Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies
to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence.
To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by
the community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun
all that came from the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I
myself imagine a marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most
pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full
cups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace.
From the moon come the folk-songs imagined by reapers and spinners out
of the common impulse of their labour, and made not by putting words
together, but by mixing verses and phrases, and the folk-tales made by
the capricious mixing of incidents known to everybody in new ways, as
one deals out cards, never getting the same hand twice over. When one
hears some fine story, one never knows whether it has not been hazard
that put the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me,
desires an infinity of wonder or emotion, for where there is no
individual mind there is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The
poor fisher has no possession of the world and no responsibility for it;
and if he dreams of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that seems
too common for poetry, why should he not dream of a glove made from the
skin of a bird, or shoes made from the skin of a fish, or a coat made
from the glittering garment of the salmon? Was it not Aeschylus who said
he but served up fragments from the banquet of Homer?--but Homer himself
found the great banquet on an earthen floor and under a broken roof. We
do not know who at the foundation of the world made the banquet for the
first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough hands; but we do
know that, unless those that have made many inventions are about to
change the nature of poetry, we may have to go where Homer went if we
are to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts
to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream,