Page 16 - GALIET THE TORCH, THE GODDESS: On Poesy Plato IV

In this passage, poems are equated with the act of creation and the beauty of the quotidian: fathers, children and money 3⁄4 and, yes, how unfortunate for him that he ignored mothers! This excerpt further implies that poems are symbiotic with the dwellings of life, very much like children and fathers are, and that they offer opportunities for love, very much like children do. We can also deduce from these words that poems, like children, are equally born from the eternal womb of mystery and of shadows and therefore dwell in light. Made poems then, like children, are as divine as Shakespeare’s most beautiful expression of poetry:
“...The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth,
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing
a local habitation and a name” (5.1) 5
Isn´t there then beauty in Plato´s poetic struggle, in our daily struggles for understanding? Such struggles, seducing us to exercise our potentials for beauty and perfection within us – for what is poetry but a window to our own souls and minds and the mirror of all those great artists whose lives, before ours,
5 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Peter Holland. London: Oxford University Press. 1994.231
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