Here is no peace, although the air has fainted,
And footfalls die and are buried in deep grass,
And reverential trees are softly painted
Like saints upon an oriel of glass.
The pattern of the atmosphere is spherical,
A bubble in the silence of the sun,
Blown thinner by the very breath of miracle
Around a core of loud confusion.
Here is no virtue; here is nothing blessèd
Save this foredoomed suspension of the end;
Faith is the blossom, but the fruit is cursèd;
Go hence, for it is useless to pretend.
“The transport ... that the poet kindles in us,” observes Professor
De Selincourt in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, “springs from our
instinctive recognition that his form, a term that includes both rhythm
and diction, is an entirely faithful rendering of his experience,
so that we gain from it a sudden clear sense of fulfilment, such as
we can hardly hope to gain outside the ideal world of art.” That may
be a rather narrowly æsthetic interpretation of Longinus’s doctrine
of the poetic “transport,” but certainly “a sudden clear sense of
fulfilment” is an experience which it is easy to miss in the poetry of
our contemporaries.
In fact, this “sense of fulfilment” is precisely what the typical
modernist, experiencing nothing of the sort in life itself and
disdaining an “ideal world” thus cut off from reality, avoids giving
us. He would regard it as part of the old hocus-pocus of orthodoxy.
Life being to him fragmentary, inchoate, he would say that his poetry,
if it is to be “an entirely faithful rendering of his experience,” must
itself produce an effect of inchoateness, fragmentariness.