Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/51

Rh flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters:

Or there is a whole three volume novel to be mused over and spread out in a verse of Hardy’s, or a sentence of La Bruyères. We dip in Lamb’s Letters—some prose writers are to be read as poets—and find ‘I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inchmeal just now. But the snake is vital’ and who shall explain the delight of that? or open Rimbaud and read

and who shall rationalise the charm? In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause—which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having travelled slowly up with all the bloom upon its wings. Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have