Most poems about death look backward, at grief, loss, and the life left behind. Brooke's sonnet begins by forbidding exactly that. "Not with vain tears," it says, will the dead hammer on heaven's "substantial doors" or trail along "the dusty high-roads of the aimless dead" with a "plaintive" longing for Earth. What he offers instead is stranger and more intimate: a pair or company of souls slipping away to a hidden corner of the afterlife, where they can finally know each other and the world without the body in the way.
The central idea is that the body is a handicap, and death a release from it. The final lines make this clear through a run of paradoxes. In the afterlife, the speaker says, we will "hear, know, and say / What this tumultuous body now denies." We will "feel, who have laid our groping hands away," and "see, no longer blinded by our eyes." Normally eyes are how we see, but here they are what blinds us. The word "groping" turns the hands into clumsy tools, like a person feeling along a dark wall, and "laid away" makes giving them up sound as ordinary as setting down a bag. "Tumultuous" is just as telling, since the living body is noisy and restless, always interfering with the clear understanding the soul wants.
The imagery sets two kinds of afterlife against each other. The first is public, grand, and mournful: solid doors, wide dusty roads, crowds of the "aimless dead." The second is small and secret: a "close-covered by-way of the air," a "low sweet alley between wind and wind," a "whispering ghost-forgotten nook." Brooke borrows the language of ordinary streets and back lanes, and the effect is almost playful, like children escaping a crowd to find a private place. The verbs add to this: "turn and run," "stoop," "thread the shadows," "find." Even the ghosts have forgotten this nook, so it belongs only to the speakers. The sounds support the hush. Soft, hissing consonants gather in "Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows" and "whispering ghost-forgotten nook," so that reading it aloud feels like moving quietly.
The form is a carefully handled sonnet in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme follows the Italian pattern: an octave rhyming ABBA CDDC, then a sestet rhyming EFEFEF. Normally a sonnet turns at the break between these parts, but Brooke blurs it. The octave ends mid-sentence on "and there," and the sentence runs straight into "Spend in pure converse our eternal day." The effect is a drift from one stanza into the next, as if the speakers were slipping from one space to another. The rhythm is mostly steady, but Brooke breaks it at key moments. "Plaintive" opens line four with an emphasis on its first syllable, so the word the poem rejects sounds stiff and heavy. The crowded stresses of "Stoop under faint gleams" make the reader slow down and duck, just as the speakers do.
A few word choices carry more than one meaning. "Converse" can mean conversation, but "pure converse" suggests a meeting of minds with nothing in between. "Think each in each, immediately wise" extends this. "Immediately" means "at once," but it also means "without anything intervening," so understanding passes directly from one mind to another with no need for speech, touch, or glances. The repeated "we" and "each in each" show that the poem is about shared knowledge, not solitary escape, and about a closeness the living can only approximate.
What makes the sonnet worth reading is how it turns an old fear upside down. Death usually means losing the senses, but here it means gaining them in a purer form. The poem does not argue for this vision. It simply states it with calm confidence in a firm, balanced form, and the last line's paradox, seeing better because the eyes are gone, gives the sonnet its lasting hold on a reader. Whether or not you share Brooke's picture of the afterlife, his insistence that the body might be a limit on understanding is a bold and memorable idea, delivered in fourteen lines that move as quietly as the souls they describe.