Poems

Chapter 94: VII

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About This Book

This collection gathers lyrical poems that move between expansive meditations and concentrated sonnets, exploring awe, longing, and the burdens of compassion. Recurring subjects include nature, seasonal change, mortality, and desire, with vivid images of orchards, sea, and city life anchoring philosophical reflection. The volume alternates long narrative-lyric pieces with brief, tightly crafted songs and sonnets, shifting from exuberant, declarative lines to quiet elegiac tones. Organized in sections that vary in mood and form, the work emphasizes emotional immediacy, formal variety, and an attentive speaker negotiating self, other, and the natural world.

VII

When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.