202 The Future Poetry
or passes through that intensity to the sense of the very soul and
emotion of what seems to us in less seeing moods an inconscient
and inanimate Nature, as in the
trees
Motionless in an ecstasy of rain.Meredith with his greater force of thinking gives us the clear
significance of what is here only a powerful indication, a seeing
identity of the soul of man with the hidden soul in earth-nature.
I neighbour the invisible
So close that my consent
Is only asked for spirits masked
To leap from trees and flowers.
And this because with them I dwell
In thought, while calmly bent
To read the lines dear earth designs
Shall speak her life on ours.And the same turn emerges too in direct thought on the large
aspects of life, as in such a phrase as
Lonely antagonist of destiny,or that which describes
The listless ripple of oblivion,lines which give us by some deep suggestion to the spiritual
sight a whole abiding soul aspect of man and the universe in a
single revealing expression. The effort of poetry of this kind of
inspiration may be defined by adapting another expression of
Meredith’s,
To spell the letters of the sky and read
A reflex upon earth else meaningless.