Here, where love's stuff is body, arm and side <br /> Are stabbing-sweet 'gainst chair and lamp and wall. <br />In every touch more intimate meanings hide; <br /> And flaming brains are the white heart of all. <br /> <br />Here, million pulses to one centre beat: <br /> Closed in by men's vast friendliness, alone, <br />Two can be drunk with solitude, and meet <br /> On the sheer point where sense with knowing's one. <br /> <br />Here the green-purple clanging royal night, <br /> And the straight lines and silent walls of town, <br />And roar, and glare, and dust, and myriad white <br /> Undying passers, pinnacle and crown <br /> <br />Intensest heavens between close-lying faces <br /> By the lamp's airless fierce ecstatic fire; <br />And we've found love in little hidden places, <br /> Under great shades, between the mist and mire. <br /> <br />Stay! though the woods are quiet, and you've heard <br /> Night creep along the hedges. Never go <br />Where tangled foliage shrouds the crying bird, <br /> And the remote winds sigh, and waters flow! <br /> <br />Lest -- as our words fall dumb on windless noons, <br /> Or hearts grow hushed and solitary, beneath <br />Unheeding stars and unfamiliar moons, <br /> Or boughs bend over, close and quiet as death, -- <br /> <br />Unconscious and unpassionate and still, <br /> Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, <br />And gradually along the stranger hill <br /> Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air, <br /> <br />And suddenly there's no meaning in our kiss, <br /> And your lit upward face grows, where we lie, <br />Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is, <br /> And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky.<br /><br />Rupert Brooke<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/town-and-country/
