ABSTRACT
Sometimes poetry of weight deliberately takes the other arts as its subject, often in contrast with nature, and in so doing makes valuable commentaries on them, on itself, and on the meanings of existence. Whether in literature or in life it will be found that the separation of the spatial and the temporal, of sight and sound, is provisional only, and often dangerous, whereas the aim must always be a fusion. Both Tennyson and Browning have left us interesting critiques of what Nietzsche called the 'Apollonian' arts of spatial design. The three stanzas, sometimes printed as here, alone, make a compact unit. The poet' expanded version, which runs to a number of stanzas, seems weaker. There appears to be both danger and safety in such basic symbolisms: it is when O'haughnessy leaves them that authenticity sags.
