The Sun of Poetic Truth 231joy of the word because they do not go to its fountain-head,
even though each has its own intense delight, as philosophy has
its joy of deep and comprehensive understanding and religion its
hardly expressible rapture. Still it remains true that the poet may
express precisely the same thing in essence as the philosopher
or the man of religion or the man of science, may even give us
truth of philosophy, truth of religion, truth of science, provided
he transmutes it, abstracts from it something on which the others
insist in their own special form and gives us the something more
which poetic sight and expression bring. He has to convert it into
truth of poetry, and it will be still better for his art if he saw it
originally with the poetic insight, the creative, intuitive, directly
perceiving and interpreting eye; for then his utterance of truth
is likely to be more poetic, authentic, inspired and compelling.
This distinction between poetic and other truth, well enough
felt but not always well observed, and their fusion and meeting-
place are worth dwelling upon; for if poetry is to do all it can for
us in the new age, it will include increasingly in its scope much
that will be common to it with philosophy, religion and even in
a broader sense with science, and yet it will at the same time
develop more intensely the special beauty and peculiar power
of its own insight and its own manner. The poetry of Tagore
is already a new striking instance of what differently seen and
followed out might have been a specifically philosophic and
religious truth, but here turned into beauty and given a new
significance by the transforming power of poetic vision.
The difference which separates these great things of the mind
is a difference of the principal, the indispensable instrument we
must use and of the appeal to the mind and the whole manner.
There is a whole gulf of difference. The philosopher sees in the
dry light of the reason, proceeds dispassionately by a severe
analysis and abstraction of the intellectual content of the truth,
a logical slow close stepping from idea to pure idea, a method
difficult and nebulous to the ordinary, hard, arid, impossible to
the poetic mind. For the poetic mind sees at once in a flood
of coloured light, in a moved experience, in an ecstasy of the
coming of the word, in splendours of form, in a spontaneous