Friday 20 May 2011

Strength

One of my favourite bits of the Prelude [1850; XII:269-71]:
Feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong.
Rather like Keats's beauty-truth equivalence (with which it has, I think, something deep in common) it doesn't seem to impair the effectiveness of this as poetry that it is, patently, untrue. That in itself is a puzzling thing.

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