35 Sonnets | Page 3

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 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