Two sonnets from the sequence *Later Life* make an unusual pair. The first admits to a longing it cannot name. The second imagines two stars that never touch and still belong together. Read side by side, they move from restlessness toward a hushed, uncertain comfort.
Sonnet VI opens with a sentence that circles its own subject: "We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack." The word "lack" appears twice, first as a verb and then as a noun, and the sentence still cannot pin it down. "Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly" follows, where the vague "somewhat" is propped up by a stubborn "certainly". The speaker, who says "we" throughout, is sure of the ache and unsure of its object. The past offers no help either: it holds "lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack", and hopes "that were never ours yet seem'd to be". The sea imagery turns life into a voyage through extremes, "the sunstroke and the frozen pack". The octave's rhymes (lack, back, rack, pack) clang like the same disappointment arriving again and again.
The turn comes in the sestet, which first closes off every direction: it is "all in vain to look to left or right". Then comes a question rather than a command: "Why face we not our future once again?" The answer is modest. The "hardier hearts" of the last lines echo the "hearts upon the rack" earlier, so the same organ is toughened rather than replaced. The eyes are "dim", and what they strain for is "the invisible sight", a paradox that makes faith sound like effort. The poem ends on "patient pain", with endurance offered in place of a cure.
Sonnet IX trades the sea for the sky, and the voyagers' two extremes return as stars. Sirius "blazes through the brief bright summer's length / Lavishing life-heat from a flaming car", with the car a chariot, a picture of generous excess. The Pole Star is "unchangeable upon a throne" and "broods o'er the frozen heart of earth alone". "Broods" is a good choice, since it suggests both a bird sitting on eggs and a mind sunk in thought. This star is "Content to reign" over "some who wander or of some who groan", which recalls the travellers of the earlier sonnet. Heat and ice, spendthrift and fixed, the two stars seem to have nothing in common.
The form loosens as the argument develops. The rhymes lose the tidy pattern of VI, and "strength" and "length" return so often that the poem seems to circle. Line 9 almost repeats line 2: "They own no drawings each of other's strength." The idea of mutual attraction is raised and then denied a second time. A run of "Nor" clauses follows, listing what the stars do not do. In the text supplied, line 11 breaks off at "toward", so the stars' failure to turn toward each other literally has no object. Then "Yet" reverses everything: their "orbits pitch'd in harmony / Of one dear heaven". "Pitch'd" is a musical word, and it brings in the old idea of the heavens making a kind of music. The word "dear" gives the shared sky some warmth.
The last line, "Mayhap they talk together without speech", is the only one in the sonnet whose end-word rhymes with nothing, so the poem's final sound is a silence. "Mayhap" is a hedge, and it keeps the claim tentative. The poem does not say who the stars stand for. They could be two unlike people, or two temperaments, or a soul and something beyond it. The openness is part of the point.
What makes the pair worth reading is its honesty. Sonnet VI does not pretend that the lack can be named or filled. Sonnet IX does not claim that distant things are secretly joined, only that they might be, and that harmony does not need visible contact. The language is plain, and many of the key words are single syllables: lack, rack, pack, pain, speech. That plainness gives the consolation more weight, because the poems keep their hope small and set it against a very large sky.