Imagery
is for the time when, as in these lines, the shock of feeling (which must
needs pass, as the heart beats and pauses) is gone by:
Thy heart with dead winged innocence filled,
Even as a nest with birds,
After the old ones by the hawk are killed.
I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their imagery in a poem that
without them would be insupportably close to spiritual facts; and because
it seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realities
holds his symbols for a while. A great writer is both a major and a
minor mystic, in the self-same poem; now suddenly close to his mystery
(which is his greater moment) and anon making it mysterious with imagery
(which is the moment of his most beautiful lines).
The student passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, from
the outer to the inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and from
decoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for the
greater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the last
threshold he finds this mid-most sanctuary to be a hypaethral temple, and
in its custody and care a simple earth and a space of sky.
Emily Bronte seems to have a nearly unparalleled unconsciousness of the
delays, the charms, the pauses and preparations of imagery. Her strength
does not dally with the parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant of
those rites.
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