by Coleridge · Cluster: Melancholy · Suffering · Pain and Suffering
Abstract
Sonnet of lost love and vanished hope, the beloved’s smile recalled in dream amid melancholy and a vale of tears; lyric on memory and transience.
Connections
Motifs: Dreams, Flowers Themes & Concepts: Grief and Loss, Melancholy, Nostalgia, Hope, Transience Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
Thou gentle Look, that didst my soul beguile,
Why hast thou left me? Still in some fond dream
Revisit my sad heart, auspicious Smile!
As falls on closing flowers the lunar beam:
What time, in sickly mood, at parting day 5
I lay me down and think of happier years;
Of joys, that glimmer’d in Hope’s twilight ray,
Then left me darkling in a vale of tears.
O pleasant days of Hope — for ever gone!
Could I recall you! — But that thought is vain. 10
Availeth not Persuasion’s sweetest tone
To lure the fleet-wing’d Travellers back again:
Yet fair, though faint, their images shall gleam
Like the bright Rainbow on a willowy stream.
? 1793.