free-verse51 lines

A Letter To A Live Poet

by Rupert Brooke

Sir, since the last Elizabethan died,

Or, rather, that more Paradisal muse,

Blind with much light, passed to the light more glorious

Or deeper blindness, no man's hand, as thine,

Has, on the world's most noblest chord of song,

Struck certain magic strains. Ears satiate

With the clamorous, timorous whisperings of to-day,

Thrilled to perceive once more the spacious voice

And serene utterance of old. We heard

With rapturous breath half-held, as a dreamer dreams

Who dares not know it dreaming, lest he wake

The odorous, amorous style of poetry,

The melancholy knocking of those lines,

The long, low soughing of pentameters,

Or the sharp of rhyme as a bird's cry

And the innumerable truant polysyllables

Multitudinously twittering like a bee.

Fulfilled our hearts were with that music then,

And all the evenings sighed it to the dawn,

And all the lovers heard it from all the trees.

All of the accents upon all the norms!

And ah! the stress on the penultimate!

We never knew blank verse could have such feet.

Where is it now? Oh, more than ever, now

I sometimes think no poetry is read

Save where some sepultured Caesura bled,

Royally incarnadining all the line.

Is the imperial iamb laid to rest,

And the young trochee, having done enough?

Ah! turn again! Sing so to us, who are sick

Of seeming-simple rhymes, bizarre emotions,

Decked in the simple verses of the day,

Infinite meaning in the little gloom,

Irregular thoughts in stanzas regular,

Modern despair in antique meters, myths

Incomprehensible at evening,

And symbols that mean nothing in the dawn.

The slow lines swell. The new styles sighs. The Celt

Moans round with many voices.

God! to see

Gaunt anapaests stand up out of the verse,

Combative accents, stress where no stress should be,

Spondee on spondee, iamb on choriamb,

The thrill of the all the tribrachs in the world,

And all the vowels rising to the E!

To hear the blessed mutter of those verbs,

Conjunctions passionate toward each other's arms,

And epithets like amaranthine lovers

Stretching luxuriously to the stars,

All prouder pronouns than the dawn, and all

The thunder of the trumpets of the noun!