In honor of one of secularism’s many talented voices, the poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) — whose birthday is today, Aug. 3 — the Freedom From Religion Foundation is sharing the animated music video we produced featuring his charmingly irreverent poem, “Heaven.”
FFRF Co-President Dan Barker, an accomplished piano player and songwriter, has set the poem to music and ubertalented young artist Kati Treu has captured the song with painstaking animation. Click on the embedded video above or click here to watch.
Rupert Brooke is only one of the numerous freethinkers featured in the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s online archive of famous nonbelievers, Freethought of the Day. Read more about Brooke here. You can also sign up to start your day with these short bios and featured freethinking quotes by famous or celebrated atheists, agnostics, humanists and heretics.
It’s been a hard summer for those of us who value the separation between state and church and the individual liberties this separation protects. We hope you will enjoy this secular interlude as a change of pace.
The words of the poem are embedded in the video, and also reprinted below for your enjoyment.
Heaven
By Rupert Brooke
Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud!--Death eddies near--
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.