The Sun of Poetic Truth 239in whose universal light the poet creates. But all depends on
how he sees or uses the light. He can catch this or that sight in
an isolated ray, or sometimes lights with it his own personality
and kindles a lamp in the house of his own being, or looks
through its radiance over the material earth and the forms and
first movements of her children or searches with the lustre the
surge of the life-soul and its passion and power or discovers
the lesser or the greater secrets of the mind and heart of man, or
looks upwards through a loftier flood of beams and sees the mid-
worlds and heavens and the actions of the gods and the scenes
and moments of an immortal life. And sometimes the dark sun
of the Vedic image lodging in the blind cave gives him a negative
light; a darkness visible revealing darkness immeasurable shows
him the gloomy secrets of some city of dreadful Night, shadow
of Hades or lowest Tartarean clot of Hell. The sun of Truth may
be still for him below the verge with its light already on the tops
and flushing the chill of the snows, ride regal in heaven or gravely
sunken or splendid in some setting light. He may stand on the
earth or wander winged like the symbolic birds of the Veda still
in the terrestrial atmosphere or rise into worlds beyond nearer
to the sun and see in a changed light all that is below. And one
or two may perhaps be strong to look with unblinded eyes into
the source of all light, see that splendour which is its happiest
form of all, to which approaching or entering one can say “He
am I”, discover the identity of his spirit with all things and find
in that oneness the word of light which can most powerfully
illumine our human utterance.
And where then is the highest range of sight into which the
mind of the poet can rise and according to the power of his
genius find a deeper and deeper and larger and larger truth of
already spoken things and of new things to be spoken and as
yet unattempted in prose or rhyme? If some kind of intuitive
seeing is at the back of his imaginative vision and the real power
that calls down the inspired word, it will be when he can rise
to its source and live in the fullness of a highest intuitive mind
which is greater than the awakened sense, intuitive life-vision
or inspired reason, though it will see all that they can see, that