| Rupert Brooke (1887–1915). Collected Poems. 1916. |
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| II. 1908–1911 |
| 12. The Jolly Company |
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| THE STARS, a jolly company, | |
| I envied, straying late and lonely; | |
| And cried upon their revelry: | |
| “O white companionship! You only | |
| In love, in faith unbroken dwell, | 5 |
| Friends radiant and inseparable!” | |
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| Light-heart and glad they seemed to me | |
| And merry comrades (even so | |
| God out of Heaven may laugh to see | |
| The happy crowds; and never know | 10 |
| That in his lone obscure distress | |
| Each walketh in a wilderness). | |
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| But I, remembering, pitied well | |
| And loved them, who, with lonely light, | |
| In empty infinite spaces dwell, | 15 |
| Disconsolate. For, all the night, | |
| I heard the thin gnat-voices cry, | |
| Star to faint star, across the sky. | |
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