... muffled speech
Of a world of folk.
But no cry can reach those others: no clear sight can be had of them, and no intelligible word of theirs can come back.
Only through a crack in the door's blind face
He would reach a thieving hand,
To draw some clue to his own strange place
From the other land.
But his closed hand came back emptily,
As a dream drops from him who wakes;
And naught might he know but how a muffled sea
In whispers breaks.
.....
On either side of a gray barrier
The two blind countries lie;
But he knew not which held him prisoner,
Nor yet know I.
This poem may be said to state the theme of the whole book. It would appear, however, that in the difficult feat of giving form to thought so intangible, the poet has attained here a detachment which is almost cold. But it would be unfair to judge her manner of expression from one poem; and it happens that there is another piece, built upon a similar theme, which is much more characteristic. It is called "Foregrounds," and here again the two countries are conceived as bordering upon each other, inter-penetrating, but sharply contrasted as night from day. The contrast favours a more vivid setting, and the subjective treatment, admitting deeper emotion, infuses a warmth that "The Alien" lacked. Moreover, the psychic region is here called simply the dream-country; and, presented in the delicate suggestion of a moonlit night, it hints only at the lure of the mystery, and nothing of its terror. Throughout the poem, too, runs exuberant joy in common earthly things, in the beauty of nature and in human feeling; and this is followed, in the closing lines of each stanza, by an afterthought and a touch of melancholy: reflection coming, in the most natural way, close upon the heels of emotion. Thus the first lines revel in the glory of spring; and then, almost audibly, the tone drops to the lower level of one who perceives that glory as the veil of something beyond it.
The pleasant ditch is a milky way,
So alight with stars it is,
And over it breaks, like pale sea-spray,
The laughing cataract of the may
In luminous harmonies.
(Cloak with a flower-wrought veil
The face of the dream-country.
The fields of the moon are kind, are pale,
And quiet is she.)
Thus, too, in the third stanza, the recurrent idea of an alien spirit is caught into imagery which glows with light and colour: imagery so simple and sensuous as almost to mock abstraction and quite to disguise it; but bearing at its heart the essence of a philosophy. Again the soul is imagined as standing at the barrier of the two countries, when reality has melted to an apparition and the sense of that other realm has grown acute. Bereft of the comfortable earth, but powerless still to enter the dream-country: standing lonely and fearful at the cold verge of the mystic region, the spirit will seek to draw about it the garment of appearance:
I will weave, of the clear clean shapes of things,
A curtain to shelter me;
I will paint it with kingcups and sunrisings,
And glints of blue for the swallow's wings,
And green for the apple-tree.
(Oh, a whisper has pierced the veil
Out of the dream-country,
As a wind moans in the straining sail
Of a ship lost at sea.)