In a chapter devoted to a closer examination of the landscape poems it is not enough to say, as I have said in my Introduction, that Tomlinson's verbal translations of sense experience invariably have an analogous human content: the relation between ‘the analysis of sensation’ (the phrase is Eliot's) and the discovery of human meaning calls for ampler and more particular definition. We may infer from a statement by the poet himself (quoted on the dust-cover of Seeing is Believing) that the relation is nearer to identity than to analogy. Tomlinson points to certain recurrent images in his previous volume, The Necklace—‘the facets of cut glass … the shifting of light, the energizing weather which is the result of the combination of sun and frost’, images of definition, of movement and change, of the interaction of contraries—and comments: ‘these are the images of a certain mental climate, components of the moral landscape of my poetry in general’, not exclusively of the nature poems. We must suppose, then, that looking and cognition are branches of the same mental activity of making the world intelligible, that both are forms of knowing. ‘Perception’ is one word, an important one in Tomlinson's vocabulary, that assumes their virtual identity-a close association certainly, which when we are reading Tomlinson we cannot easily forget. ‘It is the mind sees’: a sentence from the prose poem ‘Skullshapes ‘ (CP p. 191) which expounds the thought-world of the painter, makes the point succinctly. Memory and expectation shape the meaning of what we see; mental temper and moral disposition humanize that meaning. For the same reasons that there is a natural communication between the physiological and the epistemological senses of ‘perception’ (therefore between the language of the painter and of the poet), for a poet-painter, but also for anyone who is attentive to what he sees, the physical world is inherently a human world.

These observations indicate the form of Tomlinson's interest in sense experience; they do not explain the interest itself, his preoccupation with the physical world. Why would a poet choose this particular method, the analysis of sensation, of interpreting and articulating meanings and values?