35 Sonnets | Page 4

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 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