35 Sonnets | Page 5

as if

life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
Thus I my
hope on unknown truth lay; yet
How but by hope do I the unknown
truth get?
XXXII.
When I have sense of what to sense appears,
Sense is sense ere 'tis
mine or mine in me is.
When I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears.

When I see, before me abstract Seeing sees.
I am part Soul part I in
all I touch--
Soul by that part I hold in common with all,
And I the
spoiled part, that doth make sense such
As I can err by it and my
sense mine call.
The rest is wondering what these thoughts may mean,

That come to explain and suddenly are gone,
Like messengers that
mock the message' mien,
Explaining all but the explanation;
As if
we a ciphered letter's cipher hit
And find it in an unknown language
writ.
XXXIII.
He that goes back does, since he goes, advance,
Though he doth not
advance who goeth back,
And he that seeks, though he on nothing
chance,
May still by words be said to find a lack.
This paradox of
having, that is nought
In the world's meaning of the things it screens,

Is yet true of the substance of pure thought
And there means
something by the nought it means.
For thinking nought does on
nought being confer,
As giving not is acting not to give,
And, to the
same unbribed true thought, to err
Is to find truth, though by its
negative.
So why call this world false, if false to be
Be to be aught,
and being aught Being to be?
XXXIV.
Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind--
All who, stamped
separate by curtailing birth,
Owe no duty's allegiance to mankind

Nor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth!
But I, whom Fate, not

Nature, did curtail,
By no exterior voidness being exempt,
Must
bear accusing glances where I fail,
Fixed in the general orbit of
contempt.
Fate, less than Nature in being kind to lacking,
Giving
the ill, shows not as outer cause,
Making our mock-free will the
mirror's backing
Which Fate's own acts as if in itself shows;
And
men, like children, seeing the image there,
Take place for cause and
make our will Fate bear.
XXXV.
Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad.
The outer day, void
statue of lit blue,
Is altogether outward, other, glad
At mere being
not-I (so my aches construe).
I, that have failed in everything, bewail

Nothing this hour but that I have bewailed,
For in the general fate
what is't to fail?
Why, fate being past for Fate, 'tis but to have failed.

Whatever hap-or stop, what matters it,
Sith to the mattering our
will bringeth nought?
With the higher trifling let us world our wit,

Conscious that, if we do't, that was the lot
The regular stars bound us
to, when they stood
Godfathers to our birth and to our blood.
***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35
SONNETS***
CREDITS
November 30, 2006
Project Gutenberg Edition
Rita Farinha
Joshua Hutchinson
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
This file was produced
from images generously made available by
National Library of
Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional de
Portugal).

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