This is better understood by paraphrase:  “I wonder if the soul of a certain person, who lately died, slipped so gently out of the hard sheath of the perishable body—­I wonder if she does not look down from her home in the sky upon me, just as that little butterfly is doing at this moment.  And I wonder if she laughs at the clumsiness of this poor swimmer, who finds it so much labour even to move through the water, while she can move through whatever she pleases by the simple act of wishing.  And this man, strangely enough, does not want to die, and to become a ghost.  He likes to live very much; he does not yet desire those soul-wings which are supposed to be growing within the shell of his body, just as the wings of the butterfly begin to grow in the chrysalis.  He does not want to die at all.  But sometimes he wants to get away from the struggle and the dust of the city, and to be alone with nature; and then, in order to be perfectly alone, he swims.  He would like to fly much better; but he can not.  However, swimming is very much like flying, only the element of water is thicker than air.”

However, more than the poet’s words is suggested here.  We are really told that what a fine mind desires is spiritual life, pure intellectual life—­free from all the trammels of bodily necessity.  Is not the swimmer really a symbol of the superior mind in its present condition?  Your best swimmer can not live under the water, neither can he rise into the beautiful blue air.  He can only keep his head in the air; his body must remain in the grosser element.  Well, a great thinker and poet is ever thus—­floating between the universe of spirit and the universe of matter.  By his mind he belongs to the region of pure mind,—­the ethereal state; but the hard necessity of living keeps him down in the world of sense and grossness and struggle.  On the other hand the butterfly, freely moving in a finer element, better represents the state of spirit or soul.

What is the use of being dissatisfied with nature?  The best we can do is to enjoy in the imagination those things which it is not possible for us to enjoy in fact.

  Emancipate through passion
  And thought, with sea for sky,
  We substitute, in a fashion,
  For heaven—­poetry: 

  Which sea, to all intent,
  Gives flesh such noon-disport,
  As a finer element
  Affords the spirit-sort.

Now you see where the poet’s vision of a beautiful butterfly has been leading his imagination.  The nearest approach which we can make to the act of flying, in the body, is the act of swimming.  The nearest approach that we can make to the heavenly condition, mentally, is in poetry.  Poetry, imagination, the pleasure of emotional expression—­these represent our nearest approach to paradise.  Poetry is the sea in which the soul of man can swim even as butterflies can swim in the air, or happy ghosts swim in the finer element of the infinite ether.  The last three stanzas of the poem are very suggestive: