236 The Future Poetry
beauty and delight, and if we judge by such instances, we shall
say that so only he has to do it, to cast as if casually the seed of
the beauty and delight of some high mood of life and nature into
the mind and pass on leaving it to its work on the soul’s reflecting
emotional experience, perhaps hardly himself knowing what he
has done since he is absorbed in sight and satisfied with the joy
of beautiful creation.
And yet actually we find that we cannot quite set these
limits or they are not regarded by poets of a high order. The
poet of the Gita has the conscious intention of laying the form
of unity on the soul of the hearer and moving him to seek the
full experience. “He is the greatest Yogin who, come happi-
ness by that or come grief, sees wherever he turns his eyes all
equally in the image of his self.” That is something high, grave,
couched in the language of the inspired reason, uplifted in the
original by a sweet and noble diction and rhythm, religious and
philosophical in its strain and yet poetical, because it adds to
the fundamental idea the visualising and bringing home of the
spiritual experience, the sustaining emotion of the thing felt and
a touch of its life. And in the much older Yajur Veda we find
breaking out with a different, a more moved and less reflec-
tive voice the same truth of experience, the same touch on the
soul, “Where I am wounded, make me firm and whole. May
all creatures gaze on me with the eye of the Friend, may I gaze
on all creatures, may we all gaze on all with the eye of the
Friend.” There poetry and religious emotion become powerfully
fused and one in the aspiration to the heart’s perfection and the
loving unity of all life. The same uniting alchemy and fusion
can take place between truth of philosophy and poetic truth and
it is continually found in Indian literature. And so too all the
old Rig Veda, all the Vaishnava poetry of North and South had
behind it an elaborate Yoga or practised psychical and spiritual
science, without which it could not have come into birth in that
form. Today much of the poetry of Tagore is the sign of such a
Sadhana, a long inheritance of assured spiritual discovery and
experience. But what is given whether directly or in symbol
or in poetic image is not the formal steps of the Sadhana, but