35 Sonnets | Page 4

absent god by essence' right.
The
withdrawn cause by being withdrawn doth get
(Being thereby cause
still) the denied effect.
XXIV.
Something in me was born before the stars
And saw the sun begin
from far away.
Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,
For it hath
communed with an absolute day.
Through my Thought's night, as a
worn robe's heard trail
That I have never seen, I drag this past
That
saw the Possible like a dawn grow pale
On the lost night before it,
mute and vast.
It dates remoter than God's birth can reach,
That had
no birth but the world's coming after.
So the world's to me as, after
whispered speech,
The cause-ignored sudden echoing of laughter.

That 't has a meaning my conjecture knows,
But that 't has meaning's
all its meaning shows.
XXV.
We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack
Outness from soul to know
ourselves its dwelling,
And do but compel Fate aside or back
By
Fate's own immanence in the compelling.
We are too far in us from
outward truth
To know how much we are not what we are,
And live
but in the heat of error's youth,
Yet young enough its acting youth to
ignore.
The doubleness of mind fails us, to glance
At our exterior
presence amid things,
Sizing from otherness our countenance
And
seeing our puppet will's act-acting strings.
An unknown language
speaks in us, which we
Are at the words of, fronted from reality.
XXVI.
The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in

our truth may lie--
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror

We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things
the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double
lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true
place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet

Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our
perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words' sense from
words--knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not
what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.
XXVII.
How yesterday is long ago! The past
Is a fixed infinite distance from
to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
In irreparable
sameness far away.
How the to-be is infinitely ever
Out of the place
wherein it will be Now,
Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,

Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!
This thing Time is,
whose being is having none,
The equable tyrant of our different fates,

Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun
Or tricked by new
use of our careful dates.
This thing Time is, that to the grave-will bear

My heart, sure but of it and of my fear.
XXVIII.
The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss
Upon the wetted sand. I
look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!
Somehow,
somewhere this surely doth but seem!
The sky, the sea, this great
extent disclosed
Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,
Is not
something, but something interposed.
Only what in this is not this is
real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright,
great sleep of things,
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take

And for truth commune with imaginings,
Holding a dream too bitter,
a too fair curse,
This common sleep of men, the universe.

XXIX.
My weary life, that lives unsatisfied
On the foiled off-brink of being
e'er but this,
To whom the power to will hath been denied
And the
will to renounce doth also miss;
My sated life, with having nothing
sated,
In the motion of moving poisèd aye,
Within its dreams from
its own dreams abated--
This life let the Gods change or take away.

For this endless succession of empty hours,
Like deserts after deserts,
voidly one,
Doth undermine the very dreaming powers
And dull
even thought's active inaction,
Tainting with fore-unwilled will the
dreamed act
Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact.
XXX.
I do not know what truth the false untruth
Of this sad sense of the
seen world may own,
Or if this flowered plant bears also a fruit

Unto the true reality unknown.
But as the rainbow, neither earth's nor
sky's,
Stands in the dripping freshness of lulled rain,
A hope, not
real yet not fancy's, lies
Athwart the moment of our ceasing pain.

Somehow, since pain is felt yet felt as ill,
Hope hath a better warrant
than being hoped;
Since pain is felt as aught we should not feel

Man hath a Nature's reason for having groped,
Since Time was Time
and age and grief his measures,
Towards a better shelter than Time's
pleasures.
XXXI.
I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of
Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was
born makes me not countryless.
Ay, and dim through my daylight
thoughts escape
Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,

Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
But haunts my hours like
something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light remembered,

Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes