35 Sonnets

Chapter 19: XVIII.

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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.

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.