Jiménez, indeed, is a mystic of the naturalistic order of Walt Whitman. He traces the constant divine in life; he ignores the transcendental. He finds God in the sea, in the subtle sense-play of love, in the landscapes of Spain; or in the gyring thoughts of his own meditation. Yet no poet’s accent could more radically differ from that of the Bible, of Spinoza or of Whitman. Not the least magic of Jiménez’ work is its perpetual counterpoint of meaning and substance. The meaning is cosmic, the stuff is light and casual. Often a seeming haphazard of expression fringes the ineffable; a drop of water miraculously turns into a universe. No tinge of cosmic rhetoric mars the body of his words. The universe is implicit. The ultimate gift of Jiménez is a song of life, liquid and gemmed, within whose moment silence is an inner flame. This flame is simple and constant. The variation in the poems is the outturning into surfaces of mood and color. The flame is One. Life’s mystery is its becoming form, its creating for itself out of a single depth numberless facets, out of whiteness many tints, out of silence, song. This is the process of life: and this is the process of Jiménez’ writing. When he speaks of _La Obra_ he means his record of these inscrutable _becomings_, of which he is a rapt and consecrated witness. If his poems are many, so are the shapes of life: if they are fleet, fragmentary, snatches of a Form whose symmetry lies in dimensions beyond the fragments, so is our visible world a phantasm of shreds, thrusts, flashes. And to see it whole, the eye must be beyond as well as within it. Jiménez’ work is a sort of _comédie mystique_. Singly, the poems have variety of notes. Yet there is a cryptic quality in them, and a subtle allusiveness to something not explicit, which must repugn the shallow sense, even as it entrances the mind hungry for great vistas. His poems have prosodic value. Yet their chiefest value is that they _create æsthetically_ a sense of incompleteness. Æsthetically, they are whole because they contain this _lack_--this positive surge toward an apocalyptic sense which lives in them only by the imprint of its absence. Each of his poems is at once a sensory form, and a spiritual inchoation. Like the atom, it is complete, yet holds in the whirlwind of electrons an infinitude and a contingency with infinitude: it is appearance forever tending to disappear into the Real. One might say that a poem of Jiménez is like an instant in a human life: full-limned, full-equipped with thought, emotion, will; and yet this fullness is but the passing function of an implicit unity which transcends and subscends it.