176 The Future Poetry
instruments, to break beyond the life-force and the emotion, the
imagination and the idea, not to be stopped by these things,
though using the inmost life-stress, the inmost releasing force
of the emotion, the inmost plunge of the imagination or its
most searching power of form, colour and symbol, the inmost
penetrating subtlety of the idea and to arrive at what we may
call the soul-sense, the soul-sound and as far as may be the soul-
word interpretative of some yet deeper revealing truth in all their
objects. There is in most recent poetry that counts, though less
here, more there, some element of this kind of straining, force,
pressure on sound and word and vision, and though it often
turns into strange, obscure and devious paths, obstructed by
the insistence of the superficial desire-soul or weighted by the
intellect, — the two powers in us which modern humanity has
developed into an exaggerated predominance, — still it reaches
out towards this effort to see our inmost in the inmost way, and
when it gets free, delivers voices of a supreme power, vision and
purity. And what it must lead to in the end if it gets to its end,
does not stop short or turn aside after some other lure, must
be some direct seeing by the soul of the soul or self everywhere
in its own delivered force of vision, — the direct vision of In-
dian aspiration,atmani ̄ atm ̄ anam ̄ atman ̄ a ̄, — not the sensuous
or the imaginative or the intellectual or the vital insistence, but
a greater Potency using and surmounting them, the Soul’s own
delivered self-vision in all things and delight of its own greatness
and light and beauty. That is the turn of mind which is now mak-
ing itself heard in effort, though not in full mastery, stammered
here, there sung with a slight, delicate and subtle sweetness or
with an initial load of rare or crowding suggestion, but waiting
still the splendour of the master song that shall rise into the light
of the spirit, —
So pure that it salutes the suns,
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.