Читать книгу Mearing Stones: Leaves from My Note-Book on Tramp in Donegal - Campbell Joseph, Joseph Campbell - Страница 16

“The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark.” One feels the truth of this saying of Walt Whitman’s in a place like the Pass of Glengesh, or the White Strand outside Maghery. Chanting a fragment of the “Leaves” one night in the Pass, when everything was quiet and the smells were beginning to rise out of the wet meadows below, I felt how supremely true it was, and how much it belonged to the time and place – the darkness, the silence, the vibrant stars, the earth smells, the bat that came out of the shadow of a fuchsia-bush and fluttered across a white streak in the sky beyond. And I have tried Wordsworth’s sonnet beginning, “The world is too much with us,” by a criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight, and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the sand-pools with flakes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone of art. Tried by it, the counterfeit fails and the unmixed gold is justified.