The Wayfarers
by Rupert Brooke

English poet. His two best-known poems are The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (1912), published in Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 by his friend, Edward Marsh, and The Soldier (1914), a war-inspired sonnet. Other fine poems he wrote include Retrospect (1913) and Tiare Tahiti (1913). He also wrote a one-act play, Lithuania (1915), and Letters from America, for which Henry James wrote a preface in 1916. As a war poet, his work is more idealistic than those of other war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

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The Wayfarers
by Rupert Brooke

Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
Oh, I'll remember! but . . . each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

Do you think there's a far border town, somewhere,
The desert's edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
In which I'll find you waiting; and we'll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
Into the waste we know not, into the night?

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The Wayfarers by Rupert Brooke