To Walter de la Mare

Arnold Bocklin, Isle of the Dead 1886

"When the familiar scene is suddenly strange

Or the well known is what we have yet to learn,

And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantom of the mind?

By the delicate invisible web you wove- 

The inexplicable mystery of sound." TS Eliot