And hid in darkness that none could behold
The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day
Did never in that house itself display,
But a faint shadow of uncertain light;
Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away;
Or as the moon clothéd with cloudy night,
Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.”
When he writes thus, we do not, in our search for potential speech, have to remember that he is writing of the love of money. Away with such tedious recollections. The stanza is like a picture by Rembrandt of an alchemist’s laboratory, where dusty alembic and smouldering fire mean far more than themselves. The lines say something, but we hear much for which they have not words. “The moon clothéd with cloudy night,” is not richer in suggestion than that same description. Not in the allegory but in the words themselves, their order and their melody, must we find, if they are to be literature, that combination of kinetic and potential speech.
Let me take another example of fine poetry, and show that it does perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the first stanza of Blake’s “The Tiger”:
“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright