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or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves."
Pottle cites Wordsworth's letter to Landor, where what moves Words–
worth most in poetry is spoken of as that point of vision "where things
are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised."
The strength of hope, in Wordsworth as in Margaret, is more than
natural, and perhaps the clue to his distrust of the bodily eye is to be
found in the apocalyptic power of his hope. His sense of possible
sublimity is always with him, and his poetry holds us, ultimately, by our
own sense that it will reveal "something evermore about to be." The
visible has been, and is, and even its actual sublimity is always a betrayal
of its possible grandeur. The spirit of the unvisited haunts Wordsworth,
and the unvisited resists even the counterpoint of the visual and the
visionary.
Blake lived in apocalyptic hope also, but his response to that hope
was unequivocal; the expanding eyes of Man would
see,
and in that.
revelation the deeps would shrink to their foundations. The blending or
dual element in Wordsworth refuses a clarified sight as the gift of revela·
tion; either common sight must suffice or, since it does not, a synesthetic
blend of seeing-hearing must return, as once it existed for the young
chi ld. And, when this return is doubted or modified, the synesthetic
phenomenon, the sober coloring that is also a still, sad music, must yield
to hearing alone, as nothing in nature will satisfy the eye that quests
for evidences of the mind's excursive power. The things not seen
provide the substance of hope, and Wordsworth at last approximates
Milton in practicing an art of the eye's abyss, in taking us down to that
inward depth where no modern prophet of the eye has followed. An art
so deep is a lasting reproof to our cinema, and to ourselves.
My epilogue is in Shelley, who went on until he had stopped eye
and ear together. As I have used such melancholy passages of Blake and
Wordsworth, I am happy to quote Shelley at his most loving. Here is
one of the dazzling passages of
his Epipsychidion,
where he describes,
or rather does not describe, the beauty of Emilia Viviani, that soul out
of his soul:
The glory of her being, issuing thence,
Stains the dead, blank, cold air with a warm shade
Of unentangled intermixture, made
By Love, of light and motion: one intense
Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence,
Whose flowing outlines mingle in the flowing,
Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing
