Just as there the lines and their meaning are to you one thing, not two,
so in poetry the meaning and the sounds are one: there is, if I may put
it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance. If you read the
line, "The sun is warm, the sky is clear," you do not experience
separately the image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and
certain unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you
experience them together, side by side; but you experience the one _in_
the other. And in like manner when you are really reading _Hamlet_, the
action and the characters are not something which you conceive apart
from the words; you apprehend them from point to point _in_ the words,
and the words as expressions of them. Afterwards, no doubt, when you are
out of the poetic experience but remember it, you may by analysis
decompose this unity, and attend to a substance more or less isolated,
and a form more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic
head, not in the poem, which is _poetic_ experience.
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