Recent English Poetry – 2 175he speaks of the hampered human voice that could never say
Our inmost in the sweetest way —hampered by the austerity of its wisdom or the excess of its sense
and passion. But if it is rarely that this sweetest way is found —
yet do we not get near to it sometimes in Yeats and Tagore? —
at least this new turn of the poetic voice is characteristically an
endeavour to see and to say our inmost in the inmost way.
The natural turn of poetry, that which gives to it its soul of
superiority to other ways of human utterance, is the endeavour
of the interpretative cast of its mind always to look beyond the
object, even to get behind it and evoke from a something that
was waiting for us within its own inevitable speech and rhythm.
That inwardness is the triumph of great poetical speech, whether
the poet has his eye like Homer on physical object and power
of action and the externalised thought and emotion which they
throw up into the surface roll of life, or else like Shakespeare on
the surge of the life-spirit and its forms of character and passion
and its waves of self-interpreting thought and reflection, or on
the play of the detached or half-detached seeing intellect or the
inspired reason, or on the strainings of the desire-soul of man
striving to find the delight of things in the thousand-coloured
threads of the double web of our existence. The manner and
yield of poetry vary according to the depth we penetrate into
that inner something which is hidden by layer upon layer of
many an intervening medium, but which offers and gives itself
wonderfully in all of them, yet seems to retreat always and invites
to a profounder pursuit and discovery; it varies according to the
insistence of the eye on the object or its liberation into the greater
significance of which the object is only the seizable symbol, or
according as we are stopped by the medium or break through it
to some truth of the one thing in all which throws out in these
various sheaths such different richnesses of form, colour and
suggestion of idea and sound, but is yet one in all things to the
soul that can discover its eternal unity.
But this new way of seeing is a first effort to get through
the object and the medium and employ them only as suggestive