“We see it and we make it”

“We see it and we make it” is a poetic expression of imaginative making: perception does not simply receive a finished world but participates in giving it form. Its force emerges both in Ash’s lines about populating a landscape with imagined beings and in Roland Michell’s rereading of the poem, where interpretation becomes an act of recognition and creation.

The Phrase in Ash’s Poem

Ash’s verse connects the phrase to the vanished Tree and the stories that gather around it. The poem imagines people filling a place with creatures of the mind, naming lamias, dryads, and mélusines among them. Seeing and making are therefore joined: the place becomes populated through the imaginative language brought to bear on it. The line does not reduce the setting to a private fantasy; it presents imaginative invention as part of how a meaningful world takes shape.

Roland’s Rereading

The phrase acquires a further significance when Roland rereads Ash’s “The Golden Apples.” He apprehends the tree, fruit, fountain, woman, grass, and serpent as both distinct images and forms that multiply across the poem. The act of reading lets these elements become newly legible without making them settle into one fixed meaning: Christabel LaMotte appears to him as the Muse and Proserpina, and at once as neither. His recognition makes him laugh, marking the pleasure of seeing a pattern without claiming that it exhausts the poem.

Roland also hears the language moving beyond the control of any single writer or reader. Ash’s poem, Vico’s account of the first poets and their naming of things, and Roland’s own previously puzzling lists from Lincoln converge in his understanding. The lists had seemed strangely necessary without making their purpose clear; now their words appear important because they name things and participate in poetic language. The reading brings an insight into focus rather than supplying a private message from Ash to Roland: Ash had not addressed him across time, but Roland happens to be present to understand what the work makes available.

Reading as Creation and Recognition

The expression also condenses the novel’s account of reading. Roland experiences Ash’s words as living creatures and stones of fire, while the poem’s recurring images—tree, fruit, fountain, woman, grass, and serpent—remain multiple rather than collapsing into a single allegorical answer. Reading makes connections among them, but it also reveals that no individual reader owns the language or fully contains its meanings.

That balance is important to the phrase. To see is already to encounter forms shaped by language and inherited meanings; to make is to read those forms into relation, producing a renewed understanding. Roland’s recognition feels at once new and as though the knowledge had always been there. The phrase thus describes neither unconstrained invention nor passive recovery, but the creative work through which a text becomes newly present to its reader.