You can read this poem here.

It feels so right that it is a ‘delight song‘: for delight is indeed like the soul singing, transported, blossoming, trying to express something too large, too magical, to capture in words alone (or at all). Yes!

I’m sure you’ll have your own things to add to this catalogue of delights, but isn’t it great that, at the end of the list, he adds, ‘I am the whole dream of these things’? Yes again! That’s one of those phrases my being apprehends way before my head does; but, if I stay with it, I takes me to something about the way that fun, delight, exhilaration, joy—all amazing, certainly—also point to something beyond themselves: to the sheer wonder of the gift of life, and of the world we’re alive in. Not just the things in themselves, and how they feel, but the fact that they exist at all. And that we exist, to experience them. (Re-reading this para, I’m struck all over again by how succinctly and well poetry says what prose flails and struggles to articulate. Oh well. You know what I’m saying, I hope.)

And of course, these are all moments; as our Emily notes, wistfully, “If it would last/ I asked the East”… (You can read this here; and, should you fancy a kind of horrified laugh, turn on the auto-read option above the text. It reads out all the em-dashes and is so bad it stops being funny and turns into murder.) We’re back to the transitory nature of things. One more reminder to kiss that joy as it flies.