182 The Future Poetry
There we have, very near to the ear of the sense, that inaudible
music floating the vocal music, the song unheard, or heard only
behind and in the inner silence, to catch some echo of which is
the privilege of music but also the highest intention of poetical
rhythm.
Beyond all analysis or set provision of means that is the
constant attempt to which poetry must move, if this new realm
is to open to its footsteps, not to suit the metre to the intellectual
or even the emotional sense or to cast it in the moulds of life, but
to seize some sound, some intonation of the voice of the soul, the
lyric or the epicchandasor the large or simple measures of its
meditation and creation, which, as the old Vedic theory would
say, initiate, roll out and support all the steps of the universe.
This intoned music in which the outer form becomes an external
subtle means and suggestion, but the building power is other and
brings in a spiritual accompaniment which is the real thing we
have to listen to, opens at least one line on which we can arrive at
that greater hearing whose wave can bring with it the inspiring
word of a higher vision. For the musical tone of the older poetry
is the simply sensuous, the emotional, the thought or the life tone
with the spiritual cadence as the result of some strong intensity
of these things, but here is some beginning of a direct spiritual
intonation.