| Rupert Brooke (1887–1915). Collected Poems. 1916. |
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| II. 1908–1911 |
| 8. Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body |
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| HOW can we find? how can we rest? how can | |
| We, being gods, win joy, or peace, being man? | |
| We, the gaunt zanies of a witless Fate, | |
| Forget the moment ere the moment slips, | |
| Kiss with blind lips that seek beyond the lips, | 5 |
| Who want, and know not what we want, and cry | |
| With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by. | |
| Love’s for completeness! No perfection grows | |
| ’Twixt leg, and arm, elbow, and ear, and nose, | |
| And joint, and socket; but unsatisfied | 10 |
| Sprawling desires, shapeless, perverse, denied. | |
| Finger with finger wreathes; we love, and gape, | |
| Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape, | |
| Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed, | |
| Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost | 15 |
| By crescive paths and strange protuberant ways | |
| From sanity and from wholeness and from grace. | |
| How can love triumph, how can solace be, | |
| Where fever turns toward fever, knee toward knee? | |
| Could we but fill to harmony, and dwell | 20 |
| Simple as our thought and as perfectible, | |
| Rise disentangled from humanity | |
| Strange whole and new into simplicity, | |
| Grow to a radiant round love, and bear | |
| Unfluctuant passion for some perfect sphere, | 25 |
| Love moon to moon unquestioning, and be | |
| Like the star Lunisequa, steadfastly | |
| Following the round clear orb of her delight, | |
| Patiently ever, through the eternal night! | |
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