Eleanor Farjeon's Sonnets and Poems opens with a sonnet that insists on naked self-examination: “Man cannot be a sophist to his heart, / He must look nakedly on his intent.” This demand for emotional honesty sets the tone for a collection that repeatedly tests the gap between inner feeling and outward expression. The poems move between strict sonnet forms and looser lyrical pieces, often using natural imagery—birds, fire, sea, snow—to frame human vulnerability. Farjeon’s speakers confront love as a risky expenditure, solitude as a silent condition, and the self as something that can be reflected but not fully seen by others.

Love as Reckless Expenditure

Several sonnets argue against cautious love. In Sonnet II, the speaker warns against “niggard love / That grasps at interest on what it lends,” calling such prudence a form of hoarding that buries “untested treasure” in the grave. The poem insists that saving love for later misses its point: “life only gave ye this / Because earth has such need of heavenly bliss.” Sonnet III continues the theme, urging “Once, Love, be prodigal, nor look hereafter,” and dismissing “perjured wisdom” that equates joy with eventual pain. The sonnet’s closing question—“Why in life’s name this high passion of love / But in life’s name its passionate height to prove?”—frames love as an end in itself, not a bargain with fate.

The Solitary Self and Its Reflections

Farjeon repeatedly examines characters who feel disconnected from others. In “Solitary,” a man moves among people but “His heart was separate from his tongue,” and others, though sharing similar needs, “felt alone.” The poem “The Reflection” portrays a woman who becomes only what others need, giving back their own concerns: “she only gave to such and such / Themselves awhile.” When she dies, mourners grieve “some pale reflection that she threw, / Not what she was.” These poems suggest that social roles can obscure the self, and that true solitude is not physical but emotional—a condition where one’s inner life remains unseen.

Imagery of Fire, Water, and Light

The collection’s imagery often centers on elemental forces. In “The Story-Teller,” a woman’s voice rises and falls “like wind / That wanders lost among the eaves,” and her tales emerge from a hazel branch burning in the hearth. Fire becomes a source of narrative, and its extinction leaves “the room was dumb and dark.” In “The Girl with the Ball,” a child runs by the sea, her image “under her feet on the wet gold shore,” and her laughter sounds “as though the world had never heard laughter before.” Light and reflection recur: “Spring-Dawn” describes a sky of “spring-blue” with clouds like released doves, while “The Reflection” uses the title as a metaphor for a life lived only as a mirror. These images anchor abstract emotions in physical, often fleeting, moments.

Farjeon’s poems reward attention to their formal craft—the sonnets adhere to Petrarchan or Shakespearean patterns, while the narrative pieces use varied rhyme and meter. Readers may notice how the same concerns (honesty, love, solitude) recur across different forms, and how the natural world serves not as decoration but as a precise analog for inner states. The collection is compact enough to be read in a single sitting, but its tensions reward rereading.