Sensibility How Charming
written in 1790
Sensibility How Charming - meaning Summary
Pleasure Entwined with Pain
Burns addresses "Nancy" to consider sensibility as a double-edged gift: it brings heightened pleasure but also exposes one to deeper suffering. Through simple natural images — a lily felled by a blast, a woodlark made vulnerable to predators — the poem links delicate feeling with inevitable risk. The speaker accepts that the same capacity for "finer Feelings" that yields sweetest joys also produces profound sorrow. Overall the poem presents emotional sensitivity as a valuable but costly human endowment, worth its pains because it enables richer experience.
Read Complete AnalysesSensibility how charming, Dearest Nancy, thou canst tell; But distress with horrors arming, Thou hast also known too well. Fairest flower, behold the lily, Blooming in the sunny ray: Let the blast sweep o'er the valley, See it prostrate on the clay. Hear the woodlark charm the forest, Telling o'er his little joys: Hapless bird! a prey the surest To each pirate of the skies. Dearly bought the hidden treasure, Finer Feelings can bestow: Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure, Thrill the deepest notes of woe.
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