There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
This prose piece sometimes shows up on the net as poetry; that's how I found it. It's from Wendell Berry's essay Poetry and Marriage, in his compilation Standing by Words. Br. Tom Murphy tells a story of how he tracked this piece down from a fragment, and then realized he had given it to his students the previous semester.
