ABSTRACT
Of absolute forest gloom and damp and scent From the guessed-at exquisite sugarpink massing sprays of
mountain laurel, As those crazier insects,
cosmic dragonflies, The comets whirring Over the lake of darkness. A thinking first, but that implicates The life as well, Waking or dreaming-do I wake or dream? The man become metaphor (your word, Novalis) Each man alive, to himself and others a part of the process By which the cosmos is grasped, The life become poem (in Milton or Goethe) The life that is allegory (in Keats and Coleridge); For the beloved shadows assemble here Under the faint groves, Naked all, as in Eden, And murmur of power, a twinned ambiguous murmur, Two-sided as
history and natural history nature and human nature body and body politic
these are numinous twins, Two-sided as, where they walk, the scarcely moving leaves, Tongues whether olive or silver, Dappling in the no-light and Mystery of the terrible stars Which we must read, and read by, As poets by lives of fire and myth we spin behind us; Take into cosmos and kingdom this way of thinking
of anguish and struggle
of loving and dying the poets enjoin
Knitting us by our own nature into Nature Knitting us by our own histories into History Knitting us by our own organs into the Polis
To you, now, for this third and harder work. 333
Back, a century and a half? To unanimous voices, Back, beyond faculties split and follies divisive, To a cluster of poets (the scientists take it up later):
The organic whole, mind-body, imagining reason-
Each, according to his own stamp, they witness-
The first Building in ice and sunlight those airy singing domes, Vision nascent
cosmic palace the process of self-construction
The second Climbing through mist up mountains, the water-thundering
landscape, To front with the forehead at last the serried constellations, Exalted kindred
intellect with its figures a bright and ample
power
The third Sees in the three planes of time a city, forged and woven, And starry works of wheels that turn in the heavens, And prophesies of our thinking, unbodied, imageless,
spectral, The city will grow redhot, the looms with their vestures of Gold and sea-shot tissue ravel and flap In the burning winds, and the stars grind us
The fourth Running towards us shouting, ‘To imagine that which we
know, To act that which we imagine,’ to be flung from us, caught In an elemental turmoil of air and water and fire, The toss and whirl of dreadful oceanic rainbows, with
Homer In his salt-sodden pocket
The fifth and dearest Burning his life out in love and fever and effort, Intense towards beauty neither belied nor answered By soft showers over the heath, and the birds singing, Till in the last assay The dark eclipsing disc of death reveals the unmistakable
steadfast Corona of heroic fire
To you, Novalis, next; most like, and different.
