186 The Future Poetry
His is often a highly imaged style, but Shakespeare’s images are
not, as with so many poets, decorative or brought in to enforce
and visualise the intellectual sense, they are more immediately
revelatory, intimate to the thing he speaks and rather the proper
stuff of the fact itself than images. But he has too a clearer, less
crowded, still swifter fashion of speech in which they are absent;
for an example,
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word, —which has yet the same deep and penetrating intuitive spirit in
its utterance. Or the two manners meet together and lean on
each other, —
I have lived long enough; my way of life
Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,or become one, as in the last speeches of Antony, —
I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.But all have the same characteristic stamp of the intuitive mind
rapidly and powerfully at work; but always too, — and this is
the important distinction, — that mediator between the secret
spirit and our ordinary surface mentality works in him through
and behind the life vision to give the vital impression, the vital
psychology, the life-burden of the thought, the emotion, the act
or the thing seen in Nature.
The movement that immediately followed, abandoned this
power which Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had brought
into English poetry; it sought after a language cut into the pre-
cision or full with the suggestions of the poetical intellect, and
it gained something by its sacrifice; it purified the language, got
rid of Elizabethan conceit and extravagance, laid a clearer basis
of thought, went back to ordinary speech and raised it into a