Words, acts, sights, pass through our
experience hazily, suggesting meanings which we never fully grasp.
Grief and love, the most intense, perhaps, of sensations, we
seldom understand except by comparison with what has been said of
the grief and love of others. Happiness remains at best a diffused
emotion--felt, but not comprehended. Thought, if in some moment
of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to the stream of
life, in the next shreds into trivialities. Is this true? Test it
by any experience that is still fresh in memory. See how dull, by
comparison with the vivid colors of the scene itself, are even now
your ideas of what it meant to you, how obscure its relations to
your later life. The moment you fell in love, the hour after your
child had died, the instant when you reached the peak, the quarrel
that began a misunderstanding not yet ended, the subtle household
strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sunders two who
love each other--all these I challenge you to define, to explain,
to lift into the light above the turbid sea of complex currents
which is life.
And this, of course, is what good poetry does.
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