by Coleridge · Cluster: Unrequited Frustrated Love · Unattainable Beloved · Petrarchan Sonnet
Abstract
Sonnet probing the bleeding heart wounded by jealousy and lost hope; grief, jealousy, madness, and the painful self-reproach of reason. Form: sonnet.
Connections
Motifs: Madness (2) Themes & Concepts: Jealousy, Grief and Loss, Madness, Hope, Unrequited Frustrated Love Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
Thou bleedest, my poor Heart! and thy distress
Reasoning I ponder with a scornful smile
And probe thy sore wound sternly, though the while
Swoln be mine eye and dim with heaviness.
Why didst thou listen to Hope’s whisper bland? 5
Or, listening, why forget the healing tale,
When Jealousy with feverous fancies pale
Jarr’d thy fine fibres with a maniac’s hand?
Faint was that Hope, and rayless! — Yet ‘twas fair
And sooth’d with many a dream the hour of rest: 10
Thou should’st have lov’d it most, when most opprest,
And nurs’d it with an agony of care,
Even as a mother her sweet infant heir
That wan and sickly droops upon her breast!
1794.