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The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems cover

The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems

Chapter 15: Sonnet
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About This Book

A varied assemblage of lyrical and narrative poems that move between visionary fable and intimate lyric, focusing on encounters with nature, seasonal moods, and the creative impulse. A long dream-poem personifies the seasons as ethereal sylphs who shape the poet’s sensibility, while compact sonnets respond to paintings and sculptural groups with reflections on artistic vision. Ballads and occasional pieces explore love, melancholy, eccentric characters, and the temperament of the painter, alternating vivid landscape imagery with meditations on creativity, transience, and the relations between feeling and art.

Sonnet

On the Group of the Three Angels before the Tent of Abraham, by Raffaelle, in the Vatican.

Oh, now I feel as though another sense
From Heaven descending had informed my soul;
I feel the pleasurable, full control
Of Grace, harmonious, boundless, and intense.
In thee, celestial Group, embodied lives
The subtle mystery; that speaking gives
Itself resolv'd: the essences combin'd
Of Motion ceaseless, Unity complete.
Borne like a leaf by some soft eddying wind,
Mine eyes, impelled as by enchantment sweet,
From part to part with circling motion rove,
Yet seem unconscious of the power to move;
From line to line through endless changes run,
O'er countless shapes, yet seem to gaze on One.