Caleb, I paraphrase the lines as "neither mouth nor mind had expressed what the heart heard and the spirit guessed." The nor / nor form is archaic, where we'd say neither / nor. Of course, if a poem's any good then a paraphrase always falls short. This poem's good, and this paraphrase does. But the lines go right to the heart of your point in posting the poem, I think: they assert that we apprehend things emotionally and spiritually without being able to parse them intellectually, perhaps because they don't originate in intellect.
Richard
|