Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

The couplet evokes a moment of youthful, bodily freedom: the speakers, out of breath from exertion, collapse onto an exposed hillside and respond to the world with laughter and tactile affection. Brooke fuses human intimacy with the landscape—“kissed the lovely grass”—so that desire and delight are redirected into nature itself. The wind and sun suggest an elemental, cleansing intensity, while the breathlessness implies both physical passion and the fleetingness of such moments. The lines exemplify Brooke’s pre-war lyricism: sensuous, idealizing, and celebratory of experience before it hardens into memory or loss.