I have only now discovered the writings of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) and am searching locally for his 1960 book The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. I must own this book!
This quote from the book strikes me on a very personal note today as Peter's birthday draws near:
"Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. The reveries of two souls prepare the sweetness of loving…The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness."
The mundane is the enemy of love. The mundane is the enemy of art.
This, Peter and Yeats understood.
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| Photograph by Peter Reichelt Hughes. All Rights Reserved. |
A Poet To His Beloved by William Butler Yeats
I BRING you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams,
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-gray sands,
And with heart more old than the horn
That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:
White woman with numberless dreams,
I bring you my passionate rhyme.
