Dream dazzled gaze
Aflame and burning like a god in song.
[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke.]
Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." [Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, John Keats, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one—the heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, On the Death of James Hogg] Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser,
With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]
one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a fictitious poet that
His steadfast eye burnt inwardly
As burning out his soul,
[Footnote: 'The Poet's Vow.]
we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before serious damage is done.
The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: See A Poet's Epitaph, and Sonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted Eyes.] Mrs. Browning notes his
Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined
Before the sovran-thought of his own mind.
[Footnote: On a Portrait of Wordsworth.]
Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. I. Osborne, Arthur Hugh Clough.]
But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to