238 The Future Poetry
and gives it body in the mind by the word. Then there must
be the touch, presence, breath of the very life, not the outward
only, but the inward life, not an imitation by force of speech or
the holding up of a mirror to some external movement or form
of Nature, but a creative interpretation which brings home to
us as much as may be of what she is or things or we are. And
again that must carry in it and arouse in us an emotion of its
touch on the soul, not the raw emotion of the vital parts, —
though that comes in in certain kinds of poetry, — but a spiri-
tual essence of feeling to which our inner strands can vibrate.
The intellectual, vital, sensible truths are subordinate things; the
breath of poetry should give us along with them, or it may even
be apart from them, some more essential truth of the being of
things, their very power which springs in the last resort from
something eternal in their heart and secrecy,hr.daye guhay ̄ am ̄ ,
expressive even in the moments and transiences of life. The soul
of the poet, and the soul too of the hearer by a response to his
word, enters into some direct contact through vision and straight
touch and emotion, possesses and feels at its strongest by a union
in our own stuff of being, a moved identity. A direct spiritual
perception and vision called by us intuition, however helped
or prepared by other powers, can alone avail to give us these
things. Imagination is only the poet’s most powerful aid for this
discovery and interpretative creation, fancy a brilliant opener of
hidden or out-of-the-way doors. The finding of a new image is
itself a joy to the poet and the hearer because it reveals some new
significant correspondence or sheds a stronger disclosing light on
the thing seen and makes it stand out and live more opulently,
luminously, with a greater delight of itself in the mind. The poet
having to bring home something, even in things common, which
is not obvious to surface experience, avails himself of image,
symbol, whatever is just, beautiful, meaningful, suggestive. His
fictions are not charming airy nothings, but as with every true
artist significant figures and creations which serve to bring very
real realities close to the spirit, and their immortality is the
immortality of truth.
It is in this sense that we can speak of the sun of poetic truth