The same bafflement is Sordello's, over whom the author muses,
Of a power above you still,
Which, utterly incomprehensible,
Is out of rivalry, which thus you can
Love, though unloving all conceived by man—
What need! And of—none the minutest duct
To that out-nature, naught that would instruct
And so let rivalry begin to live—
But of a Power its representative
Who, being for authority the same,
Communication different, should claim
A course, the first chosen, but the last revealed,
This human clear, as that Divine concealed—
What utter need!
There is, after all, small need that the public should charge the poet with deliberate failure to gain a satisfactory view of the deity. The quest of a God who satisfies the poet's demand that He shall include all life, satisfy every impulse, be as personal as the poet himself, and embody only the harmony of beauty, is bound to be a long one. It appears inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in
The too-bold dying song of her whose soul
Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died.
[Footnote: Said of Emily Bronte. Arnold, Haworth Churchyard.]
A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him,
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, "No God,"
Finding no bottom.
[Footnote: A Vision of Poets.]
If the poet's independent quest of God is doomed to no more successful issue than this, it might seem advisable for him to tolerate the conventional religious systems of his day. Though every poet must feel with Tennyson,
Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they,
[Footnote: In Memoriam.]
yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to
Let lore of all theology
Be to thy soul what it can be.
[Footnote: Soothsay.]