35 Sonnets

Chapter 23: XXII.

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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.

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.