The Word and the Spirit 293a more intense and revealing speech, to which the soul can be
more vibrantly sensible.
This comes to its first self-discovery when either the ade-
quate or the dynamically effective style is raised into a greater
illumination in which the inner mind sees and feels object, emo-
tion, idea not only clearly or richly or distinctly and powerfully,
but in a flash or outbreak of transforming light which kindles the
thought or image into a disclosure of new significances of a much
more inner character, a more profoundly revealing vision, emo-
tion, spiritual response. This illuminating poetic speech comes
suddenly and rarely, as in Dryden’s
And Paradise was opened in his face,breaking out of a surrounding merely effective poetical elo-
quence, or intervening at times as in Shelley’s
The heart’s echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute,
No song but sad dirges
Like the wind through a ruined cell,where the effective force of image and feeling that makes us see
and respond by a strong suggestion, at work throughout the rest
of the lyric, passes now beyond itself into an illuminative close-
ness and then we feel, we bear, we ourselves live at the moment
through the power of the poetic word the authentic identity of
the experience. It comes in luminous phrases emerging from a
fine and lucid adequacy and the justice or the delicacy makes
place for a lustrous profundity of suggestion, as in Shelley’s
And now, alas! the poor sprite is
Imprisoned for some fault of his
In a body like a grave,or it strikes across a movement of strong and effective poetical
thinking, as in Wordsworth’sOde to Duty,
Me this unchartered freedom tires,or leaps up at once to set the tone of a poem,