nowhere --
We gave her birth, who bore us --
Our wandering feet have sought, but never found
her --
She is built a long way off --
She, though all men be traitors, not betrayed --
Whose soil is love, and her stars justice, she --
Gracious with flowers,
And robed ... and glorious in the sea.She was in his eyes, but he could not see her,
And he was England, but he knew her not.