Burning Bright

I am thinking about words and experience.  I have been revisiting The Tyger by Blake, the first poem I remember seeing on a page and hearing in my head at the same moment.  It was 1969 and Lulu was singing Boom-Bang-a-Bang.  What was it from the 18th century that was able to speak so powerfully in a page to child nearly 2 centuries after it was written?  There was no illustration with this text.  I knew nothing about Blake.  Something from his mind soared through time and into mine.  The sieve of the mind is the only way to discover the right words to attach to experience but there is much of the process of imagination that belongs to the body.  That tyger “burning bright” appears to the eyes.  The voice of the poet is in the ear of the reader.  Perhaps the imagination is the in-between place explored through Winnicott’s ideas on transitional objects?  Or is our drive towards poetry the drive of life?  To capture and re-experience being.  What Hughes describes as:

Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are…Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaningless. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment of time, and in that moment make out of it all the vital signature of a human being – not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses, but a human being – we call it poetry.

Find The Tyger here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172943