I laid my pencil aside and thought; thought it was a mistake, to begin with, that I should have tried to make a picture of abstract feelings. Men are not so different from one another and there must have been some who have had the same touch of thought as I have and must have tried to perpetuate such feelings by some means or other. By what means I wondered.
Music! The word flashed across my mind. Yes, music must be the voice of nature, born under such necessity, under such circumstances. It occurred, for the first time, to me, then, that music is something that must be listened to and that must be learned. Unfortunately, I am a perfect stranger to music.
I wondered next if my fancy would not make poetry, and ventured to step into the third dominion. In my memory, it was an individual named Lessing, who arguing that the province of poetry are events that occur conditioned on the passing of time, established the fundamental principle that poetry and painting are not one but two different arts. Seen in this light, poetry seems to give little promise of making anything out of the situation of things, to which I have been struggling to give expression. The physical condition of my feeling of joy may have in it the element of time, but does not consist of an event that progressively developed in the flow of time. My joy is joyous not because No. 1 goes away and No. 2 comes in its place, and not because No. 3 is born as No. 2 vanishes. I am joyful because my joy is felt deeply and retained from the beginning. Say this in an every-day language, and there will be no need of making a factor of time. Poetry, like painting, will come of things arranged separately. Only what scene and sentiment to bring into the poetry, to portray this expansive and abandoned condition is the question. Poetry should be forthcoming, in spite of Lessing, so soon as these factors are caught. Homer and Virgil may be let alone. If poetry be fit to give voice to a mood, that mood may be painted in words without being under time restrictions and unaided by an event that progresses in an orderly manner, as long as the simple spatial requirements of painting are fulfilled.
The point of my pencil began to move slowly, very slowly at first, then with more speed on my sketch book and in half an hour I got these lines:
“Spring two or three months old,
Sadness is long as sweet young plants.
Flowers fall on the empty garden,
In the soulless hall lies a plain harp.
Immobile the spider in its maze hangs
Winding travels blue smoke up the bamboo beams.”