which of them does the value lie? But really in a poem, apart from
defects, there are no such factors or components; and therefore it is
strictly nonsense to ask in which of them the value lies. And on the
other hand, if the substance and the form referred to are not in the
poem, then both the contentions are false, for its poetic value lies in
itself.

[Sidenote: IDENTITY OF SUBSTANCE AND FORM]

What I mean is neither new nor mysterious; and it will be clear, I
believe, to any one who reads poetry poetically and who closely examines
his experience. When you are reading a poem, I would ask--not analysing
it, and much less criticizing it, but allowing it, as it proceeds, to
make its full impression on you through the exertion of your re-creating
imagination--do you then apprehend and enjoy as one thing a certain
meaning or substance, and as another thing certain articulate sounds,
and do you somehow compound these two? Surely you do not, any more than
you apprehend apart, when you see some one smile, those lines in the
face which express a feeling, and the feeling that the lines express.
Just as there the lines and their meaning are to you one thing, 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.
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
have again 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 th