35 Sonnets | Page 3

daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see,

But by my thought of others' thought of me.
XVI.
We never joy enjoy to that full point
Regret doth wish joy had
enjoyèd been,
Nor have the strength regret to disappoint
Recalling
not past joy's thought, but its mien.
Yet joy was joy when it enjoyèd
was
And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,
It must have been joy
ere its joy did pass
And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.

Alas! All this is useless, for joy's in
Enjoying, not in thinking of
enjoying.
Its mere thought-mirroring gainst itself doth sin,
By mere
reflecting solid life destroying,
Yet the more thought we take to
thought to prove
It must not think, doth further from joy move.
XVII.
My love, and not I, is the egoist.
My love for thee loves itself more
than thee;
Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,
And makes me
live that it may feed on me.
In the country of bridges the bridge is

More real than the shores it doth unsever;
So in our world, all of
Relation, this
Is true--that truer is Love than either lover.
This
thought therefore comes lightly to Doubt's door--
If we, seeing
substance of this world, are not
Mere Intervals, God's Absence and no
more,
Hollows in real Consciousness and Thought.
And if 'tis
possible to Thought to bear this fruit,
Why should it not be possible
to Truth?
XVIII.
Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery

two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable light

Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;
The stream of time,
known by birth-bursting bubbles;
The gulf of silence, empty even of
nought;
Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles

Because the string's lost and the plan forgot:
When I think on this
and that here I stand,
The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise,

Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand
And looking at it with
thought-alien eyes,
The prayer of my wonder looketh past
The
universal darkness lone and vast.
XIX.
Beauty and love let no one separate,
Whom exact Nature did to each
other fit,
Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate
And to Love
beauty as true colour of it.
Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair,

But let none love outside the body's thought,
So the seen couple's
togetherness shall bear
Truth to the beauty each in the other sought.

I could but love thee out of mockery
Of love and thee and mine
own ugliness;
Therefore thy beauty I sing and wish not thee,

Thanking the Gods I long not out of place,
Lest, like a slave that for
kings' robes doth long,
Obtained, shall with mere wearing do them
wrong.
XX.
When in the widening circle of rebirth
To a new flesh my travelled
soul shall come,
And try again the unremembered earth
With the
old sadness for the immortal home,
Shall I revisit these same
differing fields
And cull the old new flowers with the same sense,

That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields,
Of more age
than my days in this pretence?
Shall I again regret strange faces lost

Of which the present memory is forgot
And but in unseen bulks of
vagueness tossed
Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought?

Were thy face one, what sweetness will't not be,
Though by blind

feeling, to remember thee!
XXI.
Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing.
Its
careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,
Still suggests form as
aught whose proper being
Mere finding touch with erring darkness
drapes.
Yet whence, except from guessed sight, does touch teach

That touch is but a close and empty sense?
How does mere touch,
self-uncontented, reach
For some truer sense's whole intelligence?

The thing once touched, if touch be now omitted,
Stands yet in
memory real and outward known,
So the untouching memory of
touch is fitted
With sense of a sense whereby far things are shown

So, by touch of untouching, wrongly aright,
Touch' thought of seeing
sees not things but Sight.
XXII.
My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,
Of some Egyptian art than
Egypt older,
Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,

Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder.
Whate'er its sense
may mean, its age is twin
To that of priesthoods whose feet stood
near God,
When knowledge was so great that 'twas a sin
And man's
mere soul too man for its abode.
But when I ask what means that
pageant I
And would look at it suddenly, I lose
The sense I had of
seeing it, nor can try
Again to look, nor hath my memory a use
That
seems recalling, save that it recalls
An emptiness of having seen
those walls.
XXIII.
Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,
When clouds are one
cloud till the horizon,
Our thinking senses deem the sun away
And
say «'tis sunless» and «there is no sun»;
And yet the very day they
wrong truth by
Is of the unseen sun's effluent essence,
The very

words do give themselves the lie,
The very thought of absence comes
from presence:
Even so deem we through Good of what is evil.
He
speaks of light that speaks of absent light,
And absent god, becoming
present devil,
Is still the