You seem to lose them, but retain
The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.
Now obviously there is no sense in this in the ordinary intellectualistic meaning of the word sense. Unlike most poetry, it cannot be analyzed into a content which we might say was expressed suitably or unsuitably in a form. If, then, it be a good poem, we must look elsewhere for its excellence. I would hesitate to find that excellence in the mere sound of the words. Is it then in their associations? Arthur Ransome, the English critic, accounts for the peculiar effect of poetry by its use of what he calls potential language—of words which by long association have come to mean more than they say, that have not only a denotation like scientific words, but a sometimes definite, sometimes hazy, connotation, an emotional content over and above what is intellectually given in their purely etymological content. Does this help us here? I am afraid not. Personally I have always associated sieves with ashes and garden-earth (there is also a little triangular sieve that fits into kitchen sinks). Blue oblongs and saffron circles remind me of advertising posters and futurist pictures; while—I admit a certain poetic quality of a sort here—powdered souls remind me of Aubrey Beardsley.
But, perhaps, the ultimate objection to this poem as it stands is the fact that I have an uneasy suspicion that some printer may have transposed some of these expressions. For would it not really have made better sense if the poem had spoken of a saffron oblong and a blue square? Certainly if I choose to think that that is what it must have been originally no other reader, on the face of the matter, could convince me otherwise. While, if another reader told me that Mr. Bodenheim had once studied geometry and therefore could not possibly have written about a “slim square”, I would be quite unable to convince him otherwise.
But—it will be objected—it is quite unfair to any poem to analyze it word by word. It spoils its beauty. I challenge the assertion, and even assert the opposite. As a matter of fact, it is only by analysis that we can tell good poetry from bad poetry. For instance:
Crown him with many crowns
The lamb upon his throne.
Analyze that and it straightway appears the nonsense that it really is. But, on the other hand, take this poem of Francis Thompson’s (I quote only a part):
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—