The Future Poetry

The Word and the Spirit 295

undergoes an unanalysable alchemy and spiritual change. And
beyond this first language of intuitive illumination we arrive at
a more uplifted range of an inspired poetic speech which brings
to us not only pure light and beauty and inexhaustible depth,
but a greater moved ecstasy of highest or largest thought and
sight and speech and at its highest culminates in the inevitable,
absolute and revealing word. This too is sometimes a magical
transformation of the adequate manner, as in Wordsworth’s

A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard

In springtime from the cuckoo bird

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides —

sometimes of the richer or more dynamic imaged style,

Flowers laugh before thee in their beds

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong

— and sometimes it is the illuminative speech powerfully in-
spired and rising suddenly into the highest revealing word,

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong,

I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,

The winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

There the inspiration takes up the effort of the poetic intelligence
and imagination into a stirred concentration of the speech of
sight and in its last movement seems to leap even beyond itself
and beyond any pursuit or touch of the intellect into a pure
revelatory spiritual vision.
The genius of the poet can do work of a high beauty or
of a considerable greatness in any of these degrees of poetic
speech, but it is the more purely intuitive, inspired or revelatory
utterance that is the most rare and difficult for the human mind
to command, and it is these kinds that we peculiarly value.
Their power not only moves and seizes us the most, but it