Never had Nature's material loveliness been more vividly,
piercingly present to him. The warm air was like a touch, palpable yet
divine. He lay face downwards on the earth and pressed it with his
hands; he smelt the good smell of the grass and young bracken, and the
sweet almond-scented blossom of the furze. And he suffered all the
torment of the lover who possesses the lips and body of his mistress,
and knows that her heart is far from him and that her soul is not for
him.
He felt himself to be severed from the sources of his inspiration;
estranged, profoundly and eternally, from the beauty he desired. And
that conviction, melancholy in itself, was followed by an overpowering
sense of intellectual dissolution, the corruption and decay of the
poetic faculty in him. He was aware, feverishly aware, of a faint
flowing measure, the reverberation of dead songs; of ideas, a
miserable attenuated procession, trailing feebly in the dark of his
brain, which when he tried to grasp them would be gone. They were only
the ghosts of the ideas that he had brought with him from London, that
had died on the journey down. The beauty of this place was devilish
and malign. He looked into Harmouth valley as if it had been a
graveyard. They were all buried down there, his dead dreams and his
dead power, buried without hope of any resurrection. Rickman's genius,
the only thing he genuinely trusted, had forsaken him.
It may be that every poet once in his lifetime has to come to this
Calvary, to hang through his black hour on the cross, and send out
after the faithless deity his Lama Sabachthani.
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