---

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Sonnets XCII: XCIII: The Sun`s Shame
Work rating: Low

I
Beholding youth and hope in mockery caught
From life; and mocking pulses that remain
When the soul`s death of bodily death is fain;
Honour unknown, and honour known unsought;
And penury`s sedulous self-torturing thought
On gold, whose master therewith buys his bane;
And longed-for woman longing all in vain
For lonely man with love`s desire distraught;
And wealth, and strength, and power, and pleasantness,
Given unto bodies of whose souls men say,
None poor and weak, slavish and foul, as they:—
Beholding these things, I behold no less
The blushing morn and blushing eve confess
The shame that loads the intolerable day.

II
As some true chief of men, bowed down with stress
Of life`s disastrous eld, on blossoming youth
May gaze, and murmur with self-pity and ruth,—
“Might I thy fruitless treasure but possess,
Such blessing of mine all coming years should bless;”—
Then sends one sigh forth to the unknown goal,
And bitterly feels breathe against his soul
The hour swift-winged of nearer nothingness:—
Even so the World`s grey Soul to the green World
Perchance one hour must cry: “Woe`s me, for whom
Inveteracy of ill portends the doom,—
Whose heart`s old fire in shadow of shame is furl`d:
While thou even as of yore art journeying,
All soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!”
Source
The script ran 0.001 seconds.