act.

Emancipate through passion
And thought, with sea for sky,
We substitute, in a fashion,
For heaven--poetry:

Which sea, to all intent,
Gives flesh such noon-disport,
As a finer element
Affords the spirit-sort.

Now you see where the poet's vision of a beautiful butterfly has been
leading his imagination. The nearest approach which we can make to the act
of flying, in the body, is the act of swimming. The nearest approach that
we can make to the heavenly condition, mentally, is in poetry. Poetry,
imagination, the pleasure of emotional expression--these represent our
nearest approach to paradise. Poetry is the sea in which the soul of man
can swim even as butterflies can swim in the air, or happy ghosts swim in
the finer element of the infinite ether. The last three stanzas of the
poem are very suggestive:

And meantime, yonder streak
Meets the horizon's verge;
That is the land, to seek
If we tire or dread the surge:

Land the solid and safe--
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress.

Does she look, pity, wonder
At one who mimics flight,
Swims--heaven above, sea under,
Yet always earth in sight?

"Streak," meaning an indistinct line, here refers to the coast far away,
as it appears to the swimmer. It is just such a word as a good Japanese
painter ought to appreciate in such a relation. In suggesting that the
swimmer is glad to return to shore again and get warm, the poet is telling
us that however much we may talk about the happiness of spirits in
heaven--however much we may praise heaven in poetry--the truth is that we
are very fond of this world, we like comfort, we like company, we like
human love and human pleasures. There is a good deal of nonsense in
pretending that we think heaven is a better place than the world to which
we belong. Perhaps it is a better place, but, as a matter of fact, we do
not know anything about it; and we should be frightened if we could go
beyond a certain distance from the real world which we do know. As he
tells us this, the poet begins again to think about the spirit of the dead
woman. Is she happy? Is she looking at him--and pitying him as he swims,
taking good care not to go too far away from the land? Or is she laughing
at him, because in his secret thoughts he confesses that he likes to
live--that he does not want to become a pure ghost at the present time?

Evidently a butterfl