If we but give it time, a work of art 'can rap and knock and enter our souls' and re-align us - all our molecules - to make us whole again.
The fire first has to be laid before the match can be put to it.
Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.
It is the stress that holds the structure up.
Apertures, passages from one world to another. Man's escape hatches.
