The Pacific

Rupert Brooke In

I SHALL go out and wander through the forest paths by the grey moon light.

Fiji in moonlight is like nothing else in this world or the next. It’s all dim colours and all scents. And here where it’s high up, the most fantastically shaped mountains in the world tower up all around, and little silver clouds and wisps of mist run bleating up and down the valleys and hillsides like lambs looking for their mother.

There’s only one thing on earth as beautiful; and that’s Samoa by moon light. That’s utterly different, merely Heaven, sheer loveliness.

You lie on a mat in a cool Samoan hut, and look out on a white sand under the high palms, and a gentle sea, and the black line of the reef a mile out, and moonlight over every thing, floods and floods of it. . . . And then among it all are the liveliest people in the world, moving and danc ing like gods and goddesses, very quietly and mysteriously, and utterly content.

It is sheer beauty, so pure that it’s difficult to breathe in it—like living in a Keats world, only it’s less syrupy Endymion without sugar. Completely unconnected with this world. —From “The Collected Poems of Ru pert Brooke, with a Memoir .”