'She is late' . . ."

The poetry is unchallengeable, but the information by scientific
standards of truth is demonstrably false, and even absurd.
On the other hand (see Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, c. xiv.),
the famous lines--

"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November, . . ."

Though packed with trustworthy information, are quite as demonstrably
unpoetical. The famous senior wrangler who returned a borrowed
volume of _Paradise Lost_ with the remark that he did not see what it
proved, was right--so far as he went. And conversely (as he would
have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's
_Principia_ and Darwin's _Origin of Species_ by casting them into
blank verse; or Euclid's _Elements_ by writing them out in ballad
metre--

The king sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blude-red wine;
'O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?'

We may be sure that Poetry does not aim to do what Science, with
other methods, can do much better. What craving, then, does it
answer? And if the craving be for knowledge of a kind, then of what
kind?

The question is serious. We agree--at least I assume this--that men
have souls as well as intellects; that above and beyond the life we
know and can describe and reduce to laws and formulas there exists a
spiritual life of which our intellect is unable to render account.
We have (it is believed) affinity with this spiritual world, and we
hold it by virtue of something spiritual within us, which we call the
soul. You may disbelieve in this spiritual region and remain, I dare
say, an estimable citizen; but I cannot see what business you have
with Poetry, or what satisfaction you draw from it. Nay, Poetry
demands that you believe something further; which is, that in this
spiritual region resides and is laid up that eternal scheme of
things, that universal _order_, of which the phenomena of this world
are but fragments, if indeed they are not mere shadows.

A hard matter to believe, no doubt! We see this world so clearly;
the spiritual world so dimly, so rarely, if at all! We may fortify
ourselves with the reminder (to be found in Blanco White's famous
sonnet) that the first man who lived on earth had to wait for the
darkness before he saw the stars and guessed that the Universe
extended beyond this earth--

"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
Within t