He was not asleep, he was not awake, stupefied merely, lapsing back to the state of the faun, the satyr.
After a while, rousing himself a little, he shifted his position and, drawing from the pocket of his shooting coat his little tree-calf edition of the Odyssey, read far into the twenty-first book, where, after the failure of all the suitors to bend Ulysses's bow, it is finally put, with mockery, into his own hands.

Abruptly the drama of the story roused him from all his languor.

In an instant he was the poet again, his nerves tingling, alive to every sensation, responsive to every impression.

The desire of creation, of composition, grew big within him.

Hexameters of his own clamoured, tumultuous, in his brain.
Not for a long time had he "felt his poem," as he called this sensation, so poignantly.