hing, not two,
so in poetry the meaning and the sounds are one: there is, if I may put
it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance. If you read the
line, "The sun is warm, the sky is clear," you do not experience
separately the image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and
certain unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you
experience them together, side by side; but you experience the one _in_
the other. And in like manner when you are really reading _Hamlet_, the
action and the characters are not something which you conceive apart
from the words; you apprehend them from point to point _in_ the words,
and the words as expressions of them. Afterwards, no doubt, when you are
out of the poetic experience but remember it, you may by analysis
decompose this unity, and attend to a substance more or less isolated,
and a form more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic
head, not in the poem, which is _poetic_ experience. And if you want to
have the poem again, you cannot find it by adding together these two
products of decomposition; you can only find it by passing back into
poetic experience. And then what you recover is no aggregate of factors,
it is a unity in which you can no more separate a substance and a form
than you can separate living blood and the life in the blood. This unity
has, if you like, various "aspects" or "sides," but they are not factors
or parts; if you try to examine one, you find it is also the other. Call
them substance and form if you please, but these are not the
reciprocally exclusive substance and form to which the two contentions
_must_ refer. They do not "agree," for they are not apart: they are one
thing from different points of view, and in that sense identical. And
this identity of content and form, you will say, is no accident; it is
of the essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry, and of all art in so
far as it is art. Just as there is in music not sound on one side and a
meaning on the other, but expressive sound, and if you ask what is the
meaning you can only answer by pointing to the sounds; just as in
painting there is not a meaning _plus_ paint, but a meaning _in_ paint,
or significant paint, and no man can really express the meaning in any
other way than in paint and in _this_ paint; so in a poem the true
content and the true form neither exist nor can be imagined apart. When
then you are asked whether the value of a poem lies in a