Soil so quick receptive,--not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!
Indeed?
Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.
[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls_. The same thought is in
the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James
Russell Lowell, and _Overnight, a Rose_, by Caroline Giltiman.]

Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be
as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden
gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a
poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and
phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?"
[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.]

It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we
misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets
bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not
because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but
because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words
was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says
William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable
and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the
poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage."