Loves and hates
In the Sea—
The stately Shuttle
To and fro,
Mast by mast,
Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.
Flights of Days and Nights
Flies fast.
It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion the modern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities, making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and rolling out the roads of continents.
If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet there are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against us—against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have almost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man and fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He ought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age—the one he lives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him, “Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?”