So the sedge-warbler's
'Song that lacks all words, all melody,
All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.'
Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead
poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been,
both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Because
he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made
the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's
ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to
something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or
by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns.
But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly
into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal
present on whose pinnacle we stand.
'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember.
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