Poetry Day - The something

I thought it was time for some more Christina Rossetti. I've mentioned that my life seems to have a current theme about the Sehnsucht, and it has struck me that perhaps this is why I have always been taken with the two lines of poetry that feature in my header — Christina Rossetti was writing about it too. So here are two sonnets from her double sonnet of sonnets called Later Life. You can read some of the other sonnets from this sequence that I have blogged before here. But first listen to the Sehnsucht in these first eight lines:

17.

Something this foggy day, a something which

  Is neither of this fog nor of today,

  Has set me dreaming of the winds that play

Past certain cliffs, along one certain beach,

  And turn the topmost edge of waves to spray:

  Ah pleasant pebbly strand so far away,

So out of reach while quite within my reach,

  As out of reach as India or Cathay!

I am sick of where I am and where I am not,

  I am sick of foresight and of memory,

  I am sick of all I have and all I see,

    I am sick of self, and there is nothing new;

Oh weary impatient patience of my lot!—

    Thus with myself: how fares it, Friends, with you?

...

24.

The wise do send their hearts before them to

  Dear blessed Heaven, despite the veil between;

  The foolish nurse their hearts within the screen

Of this familiar world, where all we do

Or have is old, for there is nothing new:

  Yet elder far that world we have not seen;

  God's Presence antedates what else hath been:

Many the foolish seem, the wise seem few.

Oh foolishest fond folly of a heart

  Divided, neither here nor there at rest!

    That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth;

    That neither here nor there knows thorough mirth,

Half-choosing, wholly missing, the good part:—

  Oh fool among the foolish, in thy quest.

I took this photo at Lands End in England. My scanning is a bit wonky, because I didn't want to tear the photo out of the album, but I quite like it like that.