Mummia

As those of old drank mummia

    To fire their limbs of lead,

    Making dead kings from Africa

    Stand pandar to their bed;

    Drunk on the dead, and medicined

    With spiced imperial dust,

    In a short night they reeled to find

    Ten centuries of lust.

    So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,

    Stuffed love's infinity,

    And sucked all lovers of all time

    To rarify ecstasy.

    Helen's the hair shuts out from me

    Verona's livid skies;

    Gypsy the lips I press; and see

    Two Antonys in your eyes.

    The unheard invisible lovely dead

    Lie with us in this place,

    And ghostly hands above my head

    Close face to straining face;

    Their blood is wine along our limbs;

    Their whispering voices wreathe

    Savage forgotten drowsy hymns

    Under the names we breathe;

    Woven from their tomb, and one with it,

    The night wherein we press;

    Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit

    Your flaming nakedness.

    For the uttermost years have cried and clung

    To kiss your mouth to mine;

    And hair long dust was caught, was flung,

    Hand shaken to hand divine,

    And Life has fired, and Death not shaded,

    All Time's uncounted bliss,

    And the height o' the world has flamed and faded,

    Love, that our love be this!

By Rupert Brooke

https://www.public-domain-poetry.com/rupert-brooke/mummia-9659