More poetry about poetry

Another offering on the theme of 'What is poetry?' - or perhaps more accurately here, 'What is language?': an intriguing contemplation of the role of language as a mediator of experience, an instrument that takes the rawness and immediacy out of our perception and makes it more manageable (though it may also, I hope, sometimes have a transformative and transcendent power that adds to the raw material of our experience).

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by;

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)