The lunatic, the lover, and the poet - Text

	Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,            1
	Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
	More than cool reason ever comprehends.
	The lunatic, the lover and the poet
	Are of imagination all compact:                                      5
	One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
	That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
	Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
	The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
	Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;     10
	And as imagination bodies forth
	The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
	Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
	A local habitation and a name.
	Such tricks hath strong imagination,                                     15
	That if it would but apprehend some joy,
	It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
	Or in the night, imagining some fear,
	How easy is a bush supposed a bear!                                  19

 

 Explanatory Notes:

seething, boiling;, "Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?"

Such shaping fantasies, fancies capable of giving form and shape to things that have no existence: apprehend, seize hold of; perceive the existence of.

comprehends, takes hold of and assimilates to itself. The hasty clutching at an idea by fancy is contrasted with the deliberate manner in which reason examines an idea before accepting and making it a part of herself.

compact, made up of; put together with;  "Love is a spirit all compact of fire ; "If he, compact of jars, grow musical."

all, wholly.

In a brow of Egypt, in the face of a gipsy..

in a fine frenzy rolling, rolling in the ecstasy of inspiration; "With wrinkled brows, with nods, with rolling eyes"; and for the transitive use, "Rolling his greedy eyeballs in his head."

bodies forth, presents as something concrete.

tricks, feats of conjuring.

That, if ... that joy, that if its intention is merely to conceive some joy, it necessarily conceives also, etc. In the language of logicians, the idea denoting some joy is connoted by the idea of some cause of that joy.

 

Synopsis:

Lovers and madmen hallucinate about things that sane people just can’t understand. Lunatics, lovers, and poets all are ruled by their overactive imaginations. some people think they see devils and monsters everywhere—and they’re lunatics. Lovers are just as crazy, and think a dark-skinned gypsy is the most gorgeous woman in the world. Poets are always looking around like they’re having a fit, confusing the mundane with the otherworldly, and describing things in their writing that simply don’t exist. All these people have such strong imaginations that, when they feel happy, they assume a god or some other supernatural being is bringing that happiness to them. Or if they’re afraid of something at night, they look at the shrubbery and imagine it’s a wild bear!