Languid, half
inarticulate, coming from the heart of a drowsy sorrow very conscious
of itself, and not less sorrowful because it sees its own face looking
mournfully back out of the water, the song seems to have been made by some
fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all the sighs and tremors of the
mood, wrought into a faultless strain of music. Stepping out of a paradise
in which pain becomes so lovely, he can see the beauty which is the other
side of madness, and, in a sonnet, "To One in Bedlam," can create a more
positive, a more poignant mood, with fine subtlety.
Here, in the moment's intensity of this comradeship with madness, observe
how beautiful the whole thing becomes; how instinctively the imagination
of the poet turns what is sordid into a radiance, all stars and flowers
and the divine part of forgetfulness! It is a symbol of the two sides of
his own life: the side open to the street, and the side turned away from
it, where he could "hush and bless himself with silence." No one ever
worshipped beauty more devoutly, and just as we see him here transfiguring
a dreadful thing with beauty, so we shall see, everywhere in his work, that
he never admitted an emotion which he could not so transfigure.
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