Sehnsucht is a powerful German word which is difficult to fully explain. It’s a kind of painful yearning like that of homesickness, nostalgia or an earnest desire. A similar word in Welsh is hiraeth. It is an intense bittersweet contradiction of longing for something that would make life complete, but it is remote or seems unattainable. Plato presented it as the origin of our desire for love or partnership.

These two figures yearn and stretch upwards together with an inner yearning for something higher than themselves, above their personal circumstances, for hope perhaps for Utopia or Heaven.