Now I will try to say how poetry enters into life for most of us; and
this is not an easy thing to express, because one can only look into
the treasure of one's own experience, wander through the corridors and
halls of memory, and see the faded tapestries, the pictures, and,
above all, the portraits which hang upon the walls. I suppose that
there are many people into whose spirits poetry only enters in the
form of love, when they suddenly see a face that they have beheld
perhaps often before, and have vaguely liked, and realise that it has
suddenly put on some new and delicate charm, some curve of cheek or
floating tress; or there is something in the glance that was surely
never there before, some consciousness of a secret that may be shared,
some signal of half-alarmed interest, something that shows that the
two lives, the two hearts, have some joyful significance for each
other; and then there grows up that marvellous mood which men call
love, which loses itself in hopes of meeting, in fears of coldness, in
desperate desires to please, to impress; and there arise too all sorts
of tremulous affectations, which seem so petty, so absurd, and even so
irritating, to the spectators of the awakening passion; desires to
punish for the pleasure of forgiving, to withdraw for the joy of being
recalled; a wild elated drama in which the whole world recedes into
the background, and all life is merged for the lover in the
half-sweet, half-fearful consciousness of one other soul,
Whose lightest whisper moves him more
Than all the ranged reasons of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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