'Half-Hidden from Sight'

I’ve never had trouble accepting T.S. Eliot’s announcement in his 1929 essay “Dante” that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” I can rattle off poems I’ve read and loved for decades that I still don’t thoroughly understand. Take Allen Tate’s 1934 sonnet beginning “Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky.” Or Edgar Bowers’ “Dark Earth and Summer” from his first collection, The Form of Loss (1956). I’ve often pondered those lines from the final stanza: “What you are will outlast / The warm variety of risk.” Of course, a poem that can be thoroughly paraphrased in prose is probably not much of a poem.

It might be argued that Tate and Bowers are difficult poets, whose language and syntax are often knotty. But what about a poet no one would confuse with the high priests of modernism? Take Walter de la Mare, often dismissively pigeonholed as a poet for kids.  Here’s a poem of his I have been trying to commit to memory:

 

“So true and sweet his music rings,

So radiant is his mind with light

The very intent and meaning of what he sings

May stay half-hidden from sight.

 

“His flowers, waters, children, birds

Lovely as their own archetypes are shown;

Nothing is here uncommon, things or words,

Yet every one’s his own.”

 

The poem is “Henry Vaughan” from Inward Companion (1950). As always with de la Mare, clarity is no issue. The third and fourth lines even restate my argument above. I first encountered Vaughan (1621-1695) in high school while reading the first of Alfred Kazin’s memoirs, A Walker in the City (1951). Kazin is a blowhard, the spiritual opposite of the writers he claims to celebrate, but he did introduce me to Vaughan’s “The World,” which begins with a line that remains for me the definitive literary expression of wonder: “I saw Eternity the other night.”

 

Mystics lose us with their inarticulate gush. Their experiences defy articulation so they sometimes resort to yawping, the verbal counterpart of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be recounting last night’s visit to the bowling alley. His manner is matter-of-fact, methodical, almost journalistic. He does this with impressive regularity, especially in his opening lines, as in “They are all gone into the world of light!” and “I Walk’d the Other Day.” The effect recalls a gifted storyteller who hooks us with his first words. To be convincing and memorable, wonder must be made to sound familiar, even mundane.