“...Infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn.”

(Browning, Bump 909)

In my mind, I view this “infinite passion” that Browning mentions in his poem in the form of a fish pond. We cast our lures and bait into the water, hoping to attain a certain passion that we feel we can identify with. Just like a fish, if that passion is undesirable or irrelevant to us in some way or another, we throw it back into the pond, allowing someone else to catch it again. We are its fishermen/women. We are the “pain of finite hearts that yearn.”

To put the analogy of a pond into the perspective, we should refer to what Watt offers in “The World is Your Body.” In short, we are essentially extracting things from the world and utilizing them for ourselves. Specific things such as the passion that exists in the pond that is our world can be harnessed into our own personal “unities.” Because of this relation, we are also part of the “fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being.” (Watt, 917)

Though I use the analogy of the pond to only contain our potential passions, those passions are only a small part of what composes our personal unities. There are many other elements out there that will “make up, form, frame, fashion, construct, [and] produce” (Definition of Composition #1, 111) who we ultimately are. Every person is considered to be a puzzle with missing pieces, or “meaningless fragment” that has never [been] “joined into a man.”(Forster, 910) And as Brad and Eric mentioned before, the traces, or beginnings (in some cases), of our personal unities can be traced back to how we take those “fishes” and construct that “rainbow bridge” or “hammer our thoughts into unity” with them.