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The inner shape of a particular emotion or state thus becomes the unseen centre of convergence. In the following poem, we may observe how the poet has created an analogical "scene" to replace outward particulars. The central consciousness is anonymous and universal:
HE HAS BREATHLESSLY DRUNK
He has breathlessly drunk
All the milk of Heaven-sky.
He now gladly drinks
All the venom of earth-sigh.[53]
The poem is composed of two experiences which are condensed in a time sequence of cause and effect. Initially, the emphasis is literal: the subject "has breathlessly drunk/All the milk..." It is the final compound noun of the sentence that discloses the poem's figurative meaning. We realise that the word "milk," read in the context of "Heaven-sky," symbolically captures all the sweetness, fulness and beauty of Heaven. We recall the lines from Coleridge's "Kubla Khan":
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
As a substitute for "Paradise," the compound "Heaven-sky" deftly establishes the remoteness of Heaven, far above the earth scene, and also, by analogy with the sky, something of its vastness. What is most challenging to the reader is the implied conquest of Heaven by the subject of the poem: he has drunk all its milk, emptied Heaven, as it were, of its richness. We are led to draw the extrasyntactical conclusion that this subject has now become divinised. Tremendous expectation, therefore, is carried over into the second statement of the poem.
This next statement is revealed from the outset as a paratactic extension of the first. The precise structural reproduction compels us to correlate its member parts with those of the first. Within this framework of juxtaposition we are led to consider pairs of rhyming ideas: "has drunk" /"now drinks"; "breathlessly"/"gladly"; "milk"/"venom"; "Heaven-sky/earth-sigh." As milk is selected by the poet to represent Heaven's supreme offering, so venom is put forward as the embodiment of earth. This second metaphor is considerably more difficult to penetrate. The image of a sighing and impure world keenly revives the age-old division between Heaven and earth, light and darkness, God and man. And yet the status of the poems mysterious subject figure remains puzzling. Here is a man who seems somehow to stand outside of both Heaven and earth. He has drunk of them both equally milk and venom alike he has taken upon himself with undiminished joy and eagerness. We emerge with a complex picture of a man who is at once a child breathlessly tasting heavenly milk and a hero, accepting the burden of the world with serene gladness. It is a unique interpretation of man at the summit of his spiritual evolution.
