POET'S MYSTIC VISION

Timaru Herald, Volume CVI, Issue 16227, 24 March 1917, Page 3

POET'S MYSTIC VISION

A declaration of faith by Lord'Dunsany, wnich will interest his reauers., lias a mystical ring. There are, no say's, only two. ways of understanding lite, inasmuch as no man can live long enough to do it himself. "One is to find some ancient folk, some age-old peasantry, and borrow from the starehouse of their wisdom which they nave had leisure to fill while wars ana earthquakes troubled the thrones and citadels of jkings. I never hear a nursery rhyme nor an old saying but it comes to "me in this age, that trade and politics have made bo sordid, like a little cool breeze into a stilling town out of some far, quiet hills. And the only other way of which I know to Come at the meaning of life and tiio .scheme of man is to turn 'to the pools. No , man in his lifetime indeed can understand it, and I do not think tJi'at any poet would claim to or would pretend to know more than any ooher man; but when at moments unknown, always unexpected, there comes that clear voice in his mind, and with a feeling surely of ignorance and of awe he finds himself speaking of cities he has known >and by-ways he. has trod in lands where the desert has long since covered all ,coming back again to its own, where the historian can only guess and the traveller durst not go. He speaks of things that were before cities began, and of gods that walked with him in the prime of the stars. The voice passes '(like "the wind in the gospel of John), and he is only a man again, with a man's humiliations."