Each Had Lived in the Other's Mind and Speech

Lord Tennyson · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages giving one of Tennyson's Early Sonnets, first published in 1830, complete and with its source in a footnote.

The sonnet describes a common experience precisely enough to make it strange. Its first half is about the state of musing with downcast eyes and ebbing into a former life, or seeming to lapse back through some confused dream into states of mystical similitude — and about how the smallest interruption, someone speaking or clearing his throat or shifting his chair, makes the sensation grow rather than break, until one says that all this has been before, though not knowing when or where. The second half applies that to meeting a person. On first looking at his friend's face, the poet says, their thought answered each to each so truly — opposed mirrors, each reflecting the other — that although he could not say in what time or place, it seemed he had often met him before, and that each had lived in the other's mind and speech. The piece is chosen for this series because it puts a claim about the persistence of the soul in the form of an ordinary recognition rather than a doctrine.

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