Mind seeks echoes between world and language. Every mind does this. Lack of echo leaves us with sullenness and, sometimes, poison. Metaphor is echo. Bronowski stepping into the pond (in the film below) scooping the mud is echo. His act is poetry in motion: simple, dramatic, almost too perfect, but stopping short of perfection and self-admiration. Bronowski understood this. He wrote a study of William Blake that I used as a student when writing a thesis on Blake. Language has led him to the edge. That moment of stepping in is the echo. Poetry is that kind of stepping in, shoes and all. But it cannot afford perfection. It is the lack of absolutes that makes poetry: not smoothness but falling short. Almost a clumsiness. There is an element of uncomfortable soaking in it.