Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets

This Life is full of numbness and of balk, / Of haltingness and baffled short-coming, / Of promise unfulfilled, of everything / That is puffed vanity and empty talk: / Its very bud hangs cankered on the stalk, / Its very song-bird trails a broken wing, / Its very Spring is not indeed like Spring, / But sighs like Autumn round an aimless walk. / This Life we live is dead for all its breath; / Death's self it is, set off on pilgrimage, / Travelling with tottering steps the first short stage: / The second stage is one mere desert dust / Where Death sits veiled amid creation's rust: -- / Unveil thy face, O Death who art not Death.