Souls of a thousand nations filled the air.
As bees in meadows at the height of summer
Hover and home on flowers and thickly swarm
On snow-white lillies, and the country side
Is loud with humming

Plato observes, illusions are intrinsically mendacious: 'the same objects appear straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colours to which sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.

For the symbolic imagination has limits, and these are co-extensive with art's illusions: the work it can do fails before that supreme (godlike) act of creation, animating the inanimate. A state of lifelikeness, however brilliantly done, can't become life itself- except in fantasy. Th art object's eternal horizon cannot command the true mutability of life itself; its freezing of time makes it lose that metamorphic nature that is the essence of vitality.

XVII.
DAWN.
When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It's time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.

the portal is an enabling kind of border.
the wall/fence is a disabling kind of border.

the positioning of the border matters.

it's the agency of the border that defines the relationship between two ends.

walk slowly; drink lots of water