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Poetry

On Reading Kant

by Brandon Robshaw

Eerie in its grandeur.
Sublime in its mystique.
Passing understanding.
Thrillingly opaque.

So abstract that it’s concrete.
An edifice of blocks
of monumental marble:
words as hard as rocks.

Space and time. Causation.
Perception. Apperception.
Notion. Intuition.
Dialectal. Transcendental.
Unity. Totality.
Faculty. Plurality.
Noumena. Phenomena.
Categories. Antinomies.
And – the crowning glory –
the synthetic a priori.

It’s like the language of a race of superior beings.

Reading it’s like stumbling under glimmering stars
over a vast expanse of twilit marshes.
Or wandering through an unknown, dimly-lit cathedral,
at evensong, without your glasses.

Brandon Robshaw is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University and runs a Philosophy class for the WEA. He is crowdfunding a philosophical novel for Young Adults with Unbound: unbound.com/books/adam-gowers.