Dubiety

( A solan do , 1889.) Richardson said that “a state of dubiety and suspense is ever accompanied with uneasine .” Sleep, if sound, is restful; but the poet asks for comfort, and to be comfortable implies a certain amount of consciousne —a dreamy, hazy sense of being in “luxury’s sofa-lap.” An English lady once asked a British tar in the Bay of Malaga, one lovely November day, if he were not happy to think he was out of foggy England—at least in autumn? The sailor protested there was nothing he disliked so much as “the everlasting blue sky” of the Mediterranean, and there was nothing he longed for so much as “a good Thames fog.” So the poet here demands, “Just a cloud, Suffusing day too clear and bright.” He does not wish to be shrouded, as the sailor did, but his idea of comfort is that the world’s busy thrust should be shaded by a “gauzine ” at least. Vivid impre ions are always more or le painful: they strike the senses too acutely, as “the eternal blue sky” of the south is too trying for English eyes. As such a light is sometimes too stimulating, so even too much intellectual light may be painful; a “gauzine ,” a “dreaming’s vapour wreath” is to the overwrought brain of the thinker happine “just for once.” In the dim musings, neither dream nor vision, but just a memory, comes the face of the woman he had loved and lost, the memory of her ki , the impre of the lips of Truth, “for love is Truth.”