35 Sonnets

Chapter 5: IV.

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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.

IV.

I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,
Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;
Yet thou liv’dst entire in my seeing thought
And what thou wert in me had never fled.
Nay, I had fixed the moments of thy beauty—
Thy ebbing smile, thy kiss’s readiness,
And memory had taught my heart the duty
To know thee ever at that deathlessness.
But when I came where thou wert laid, and saw
The natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame,
And the encroaching grass, with casual flaw,
Framing the stone to age where was thy name,
I knew not how to feel, nor what to be
Towards thy fate’s material secrecy.