Page:Collected poems of Rupert Brooke.djvu/72

 THE ONE BEFORE THE LAST

I was in love again

With the One Before the Last,

And smiled to greet the pleasant pain

Of that innocent young past.

But I jumped to feel how sharp had been

The pain when it did live,

How the faded dreams of Nineteen-ten

Were Hell in Nineteen-five.

The boy's woe was as keen and clear,

The boy's love just as true,

And the One Before the Last, my dear,

Hurt quite as much as you.

Sickly I pondered how the lover

Wrongs the unanswering tomb,

And sentimentalizes over

What earned a better doom.