Read and enjoy.
By Ted Hughes
Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments,
to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside
the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of
information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over
and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did
one day a dozen years ago.
Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us
precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the
force that created men distinct from trees.
Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from
moment to moment like water in a river.
Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river.
Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality
of all this.
Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter
meaninglessness.
And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment,
of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being
- not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses -
but a human being, we call it poetry.
