The Future Poetry

The Word and the Spirit 297

Life’s but a walking shadow...

it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing —

and Shelley’s voicing of a kindred idea of transience,

Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly;

Life like a dome of many-coloured glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity,

Until death tramples it to fragments.

The one has the colour of an intuition of the life-soul in one
of its intense moods and we not only think the thought but
seem to feel it even in our nerves of mental sensation, the other
is the thought mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and
illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence. It would
be difficult for the present human mind to recover the same
spirit as moved Shakespeare’s speech; it is nearer to that of the
later poets and their voice of the brooding or the moved poetic
intelligence or of the intuitive mind rising out of the intellect
and still preserving something of its tones. Still the manner of
the coming poetry is likely to recover and hold as its central
secret something akin to the older poet, a greater straight impact
and natural body of intuitive intensity, because it too will take
up the thought and feeling into a concentrated expression of an
equal though a different directness. It will be the language of a
higher intuitive mind swallowing up the intellectual tones into
the closenesses and identities of a supra-intellectual light and
Ananda.
The future poetry, assuming it to be of the kind I have
suggested, its object to express some inmost truth of the things
which it makes its subject, must to be perfectly adequate to
its task express them in the inmost way, and that can only be
done if, transcending the more intellectualised or externally vital
and sensational expression, it speaks wholly in the language of
an intuitive mind and vision and imagination, intuitive sense,
intuitive emotion, intuitive vital feeling, which can seize in a