![]() ![]() Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets? Stroke on stroke of pain, - but what slow panic, Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,ĭrooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,īaring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked? Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Although its title announces its subject as neurasthenia, Robinson’s evocation of what it’s like to feel cut off from the world around you by psychological and neurological illness chimes with many sufferers’ descriptions of the blackest moods experienced during depression. Robinson’s poetry is little-read now, which is a shame, as this fine sonnet, about the condition known as neurasthenia, attests. Housman asks for ‘guts in the head’ to help him steel himself to life’s travails, to toughen up the ‘brains in my head’.Ĭome in and out, and talk, and go their ways Ī. This poem, which remained unpublished until after Housman’s death in 1936, is about that continual theme in Housman’s poetry: the heartsick lovelorn man. The brains in my head and the heart in my breast … My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.īut oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest, The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do: Housman, ‘ The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do’. (The comparison works especially well: it’s not the exclusive province of the poet, as anyone who’s described a friend with a head for facts as having a brain like a sponge will attest.)Ħ. Just as the brain is wider than the sky because of the breadth of human imagination, so it is deeper than the sea because it can contain and carry thoughts of all the oceans, much like a sponge soaking up the water in a bucket. This is the starting point of one of Emily Dickinson’s great meditations on the power of human imagination and comprehension. ‘The brain is wider than the sky’: the mind and all that it can take in – and imagine – is far greater than even the vast sky above us. ![]()
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