Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets
Speakers pray for strength, forgiveness and love while confronting exhaustion, failed hopes and a heart divided between earth and heaven. Reflections on shame, Adam and Eve, and love accompany seasonal observations and memories of birdsong at Lake Como and a descent through St. Gothard. The closing sonnets weigh earthly suffering, question whether to wish the beloved dead back into life, fear dying without salvation, and suggest that the dead may remain lovingly near.
By Christina Georgina Rossetti · Genre: Sonnets, Christian Devotional Poetry, Meditative Poetry · 28 chapters · 4,816 words
First lines
Before the mountains were brought forth, before / Earth and the world were made, then God was God: / And God will still be God, when flames shall roar / Round earth and heaven dissolving at His nod: / And this God is our God, even while His rod / Of righteous wrath falls on us smiting sore: / And this God is our God for evermore / Through life, through death, while clod returns to clod. / For though He slay us we will trust in Him; / We will flock home to Him by divers ways: / Yea, though He slay us we will vaunt His praise, / Serving and loving with the Cherubim, / Watching and loving with the Seraphim, / Our very selves His praise through endless days.
What this Textopian page supports
Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets is listed on Textopian as a poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti, dated Date unknown.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Christina Georgina Rossetti
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Sonnets, Christian Devotional Poetry, Meditative Poetry
- Length: 4,816 words
- Structure: 28 chapters, 29 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets by Christina Georgina Rossetti
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
- Readability and classroom-planning context
- Passage-specific claims should cite the exact /read/ URL for the relevant chapter or paragraph
Genres
- Sonnets — Twenty-eight fourteen-line poems develop separate reflections through rhymed octaves and sestets.
- Christian Devotional Poetry — Direct prayers ask Christ for remembrance, salvation and the strength to love, while affirming trust in God amid suffering.
- Meditative Poetry — The speakers reconsider lost hopes, shame, remembered journeys and the prospect of death, repeatedly questioning their own responses.
Tags
sonnet sequence · Christian prayer · repentance · spiritual weariness · memory · seasons · mortality · afterlife
Contents
- Before the Mountains were Brought Forth, Before
- Rend Hearts and Rend not Garments for our Sins
- Thou who Didst Make and Knowest Whereof we are Made
- So Tired am I, so Weary of to-Day
- Lord, Thou Thyself Art Love and only Thou
- We Lack, Yet Cannot Fix Upon the Lack
- To Love and to Remember; that is Good
- We Feel and See with Different Hearts and Eyes
- Star Sirius and the Pole Star Dwell Afar
- Tread Softly! all the Earth is Holy Ground
- Lifelong our Stumbles, Lifelong our Regret
- A Dream there is Wherein we are Fain to Scream
- Shame is a Shadow Cast by Sin: Yet Shame
- When Adam and when Eve Left Paradise
- Let Woman Fear to Teach and Bear to Learn
- Our Teachers Teach that One and One Make Two
- Something this Foggy Day, a Something Which
- So Late in Autumn Half the World's Asleep
- Here now is Winter. Winter, after All
- A Hundred Thousand Birds Salute the Day
- A Host of Things I Take on Trust: I Take
- The Mountains in their Overwhelming Might
- Beyond the Seas we Know Stretch Seas Unknown
- The Wise do Send their Hearts before them To
- When we Consider what this Life we Lead
- This Life is Full of Numbness and of Balk
- I have Dreamed of Death: -- what will it be to Die
- In Life our Absent Friend is Far Away