Imagination Is The Fountain Poem by Ananta Madhavan

"Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream? "

William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of
Immortality.1802-04.


"I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within."

S.T. Coleridge, Dejection: an Ode. 1802


We scribblers deal in words,
Though they are but label-shards
To name palpable things,
And odd imaginings,
Feelings or ideas we conceive
In the game of make-believe
We have all agreed to play
As fellow-scribes today.

Sometimes a poem contrives
To call up entities from unfathomable lives,
Secret world-maps, portraits, diagrams,
The real and the unreal made true as dreams
That we have dreamt ourselves and own,
No matter whence they came or shone.

But chosen words will matter if they touch
A remembered passion, inasmuch
We did not know of it as such,
Without a scholar's gloss or explication.
Understand it in your fashion.

For me two Lakeside Odes
Have been precursor modes,
Foreknown from childhood to ripe age
In this cross-mirrored world, a stage.
Wordsworth and Coleridge found a choice of words
To recover "the glory and the dream" that birds
At dawn appear to know by instinct, the passion fountains within
Our remembered routine.

I don't need epithets and similes to write about
Wilting fronds
Drooping from the top of pine trees.
Dried up, ready to fall, but they seem to have a dignity.
Bereft, but not banished by their dark green company,
They seem to be impervious to the end
Of life and age and season.
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September,2014