"Whither is fled the visionary gleam? <br /> Where is it now, the glory and the dream? " <br /> <br /> William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of <br /> Immortality.1802-04. <br /> <br /> <br /> "I may not hope from outward forms to win <br /> The passion and the life, whose fountains are within." <br /> <br /> S.T. Coleridge, Dejection: an Ode. 1802 <br /> <br /> <br />We scribblers deal in words, <br />Though they are but label-shards <br />To name palpable things, <br />And odd imaginings, <br />Feelings or ideas we conceive <br />In the game of make-believe <br />We have all agreed to play <br />As fellow-scribes today. <br /> <br />Sometimes a poem contrives <br />To call up entities from unfathomable lives, <br />Secret world-maps, portraits, diagrams, <br />The real and the unreal made true as dreams <br />That we have dreamt ourselves and own, <br />No matter whence they came or shone. <br /> <br />But chosen words will matter if they touch <br />A remembered passion, inasmuch <br />We did not know of it as such, <br />Without a scholar's gloss or explication. <br />Understand it in your fashion. <br /> <br />For me two Lakeside Odes <br />Have been precursor modes, <br />Foreknown from childhood to ripe age <br />In this cross-mirrored world, a stage. <br />Wordsworth and Coleridge found a choice of words <br />To recover "the glory and the dream" that birds <br />At dawn appear to know by instinct, the passion fountains within <br />Our remembered routine. <br /> <br />I don't need epithets and similes to write about <br />Wilting fronds <br />Drooping from the top of pine trees. <br />Dried up, ready to fall, but they seem to have a dignity. <br />Bereft, but not banished by their dark green company, <br />They seem to be impervious to the end <br />Of life and age and season. <br /> - - - - - <br /> September,2014<br /><br />Ananta Madhavan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/imagination-is-the-fountain/
