Day That I Have Loved

by Rupert Brooke

Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes,
   And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands.
The grey veils of the half-light deepen; colour dies.
   I bear you, a light burden, to the shrouded sands, 

Where lies your waiting boat, by wreaths of the sea's making
  Mist-garlanded, with all grey weeds of the water crowned.
There you'll be laid, past fear of sleep or hope of waking;
  And over the unmoving sea, without a sound, 

Faint hands will row you outward, out beyond our sight,
   Us with stretched arms and empty eyes on the far-gleaming
And marble sand. . . .
                                  Beyond the shifting cold twilight, 

   Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming, 

There'll be no port, no dawn-lit islands! But the drear
   Waste darkening, and, at length, flame ultimate on the deep.
Oh, the last fire -- and you, unkissed, unfriended there! 
   Oh, the lone way's red ending, and we not there to weep! 

(We found you pale and quiet, and strangely crowned with flowers,
   Lovely and secret as a child. You came with us,
Came happily, hand in hand with the young dancing hours,
   High on the downs at dawn!) Void now and tenebrous, 

The grey sands curve before me. . . .
                                                       From the inland meadows,
   Fragrant of June and clover, floats the dark, and fills
The hollow sea's dead face with little creeping shadows,
   And the white silence brims the hollow of the hills. 

 

Close in the nest is folded every weary wing,
   Hushed all the joyful voices; and we, who held you dear,
Eastward we turn and homeward, alone, remembering . . .
   Day that I loved, day that I loved, the Night is here!

Logic jumps the rails

"At some point, and it is always hard to tell exactly where, logic jumps the rails, which is to say that one finishes an Aickman story not really knowing if it has ended in reality or hallucination, waking or sleeping, the land of the living or of the dead."

That's from Anwen Crawford's review in The New Yorker of Robert Aickman's Compulsory Games. We'd like to feature more of Aickman's strange stories in Wrong, but he didn't die until 1981 and we may not still be around when his work shuffles off the coil of copyright. All we can do is direct the reader's attention to several fine collections, supported by the approbation of connoisseurs of the eerie. They are:

Compulsory Games

Cold Hand In Mine

Dark Entries

The Unsettled Dust

The Wine-Dark Sea

Go Back At Once

“From vaults, skeleton hands protruded a while, and then dropped off or were snapped off.”