Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke — The Life Beyond

But I, remembering, pitied well And loved them, who, with lonely light, In empty infinite spaces dwell, Disconsolate.

For, all the night, I heard the thin gnat-voices cry, Star to faint star, across the sky.

The Life Beyond He wakes, who never thought to wake again, Who held the end was Death.

He opens eyes Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens.

He lies;

And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand, Like a dry branch.

No life is in that land, Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;

An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck Of moveless horror; an Immortal One Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse's neck.