On Himself

Shakespeare's Inspiration

Q: From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this phrase from Shakespeare?—

        the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

Are they really from his usual plane—the vital?

A: The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some others it comes from the poetic intelligence.

Page 330

What play or poem is this from? I don't remember it. It sounds almost overmental in origin.

Q: The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII beginning,

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.

What I am eager to know is whether the rhythm of the words I have picked out is a fusion of the overmental and the vital; or is only the substance from the Overmind?

A: There is something from the Above in the rhythm also, but it is rather covered up by the more ordinary rhythm of the first half line and the two lines that follow. It is curious that this line and a half should have come in as if by accident and have nothing really to do with the restricted subject of the rest.

19-5-1934

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Q: Is there something definitely in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane? Take the lines I am sending you. From what you once wrote to me I gather that my first quotation from Shakespeare has an Overmind movement as well as substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the vital colour which makes it the highest Shakespearian and not, say, the highest Wordsworthian—the line inspired by Newton? How does one catch here and elsewhere the essential differentiae?

A: It is a question of feeling, not of intellectual understanding. The second quotation from Shakespeare—

Page 331

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven—

is plainly vital in its excited thrill. Only the vital can speak with that thrill of absolute passion—the rhythm too is vital.¹ I have given the instance² of Shakespeare's

        it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

That is a "thought", a judgment on life, so would naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are vital.

About the first quotation, Shakespeare's

        the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,

there might be some doubt, but still it is quite different in tone from Wordsworth's line on Newton—

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone—

which is an above-head vision—and the difference comes because the vision of the "dreaming soul" is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression. It is this constant vitality, vital surge in Shakespeare's language, which makes it a sovereign expression not of mind or knowledge but of life.

27-2-1935