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35 Sonnets

Chapter 18: XVII.
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About This Book

These sonnets probe the gap between inner life and outward expression, arguing that the soul resists full translation into words and often presents itself behind masks of consciousness. They shift between intimate anxieties—memory’s preservation of love, the material facts of death, and daily needs that squander creative intention—and broader doubts about identity, fate, and the capacity of thought. The poet repeatedly examines how self-awareness both enables and impoverishes feeling, while recurring images of storms, mirrors, and childhood fear dramatize the friction between desire for action and the paralysis of inaction.

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?