John Mansfield was comparatively young when he wrote his sonnet cycle, and yet he seems to have been able to look at life and circumstances from a most wise perspective. Maybe it was his tragic childhood, losing his mother when he was only six and his father soon after, being sent away from his brothers and sisters to a boarding school and then sent to sea… Flinging off youth’s happy promise, he writes.
XV
Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men;
Something that uses and despises both,
That takes its earth’s contentment in the pen,
Then sees the world’s injustice and is wroth,
And flinging off youth’s happy promise, flies
Up to some breach, despising earthly things,
And, in contempt of hell and heaven, dies,
Rather than bear some yoke of priests or kings.
Our joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man’s,
A woman’s beauty or a child’s delight,
The trembling blood when the discoverer scans
The sought-for world, the guessed-at satellite;
The ringing scene, the stone at point to blush
For unborn men to look at and say “Hush.”
Lois Elsden 