Canadian poet and music teacher Helena Coleman (1860–1953) published “The Sense of Mystery” in her 1906 collection Songs and Sonnets. Born in Ontario and trained as a musician, Coleman belonged to a generation of Canadian writers still drawing on Romantic and Victorian ideas about nature, spirit, and perception. Her sonnet answers a modern fear—not the loss of faith exactly, but the loss of wonder. The speaker announces an intention to preserve the mystery “that broods about our little lives” and “springs / Eternal from the unknown heart of things.” That word “little” matters: human life is deliberately small against the “unknown heart,” yet the unknown is not remote. It “broods” like something alive and protective.
The central idea is that the ordinary world becomes thin only through “rude familiarity,” the habit of seeing things so often that their strangeness wears away. Against this, Coleman sets “the finer harmony / That underlies all dissonance,” a musical image drawn from her own training. Mystery is not a separate realm; it runs beneath ordinary experience and “flings / A glory round our way continually.” The enjambment across those lines makes the glory feel sudden and generous, as if thrown across the line-break before the reader can prepare for it.
The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet. Its octave rhymes ABBAABBA, pairing “mystery,” “familiarity,” “harmony,” and “continually” so that long final syllables roll and echo. The sestet turns with “For” and shifts from personal wish to universal statement. Those who “make room for things inscrutable” are the ones who “win their happiness.” Happiness, Coleman insists, is not chased directly; it follows from a posture of openness. The sestet then narrows from cosmic language to “folded leaf” and “purple bell,” small natural images that contain “The Infinite.” The capital letter makes the claim bold, but the objects remain humble. The poem’s heart is that paradox: the largest reality can be met in the smallest detail.
Rhythmically, the sonnet mostly follows iambic pentameter, yet its sentences spill over line endings, especially in the octave. That movement mirrors the ongoing, uninterrupted presence the speaker wants to keep. Words such as “inscrutable,” “continually,” and “miracle” slow the line and invite the reader to pause. The final phrase “daily miracle” is a quiet collision of the ordinary and the extraordinary. No special revelation is needed; the folded leaf and purple bell are available to anyone who looks.
What makes “The Sense of Mystery” significant is its refusal to separate spiritual life from everyday attention. It quietly resists a purely materialist view of nature, not by rejecting reason but by asking for an added dimension of perception. For a school audience, it offers a gentle rebuke to distraction. The sonnet form—small, orderly, and demanding—becomes an image of that protection: it holds large, inscrutable things in a disciplined shape and still lets them glow. The last line leaves the reader with “kinship,” not simply admiration. To see the infinite in a leaf or bell is to belong to the world’s daily miracle rather than stand outside it.