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Poetry · Chapter

Chapter XX explained

The speaker contemplates the possibility of reincarnation and whether, in a future life, he will retain any faint memory of his current existence and love.

What happens

The speaker contemplates the possibility of reincarnation and whether, in a future life, he will retain any faint memory of his current existence and love. He wonders if he will revisit familiar places with the same sense of loss and longing, and if the beloved's face will be one of the 'strange faces lost' that haunt him, even if only through blind feeling.

Themes in this chapter

  • Time and Mortality

    The speaker contemplates the cycle of rebirth and the erosion of memory across lifetimes, highlighting the transient nature of identity.

  • Love and Loss

    The hope to remember the beloved's face in a future life underscores the enduring power of love despite the losses imposed by time and death.

Characters to notice

  • Unknown

    The speaker reflects on his own soul's journey through rebirth and the persistence of memory.

  • Hadrian

    The beloved addressed as 'thee' whose face the speaker hopes to remember in a future life.

  • Thought

    Referenced as 'Thought' from which vague memories emerge like 'unseen bulks of vagueness'.

Key passages

  • “When in the widening circle of rebirth To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come, And try again the unremembered earth With the old sadness for the immortal home”

    When my soul is reincarnated into a new body and experiences the forgotten world again, it will still feel the same sorrow of being separated from its eternal origin.

    The speaker imagines the soul's return to earthly life, carrying an innate homesickness for a heavenly home.

  • “Shall I again regret strange faces lost Of which the present memory is forgot And but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought?”

    Will I mourn the loss of unfamiliar faces that I can no longer recall, which now exist only as indistinct shapes emerging from the dark depths of my mind?

    The speaker questions whether vague, forgotten memories of past lives will haunt him in his next incarnation.

  • “Were thy face one, what sweetness will’t not be, Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!”

    If your face were among those lost memories, how sweet it would be to remember you, even if only through an instinctive, blind sensation!

    The speaker expresses that even the faintest, non-visual memory of the beloved would be profoundly precious.

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