the sea instead

Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? "Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea instead? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his pens in his fingers, this way and that way; and gazed and muse; and then, very quickly, wrote a half-a-dozen lines and looked up.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando