All
poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the
sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one.
A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's
unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as
Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to
do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If
he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina
Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by
The foolishest fond folly of a heart
Divided, neither here nor there at rest,
That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth.
[Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.]
On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely
physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his
nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint.
Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both
elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him.
Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a
conscious formulation.
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