DAILY MIRACLES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 221, 14 June 1930, Page 11

DAILY MIRACLES

Poetry’s Part in Modern Life “The value of poetry is that it is a means of Increasing the real values of life itself,” writes Mr. Alfred Noyes, the poet, in the “Sunday Express.” “Most people at the present day ar® sleep-walkers. They are alive, but they are not really awake, and they do not realise their own miraculous possessions, or really perceive the world around them. We have only to think of what would happen to our minds if (through some climatic change) the trees were to break into leaf only once in a generation and flowers to appear on the earth once in a quarter of a century.

“The beauty of that appearance would be almost overwhelming. We should walk in wonder and awe through our fields and woods, and an apple-bough in blossom would seem to us, then, the miracle that it really is. It is in this quickening of the senses, not to airy nothings (Shakespeare gave that phrase to a representative of statecraft, not to a citizen of the heavenly city), that poetry has its great part to. play in our modern life. It quickens us to miraculous realities. To enter into the kingdom of great poetry is to enter into the real world, the intelli--gible world, a world that is far more solid and sure than that which surrounds most people.”