no. So

AE: A MYSTICAL POET

Syed Amanuddin

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1970

Approved by Doctoral Committee il

ABSTRACT

AE’s position as a mystical poet has not been' questioned by his critics, but critical interest in his work has been mostly confined to his biography and philosophy and there has been no adequate study of the body of his work to affirm his position as a mystical poet. The present study concentrates on the collaboration between the poetic and the mystical consciousness in AE through an examination of his ideas of poetic theory and specific poems.

AE’s theory of poetry is based on his mystical assump­ tions. He expected poetry to concern itself with the'vision of the ultimates, the intoxication with divine things, and the unified experience of Man, God,•and Nature. His views of imagination, meditation, vision, and the creative process e- volve out of his belief in an internal creator in man with the wisdom and memory of the spirit.

AE’s meditations were intent on the discovery of the nature of soul and spirit and in their revelatory process const tained the elements of imagination and vision. But his vision ary experience was not always preceded by the meditative ac­ tion. On the basis of their dominant experience most poems of AE may be divided into two groups: Poems of Meditation and Poems of Vision.

AE’s poetry of meditation is remarkable for its medi­ tative structure based on the progression of mystical experi­ ence and for its language of symbol and image supplied by the same experience. The tendency to use the language of symbol and image is greater in his poetry of vision where he attempts to capture’ the elusive experience of the Ultimate in intelli­ gible human terms. Sometimes this tendency stimulates his mythical imagination and the experience is concretized in terms of myths. And the myth of the Mighty Mother based on his experience of the divinity of the earth is the .most sig­ nificant expressive symbol used in AE’s poetry. XXI

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study began in India six years ago under the supervision of Dr. V. A. Shahane of Osmania University but could not be completed there for several reasons. It fits into the cosmopolitanism of AE that a study of his work that began in India should be completed at an American university. I am grateful to Bowling Green State University for providing me with this opportunity. British Council, Madras, Bombay University Library, Cornell Library, and the Inter-Library Loan facility at Bowling Green were of'immense help. My Committee members—Drs? Eckman, Leland, Nemeth, and Wymer— took abundant interest in this study. Dr. Eckman and Dr. Leland helped me at the right moment with their valuable suggestions. The Chairman of my Committee, Dr. Wymer, de­ serves special thanks for the time he spent with my work and his inspiring guidance. It may not be out of place to thank Irfan, Rizwan, and Ashraf Amanuddin for sacrificing their interests when this study was underway and for tolerat­ ing the eccentricities of a scholar. My neighbors showed unusual restraint in their complaints about the harsh music of the typewriter disturbing their sleep. The final copy was typed by Sally Malott who worked fast on it yet with patience and care. iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Chapter One

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter Two

THEORY OF POETRY...... 13

Chapter Three

POETRY OF MEDITATION ...... 26

Chapter Four

POETRY OF VISION...... 58

Chapter Five

THE MYTH OF THE MIGHTY MOTHER...... 86

Chapter Six

THE MYSTICAL POET...... 101

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 116 CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

In a letter to Charles Weekes, the publisher of his

first book of poems, AE wrote:

My dear boy, a man’s success or failure is always with his own soul. You would like to see me well known, writing wise and beautiful books, hailed by the applause of the best critics. I might be all this and a failure in my own eyes, wretched and unhappy. I am working for causes I feel to be good. I don’t care in the least for recognition. In fact I loathe personal publicity. I can’t say that I have lived up to my highest possibili­ ties. Nobody does, but I have not sunk to my worst, and many people do. I will go back to the stars without any flourish of trumpets, but I won’t weep as I go back or whine about circumstances.!

These words summarize for us AE’s attitude to life and writing. He was not after literary success or personal publicity. His mission in life was to work for causes he felt to be good and to live up to his highest possibilities, accepting with total resignation whatever life had in store for him. Complaining about the miseries of existence or es­ caping into a lethargic retirement in a hermitage was not

AE’s way of life which was essentially one of action: ”1 simply want to live a natural energetic life and if a poem ever takes me along the way I will welcome it but won’t go

1 Letters from AE, ed. Alan Denson (New York, 1961), p. 61 2

out of my way to look for one.” Writing poetry was only a

small part of AE’s life of action which involved him in such

diverse pursuits as mysticism, journalism, painting, art

criticism, and cooperative economics. But the apparent con­

tradictions in his life and diverse pursuits did not preclude

him from the practice of a single philosophy of life based

on what he called the spiritual point of view:

With man and his work we must take either a spiritual or a material point of view. All half-way beliefs are temporary and. illogical. I prefer the spiritual with its admission of incalculable mystery and romance in '• nature, where we find the infinite folded in the atom, and feel how in the unconscious result and labour of man’s hand the Eternal is working Its will.3

The spiritual point of view not merely admits the mystery of

existence but also recognizes the power (will) of the Eternal

in human action. Elsewhere AE writes that everything for which he had an "inner approval" was related to the "search of the spirit" and all his "wanderings of imagination" led him to his "destination as a mystical poet."^

In the beginning of his poetical career, AE seems to have had some doubt about his being a genuine mystic. He wrote to Dowden in response to his review of his (AE’s) first

2 Letters, p. 60.

3 "Art and Literature," Imagination and Reveries (Lon­ don, 1925), p. 52,

4 Song and Its Fountains (London, 1932), p. 94« 3 book of poems, Homeward: Songs By the Way;

I am glad you have regarded me rather as a mystical poet than as poetical mystic. To the title of mystic I have really no claim. I am not capable of leading the pure ascetic life in thought and act which alone could develop any spiritual insight worth acquiring. Meanwhile I try only to put into intelligible form such beauties as I can feel.5

It is possible, however, AE was trying to be modest while

denying himself the title of the mystic, for, his next letter

to Dowden clearly brings out his convictions as a poet and mystic:

The choice of symbolism and a method of thinking is a matter of temperament. I can only work within a little space at present; while I see with you quite clearly that the truest mystical spirit will and must finally unite itself with exact observation of fact and mastery of details: still I think that facts and details with many of us hardly subserve the purposes of soul. We are for the most part overpowered by material forms.... To get free; to be able to rise from the region of dependent things into the self existent spiritual life is the first need of the mystic.... I was pagan in my childhood and have grown naturally into Indian methods of thought and so I must continue until I can see the True without a veil.65

AE’s distinction between mystical poet and the poetical mystic is not without significance, if by the term poetical mystic, we mean a mystic whose interest in writing poetry is limited to the articulation of the ’’facts and details” of his mystical experience. A mystical poet is not so much con-

5 Letters, p. 10.

6 Ibid., pp. 12-13, 4

cerned with a factual report of the experience as with the

poetic communication of the experience. In other words, the

poetical mystic is primarily a mystic while the mystical poet

is as much interested in his art as in his mystical experience

The purpose of this study is to emphasize this fundamental relationship between the poet and the mystic in AE in order to establish his title as a mystical poet.

Critical studies of AE do exist. But most of them are in the form of articles, memoirs, and studies in Irish literary history. A.C. Bose, Earnest Boyd, William Clyde,

John Eglinton (W.K. Magee), Darrell Figgis, Grace Jameson,

Francis«Merchant, and James O’Brien are the chief critics of

AE. Among them Francis Merchant’s AE: An Irish Promethean is the only full-length published study of AE. But the emphasis in this work is on AE the man and his many-sided achievements. So far there has been no systematic full- length study of AE’s poetry. Unpublished dissertations by

Jameson and O’Brien largely concentrate on the philosophical aspects of AE and other writers taken as a group. Earnest

Boyd and William Clyde have written with occasional insights into the poetry of AE. With few exceptions, studies of AE have been largely biographical, historical, and philosophical.

No attempt has been made by critics to analyze and evaluate the body of AE’s work in order to determine his status as a poet. It is hoped this study would perform this task while attempting to establish AE’s title as a mystical poet. 5

Our use of the term ’mysticism* in this study needs some clarification. In order to avoid misleading connota­

tions and associations, it is necessary that we limit the meaning of the term to the experience of the acknowledged mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Rabia, Sankara, St.

Teresa, St, John of the Cross, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda.

Students of mysticism such as Elvyn Underhill, Elmer O’Brien

S. Mukerjee, W. R. Inge, Sidney Spencer, R. Otto, William

James, and J. H. Leuba, are agreed on the general character­ istics of mysticism. Sidney Spencer writes:

What is characteristic of the mystics is the claim which they make to an immediate contact with the Transcendent. Such contact typically assumes the form of knowledge, often described in terms of vision, and of union.7

The Transcendent is variously referred to as the Ultimate,

Brahman, Nirvana, the Good, the One, the Void. The term

Ultimate would best represent the realm of being which is

devoid of the limitations of personality, yet not'devoid of its essential qualities of life, consciousness, spirit, even though such terms may not be strictly applicable, and must be understood in an analogical or symbolic sense.87

The goal of the mystical endeavor is union with the Ultimate,

But the mystic has to pass through a stage of transformation, which Zen calls sartori. Suzuki writes:

7 Mysticism in World Religion (New York, 1963), p. 9.

8 Ibid., pp. 326-327. 6

The individual shell in which my personality is so solidly encased explodes at the moment of sartori. Not, necessarily, that I get unified with a being greater than myself or absorbed in it, but that my individuality, which I found rigidly held together and definitely kept separate from other individual existences, becomes loosened somehow from its tightening grip and melts away into something indescribable, something which is of quite a different order from what I am accustomed to. The feeling that follows is that of a complete release or a complete rest—the feeling that one has arrived finally at the destination,9

The resulting experience of this process of transformation is the stage of awareness in which ’’the whole is intuited together with its parts.This is the experience of tathatci or ’’suchness. ” * The experience so had is not con­ fusing and chaotic but capable of leading to an ’’intense 12 realization of meaningful patterns in the universe.”

Emerson seems to describe an experience of this sort when he writes:

...the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumberroom, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.!3

o Quoted in H, N. Wieman, ’’The Problem of Mysticism,” Mysticism and the Modern Mind, ed. A. P. Stiernotte (New York, 1959), p. 26.

10Ibid., p. 27.

12 A. P. Stiernotte, ’’Mysticism and the Modern Mind,” Mysticism and the Modern Mind, p. 5.

13 Quoted in Stiernotte, p. 7. 7

This breaking down of the ’’conventional structure of the mind”with its preoccupation with the abstract forms, laws, and correlations, and its reorganization to experience the wholeness or "suchness," corresponds also with the re­ ported experiences of persons on LSD trips.Mukerjee writes about the necessity of some kind of hypnotic dissociation especially for a novice in contemplative life ”for weaning 16 himself from the habits of thought and action.” He re­ cognizes ”a great increase in the energy” of the nervous system when it is no longer under ’’conscious cerebral con- 17 trol.” Such a state can be directly stimulated by sugges- 18 tion, or what Coue and Baudoin call ’’auto-suggestion.”

The practice of meditation involves characteristics of self- hypnosis and auto-suggestion. Whatever be the technique used by the mystic for the process of sartori in order to reach the stage of tathata. his transformation is normally

14 Wieman, p. 22.

15 I have interviewed a number of persons who had such experiences.

16 R. Mukerjee, The Theory and Art of Mysticism ("New York, i960), p. 17.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid. 8 gradual and his progress toward his ultimate goal is slow and not without struggle. Underhill points out the five iq stages of mystical development:

1) Awakening: At a certain stage in his life the mystic develops a sudden consciousness of the Ultimate. This abrupt and "well marked exaltation" is accompanied by "in­ ternal feelings of joy and ecstasy."

2) Purgation: After awakening, the self realizes its own finiteness and imperfection, the "manifold illusion" in which it is immersed. Purgation is a state of pain and effort on the part of the self to purify itself before reaching the Ultimate.

3) Illumination: The purgation of the mystic leads the mystic to a joyful awareness of the Ultimate. He would now contemplate the ’Divine’ and see visions and hear voices.

4) The Dark Night of the Soul: It is a stage of the purification of the spirit, also called the "mystic death," a state of spiritual crucifixion. The mystic who has known the "Divine Presence" starts feeling the "Divine

Absence," sensing the gulf between the mystical vision and the mystical life of unity with the Ultimate.

5) The Unitive Life: This is a stage of complete surrender of his individuality on the part of the mystic.

19 Elvyn Underhill, Mysticism (London, 1945),pp.167-170 9

In utter passivity and "without any desire," he seeks union

with the Ultimate, This is the ultimate goal of the mystic

quest, a state which is very difficult to attain and very

few mystics succeed in attaining.

It may be noted here that these stages are convenient

divisions for the study of mystical experience, but a mystic

himself may not be conscious of these stages within himself

for a systematic progression in his mystical experience.

What is important forrthe mystic is his first recognition

of the Ultimate and his involvement in its quest in order to

develop a feeling of unity with the Ultimate. It is possible

that he may stop at one of the stages that Underhill mentions

or regress to the earlier stages in his quest, but as long

as he is aware of the Ultimate and is involved in its quest,

he deserves the title of mystic, whether he prefers to be

called a mystic or not. Unlike the other men who rely on the

rational processes of acquiring knowledge, the mystic depends

primarily on his intuitive experience in the development of

the mystical consciousness. But the intuitive knowledge of reality is also the source of philosophy, poetry, and re­

ligion. W.T. Stace writes: "Our supposition is that mystic intuition exists in all men, but that in the great mystic it 20 is developed in an abnormal degree." The identity of this

20 Time and Eternity (Princeton, 1952), p. 67. 10

"mystic intuition" leading to the mystical experience of

wholeness or "suchness" is not far to seek, but the differ­

ences are possible in the interpretations and labels, 21 William Hocking calls it "The whole idea," Karl Jaspers 22 names it "The Comprehensive," For Whitehead the experience 23 of unity is "extensive continuum," In the words of Elmer

O’Brien:

The diverse philosophic backgrounds of individual mystics, or the total lack of any such background, will result in the'difference being variously expressed and explained. But, in the last analysis, it would seem to come down to this: the self, itself, becomes awareness. For there is none of the externality that characterizes sense per­ ception nor any of the progressive linking together of partial insights that characterizes intellection. 24

Variety is possible in the way "the self, itself, becomes

awareness." And the writers on mysticism with some justifi­

cation classify mysticism into several kinds, the chief among

them being theological, nontheological, ethical, humanistic,

and natural or cosmic. Although religious element is pre­

dominant in mystical experience, mysticism is not always

21 Wieman, "The Problem of Mysticism," p. 22.

22 Ibid.

23 Edwin T. Buehrer, "Mysticism and A. N. Whitehead," Mysticism and Modern Mind, p. 62.

24 Varieties of Mystic Experience (New York, 1964), p. 6. 11 theistic 25

Whatever be the differences in the interpretations and explanations of the mystical experience, its essential character knows no geographical, cultural, or religious boundaries. Sir Francis Younghusband in his study of modern mystics of both East and West notes: "All these mystics living in such different countries, and under such different 26 traditions and conditions, had similar experiences.”

American Indian religious and cultural tradition developed independently of outside influences, but the reported ex­ perience of one ’Crashing Thunder* in his autobiography corresponds with the stage of tathata discussed earlier:

I prayed to Earthmaker. And as I prayed, I was aware of something above me, and there he was. That which is called the soul...that is what one calls Earthmaker. This is what I felt and saw. All of us sitting together, we had all together one spirit or soul. I did not speak to them and get an answer to know what haddbeen their thoughts.27

The words used here to describe the experience emphasize the incommunicable nature of the experience that ’Crashing

Thunder’ had. Though evidently shared by his fellows, for him the experience was beyond rational analysis, intellectual

25 Buddha is a good example.

26 Modern Mystics (London, 1935), p. 247.

27 Quoted in Mysticism in World Religion, p. 9. 12

discussion, or verbal communication. Mystical experience

thus is subjective but with its own kind of objectivity

which accounts for its universality and persistent recurrence

in the lives of several men and women of different times,

regions, and cultures. Despite its universality, it is

based on a personal quest, and the individual largely by

temperament and partly by training involves himself in this

quest. As experience itself is the source of knowledge, the

truth realized by the mystic is not scientifically demon­ strable. Any raid on this elusive experience on the part of the poet-mystic, with all the linguistic strategies he is capable of using can be only partially successful. There­ fore, the language that the mystical poet uses often is not that of expository discourse or direct statement and reduc- tionism, but one of symbol and suggestion. Without a re­ course to such a language, the poet-mystic would end up in what John Irving calls "syntactical mysticism" of Wittgen­ stein’s logical analysis: "There is indeed the inexpressible. 28 This shows itself; it is the mystical."

28 "Mysticism and the Limits of Communication," Mysticism and the Modern Mind, p. 112. 13

CHAPTER TWO

THEORY OF POETRY

AE has no systematic theory of poetry to offer but he makes a number of pertinent points about the nature and

function of art, and the creative process, a study of which

is necessary for a proper understanding of his poetry. As might be expected his aesthetics and mysticism are inter-re­ lated. We have already noticed his preference for what he calls the spiritual point of view of man and his work with its admission of the mystery and romance in nature. His at­ titude to literature and art is also based on the same point of view. He writes in a letter:

I have no interest in people who find in literature any­ thing but an avenue to life. Every thought or mood is the opening or closing of a door to the divine world, and who is there we would not laugh at who went to a door and only admired or looked at it forgetting its uses. Art for art’s sake is considering the door as a decoration and not for its uses in the house of life. I agree with you about English poetry for all its splendour that it moves in a world of illusion because of its lack of fund­ amental ideas. I except Shelley, Wordsworth and Blake. Myself, I prefer the Sufi poetry to any because of its intoxication with divine things.*

Three basic ideas of AE’s theory emerge from this letter, l) He expects poetry to be an avenue to life. His pre-

1 Letters from AE 56 u ference for the Sufi poetry to any other is because of its intoxication with divine things thus acting as an avenue to the divine life. 2) He rejects the art-for-art’s sake theory with its preoccupation with the form using the ’’door” as a decoration without making it serve as a doorway to reality. 3) He demands fundamental ideas from the poets.

The weakness of much English poetry, according to him;;^ is its lack of fundamental ideas. The Romantics, however, are an exception.

The artist’s preoccupation with the divine things is in the essential nature of art itself, and all artistic in­ spiration is spiritual in its origin:

The artist...as he creates a beautiful form outside him­ self, creates within himself, or admits to his being a nobler beauty than his eyes have seen. His inspiration is spiritual in its origin.2

AE elaborates this point further:

The fact is, art is essentially a spiritual thing, and its vision is perpetually turned to ultimates. It is indefinable as spirit is. It perceives in life and nature those indefinable relations of one thing to another which to a religious thinker suggest a master mind in nature.... Therartist may be no philosopher, no mystic; he may be with or without a moral sense, he may not believe in more than his eye can see; but in so far as he can shape clay into beautiful and moving forms he is imitating Deity; when hie eye has caught with delight some subtle relation between colour and colour there is mysticism in his vision.3

2 ’’Art and Literature,” Imagination and Reveries, p.52.

3 Ibid., pp. 50-51. 15

AE’s insistence on fundamental ideas in poetry is not to be mistaken for his interest in didacticism. He tells those who expect art to teach them:

When you ask from the artist that he should teach you be careful that you are not asking him to be obvious, to utter platitudes—that you are not asking him to debase his art to make things easy for you, who are too indolent to climb to the mountain, but want it brought to your feet. 4

Thus the fundamental ideas that the poet has would not appear in his work in the form of platitudes, but as resultant ex- A perience in the vision of the "ultimates" he captures. In this way the function of art is not to describe things as they are or to present demonstrable truth, but to capture this vision of the "ultimates”:

Life itself is more infinite, noble, and suggestive than thought. We soon come to the end of the allegory. It tells only one story; but where there is perfect image of life there is infinitude and mystery.5

And poetry with its power of suggesting the infinitude and mystery is for AE "the highest and sincerest utterance of man’s spirit.He writes in The Candle of Vision:

It is only when I turn to the literature of vision ■ and intuition, to the sacred books and to half sacred tradition, to the poets and seers, that I find a grandiose conception of nature in which every experience is pro-

4 "Art and Literature," p. 51.

5 Ibid., p. 65.

6 "Ulster," Imagination and Reveries, p. 80. 16

vided for. I have not entered the paradises they en­ tered but what little I know finds its place in the universe of their vision; Whether they are Syrian, Greek, Egyptian or Hindu, the writers of the sacred books seem to me as men who had all gazed upon the same august vision and reported of the same divinity.7

The only significant works of literature for AE are those

that relate to intuition and vision. He himself may not have

reached the heights of perception that these writers and

seers did, but he found an identity of vision and intuition

in their works which he regarded as a grandiose conception

of nature that would see all experience in its totality. As we have seen earlier, the perception of reality in its whole­ ness or "the whole idea" is an essential feature of mysti- cism. And for AE, art "perceives in life and nature" the

"indefinable relations of one thing to another," and the artist’s ability to perceive such relations is sufficient proof of hisumystical intuition if not of mystical vision.

AE’s affinity with the English Romantics is not far to seek. Like him they also advocated that the poet ought to concern himself with the mysterious and divine, with the cosmic scheme of things rather than with the obvious and superficial. They did not call themselves mystics but they shared the mystic’s view of life and art. In the words of

Albert Gerard:

If one impulse can be singled out as central to the

7 The Candle of Vision (New York, 1965), p. 149. 17

romantic inspiration, it is the Sehnsucht, the yearning toward the absolute, the aspiration to oneness and wholeness and organic unity, the dream of perfection, 8

Instead of approaching knowledge by way of abstractions and

philosophical speculations, they accepted poetic experience

as a form of knowledge which helped them reach "an intuition

of cosmic unity” and made them see the universe as ”a living

organism, imbued throughout with an idea which endows it with g its unity, its life, its harmony, its ultimate significance.”

This accounts for why AE who rejects much of English poetry

for moving in what he calls ”a world of illusion” despite all

its splendor, and lacking fundamental ideas, treats Blake,

Wordsworth and Shelley as exceptions. His affinity with the

Romantics is all the stronger in his view of imagination.

According to D.G. James a theory of poetry is ’’primarily a theory of imagination.”^ This is particularly true of the

Romantics and AE.

AE writes:

Imagination is not a vision of something which already exists, and which in itself must be unchanged by the act of seeing, but by imagination what exists in latency or essence is out-realised and is given a form in thought, and we can contemplate with full consciousness that which hitherto had been unrevealed, or only instinctively sur-

8 English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley, 1968), p. 3.

9 Ibid.„ p. 5.

10 Scepticism and Poetry (London, I960), p. 7. 18

mised. In imagination, there is a revelation of the self to the self, and a definite change in being, as there is in vapour when a spark ignites it and it be­ comes an inflammation in the air.*1

He emphasizes the revelatory nature of imagination by say­

ing:

...in'the act of imagination that which is hidden in being, as the Son in the bosom of the Father, is made manifest and a transfiguration takes place like that we imagine in the spirit when it willed, "Let there be light.’’~2

Thus imagination for AE is both creative and revelatory—it

not only outrealizes what exists in latency or essence but also acts as a shaping and transfiguring power. This concept closely corresponds with AE’s view of meditation which he defines as the yearning of the inner man to reach the infin- ite, and as ’’the fiery brooding on Majestical Self," the result of which is the "unsealing of the fountain of interior light." The difference between the outrealization of what exists in latency or essence during the process of imagina­ tion and the unsealing of the fountain of interior light during meditation is one of degree merely. The revelatory function of imagination is slow and mild while it is sudden and intense in the case of meditation. The Romantic poets 11 12

11 The Candle of Vision, pp. 66-67.

12 Ibid., p. 66.

13 Ibid., p. 23. 19

too in the same way emphasized both the creative and revela­

tory aspects of imagination. Keats said, "What the imagina­

tion seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed be­

fore or not," and compared it to Adam’s dream, "He awoke and found it truth."14 For Blake it was nothing less than God

as "He operates in the human soul."1^ Coleridge’s view of

what he called the primary imagination is particularly use­

ful in the discussion of AE’s theory of imagination:

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as repetition in the finite mind of eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.16

Coleridge makes a subtle distinction between the primary

imagination and the secondary imagination, the latter being

an echo of the former and coexisting with the conscious will: 17 "it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to create."

This vital function of imagination in the creation of poetry

leading to what I. A. Richards calls "resolution of a welter *

14 Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Bos­ ton, 1959), pp. 257-25S.

15 . C. M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (London, 1949), p. 3.

16 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), I, p. 202.

17 Ibid. 20 18 of disconnected impulses into a single ordered response,” is attributed by AE to an internal creator with ’’power to use or remould pre-existing forms, and endow them with life, 19 motion and voice.” AE calls this internal creator the

Immortal in man. This Immortal

in us has memory of all its wisdom, or, as Keats puts it in one of his letters, there is an ancestral wisdom in man and we can if we wish drink that old wine of heaven. This memory of the spirit is the basis of imagination, and when it speaks to us we feel truly inspired and a mightier creature than ourselves speaks through us.20

AE speaks of this internal creator working through him when he wrote poetry:

I remember how pure, holy and beautiful these imagina­ tions seemed, how they came like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life, and the astonishment I felt, I who was almost inarticulate, to find sentences which seemed noble and full of melody sounding in my brain as if another and greater than I had spoken them; and how strange it was also a little later to write without effort verse, which some people still think has beauty, while I could hardly, because my reason had then no mastery over the materials of thought, pen a prose sentence intelligently. I am convinced that all poetry is; as Emerson said, first written in the heavens, that is, it is conceived by a self deeper than appears in normal life, and when it speaks to us or tells us its ancient story we taste of eternity and drink the Soma juice, the elixir of immortality.2118 19 20

18 Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1955), p. 245. 19 The Candle of Vision, p. 67.

20 Ibid., p. 75. 21 Ibid., pp. 75-76. 24

Coleridge’s primary imagination is the prime agent of all human perception both conscious and unconscious, and it functions as the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the ’’infinite I AM.” In other words, the primary imagination relates the finite mind to the Infinite.

While AE’s internal creator appears to share the character­ istics of Coleridge’s primary imagination, it is effective only at certain moments of revelation and creation, and its basic role is that of ”a self deeper than appears in normal life.” It may be the prime agent of all human perception, but can be known only during moments of special insights.

The role of the internal creator extends to the visionary experience also. AE does not distinguish between the visionary experience and dream, and rules out the possi­ bility of any such distinction by calling visions waking dreams:

The dream consciousness may flood the waking, ¡and that waking consciousness may have little more to do with the moulding of the dream than the seer of the dream in sleep has to do with the creation of images by which he is surrounded.22

He rejects the Freudian equation of the latent content of dreams with repressed desire on the basis of what he calls the architecture of dreams which for him is a clear sign of a conscious artist at work:

22 Song and Its Fountains, pp. 24-25. 22

No coherent architecture in city or dream arises magically by some unreason which translates bodiless desire into organic form. However swift the succession may be, in that second of time between desire and its visionary em­ bodiment or fulfilment there must be space for intellec­ tual labour, the construction of forms or the choice of forms, and the endowing of them with motion. A second to my brain is too brief a fragment of time for more than sight, but I must believe that to a more'intense con­ sciousness, which is co-worker with mine, that second may suffice for a glimpse into some pleroma of form for the selection of these and the unrolling of a vast pageantry .... t I assert that the forms of dream or vision if self- created require a conscious artist to arrange them, a magician to endow them with life, and that the process is intellectual, that is, it is conscious on some plane of being....23

AE thinks that he is not alone in holding this view of the internal creator in man who works independently of the outer or conscious self. He cites the authority of the seers of the Upanishads by quoting from the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad the following passage which emphasizes the creative power of the soul:

There are no chariots there nor streets for chariots. The soul makes for himself chariots and streets for chariots. Nor are any delights there nor rejoicings. The soul makes for himself joys and rejoicings.... For the soul of man is creator.24

One notices a great deal of correspondence between

AE’s internal creator and the Jungian concept of the

Collective Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious signifies

23 The Candle of Vision, pp. 89-90.

24 Song and Its Fountains, p. 65. cf. Brihad- Aranyaka Upanishad, IV. iii. 10, 23

a realm with "deposits of all human experience from the

darkest of beginnings," containing "materials whose reality

is prior to the fact of individuality." AE’s internal

creator with its ancestral wisdom or the memory of the spirit

shares the characteristics of the Collective Unconscious al­

though the interpretations are based on two entirely differ­

ent approaches, one mystical and the other psycho-analytical.

Both the mystic and the psycho-analyst, however, admit a

realm of being in man with "materials whose reality is prior

to the fact of individuality."

We have noticed above the way the internal creator worked in AE during the act of poetic creation, convincing him of the truth of the statement by Emerson that all poetry is first written in the heavens. The internal creator mani­ fests itself during the act of poetic creation through the element of magic present at the moment of composition. A song would come to AE only after a long reverie.

as bird might fly to us out of the vast hollows of air. I sometimes felt like that Merlin of legend who mused long by the margin of the great deep before a ninth wave bore the infant Arthur to his feet. There was always an element of the unexpected in the poetry itself, for it broke in upon and deflected the normal current of con­ sciousness. I would be as surprised at the arising within me of words which in their combination seemed beautiful to me as I would have been if a water-lily had blossomed suddenly from the bottom of a tarn to make a shining on its darkness. The words often would rush

25 Ira Progoff, Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Mean ing (London, 1953), p. 53. 24

swiftly from hidden depths of consciousness and be fa­ shioned by an art with which the working brain has but little to do.2°

Thus inspiration for poetry comes from a realm beyond the

conscious self of the poet and rushes on him deflecting the

normal current of consciousness in such a way that the work­

ing brain of the poet has but little to do with the art that

shapes the poem except that it acts as the transmitting med­

ium. For this reason poems may be called "oracles delivered

out of the psyche” conceived and fashioned ”by some high part

of our dramatically sundered being and breathed...into the 27 waking consciousness." Being the recipient of the oracles,

the poet may be looked upon as prophet: "I think, indeed,

that almost the only oracles which have been delivered to 28 humanity for centuries have come from the poets."

The poet-prophet, however, in the scheme of AE’s world has no choice of his vocation. He is a poet not because he has cultivated the talent himself but because he is elected to be a poet by powers over which he has no control, and he cannot use his exalted calling as a means of earning bread without debasing it: "Poetry can never be made a business

26 Song and Its Fountains, p. 24.

27 Ibid., p. 55.

28 Ibid., p. 90. 25 or occupation without losing that fide air of divinity which ” 29 thrills us when we read the best poetry.” This does not mean, however, that the poet should starve, and do no other work but writing poetry. AE, who believed in leading a natural energetic life of action working for causes he felt to be good, regards writing poetry as a part of such a lifS of action. But since writing poetry is a probing into the divine realm, he would expect the poet to approach his task with an ascetic detachment with regard to its material re­ wards .

AE’s theory of poetry is largely based on his mysti­ cal assumptions. He expects poetry to concern itself with the "vision” of the "ultimates," the "intoxication with di­ vine things," and the experience of life and nature in its totality. His views of imagination, vision, and the creative process are evolved from his belief in an internal creator in man with the wisdom and memory of the spirit. His con­ cepts of the processes of imagination and meditation are not much different except that the revelatory function of imagin­ ation gains in intensity during the act of meditation. The next chapter will discuss in detail AE’s view of meditation and relate it to the study of his poems of meditation.

29 - . . The Living Torch, ed. Monk Libbon (New York, 1938), P. 97 26

CHAPTER THREE

POETRY OF MEDITATION

OK brook of crystal'sheen Could you but cause, upon your silver fine, Suddenly to be seen The eyes for which I pine Which in my inmost heart my thoughts designI —St. John of the Cross*

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonished at me, Yet they forgive my wanderings. I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination. —William Blake^

Meditation may be defined as the methodical cultiva­ tion, discipline, and concentration of the mind practiced by the mystic in order to attain the goal of mystical life.

"Make the Last Surrender^" The Mystic in Love: A Treasury of World Mystical Poetry, edl Shelley Gross (New York, 19665, pi 67.

2 "Jerusalem," Blake’s Poetry and Prose, ed. G. Keynes (New York, 1948), pp. 435-436.

3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902), p. 391. 27

We noticed in the first chapter, in order to wean himself

from the "habits of thought and action," the mystic needs

some kind of "hypnotic dissociation." The mystic may induce

such a state in himself by using various bodily postures and breathing techniques or by the action of drugs and narcotics, by tarrying long at the "magic fire," by gazing at the midday sun, or by fixing attention "upon a formula, symbol, or im­ age. The basic purpose of such a state is to break down the "conventional structure of the mind" so that it is ready for the experience of mystical consciousness. Whatever be the initial aids the mystic might use, he relies on medita­ tion as a way of attaining the stage of contemplation and vision. Mukerjee notes: "In higher mysticism the external factors which induce hypnosis and suggestion and feeling, un­ mediated by thought, are gradually eliminated, and we have an emphasis more and more on meditation.St. Francois de

Sales describes meditation as "an attentive thought iterated, or voluntarily entertained in the mind, to excite the will 6 to holy affections and resolutions."

AE’s meditations were all intent on "the discovery

4 Mukerjee, The Theory and Art of Mysticism, p. 214.

5 Ibid.. p. 217.

6 Quoted in Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Conn., 1954), p. 15. 28 7 of the nature of soul and spirit." He finds two distinct

stages in his meditative practice. The first stage is an

attempt on his part to attain mastery over the will. The

second stage is when he uses the power he thus gains to con­

centrate more intently on the Ultimate. He writes:

Day after day, at times where none might interfere, and where none through love or other cause were allowed to interfere, I set myself to attain mastery over the will. I would choose some mental object, an abstraction of form, and strive to hold my mind fixed on it in unwaver­ ing concentration, so that not for a moment, nor for an instant, would the concentration slacken. It is an exercise this, a training for the higher adventures of the soul. It is no light labour. The ploughman’s cleaving of the furrows, is easier by far. Five minutes of this effort will at first leave us trembling as at the close of a laborious day. It is then we realise how little of life has been our own, and how much a response to sensation, a drifting on the tide of desire. The rumour of revolt, the spirit would escape its thraldom, runs through the body. Empires do not send legions so swiftly to frustrate revolt as all that is mortal in us hurries along nerve, artery, and every highway of the body* to beset the soul. The beautiful face of one we love, more alluring than life, glows before us to enchant us from our task. Old sins, enmities, vanities and desires beleaguer and beseech us.8

This training of the will for the "higher adventures" is a preliminary to a "meditation which would not waver and would 9 be full of power." The effect of this preliminary medita­ tion is that "our whole being becomes vitalized, the bad as

7 Song and Its Fountains, p. 83.

8 The Candle of Vision, pp. 21-22.

9 Ibid., p. 23. 29

well as good."

The heat of this fervent concentration acts like fire under a pot, and everything in our being boils up madly.. We have created in ourselves a centre of'power and grow real to ourselves. It is dangerous, too, for we have flung ourselves into.the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, and find ourselves where the battle is hot­ test, where the foremen are locked in a death struggle.1®

This vitalization of the "whole being" is not an end in it­ self1^ as it would not by itself lead the mystic closer to

the divine being unless he controls the power thus invoked

and directs it to higher purposes. That brings us to the

second stage of meditation during which all the power of the

will is made use of to concentrate on the Ultimate:

The meditation they (the ancients) urged on us has been explained as "the inexpressible yearning of the inner man to go out into the infinite." But that Infinite we would enter is living. It is the ultimate being of us. Meditation is a fiery brooding on that majestical Self. We imagine ourselves into Its vastness. We conceive our­ selves as mirroring Its infinitudes, as moving in all' things, as living in all beings, in earth; water, air, fire,'aether. We try to know as It knows, to live as It lives, to be compassionate as It Is compassionate. We equal ourselves to It that we may understand It and be­ come It.120 11

Thus the higher form of meditation transforms the self com­

pletely so that the self equates itself with the spirit,

10 The Candle of Vision, pp. 22-23.

11 One danger of the drugs and narcotics and other substitutes for meditation to have mystical experience is that the "mystic" might not be able to make any further progress after the vitalization of his "whole being."

12 The Candle of Vision, pp. 23-24* 30

understands it, and ultimately becomes it. AE writes about

the effect of this kind of meditation on him:

I attribute to that unwavering meditation and fiery con­ centration of will a growing luminousness in my brain as if I had unsealed in the body a fountain of interior light. Normally we close our eyes on a cloudy gloom through which vague forms struggle sometimes into de­ finiteness. But the luminous quality gradually became normal in me, and at times in meditations there broke on me an almost intolerable lustre of light, pure and shin­ ing faces, dazzling processions of figures, most ancient, ancient places and peoples, and landscapes lovely as the lost Eden. These appeared at first to have no more rela­ tion to myself than images from a street without one sees reflected in a glass; but at times meditation prolonged itself into spheres which were radiant with actuality.13

The act of meditation thus while intended primarily to lead the mystic to a union with the Infinite or to the stage when the "self, itself, becomes awareness," may stimulate his visionary faculty. It may be noted here the visionary ex­ perience is not necessarily dependent on the meditative pro­ cess. As we noticed earlier, AE did not make any distinction betweeaivisions and dreams, and ruled out the possibility of such a distinction by calling visions waking dreams. By equating visionary experience with the dreaming process, AE emphasized the involuntary nature of the visionary experience

The act of meditation, however, involves a voluntary concen­ tration of the mind. But as the meditative act leads the mys tic to the different stages of mystic experience when the self equates itself with the spirit, understands it in order

13 The Candle of Vision 28 3T to become it, the visionary faculty would take over at a certain stage of the meditative act. The revelatory function of imagination, as we noticed earlier, gains in intensity during the act of meditation, and we may surmise that at a certain stage during the process of meditation the faculty of imagination is replaced by the faculty of vision. The outrealization of what exists in latency or essence gives place to the act of seeing what exists in ’’actuality." This transformation in the nature of perception accounts for the visionary nature of many of the meditative experiences AE describes. For the same reason his poems of meditation can­ not be totally free from the elements of visionary experience

It may not be wrong to conclude that meditation is the basis of much of AE’s poetry whether its dominant nature is medita­ tive action or visionary experience. For the convenience of our study, however, we will divide his poems into two groups:

Poems of Meditation and Poems of Vision.

The relation between meditation and poetry is not far to seek. Concentration of the mind on an object of thought, the element of brooding, the sudden revelation of truth at a certain stage or the visionary experience are as important in the poetic process as in the meditative action. Words­ worth’s "inward eye" which is "the bliss of solitude" is im­ portant both to the poet and the mystic. The experience is both meditative and poetic when Wordsworth writes about the

"serene and blessed mood" 32

In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.1*3

Louis Martz is right when he says that the art of meditation may be said to underlie the ars poetica.AE’s goals in writing poetry and meditation were essentially the same—the exploration of the geography of the spirit. In both he was

seeking ’’that higher wisdom which relates our spiritual being to that multitudinous unity which is God and Nature and 1 Man.” He was aware that some others had better mystical experience than he had, but there was some justification for his attempt to express his experience:

The only justification for speech from me, rather than from others whose knowledge is more profound, is that the matching of words to thoughts is an art I have practised more. What I say may convey more of truth, as the skilled artist, painting a scene which he views for the first time, may yet suggest more beauty and enchantment than the habitual dweller, unskilled in art, who may yet know the valley he loves so intimately that he could walk blindfold from end to end. I do not wish to write a book of wonders, but rather to bring thought back to that Being whom the ancient seers worshipped as Deity.16

13«Tintern Abbey,” 11. 41-49.

1^The Poetry of Meditation, p. 22.

^The Candle of Vision, p. 31.

16 Ibid., pp. 31-32. 33

AE’s poems of meditation fall into the following

three thematic divisions:

1) Retrospect Meditation;

2) Meditative Progression; and

3) Meditations on Nature and the Creative Process.

’’Desire” is a good poem to begin the discussion of

AE’s meditative poetry as it is about the meditative process

itself and the yearning of the ’’inner man" to reach the

Inf inite:

With Thee a moment: Then what dreams have play! Traditions of eternal toil arise, Search for the high, austere and lonely way The spirit moves in through eternities. Ah, in the soul what memories arise!

And with what yearning inexpressible, Rising from long forgetfulness I turn To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still: White for Thy whiteness all desires burn. Ah, with what longing once again I turn!17

AE is reiterating in this poem the idea he expressed in one

of his prose works that the nature and intensity of inspira- 18 tion depends on the quality of aspiration. The mystic's

desire, the "yearning inexpressible," leads him through the spiritual path which is "high, austere and lonely," to the

Ultimate which is in its essence "invisible, unrumoured,

17 Collected Poems (London, 1926), p. 22. Hereafter, all references to this volume will appear in the text as CP followed by the page reference.

18 The Candle of Vision, p. 26. 34 still." The burning desire of the mystic, his passionate longing and intense concentration of the will on the "ma­ jestical Self," leads him to his spiritual origins. Regain­ ing the memory of the spiritual past is the goal of what AE calls retrospect meditation. He writes in Song and Its Foun­ tains :

In this meditation we start from where we are and go back wards through the day; and later, as we become quicker in the retraining of our way, through years, what we now are passing into its antecedents (sic); and so we recall medley of action, passion, imagination or thought.... The sages enjoined this meditation with the intent that we might, where we had been weak, conquer in imagination, kill the dragons which overcame us before and undo what evil we might have done. I found, when I had made this desire for retrospect dominant in meditation, that an impulse had been communicated to everything in my nature to go back to its origins. It became of myself as if one of those moving pictures we see in the theatres, where in a few moments a plant bursts into bud, leaf and blos­ som, had been reversed and I had seen the blossom dwind­ ling into the bud. My moods began to hurry me back to their first fountains. To see our lives over again is to have memories of two lives and intuitions of many others, to discover powers we had not imagined in our­ selves who were the real doers of deeds, to have the sense that a being, the psyche, was seeking incarnation in the body,-19

The meditation involved in "Desire" has the desire for re­ trospect dominant in it. The poet refers to the "traditions of eternal toil" rising before him, being the memories of the soul, its past failures and achievements. We are not told what these memories are, but a knowledge of them evi­ dently leads the poet to the experience of the Ultimate,

19 Pages 2-3 35

"White for whose whiteness all desires burn." The poem is in the nature of an exclamation over an experience which the poet merely suggests but does not attempt to communicate.

The retrospect meditations revealed to AE not only the memories of his "past" life but those transfigured in the psyche and those which were connected with the pre-existence of the psyche. Their particular usefulness to the poet in

AE was that they led him to create some of his poems which he called "oracles delivered out of the psyche":

They breathed out of some deep remembered wisdom, warn­ ing or guidance, for when the words swam up into con­ sciousness there was more in them than the waking self had thought or known.20

Two such poems are "Resurrection" and "Recollection" whose very titles indicate that they are about the resurrection or recollection of the spiritual past. The origin of "Resur­ rection" is of particular interest to us as AE tells us that he took thirty years to complete it. He writes about the meditation that resulted in this poem:

Once I was met by a terror frightening me from my medita­ tion. In my brooding there had been born the sense that in some life before this there had been mighty happenings, aspirations, downfall and a tragic defeat. I began a concentration on that intuition.... I seemed to be warned that if I persisted in this meditation I would arouse dragons that lay in slumber. I would be beset by powers I was too feeble now to master, and they would make wreck of the life which was slowly gathering itself from that defeat of the spirit. I was so overcome by terror that I stayed the meditation, and a poem I had begun evoking

20 Song and Its Fountains, p. 47. 36 that past was left uncompleted for thirty years.21

The composition of this poem throws light on the relationship that existed between AE’s mystical experience and the crea­ tive process—in this case, at least, both had to be com­ pleted simultaneously. He tells us that the first time he began the poem, he could not continue after the first two lines lest the "very words might wind into their music the 22 passion which once had made wreckage of the soul." He completed the poem only when he was old and "desire had no power" over him. The following is the poem:

RESURRECTION

Not by me these feet were led To the path beside the wave, Where the naiad lilies shed Moonfire o’er a lonely grave.

Let the dragons of the past In their caverns sleeping lie. I am dream-betrayed, and cast Into that old agony.

And an anguish of desire Burns as in the sunken years, And the soul sheds drops of fire All unquenchable by tears.

I, who sought on high for calm, In the Everliving find All I was in what I am, Fierce with gentle intertwined;

21 Song and Its Fountains, pp. 45-40.

22 Ibid., p. 46. 37

Hearts which I had crucified With my heart that tortured them; Penitence, unfallen pride— These my thorny diadem!

Thou would1st ease in heaven thy pain, Oh, thou fiery, bleeding thing! All thy wounds will wake again At the heaving of a wing.

All thy dead with thee shall rise, Dies Irae. If the soul To the Everliving flies, There shall meet it at the goal

Love that Time had overlaid, Deaths that we again must die— Let the dragons we have made In their caverns sleeping lie.

(cp, 312-13)

AE writes that he divined from this poem that before "the psyche can be absorbed in spirit—the son in the bosom of the

Father—there must be resurrection of the past, a resurrection of the memory of all the evil we have done, and that agony 2 3 must be endured." The mystic who attempts to reach peace that passeth understanding through "yearning inexpressible," cannot do so as long as he is bound to his past and sees him­ self in the "Everliving" as "Fierce with gentle intertwined."

He cannot think of easing his pain in heaven as he is still a "fiery, bleeding thing," and all his wounds would wake again at the "heaving of a wing." The soul's merger with the spirit is possible only when the long forgotten past is re­

23 Song and Its Fountains, p. 48. 38 surrected so that the soul can endure the agony again and conquer all the "dragons." Such a moment of resurrection may be called, Dies Irae, the Day of Judgement. But there is a discrepancy in AE’s comment on the poem and the poem itself—

AE seems to have realized the importance of slaying "the dragons of the past" by resurrecting the past. But the terroft that stopped the meditation when it first began, has left its mark on the poem although it was completed thirty years later—in the poem AE still wants to let the "dragons"

"In their caverns sleeping lie."

The resurrection of the past during the retrospect meditation does not always mean the resurrection of the evil committed in the past and the tragic defeat as a consequence of it, but when the evil besetting the mystic is conquered, the dragons killed, there will be then the resurrection of

"what is lovely and beloved." 4 Such resurrection is the theme of the following poem:

RECOLLECTION

Through the blue shadowy valley I hastened in a dream: Flower rich the night, flower soft the air, a blue flower the stream I hurried over before I came to the cabin door, Where the orange flame-glow danced within on the beaten floor.

24 Song and Its Fountains, p. 48. 39

And the lovely mother who drooped by the sleeping child arose: And I see how with love her eyes are glad, her face how it glows. And I know all this was past ten thousand years away, But in the Ever-Living yesterday is here to-day, And the beauty made dust we cry out for with so much pain. Unknown lover, I lived over your joy again. Long dead maiden, your breasts were warm for the living head. It is we who have passed from ourselves, from beauty which is not dead. I know, when I come to my own immortal, I will find there In a myriad instant all that the wandering soul found fair: Empires that never crumbled, and thrones all glorious yet, And hearts ere they were broken, and eyes ere they were wet.

(CP, 195-6)

AE emphasizes in this poem the enduring nature of what is

lovely and beloved and the permanence it gains in the Ever-

living. Soul remembers all its experiences of love and beauty

during the period of its descent from its "high spheres" to

take up its labors in the world:

What are its labours? It has to make conquest of the world, become master of the nature which envelops us, until the eternal is conscious in us, and we have made this world into a likeness or harmony with the Kingdom of Light. 5

It may be noted the two different experiences—one of fright­ ening terror that made the poet "stay" his meditation and the

25 Song and Its Fountains, pp. 66-67. 49 composition of the poem for thirty years, and the other one of beauty and love in their everlasting form—are realized through a careful choice of imagery in the poems. In "Re­ surrection” naiad lilies shed moonfire over a lonely grave suggesting ghostly terrors. "Recollection" opens with

"flower rich the night" "flower soft the air" suggesting the sweetness and beauty of the experience. Love, beauty, and life are symbolized by the lover, the warm-breafeted maiden, and the mother-and-child. In contrast with this poem, the

"lonely grave" and the "thorny diadem" in "Resurrection" re­ present agony, anguish, and death.

Perhaps, more significant poems of AE are those in which the meditative action either gradually progresses or represents the distinct mystical stages. A sequence of four poems that appeared in the first volume belongs to this group. AE develops in this sequence the different stages of the meditative process with appropriate imagery and symbolism beginning with the dusky nature of the experience when the mystic reaches the calm of God to the stage of the daylight with only a thread of divine memory. Even the titles of theh poems are symbolic: "Dusk," "Night," "Dawn," and "Day," each suggesting the gradual progress toward and withdrawal from the mystical experience during the process of meditation.

And each poem through its own structure clarifies further the same progress and withdrawal. The symbolism of the chim­ ney vapor is skilfully employed to suggest the gradual 44

blending of the world of appearances into a single unity

during the dusky moment:

Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress; Each chimney vapour, like a thin grey rod, Mounting aloft through miles' of quietness, Pillars the skies of God.

Far up they break or seem to break their line, Mingling their nebulous crests that bow and nod Under the light of those fierce stars that shine Out of the calm of God.

Only in clouds and dreams I felt those souls In the abyss, each fire hid in its clod; From.which in clouds and dreams the spirit rolls Into the vast of God,

("Dusk," CP, 10)

The unity is complete when the night sets in and the mystic

rises from the outer things "Heart-hidden":

Heart-hidden from the outer things I rose; The spirit woke anew in nightly birth Unto the vastness where for-ever glows The star soul of the earth.

There all alone in primal ecstasy, Within her depths where revels never tire, The olden Beauty shines: each thought of me Is veined through with its fire.

And all my thoughts are throngs of living souls; They breathe in me, heart unto heart allied; Their joy undimmed, though when the morning tolls The planets may divide.

("Night," CP, 11)

The smoke and "fire hid in its clod" of "Dusk" are replaced here by the image of the shining "olden Beauty" each thought of the mystic veined through "with its fire." The meditative action has reached the visionary stage. The experience 42

suggested in the last stanza of the ’’Dusk” is complete in

this poem and its last stanza in turn reminds us of the dawn

when the world of multiplicity would assert itself—an ex­

perience of withdrawal on the part of the mystic from the

world of mystical vision to the world of ’’common daily ways”

which is the theme of the next poem in the sequence, ’’Dawn";

Still as the holy of holies breathes the vast, Within its crystal depths the stars grow dim; Fire on the altar of the hills at last Burns on the shadowy rim.

Moment that holds all moments; white upon The verge it trembles; then like mists of flowers Break from the fiery fountain of the dawn The hues of many hours.

Thrown downward from that high companionship Of dreaming inmost heart with inmost heart, Into the common daily ways I slip My fire from theirs apart.

(CP, 12)

After the dawn breaks, what is left is merely the dull light

of the common day which separates each shape from the other

and each color from the other. It is as if an iron will has

fixed the bars for the mystic, creating around him a sense

of disharmony and division which is hard for him to escape

from except in the memory of the dream of the Light of Lights.

The dominant image of the sequence is that of fire.

It is first seen as the smoke and the covered ember, then it

is the glowing star-soul of the earth and the shining olden

Beauty, a kind of unified flame, next it breaks into parts, and in the last poem only the memory of fire survives. But 43 this memory could lead the mystic to his goal of reaching the flame again as

Each dream remembered is a burning glass, Where through to darkness from the Light of Lights Its rays in splendour pass.

It is significant that each poem of the sequence consists of three quatrains with abab rhyme scheme, each quatrain indi­ cating a definite phase of the experience; and the last stanza of each poem is thematically related to the next poem.

This poem sequence with each poem having its own in­ herent structure yet fitting into a larger pattern of the sequence both in theme and image, not only reveals the nature of AE’s meditative action and mystical experience, but also shows the craftsmanship that was involved whether conscious or not in the creation of his poetry. Some of the poems of this group share the characteristics of what Louis Martz calls meditative structure found in the English seventeenth-century poetry. He notices a three-fold way of meditation used as the basis of the structure of meditative poems—patterned after what St. Ignatius calls the "three powers of the soul,"

Memory, Understanding, and Will—the poet opening the poem with a particular situation, then analyzing the situation, and finally reaching a certain resolution of the problems 26 which the situation had presented. It should be remembered,

26 The Poetry of Meditation, pp. 34-43 44 however, this three-fold progression of the poetic experience is certainly not peculiar to meditative poetry alone, but is generally found in poetry where an argument is presented or an exposition is attempted by the poet. For example, Andrew

Marvell’s poem, ”To His Coy Mistress,” can hardly be classi­ fied as a meditative poem (although Mar£z includes it in his anthology, The Meditative Poem). yet it has the structure re­ ferred to above. And AE’s poems such as ’’Glory and Shadow"

(CP, 212-4) and "Shadow and Lights" (CP, 247-50) also have the same structure.

"Glory and Shadow" is in the form of a dialogue be­ tween Glory, the spiritual counterpart of man who has forgot­ ten his spiritual origins, and Shadow, the self of man bound to the earth-world. The poem opens with Shadow asking:

Who art thou, Glory In flame from the deep Where stars chant their story; Why trouble my sleep? I hardly had rested; My dreams wither now. Why comest thou crested And gemmed on thy brow?

In reply Glory reminds Shadow how once they were together, but the memory of its past life in "ages agone," leaves

Shadow in a mood of despair:

My glory has dwindled, My azure and gold: Yet you keep unkindled The sunfire of old. My footsteps are tied to The heath and the stone: 4-5 My thoughts are earth-allied to, Ah, leave me alone.

Glory, however, asks Shadow to regain its will and "Come

forth to the deep” where "splendour Is waiting" for it:

Why tremble and weep now, Whom stars once obeyed? Come forth to the deep now And be not afraid. The Dark One is calling I know, for his dreams Around me are falling In musical streams. A diamond is burning In depths of the lone, Thyyspirit returning May claim for its throne. In flame-fringed islands Its sorrows shall cease, Absorbed in silence And quenched in the peace.

The three-fold way of progression of experience in the poem

does share the characteristics of the meditative structure

that Martz speaks of. It also satisfies Martz's definition

of the meditative poem with the central meditative action

consisting of "an interior drama, in which a man projects a

self upon a mental image, and there comes to understand that 27 self in the light of a divine presence." One may say that

there are ’threenesses’ within 'threenesses* in the poem.

The meditative progression roughly corresponds with the poet’s mystical progression—Awakening, Purgation, and Ilium ination, the first three stages of Underhill’s fivefold way

27 • • The Meditative Poem., (New York, 1963), p. xxxi. 46

of mystical development we discussed in the introductory

chapter. Shadow recognizes Glory and remembers its spiritual

origins, but has to pass through a stage of purgation to free

itself from the bonds of earthly existence (its thoughts are

"earth-allied to"). Glory asks it to cast off its fears and 28 sorrows and answer the call of the "Dark One." AE suggests the incommunicable nature of the experience through the effec tive use of concrete imagery: Glory is aware of the call of the Dark One through "his dreams" falling around "In musical streams." A throne awaits the spirit of Shadow in the form of a burning diamond "In depths of the lone." The islands where the spirit would reach the stage of absorption and peace are "flame-fringed" islands.

There are many other poems of AE that treat the ex­ perience of mystical progression in the same effective way.

Mystery, beauty, and musical charm are the characteristics of the poems in which AE records the mood of "Twilight’s dream" and the mystical apprehension of "Unity." The following is one such poem:

BY THE MARGIN OF THE GREAT DEEP

When the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies, All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam

28 "Dark One" stands for the Great Deep of Deity which will be discussed later. With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes; I am one with the twilight’s dream.

When the trees and skies and fields are one in dusky mood, Every heart of man is rapt within the mother’s breast: Full of peace and sleep and dreams in the vasty quietude, I am one with their hearts at rest.

From our immemorial joys of hearth and home and love Strayed away along the margin of the unknown tide, All its reach of soundless calm can thrill me far above Word or touch from the lips beside.

Aye, and deep and deep and deeper let me drink and draw From the olden fountain more than light or peace or dream, Such primeval being as o'erfills the heart with awe Growing one with its silent stream.

(CP, 3-4)

The meditative action in this poem not only shapes the struc­ ture but also gives a direction to the mystical experience which begins with the realization of the magical nature of the outer world perceived through the senses; next it proceeds to the inner world of sleep and dream; and finally it .’ends with the merger of the outer and the inner world in the ex­ perience of the primeval being.

"Unity" is another significant poem of this group:

One thing in all things have I seen: One thought has haunted earth and air: Clangour and silence both have been Its palace chambers. Everywhere 48

I saw the mystic vision flow And live in men and woods and streams, Until I could no longer know The dream of life from my own dreams.

Sometimes it rose like fire in me Within the depths of my own mind, And spreading to infinity, It took the voices of the wind.

It scrawled the human mystery— Dim heraldry—on light and air; Wavering along the starry sea I saw the flying vision there.

Each fire that in God’s temple lit Burns fierce before the inner shrine, Dimmed as my fire grew near to it And darkened at the light of mine.

At Hast, at last, the meaning caught— The spirit wears its diadem; It shakes its wondrous plumes of thought And trails the stars along with them,

(CP, 294-5)

In this later poem the progression of the experience is much different from the one in ”By the Margin of the Great Deep," an early poem. The meditative action is no longer exploratory in nature—it is simply one of mystical assertion:

One thing in all things have I seen: One thought has haunted earth and air.

The opening lines are a statement of the experience the poet already had rather than the recreation and exploration of the experience. In the subsequent stanzas, however, he traces the movement of the mystic vision starting from the outer world and progressing toward the inner one until the "spirit wears its diadem."

The sense of unity of man, nature, and the spirit in 49

the two poems introduces us to what may be called AE’s nature

mysticism which, of course, is only a phase of his comprehen­

sive mystical experience. Nature mysticism implies the mysti

cal experience gained through the contemplation of the as­

pects of nature. It may also be called cosmic as it involves

"the contemplation of the universe from which all things and ► 20 all persons have evolved.” Perhaps, the best poetic ex­

pression of such an experience in English is in Wordsworth

when he writes about

a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting'suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit which impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.3°

The relation between pantheism and nature mysticism is ob­ vious. Abraham Wolfe defines pantheism as "the theory that

God is all and all is God. The universe is not a creation distinct from God." Perhaps, a similar awareness of the unity of God and Nature made Vaughan write:

29 Stiernotte, "Philosophical Implications of Mysti­ cism," Mysticism and Modern Mind, p. l6l. Stiernotte has an­ other name for this kind of mysticism: Mysticism of Sci­ ence.

30 "Tintern Abbey," 11. 95-102.

31 Quoted in Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, p. 208 50

Walk with thy fellow creatures; note the hush And whispers among them... Each bush And oak doth know I AM.32

AE’s love of nature, especially of the earth, led him to create the myth of the Mighty Mother which will be discussed in a later chapter. Here we will confine ourselves to a dis cussion of some of AE’s poems in which the aspects of nature stimulate the poet’s meditative sensibility and lead him to mystical experience. ’’Magnificence” is a good example of such an experience:

Cloistered amid these, austere rocks, A'brooding seer, I watched an hour, Close to the earth, lost to all else, The marvel of a tiny flower.

To build its palace walls of jade What myriads toiled in dark and cold: And what gay traders from the sun Brought down its sapphires and its gold!

Oh; palace of the universe! Oh, changing halls of day and night! Does the high Builder dream in thee With more of wonder and delight?

(CP, 337)

The artistry involved in the marvel of a tiny flower made AE meditate on the Creator of the flower. The paradox of the duality of the Creator and the Creation and their unity is well brought out in the last two lines—the high Builder who dreams in the flower with wonder and delight cannot be out-

32 ’’Rules and Lessons.” The Meditative Poem, p. 385. 51

side his, creation. AE’s discovery of nature was the discovery

of a new world. A poem of his is titled "A New World”:

I who had sought afar from earth The faery land to mee, Now find content within its girth And wonder nigh my feet.

To-day a nearer love I choose And seek no distant sphere; For aureoled by faery dews The dear brown breasts appear.

(CP, 52)

The title is particularly significant. The new world AE found when he realized the divine nature of the earth may be contrasted with the "old world garden smiles" he"writes about in another poem, "The Symbol Seduces" (CP, 27). Beauty of nature for AE did not mean ... its t ' mere titillating effects on the senses. Like Wordsworth before him, he went beyond the outward appeal of nature and tried to grasp the power be­ yond its shapes and colors. Significantly enough, he found the same divine power at work even in the life of a city, and the dance of a city girl appeared to him as an act of parti­ cipation in the primeval being: I Yon girl whirls like an eastern dervish. Her dance is No less a god-intoxicated dance than his, Though all unknowing the arcane fire that lights her feet, What motions of what starry tribes her limbs repeat.

("The City," CP, 30-1)

AE’s acceptance of even the world of appearance as part of 52

spiritual life, made him treat all life as sacred. Any harm

done deliberately to any form of life was for him a harm

done to the Mighty Mother herself:

"The wrong done by thee To the least limb of beauty Was done unto'me."

("In As Much...," CP, 143)

Blake too had a similar regard for all life that made him I write: "A Robin Red breast in a Cage/Puts all Heaven in a Rage."33

We have already noticed AE’s meditation on the marvel

of a tiny flower leading him to the creator of the flower.

In the same poem he also brings,in the creative process in­

volved in the creation of the flower, the palace of the uni­

verse, and his wonder at the myriads who might have toiled

in its dark and cold and the gay traders from the sun who

might have brought down its sapphire and gold. "Artistry" is

another poem with the divine creative process as its theme:

To bring this loveliness to be, Even for an hour, the Builder must Have wrought in the laboratory Of many a star for its sweet dust.

Oh, to make possible that heart And that gay breath so lightly sighed: What agony was in the art! How many gods were crucified!

(CP, 305)

33 ’ "Auguries of Innocence," Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 118. 53

One important aspect of these poems in which AE meditates on

the divine creative process is that it makes us know-in poetic

terms AE’s own ideas about the labor and pain involved in the

creative act. These meditations on the creative process were not always on the divine creation. One meditation was about Shakespeare’s mysterious Dark Lady of the sonnets. AE wrote in a letter to H. F. Norman:

I never believed the Dark Lady was the sensual creature most interpreters assumed. I did not know the Sonnets very well, but last spring I started a meditation about Shakespeare and the Dark Lady, and I woke up in the mid­ dle of sleep into a highly lucid moment. The Dark Lady was breathing into my soul a most poignant tale, breath­ ing her being into mine.34

Another meditation on the same subject resulted in the poem,

"The Dark Lady," about which he writes in the same letter:

I wrote this poem to illustrate my belief that Shakespeare was so sensitive that by affinities the souls of the living and the dead breathed their life into him; he may have thought they were his imagination, and dressed them up as kings and villains.35 36 "The Dark Lady" is one of the longer poems of AE and may be regarded not so much as a key to the sonnets of Shakespeare

34 Quoted in John Eglinton, A Memoir of AE (London, 1937), P. 267.

35 Ibid.. p. 266.

36 Being a later poem, it is not included in the 1926 Edition of Collected Poems. It is found in Selected Poems (New York, 1935). The references to this volume will appear in the text as SP followed by the page reference. 54 as to the mysterious internal creator of AE that we discussed earlier. AE himself was conscious of this. He was half a- ware of the mysterious contact that the artist has with other minds when he wrote in a poem, "All my thoughts are throngs ■ * of living souls," ("Night," CP,'ll). But he could verify 37 this only when he meditated on Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.

The dark Lady for him is the symbol of Shakespeare’s own be­ ing, It is the psyche which is "dramatically sundered" into this and that in the creative (and meditative) act—but

Shakespeare himself might not have been conscious of this.

The Dark Lady says in the poem:

No man will ever know The mystery of his being, of multitudes Within one spirit.

(SP, 182)

There must have been some divine' purpose that Shakespeare was made "hostel to all life":

For some design I know not what. Perhaps that we who play Upon our surfaces might pry more deep In our rich mystery, the way be pointed That life must travel. I thought it so, that he Was magicked by the gods for their design, And I was a handmaid to it.

(SP, 182)

Shakespeare's being not only contained the dreams, hopes and fears of the living but also through him

37 A Memoir of AE 270 55 The mighty dead from unimagined homes Dreamed back their greatness and their frailty, The very lion-front that awed the world, Shaking it by the thunder of words that fell From the imperious heaven of the high will.

(SP, 183)

The opening lines of the poem throw light on what happens to the psyche during the process of imagination or the creative act:

0, NO, I was not wanton with that man. But to his imagination, yes. I made Myself a hundred natures. It is writ, My myriad girlhood, in that printed page. Or was it I? Did I but play the part His magic plotted for 'me? Did he know That his imagination lived in me And swayed me to be one of their own kind, To act the bawd for whom an emperor Might cast his world away: or it might be A maid to whom the world had never come, All-innocent upon a fairy isle?

(SP, 181)

Such contradictory characters as Cleopatra and Miranda were among the multitudes that inhabited the imagination of

Shakespeare and were a part of his psyche. AE regarded this poem to be an important contribution to the riddle of Shake- sperean sonnets. But the solution to the riddle is more mystical than literary and may be said to add to the mystery of the Dark Lady instead of solving it. It may not be wrong to say that AE is simply attempting to reinforce his own view of the creative process in which case the poem is all the more significant to the students of AE. He writes in

Sons: and Its Fountains: 56

I have often thought that the great masters, the Shake- speares and Balzacs, endowed more generously with a rich humanity, may, without knowing it, have made their hearts a place where the secrets of many hearts could be told.... When we sink within ourselves, when we seem most alone, in that solitude we may meet multitude.... Here we may find one of the secret sources of drama, poetry and wis­ dom. The psyche may by evolution of this sensitiveness, through love and sympathy, come to know that the whole of life can be reflected in the individual and our thoughts may become throngs 1 of living souls. 3-8

AE writes about his own personal experience of what he calls spiritual gravitation, a strarjge power within him drawing people to him, usually his own affinities:

I found every intense imagination, every adventure of the intellect endowed with magnetic power to attract its own kin. Will and desire were as the enchanter’s wand of fable, and they drew to themselves their own affinities. Around a pure atom of crystal all the atoms of the ele­ ment in solution gather, and in like manner one person after another emerged out of the mass, betraying their close affinity to my moods as they were engendered.... The concurrence of our personalities seemed mysterious and controlled by some law of spiritual gravitation, like that which in chemistry of nature makes one molecule fly to another.... I know that all I met was part of myself and that what I could not comprehend was related by affinity to some yet unrealised forces in my being.39

A meditative mind then as much as the creative may be compared to the crystal that would attract its affinities to itself, and the thoughts of the person meditating can be throngs of living souls. The mystic’s perception of the oneness in the universe thus is both as a result of his own effort and a

38 Page'-42.

39 The Candle of Vision, pp. 15-17. 5$ desire of the parts to be perceived thus unified. This may be the reason why AE elsewhere equates the universe with the

’’multitudinous meditation" in which all the "contraries" exist and "are harmonised."4^ (Was it the same perception that made Blake ask the tiger: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?")? Such a perception is one of the heights of mystical experience. But its presence in both poets and mystics is an indication of the subtle relationship that exists between the mystical experience and the poetic.

Such a mystical-poetic experience can come to the poet in the form of either intuition or vision, or both.

Although meditative action may involve visionary experience at a certain stage, the knowledge gained during the meditative act is largely intuitive based on an intense revelatory function of imagination. Visionary experience, however, can take place independent of any meditative practice on the part of the mystic. That leads us to the next chapter in which we will examine the nature of AE’s visionary experience and its bearing on his poetry.

40 Imagination and Reveries, p. x. 58

CHAPTER FOUR

POETRY OF VISION

I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years Driv’n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d, In which the world And all her train were hurl’d; The doting Lover in his quaintest strain Did there complain, Near him, his Lute, his fancy, and his flights, Wits' sour delights, With gloves, and knots the silly snares of pleasure Yet his dear Treasure All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour Upon a flower. —Henry Vaughan^

The mystic uses the senses as the windows to per­ ceive the Ultimate which might reveal itself to him in the form of visions and voices. It should be noted, however, although visions and voices play a very important role during his mystical progress, the mystic who is engrossed by the visions and voices, cannot really attain the highest stage of mystical development—the Unitive Life. True vision is what

Plotinus describes:

In this seeing we neither hold an object (external to

1 "The World," The Meditative Poem, p. 407. Spelling is modernized. 59 ourselves), nor trace distinction, nor are there two. The man is changed, no longer'himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it.2 3 4 5

The vision of the Supreme for Plotinus is the experience of the Unitive Life itself. But this does not explain for us the other visionary experiences1 of the mystic which come to him not in the form of a single flood of light or as a form­ less void, but in the shape of images and sounds. According to AE, the psyche is a focus or burning point through which that which is infinite and boundless

manifests as pure light through a prism does, becoming seven-fold; and these intellectual fires are forever playing upon us, and we apprehend them as wisdom, thought, power, love, music or vision.3

William Blake emphasizes the symbolic nature of visions when he says, "Vision or Imagination is representation of what exists, Really and UnchangeablyAnd the visionary poet for Blake is the man who by the breadth and penetration of his perception, his "copiousness of glance," discovers the materials which compose the allegories "addressed to the intellectual powers.The allegorical or symbolic nature of

2 Quoted in Spencer, Mysticism in World Religion,p.168.

3 Song and Its Fountains, pp. 23-24.

4 Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 828.

5 Ibid., p. 907. I 60- • visions cannot be ignored, for unless the mystic has reached the state of imageless void (in such a case, he would have lost even the ability to communicate), he would continue to perceive the Ultimate in terms of its symbolic manifestations.

While the mystic experiences visions leading him to a better knowledge of the Ultimate, the poet-mystic has the "copious­ ness of glance" that Blake speaks of, and can not only dis­ cover "allegories" for himself, but also can communicate them to his readers. Thus there are two phases of the visionary experience involved in the creation of the poetry of vision— first one when the Ultimate manifests itself to the mystic I in symbolic terms, and the second phase when these symbolic manifestations are translated into symbols intelligible to others. The second phase involves what Henry Matisse calls the "artist’s vision" which is discovered through the "making" every creative act being a "raid on the unknown."^ It is a kind of fusion of the "inward-outward vision" in which the 7 "inner world of being" meets the "outer world of ’what is’."

A critic of Blake writes:

The constant difficulty of the visionary arises from his acute consciousness that what he sees is unutterable, and yet he cannot rest till he has found imaginative utterance. Like S. Paul he is caught up into Paradise

6 Alec King, Wordsworth and the Artist’s Vision (Lon­ don, 1966), p. 31.

7 Ibid., p. 30. 61

and hears unspeakable words which it is not possible to utter. If he would utter his vision, it must be through the symbols and images with which his mind is most familiar.8

AE has a poetic comment to make on this process of symbolization during the visionary experience:

Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods, Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods, Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things: Clothing the vast with a familiar face; Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race.

Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light To the field labourer whose heart desires The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright From the house-wife long parted from the dawn— So the star villages in God’s great depths withdrawn.

Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, Though there no house fires burn nor bright eyes gaze: We rise, but by the symbol charioted, Through loved things rising up to Love’s own ways: By these the soul unto the vast has wings And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things.

("Symbolism," CP, 47)

The "high dreams and mystic moods" are not totally free from the memories of the loved objects of the earth. Unless the mystic reaches the desireless void, he would continue to be directed by the tendency of the human mind of converting all experience into human terms. Instead of seeing God in God’s own terms, he would see Him in human terms, the images and

8 Charles Gardner, Vision and Vesture (London, 1916), p. 20 62 symbols, thus "Clothing the vast with a familiar face," The nature of God or the spiritual home of man may be seen in terms of the images of home and hearth which act as charioting symbols that draw the mystic through the loved things to

"Love’s own ways." I It may be noted that "Symbolism” does not so much express a visionary experience as it analyzes the nature of it. "A Lost Dream" is different:

The unleashed air, A wild cold animal, Hunts on the hills.

Yet the hollow amid-the rocks Is brimful of quiet, So quiet Faery may be heard: So still There is not a flicker In the candle ofI dream, The warm East Is at my feet. : In burning blue Lagoon after lagoon Faints shimmering, All lotus besprinkled— Rose lutuses!

A woman leans, ; A dream out of Allah, The water quivers In ivory ringlets Beneath her fingers As she plucks the blossom she twines In the dark shining of her hair.

She stands; Stillness in ivory! But ere I see her eyes, Ere I make them mine, The wild cold animal leaps Leaps in the hollow. The candle flickers and is blown; 63

Paths are all darkened. A dream has lost its way to life.

(CP, 356-7)

This poem is so different from the rest of the poetry of AE

that one would doubt its authorship had not AE included it I in his volume, Voices of the Stones (1925). The traditional metrical patterns, stanzaic forms, and rhyme schemes so char­

acteristics of AE’s poetry are not found in this poem. It may be called an experiment in vers libre and AE is definitely successful. And as a poem of vision, it is perfect. Its

logic is the logic of vision itself. The poet himself seems, to have very little part to play in the vision, and perhaps, it is when he attempts to play a role in it that the "candle flickers and is blown." But the poet as the recorder of the experience is present in the poem throughout. The images of the wild cold animal hunting on the hill, the candle of dream burning without a flicker in the still air, and the beautiful woman with white body and dark shining hair, a dream out of

Allah, make the dream an enduring experience both for the poet and the reader. The poem reminds one of Coleridge’s

"Kubla Khan." Both poems treat an incomplete visionary ex­ perience. The mysterious woman in AE’s poem may be said to have an affinity with Coleridge’s "damsel with a dulcimer."

An element of magic and mystery dominates both poems. The poets recreate the experience without making any generaliza­ tions about it. One is reminded of Mallarmé*s belief that 64 poetry should not inform but suggest and evoke, not name things but create their atmosphere. 9 Both ’'Symbolism" and

"A Lost Dream" are about the nature of visionary experience— one is almost a prose statement on the role of symbols in the nature of visionary experience, and the other is the recrea­ tion of the visionary experience in terms of symbols. It is surprising that AE’s critics ignored this poem. It may be because AE himself underrated the poem by excluding it from his Selected Poems (1935) about which he wrote: "If I should be remembered I would like it to be for the verses in this book." But poets are not always the right judges of their own poetry. The fragmentary nature of the poem probably did not satisfy AE. But its fragmentary nature is of particular interest to us. The fact that an incomplete visionary ex­ perience resulted in an incomplete poem shows the control that AE’s visions had on his creative act. The woman in the vision has affinities with the other elusive woman figures of AE’s poetry. It is significant that in the poem under discussion both the woman and the dream are "lost" the moment the poet wants to have control over them. This poem is a clue to AE’s spirit-flesh relationship with women leading to the development in his poetry of an underlying myth of the woman as Mate-Beguiler. AE effectively contrasts the spirit-

9 C. M. Bowra, The Heritage of Symbolism (London, 1959), p. 9. 65

ual nature of the "dream out of Allah" and "Stillness in

ivory" with the sensual appeal of the moving fingers of woman

plucking and twining the blossom in the "dark shining of her

hair." The cold animal leaping, into the hollow and the

flickering candle may be read as sexual symbols.

The Beguiler appears in "The Symbol Seduces":

There in her old-world garden smiles A symbol of the world’s desire, Striving with quaint and lovely wiles To bend to earth the soul of fire.

And while I sit and listen there, The robe of Beauty falls away From universal things to where Its image dazzles for a day.

(CP, 27)

Instead of being "charioted" by the symbol through love to

"Love’s own ways," the mystic can get seduced by the symbol

of "world’s desire" with "quaint and lovely wiles." The kin­

ship of this symbol—once again a female figure—is with the enchantress Lilith who appears in a symbolic story by AE,

"The Cave of Lilith." AE uses in this story Plato’s concept of the cave of illusion and relates it to the Jewish folk­

lore and BabyIonian-Assyrian legend of the demon, Lilith.

In the story the enchantress describes her own nature:

10 "Lilith, a female demon of Jewish folk-lore equiva­ lent to the English vampire. The personality and name (night monster) are derived from a Babylonian-Assyrian demon Lilit or Lilu." Encyclopaedia Brittanica (London, 1953), XIV, p. 122. Also see, Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, ed. Maria Leach (New York, 1950)> II, pp. ¿22-623. 66

I offer every soul its'own shadow. I pay them their own price.... Men made me, the mortals have made me immor­ tal. I rose up like vapour from their first dreams, and every sigh since then and every laugh remains with me. I am made up of hopes and fears. The subtle princes lay out their plans of conquest in my cave, and there the hero dreams, and there the lovers of all time write in flame their history.11

Very few escape her spell—she deludes with her mirage the 12 lover, the poet, and the mystic alike. The moment of de- 1 3 lusion comes when "the symbol of being” J is mistaken for the being itself.

The conflict between spirit and flesh, the being and its symbol, takes a different shape in what may be called

AE’s "love” poems. His quest for the experience of the beauty beyond flesh while yet in the immediate presence of the beauty of the flesh makes his experience of the spirit- flesh a little ambiguous. And' the female figure appears in these poems in its duality as Soul Mate and Beguiler, The basis for these poems was a visionary experience AE once had.

He learnt from this vision that "love was a tale which already had been told" and he must not "be lured away by the romance of song,"14 He describes the vision thus: 11 12 13 14

11 "The Cave of Lilith," Imagination and Reveries,p.241.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p, 244.

14 Song and Its Fountains, p. 29. 67

...I passed out of an ancient city built by the sea. It was steeped in the jewel glow and gloom of evening. There walked with me a woman whose face I could not see, for my head was downcast and I was rapt in my musing. It needed not that I should lift my eyes to see an image that was burning in my heart. I had gone from body to soul in my brooding, and the image was nigher to the in­ ner eyes than it could ever be to the waking sight. We passed beyond the city gates, walking silently along the sands to a distant headland* The sea and sand swept by my downcast eyes in fantasmal flowings troubling not my thought. We came at last to the headland, climbed up a little way and sat down, and still no word.was spoken. The love which was in my heart drew me inwards, and I was breaking through one ring of being after another seeking for that innermost centre where spirit could pass into spirit. But when the last gate was passed I was not in that spirit I adored, but trembled on the verge of some .infinite being; and then consciousness was blinded and melted into unconsciousness, and I came at last out of that trance feeling an outcast on the distant and desert vegge of things, though there was a cheek beside mine and I felt a wetness and I did' not know whether it was the dew of night or weeping. Then the dream closed.... The dream which was burdened with such intensities of emo­ tion, when it departed left behind a slight lyric which could not hold or hardly hint at the love which had passed from earth to heaven and had forgotten the love which gave it wings to rise.

The "slight lyric" is the following poem:

PARTING

As from our dream we died away Far off I felt the outer things: Your wind-blown tresses round me play, Your bosom’s gentle murmurings.

And far away our faces met As on the verge of the vast spheres: And in the night our cheeks were wet, I could not say with dew or tears.

0 gate by which I entered ini 0 face and hair! 0 lips and eyes!

15 Song and Its Fountains, pp. 27-28. 68

Through you again the world I win, How far away from the Paradise!

(CP, 72)

Despite its simplicity, it may not be possible to understand

the poem completely without reference to the vision that in- I spired it. But the sensuous nature of the poem is not found

in the description of the vision. The woman in the poem is

not a mere burning image in the poet’s heart, but a living f woman beside him with her wind-blown tresses playing round

the poet and her "bosom’s gentle murmurings." In the vision,

she is the "gate by which I entered in," and is thus respons­

ible for a positive mystical experience—the visionary is

drawn inward through his love for her and this inward journey

leads him into spiritual spheres. But the emphasis in the

poem is on the outer journey—the poet is conscious of the

paradise he lost and imagines that his love for the woman was

responsible for that. The poem then, is not so much a re­

creation in poetic terms of the visionary experience as a

reflection on it at the end of the vision. However, the symbolic character of the woman is not ignored in the poem.

She stands for external beauty and physical desire. The

realm of desire and beauty can' be the gateway to the divine world for the mystic if he could use it that way, but it can also lure him out of the divine world. > This may be the reason why AE regarded the visionary experience he had as a warning.

The poem was an oracle out of the psyche, and he had many 69

such "oracles out of the psyche with this wisdom in their music."16 He said of them, ”As the sun in high air may be

splintered into many stars upon moving waters, so the inten­ sity of that dream was reflected in many a river of emotion."1?

A by-product of this wisdom was another wisdom which made him understand

that we cannot be wholly of this world or wholly of the heavenworld, and we cannot enter that Deity out of which came good and. evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter, until our being is neither one or the other, but a fusion of opposites, a unity akin to that Fulness where spirit, desire and substance are raised above themselves and exist in that mystic unity of all things which we call Deity.186 17

The experience of the undifferentiated reality or what AE calls the "universe" in which "contraries" exist and are harmonised in "multitudinous meditation," is possible only by the fusion of the opposites. The principle of duality (good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter, the heaven- world and this world, the being and its symbol) found in the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm, man. As a conse­ quence man is "Fated with deathless powers at war to be" and his "passionate peace is still to be at strife" ("Duality,"

CP, 132). The same duality is stressed in another poem,

16 Song and Its Fountains, p. 29.

17 Ibid., p. 30.

18 Ibid., pp. 56-57. 70

"Janus":

Imagesof beauty, when I gaze on thee, Trembling I waken to a mystery, How through one door we go to life or death By spirit kindled or the sensual breath.

And, ah, to think how thin the veil that lies Between the pain of hfell and paradise! Where the cool grass my aching head embowers God sings the lovely carol of the flowers.

(CP, 129)

And the duality of experience found in AE’s love poems may

be because of the duality of the symbolism of the female

figure—woman as the charioting symbol and the seducing

symbol. AE writes in "The Vision of Love":

The twilight fleeted away in pearl on the stream, And night, like a diamond dome, stood still in our dream. Your eyes like burnished stones or as stars were bright With the sudden vision that made us one with the night.

We loved in infinite spaces, forgetting here The breasts that were lit with life and the lips so near; Till the wizard willows waved in the wind and drew Me away from the fullness of love and down to you.

Our love was so vast that it filled the heavens up; But the soft white form I held was an empty cup, When the willows called me back to earth with their sigh, And we moved as shades through the deep that was you and X.

(CP, 168)

This poem is in many respects better than "Parting." The visionary experience need not be sought outside the poem as 71 it seems to control the poem. The emphasis is more on the

inward journey. The outward journey is effected when the

willows "call’’ the poet back—yet the sense of unity persists.

The woman acts as the charioting symbol and their love fills

"the heavens up." And the outward journey does not separate

them completely—they move as "shades through the deep" which

itself is a harmony between the poet and the woman.

The fusion of opposites or the reconciliation of the

spirit and flesh which is necessary for the experience of un­

differentiated reality is not possible so long as the mystic

is under the effects of a seducing symbol. The poet and the

woman he loves should part so that they could reach the "in­

ward glow Breathed by the Lone One on the seeker lone":

Only in my deep heart I love you, sweetest heart. Many another vesture hath the soul, X pray Call me not forth from this. If from the light I part Only with clay I cling unto the clay.

And ahi my bright companion, you and I must go Our ways, unfolding lonely glories, not our own, Nor from each gathered, but an inward glow Breathed by the Lone One on the seeker lone.

If for the heart’s own sake we break the heart, we may When the last ruby drop dissolves in diamond light Meet in a deeper vesture in another day; Until that dawn, dear heart, good-night, good-night.

("A Farewell," CP, 190)

There is nothing visionary about this poem—but its relation to AE’s love poems is obvious. The poet is aware of the kind

of path he should adopt if he has to reach the inward glow. 72

The present separation of the lovers would break their hearts, but it is for the sake of heart again, that they may meet again in a deeper vesture of the spirit. The woman thus is not a mere Beguiler, but a Soul Mate. But the encounter with the Soul Mate is possible only when the poet is free from his susceptibility to the guiles of outer charms.

AE’s attitude to women and love with its mystical and symbolic significance in his poetry was largely based on his own temperament and belief which obviously controlled his visionary experience too. This is clear from his letter to

Yeats:

I think I would break any woman’s heart whoever happened to love me. She would find me as elusive as the spirit is. Perhaps it may be I am half a woman inside. My reviewers could never make out whether AE was he or she. Perhaps I am making ready for another life as in one of my verses a lover supposes a change of condition and sex.... The fact is I have I believe passed out of love and cannot write any true love poems. I would like to get a little book of verses which would infect with this weariness in the midst of delight which is the beginning of the divine love. The sudden upstarting of the spirit from its bed of roses, the vanishing of desire as the loved eyes and lips yield themselves, all these things want expression. I think the best use to make of the weariness of life is to impart it to our too lusty gener­ ation, so cheap in its affections, so proud like Le Gallienne of informinggpeople in verse that they know pretty girls and often kiss them.*9

The elusive nature of the experience in the love poems then is because the poet himself was vague about it—he was not sure of even the sexual differences between the partners.

19 Letters from AE, pp, 21-22. 73

But this was because of his mystical conviction about the

unified experience of spirit-flesh in "a deeper vesture" of

the soul. The "weariness in the midst of delight which is

the beginning of divine love" haunts his love experiences.

But the woman figure appears in other than love poems with

the same marked characteristic of elusiveness. We noticed

the role that woman plays as a charioting-seducing symbol.

But in poems such as "Hermit" and "Mystery" she stands for

darkness, mystery, and enchantment:

Darkness to my doorway hies, Lays her chin upon the roof, And her burning seraph eyes Now no longer keep aloof.

And the ancient mystery Holds its hands out day by day Takes a chair and croons with me By my cabin built of clay.

When the dusky shadow flits, By the chimney nook I see Where the old enchanter sits, Smiles and waves and beckons me.

("Hermit," CP, 6-7)

The use of the possessive pronoun "its" seems to be deliberate as it blurs the sex of "the ancient mystery" but its relation to "Darkness" in the preceding stanza is obvious, and "Dark­ ness" is treated as feminine. The ancient mystery appears again in "Mystery":

Something a moment seemed to stoop from The night with cool, cool breath on my face: Or did the hair of the'twilight droop from Its silent wandering ways?

About me in thick wood netted 74

The wizard glow looks human-wise; And over the tree-tops barred and fretted Ponders with strange old eyes.

(CP, 50)

These poems suggest a kind of initiation into the divine mystery. The role of charioting symbol is not clear but is implied in the "old enchanter’s" waving and beckoning and the ancient mystery’s "cool breath" on the poet’s face. The ini­ tiation, however, is not into the unified experience of spirit flesh groped for in the love poems, but into the mysterious being of the Mighty Mother which is clear from the subsequent stanzas of "Mystery": ,

The tremulous lips of air blow by me And hymn their time-old melody: Its secret strain comes nigh and nigh: "Ah, brother, come with me;

"For here the ancient mother lingers To dip her hands in the diamond dew, And lave thine with cloud-cool fingers Till sorrow die from you." f (CP, 50-51)

The woman figure thus dominates a number of poems of AE in the form of two underlying myths—the myth of the Mate-Be- guiler and the myth of the Mighty Mother. The contradictory forces that generate when the woman is approached as the Mate leading to the conflict between spirit and flesh seem to at­ tain a state of reconciliation and harmony when she is sought as the Mother. But the significance of AE’s myth of the

Mighty Mother is much more than that, and will be discussed in detail in another chapter. 75

Another significant group of visionary poems is about

Childhood or what may be called the myth of the Childhood of

Humanity. ”0m’* is such a poem and is based on the following vision AE had:

Once I was walking down a passage in the great building where I was employed over forty years ago, a passage which led from one office to another; and in that dim lighted corridor my imagination of myself was suddenly changed, and I was a child, and was looking upwards to dawn of faintest yellow behind snowy peaks made blue and shadowy by the glow. The mound on which I stood was brown and bare as if it had been baked by the heat of fierce suns. The boy I had become was gazing in adoration at'the high and holy light. He was celestially transparent, pure and virgin. He chanted a divine name, and a fire that was heaven-born leaped up from the heart, and for an in­ stant the child was a delicate lyre on whose strings quivered echoing the song of Brahma.2®

The outcome of the vision was the following poem:

Faint grew the yellow buds of light Far flickering beyond the snows, As leaning o’er the.shadowy white Morn glimmered like a pale primrose.

Within an Indian vale below A child said ”0M” with tender heart, Watching with loving eyes the glow In dayshine fade and night depart.

The word which Brahma at his dawn Outbreathes and endeth his night, Whose tide of sound rolling on Gives birth to orbs of pearly light;

And beauty, wisdom, love, and youth By its enchantment gathered grow In agelong wandering to the truth, Through many a cycle’s ebb and flow.

And here the voice of earth was stilled,

20 Song and Its Fountains, pp. 25-26, 76

The child was lifted to the Wise: A strange delight his spirit filled, And Brahma looked from his shining eyes.

("Om," CP, 155-6)

The poem and the vision that inspired it belong to what AE 21 calls the ’’memories of the ancient life.’’ The poet’s ex­ perience of the mystical.childhood seems to symbolize the experience of the childhood of humanity itself. It is signi­ ficant that the sound the child utters is the ineffable ”0m.”

It stands for the triple constitution of the universe, its three component parts A-U-M symbolizing respectively the Ab- 22 solute, the Relative, and the Relationship between them.

It may also represent the three aspects of Brahma—the

Creator, the Sustainer, and the Destroyer. Being the song of

Brahma it acts in the poem as a creative energy which gives birth to orbs of pearly light from which spring beauty, wis­ dom, love, and youth, and pass through many cycles of existence

The earth is stilled when it hears the child utter the sound and becomes spiritually skin to Brahma. AE’s descriptive power, his abilfty^to capture the visionary experience in poetic terms using what may be called the visual imagination of a painter, adds to the significance of the poem. The first

21 Song and Its Fountains, p. 25.

22 Francis Merchant, AE': An Irish Promethean (Colum­ bia, S.C., 1954), p. 159. 77 stanza is especially striking in this respect with the living picture of the morning leaning like a pale primrose over the shadowy white of snow. The child is apparently in a Himalayan valley beneath one of the snow-capped Himalayan peaks.

"The Unknown God" (CP, 5) is not backed by AE’s comments on the visionary experience that inspired it, but it appears like a collective experience of children, if not of the child in the Indian valley. It is very significant .as a poem of vision as the poet does not break the pure visionary experience into symbolic forms:

Far up the dim twilight fluttered Moth-wings of vapour and flame: The lights danced over the mountains, Star after star they came.

The lights grew thicker unheeded, For silent and still were we; Our hearts were drunk with a beauty Our eyes could never see.

Twilight, moth-wings of vapor and flame, stars, and lights merely emphasize the lustrous nature of the vision, and the rushing specks of light form themselves into a beauty which eyes cannot see though it can be perceived intuitively. In

"Om" the child lifted itself up to Brahma by uttering the in­ effable sound. Here the "Unknown God" himself descends into the receptive "hearts." 23 AE like Vaughan and Wordsworth before him believed

3Vaughan’s "Retreat" and Wordsworth’s "Intimations of Immortality" are good examples. 78

in the innocence and divinity of childhood. He addresses

his poem "Childhood” to children:

We are pools whose depths are told; You are like a mystic fountain, Issuing ever pure and cold From the hollows of the mountain.

We are men by anguish taught To distinguish false from true; Higher wisdom we have not; But a joy within guides you.

(CP, 45)

There are familiar Wordsworthian echoes in the poem. Man as an adult is so blinded by his intellect and reason that he is unable to reach truth, but intuition, "a joy within guides" the children. This makes the child more receptive to the knowledge of the spirit. ?,

AE, however, takes the concept of childhood beyond the Wordsworthian view of individual development. His myth of the childhood of Humanity involves the notion that in its childhood humanity had a direct contact with the world of spirit. There was no dividing gulf between the seeker and the sought in nature. In "A Summer Night" the poet recollecting the past of humanity exclaims, "hoxtf innocent our childhood was!":

The little lives that lie Deep hid in grass join in a long-drawn sigh More softly still; and unheard'through the blue The falling of innumerable dew, Lifts with grey fingers all the leaves that lay Burned in the heat of the consuming day. The lawns and lakes lie in this night of love, Admitted to the majesty above. Earth with the starry company hath part; 79

The waters hold all heaven within their heart, And glimmer o’er with wave-lips everywhere Lifted to meet the angel lips of air.

But far too many things Obscuring, as a cloud of seraph wings Blinding the seeker for the Lord behind, X fall away in weariness of mind. And think how far apart are I and you, Beloved, from those spirit children who Felt but one single Being long ago, Whispering in gentleness and leaning low Out of its majesty, as child to child.

(CP, 114-5)

A nostalgia for the lost state of spiritual perfection or the

Golden Age when there was a direct commerce between the earth world and the heavenworld occasionally sppears in AE’s work.

He writes about a visionary "lapse” into "mystical childhood five thousand years ago":

The children were in so lovely a mood of gaiety that the Golden Age might have been whispering its last in them ere it departed. To the boy the hollow of air was not empty but seemed filled with the bright ones, the devas, and he longed to be a skywalker with them. His life was « . half with them and only half with his laughing companions. *

But this nostalgia for the lost Golden Age is not treated extensively in AE’s poetry as a myth of return to the para- disal past except in its relation to the myth of the Child­ hood of Humanity, And as the mystic's visionary experience is not bound by space-time restrictions, a return to the

"mystical childhood" was not a problem for AE. Nostalgia be­ longs to the realm of thought, feeling, and desire, and the

24 Song and Its Fountains, p. 35. 80 mystic in order to reach the Ultimate must subdue this realm.

AE calls this realm the realm of shadow.

The conquest of this realm of shadow, however, is no easy matter as it contains all that thought and sense can perceive, and freedom from this realm would mean an experience of the Void itself. The murderer and the victim, the cruci- fier and the crucified, all belong to the realm of Shadow.

AE writes in "The Things Seen":

The shadow drifted apart leaving the shadowless soul; A high, winged,.glittering, airy creature of the sky. What had we known of it but a fugitive*flash of wing? We had been drowned in our own shadows, you and I.

Our love was breathed upon phantom lips; shade ' wrought with shade. Oh, beloved, it was not I, but the shadow, who cried In bitterness, who stabbed. Oh, world, they were shadows too, Who bound their gods to the cross, and those who were crucified.

(CP, 387)

Not until we experience the shadow drifting apart from the shadowless soul and see soul as a high, winged creature of the sky, can we realize that we were bound by the world of shadow. All human actions, all sorrows, pains and joys, are a part of this world. But they are not real—they are only things "seen," and have no existence beyond the realm of human sense and thought. But the mystic’s quest is beyond the realm of cyclic labors and tears. For the visionary mystic it is a realm of exhausted vision. When the Self merges with the "Ancestral Self," it is the "close of the human story" 81 as AE calls it in "The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty" (CP,

201-7)} one of his most significant poems of vision. The visionary experience in the poem begins with the dreams of stars and burning skies:

I passed a dream of gloomy ways Where ne'er did human feet intrude: It was the border of a wood, A dreadful forest solitude.

With wondrous red and fairy gold The clouds were woven o’er the ocean; The stars in fiery aether swung And danced with gay and glittering motion.

A fire leaped up within my heart When first I saw the old sea shine; As if a god were there revealed I bowed my head in awe divine.

Next appears a divine messenger, the Pilot who guides him beyond the realm of space-time:

The Pilot stood erect thereon And lifted up his ancient face, Ancient with glad eternal youth Like one who was of starry race.

His face was rich with dusky bloom; His eyes abronze and golden fire; His hair in streams of silver light - Hung flamelike on his strange attire,

Which, starred with many a mystic sign, Fell as o'er sunlit ruby glowing: His light flew o'er the waves afar In ruddy ripples on each bar Along the spiral pathways flowing.

"Make haste, make haste!" he cried. "Away! A thousand ages now are gone. Yet thou and I ere might be sped Will reck no more of eve or dawn."

The Pilot is but the visionary’s Brother-Self: 82

Swift as the swallow to its nest I leaped: my body dropt right down: A silver star I rose and flew. A flame burned golden at his breast: I entered at the heart and knew My Brother-Self who roams the deep, Bird of the wonder-world of sleep.

The ruby vesture wrapped usround As twain in one; we left behind The league long murmur of the shore And fleeted swifter than the wind.

Next they encounter the mystic isles and the heavenly city with its "pinnacles and starry piles." But the mystic’s goal is beyond this:

"Our Father’s house hath many fanes; Yet enter not and worship not, For thought but follows thought Till last consuming self it wanes.

"The Fount of Shadowy Beauty flings Its glamour o’er the light of day: A music in the sunlight sings To call the dreamy hearts away Their mighty hopes to ease awhile: We will not go the way of them: The chant makes drowsy those who seek The sceptre and the diadem.

"The Fount of Shadowy Beauty throws Its magic round us all, the night; What things the heart would be, it sees And chases them in endless flight. Or coiled in phantom visions there It builds within the halls of fire; Its dreams flash like the peacock’s wing And glow with sun-hues'of desire. We will not follow in their ways Nor heed the lure of fay or elf, But in the ending of our days Rest in the high Ancestral Self."

His destination is the Great Deep itself, the Dark Divine:

We could not say if age or youth Were on his face: we only burned To pass the gateways of the day, 83

The exiles to the heart returned.

He rose to greet us and his breath, The tempest music of the spheres, Dissolved the memory of$ earth, The cyclic labour and our tears. In his our dream and sorrows passed, The spirit once again was free And heard the song the morning stars Chant in eternal revelry.

This was the close of human story; We saw the deep unmeasured shine, And sank within the mystic glory They called of old the Dark Divine.

The journey of the Self to the Ancestral Self described in the poem is marked by three stages. First, the mystic awakes to his own divine nature, his twin-self (the Pilot or the

Brother-Self) pointing out to him his ancient links with the

Ancestral Self and urging him to undertake the journey with him to the Ancestral Self. The second stage is when the mystic undertakes this journey consciously along with the

Brother-Self. Their journey, however, is not smooth. The world of thought and sense symbolized by the Fount of Shadowy

Beauty attempts to lure them away from their quest. This is a very important stage for the mystic on his spiritual journey when he realizes that all earthly attainments whether material or spiritual are merely lures (even the mystic isles and the paradisal city in the poem are caused by the Fount), and he should attempt to free himself from them in order to reach the Ultimate which is beyond thought, feeling, and desire.

The poem describes what may be called the limit of the mystic’s visionary experience. The mystic’s passage in the poem is 84 through a world of symbols and images to the realm of the imageless void. In the meditative poem "Glory and Shadow" discussed in the previous chapter the conflict between the realm of spirit and the realm of shadow is presented in the form of a dialogue. But there is no such conflict in "The

Fountain of Shadowy Beauty" as it is the visionary experience of the passage of the soul from the realm of shadow to the realm of spirit. The images and symbols with their particular visual appeal (description of the Pilot, for instance) add to the visionary nature of the experience. But as the "things seen" belong to the realm of shadow the poem attempts to hint at the limits of the visionary experience. The mystic must go beyond the visions in order to reach the Ultimate. But that closes the channels of communication between the mystic and others as the ultimate mystical experience is beyond symbols and images—it is the "close of human story." Yet the poem itself becomes an extended symbol of the mystical experience—the journey, the Pilot, the mystic isles with paradisal city, and the Dark Divine, all contributing to the meaning of the symbol. This is AE’s way of "Clothing the vast with a familiar face."

P. Berger writes about Blake’s visions: "Blake re­ mained always conscious of the real existence of his visions.

To him, they were the only reality, while our real world was 25 but a shadow and an illusion." AE did not doubt the

^William Blake: Poet and Mystic (London, 1914), p. 57. 85 existence of his visions. He declared that he was nourished and made to mature "in the house of dream" in whose "laby- 26 rinth were intimations of primeval being." But he did not think the visions were the only reality. He was aware that the mystic should cross the boundaries of even the visionary experience in order to reach the Ultimate. He did not hesi­ tate to include all the images and symbols of the visionary experience in his realm of shadow. This does not mean, however, that one should not attach any significance to the visionary experience. Visions by themselves are not the

Ultimate, but their importance to the mystic is their symbolic manifestation of the Ultimate. But the process of symboliza­ tion involved in the manifestations of the Ultimate is?, con­ ditioned by the mystic's psyche which attempts to convert the experience Into humanly conceivable imagistic terms. The communicability of the experience, however, is dependent on the expressive nature of the image. This explains the ten­ dency of AE’s visions to take the form of certain myths in his poetry. And the predominant myth in his poetry is the myth of the Mighty Mother, our next topic for discussion.

26 Song and Its Fountains, p. 25. 86

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MYTH OF THE MIGHTY MOTHER

A myth may be defined as a controlling image that gives shape and permanence to an experience which is other­ wise fragmentary and phenomenal. Philip Wheelwright traces the essence of myth to the ’’haunting awareness of transcen­ dental forces peering through the creeks of the visible uni­ verse.”^ Elsewhere he describes its function as that of ’’the expressive symbol" with maximal expressivity and "semantic 2 plenitude," C. G. Jung attributes the mythical experience to the Collective Unconscious with materials whose reality is

"prior to the fact of individuality" and which are inherent in the "psychic substructure of the individual from both a biological and an historical point of view." In other words the recurring symbols in different poets and ages are not inherited ideas or concepts but "notations of the same or

1 "Poetry, Myth and Reality," The Language of Poetry, ed. A. Tate (Princeton, 1942), p. 10.

2 "The Archetypal Symbol," Perspectives in Literary Symbolism (University Park, Penn., i960), pp. 217-219.

3 Progoff, Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning, PP. 53-54. 87

similar events or patterns occuring in the psyche.Earnst

Cassirer points out, "Myth and language are inseparable and mutually condition each other.We have seen the tendency of AE’s visionary experience to take the form of myths being a part of the process of symbolization involved both in the mystical experience and in its poetic expression. The rela­ tion between what may be called AE’s mythical imagination and his poetic expression has the characteristics of the "indisQ soluble involvement" that Cassirer finds in language:

Spiritual content and its sensuous expression are united: the former is not an'independent, self-contained entity preceding the latter, but is rather completed in it and with it. The two, content and expression, become what they are only in their interpenetration: the significa­ tion they acquire through their relation to one another is not outwardly added to their being: it is this signifi­ cation which constitutes their being.°

The interpenetration of the experience and the expression which almost blurs the distinction between the sign and the signifi­ cation in AE’s myths is especially because of their origin in visionary experience. His interest in myth was not because of any aesthetic value it may have but because of the role it played in shaping and concretizing his visionary experience.

4 Progoff, pp. 53-54.

5 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, tr. Ralph Manheim (New Haven^ 1960 ) , II, p. 40.

6 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ?-> p. 178. 88

And it was in the very nature of his visions to provide him with materials for the creation of the myths. The differ­ ence between AE’s myths and the classical mythology of Mil­ ton’s "Lycidas," Yeats’s mythology based on Irish folklore and his own occult studies, and Eliot’s mythology in "The

Waste Land" based on the anthropological sources, is not far to seek. AE’s myths were neither purely derivative in char­ acter nor were they intended to serve only an aesthetic pur­ pose in his poetry. They originated from his mystical ex­ perience and they concretized his experience acting as a means of clarification and communication. This does not, however, underrate the purposes with which mythology was used by the other poets. Nor does it mean that AE’s mythology does not serve any artistic purpose in his poetry. And at least one important myth of AE was not entirely dependent on his visionary experience. Although his own mystical experi­ ences convinced him about the divinity of the earth, he was aware that others including his Celtic ancestors had worship­ ped the earth as a divine being. We will concentrate in this chapter on AE’s use of this myth—the myth of the Mighty

Mother—in his poetry after making an acquaintance with his cosmological structure.

AE acknowledges his debt to Celtic imagination through the writings of Standish O’Grady who, he writes, "made me conscious and proud of my country, and recalled to my mind... to think of the earth under my feet and the children of our 89 7 common mother.” In The Candle of Vision he attempts to re­ construct the Celtic vision of Heaven and Earth as he be­ lieved it was known to the Druids and the bardic seers. But essentially it is AE’s own cosmological structure, for he tells us, "Let no one who requires authority read what I have 8 [ written for, I give none." It helped him, however, to con­ nect and organize his experiences of the supernature and to give a symbolic expression to his mystical experience. This cosmological structure is related to the Celtic divinities who symbolize some of the basic mystical ideas of AE: Lir, the Boundless Being or the Great Deep of Deity; Mananan, the

Divine Imagination or the root of all conscious life; Dana, the basis of all material form, mirage covering the true being; and Angus, the basis of all energy, eternal joy be­ coming love which in turn becomes desire and passion leading to the forgetfulness of its own divinity. Thus Angus emerges from its primordial state of ecstatic tenderness of joy in

Lir, its divided rays incarnate in form, enter upon a three­ fold life of spiritual love, desire, and of the dark shadow of love; and these three states have for themselves three worlds into which they have transformed the primal nature of

Dana: the World of Immortal Youth or Heaven-World, the Mid-

7 Imagination and Reveries, p. 21.

8 The Candle of Vision 152 99

World or the World of Waters where everything changes with

desire, and the Earth-World where matter assumes that solid

form when it appears inanimate and dead. Thus AE’s cosmolog­

ical structure consists of four worlds—the God-World (the

Great Deep of Deity), Heaven-World, Mid-World, and the Earth-

World. His quest may be regarded as one for reaching the

God-World, the "Dark Divine” of "The Fountain of Shadowy

Beauty." But most of his poems are about the Earth-World and emphasize the spiritual nature of the Earth which is sought

after as the Mighty Mother. Sometimes AE’s approach to this being is vague—it appears to symbolize the other worlds of

AE’s cosmogony. But he never wavers in his belief in its spirituality, and is for him ’ithe floor of a cathedral where Q the altar and Presence are everywhere.”

He writes:

This reverence came to me as a boy listening to the voice of birds one coloured evening in summer, when suddenly birds and trees and grass and'tinted air and myself seemed but one mood or companionship, and I felt a certitude that the same spirit was in all. A little breaking of the barriers and being would mingle with being.109

During his meditations too his thoughts turned more and more to the spiritual life of the earth:

All the needles of being pointed to it. I felt instinc­ tively that all I saw in vision was part of the life of

9 The Candle of Vision, p. 170.

10 Ibid. 91

Earth which is a court where there are many starry pal­ aces, There the Planetary Spirit was King, and that Spirit manifesting'through the substance of Earth, the Mighty Mother, was, I felt, the being groped after as God. The love I had for nature as garment of that deity grew deeper.11

He was convinced that "most of what was said of God was in 12 reality said of that Spirit whose body is Earth." He writes in his poem, "The Virgin Mother":

Who is that goddess to whom men should pray, But her from whom their hearts have turned away, Out of whose virgin being they were born, Whose mother nature they have named with scorn Calling its holy substance common clay.

Yet from this so despised' earth was made The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed Their generations with a light caress, ' And from some image of whose loveliness, The heart built up high heaven when it prayed.

Lover, your heart, the heart on which it lies, Your eyes'that gaze and those'alluring eyes, Your lips, the lips they kiss, alike had birth Within that mother being you despise.

Ah, when I think this earth on which I tread' Hath borne these blossoms of the lovely dead, And makes the living heart I love to beat, I look with sudden awe beneath my feet As you with erring reverence overhead.

(CP, 35-6)

What appears to be the inanimate and dead earth is both the creator and sustainer, although man has forgotten his own origin from her virgin being and despises her as common clay

11 The Candle of Vision, pp. 29-30.

12 Ibid., p. 32. 92

Evidently AE is against the religious belief which says about the body: Dust thou art/To dust returneth. The last two lines of the poem condense effectively AE’s concept of the Mighty Mother and his attitude to those whose God is in the sky up above. The poem also embodies the notion that the religious Celt gazes at the earth while the other races con- 13 template the heavens. AE’s intention was to bring back the old reverence and love for the Mother. He tells the metaphy­ sician in one of his essays that his (the metaphysician’s) search for the fountain of life would not lead him farther away from the earth, but deeper into her heart: "By it you are nourished with those living waters you would drink. You are yet in the womb and unborn, and the Mother breathes.for you the divine airs."1^ Others might say that men are "embers wrapped in clay," and the earth "rebukes the thought of God."

But AE knew the spiritual nature of the earth from his per­ sonal experience:

But I have touched the lips of clay Mother, thy rudest sod to me Is thrilled with fire of hidden clay, And haunted by all mystery.

("Dust," CP, 34)

13 G. E. Jameson, "Mysticism in AEand in Yeats in Relation to Oriental and American Thought," Unpublished Dis­ sertation, Ohio State University, 1932, p. 116. Also see, Edward Anwyl, Celtic Religion (London, 1916), pp. 66-67.

14 ' Imagination and Reveries, pp. 193-194. 93

The man who tries to run away from the earth despising her clay is not so ethereal as the earth herself:

Though X leap lightly ' O’er the unmoving clay, It is earth is ethereal Not I who run away. ("Earth'" CP, 331)

This realization for AE was like the discovery of a new world

He writes:

I who had sought afar from'earth The faery land to meet, Now find content within its girth And wonder nigh my feet.

To-day nearer love I choose And seek ho distant sphere; For aureoled by faery dews The dear brown breasts appear.

With rainbow radiance come and go The airy breaths of day; And eve is all a pearly glow With moonlit winds a-play.

The lips of twilight burn my brow, The arms of night caress: Glimmer her white eyes drooping now With grave old tenderness.

I close mine eyes from dream to be The diamond-rayed again, As in the ancient hours ere we Forgot ourselves to be.

And all I thought of heaven before I find in earth below: A sunlight in the hidden core To dim the noonday glow.

And with the earth my heart is glad, I move as one of old; With,mists of silver I am clad And bright with burning gold.

("A New World," CP, 52-3) 94

This is one of the best poems of AE oh the subject. The swift movement of the verses with the predominant iambic meter and the abab rhyme scheme adds to the charm of the poem.

Earth’s ’’dear brown breasts’’ aureoled ”by faery dews” make it a living beloved thing yet invested with a mysterious quality.

The poet has carefully brought out both the physical contact and the spiritual communication he .has with the earth. Her maternal affection and the protection she offers to her childcare expressed through the lips of the twilight burning the poet’s brow and the caressing arms of night.

The breath of earth is everywhere—it is the delight in every object and the majesty hidden in ordinary men:

From the cool and dark-lipped furrows Breathes a dim delight Through the woodland’s purple plumage To the diamond night. Aureoles of joy encircle Every blade of grass Where the dew fed creatures silent And enraptured pass. And the restless ploughman pauses, Turns and, wondering, Deep beneath his rustic habit Finds himself a king; For a fiery moment looking With the eyes of God Over fields a slave at morning Bowed him to the sod.

("The Earth Breath,” CP, 39)

Twilight hour and the night are the moments when everything on the earth feels her enchantment and awakes to her magic and mystery.

AE thought that the earth is the greatest living 95 creature we know, and like all living creatures she possesses memory:

...she carries with her, and it is accessible to us, all her long history, cities far gone behind time, empires which are dust, or buried with sunken continents beneath the waters. The beauty for which men perished is still shining; Helen is there in, her Troy, and Deirdre wears the beauty which blasted the Red Branch. No ancient lore has perished. Earth retains for herself and her children what her children might in passion have destroyed, and it is still in the realm of the Ever Living to be seen by the mystic adventurer. We argue that this memory must be universal, for there is nowhere we go where Earth does not breathe fragments from her ancient story to the med­ itative spirit. These memories gild the desert air where once the proud and golden races had been and. had passed away, and they haunt the rocks and mountains where the Druids evoked their skiey and subterrene deities.15

The earth whispers to her children all the story of her past, how she sprang from the fiery fountain of life that rose from the ancient darkness:

While the yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory, In the lilac-scented stillness let us listen to earth’s story. All the flowers like moths a-flutter glimmer rich with dusky hues; Everywhere around us seem to fall from nowhere the sweet dews. Through the drowsy lull, the murmur, the stir of leaf and sleepy hum, We can feel a gay heart beating, hear a magic singing come. Ah, I think that as we linger lighting at earth’s olden fire Fitful gleams in clay that perish, little sparks that soon expire: So the Mother brims her gladness from a life beyond her own, From whose darkness as a fountain up the fiery days

15 The Candle of Vision, p. 6l. 96

are thrown; Starry words that wheel in splendour, sunny systems, histories, Vast and nebulous traditions told in the eternities. And our listening Mother whispers through her children all the story. Come: the yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory!

(’’The Singing Silences,” CP, 101-2)

The moment of lilac-scented stillness, drowsy lull, and sleepy hum, is dense with revelation as the earth relates her story to her children.

Sometimes, in AE’s reference to the Mighty Mother all the physicality of the earth vanishes—she remains for him merely a spiritual being. In "Fantasy” he writes about a vision in which he saw the Mighty Mother herself:

...with hands uplifted peering through the cloudless miles Bent the Mighty Mother o’er me shining all with eyes and smiles: "Come up hither, child; my darling”: waving to the habitations, Thrones, and starry kings around her, dark embattled planet nations. There the mighty rose in greeting, as their child from exile turning Smiled the awful faces o’er the throne supernal burning.

(CP, 134-5)

AE’s concept of the Mighty Mother is related to his view of the Celtic Divinity, Dana, an aspect of Lir, a mirage that covers true being. In the Celtic mythology she appears as the Hibernian Mother of the gods who were called after her the Thuatha De Danaan or the Tribes of Goddess Dana and were sometimes called the Sidhe. Standish O’Grady writes: 97

This Dana was a great divinity of the Pagan Irish, and is described as the Mother of the Irish gods..., she appeared in camps on the eve of battle, and shouted with a shout of ten thousand men...; to accomplish her purpose she could take many forms.16

G. Squire calls her the most ancient Irish divinity: she was

the universal mother and probably represented earth and its

fruitfulnessj one might compare her with the Greek Demeter; 17 all the gods (Irish), at least by title, were her children. '

For AE she is the basis of every form "from the imperishable

body of the immortals to the transitory husk of the gnat.”

...she is the first spiritual form of matter, and there­ fore Beauty. As every being emerges out of her womb clothed with form, she is the Mighty Mother, and as mother of all she is the divine compassion which exists beyond and is the final arbiter of the justice of the gods. Her heart will be in ours when ours forgive.1“

AE’s poem ’’Dana" < is about this divinity:

I am the tender voice calling "Away”, Whispering between the beatings of the heart, And inaccessible in dewy eyes I dwell, and all unkissed on lovely lips,' Lingering between white breasts inviolate, And fleeting ever from the passionate touch, I shine afar, till men may not divine Whether it is the stars or the beloved They follow with rapt spirit. And I weave My spells at evening, folding with dim-caress, Aerial arms and twilight dropping hair, The lonely wanderer by wood or shore,

16 The Story of Ireland (London, 18 9 4 ) > p. 11«

17 Celtic Myth and Legend, Poetry and Romance (London, 191-?), PP* 47-49.

18 The Candle of Vision, pp. 157-161. 98

Till, filled with some deep tenderness, he yields, Feeling in dreams for the dear mother heart He knew, ere he forsook the starry way, And clings there, pillowed far above the smoke And the dim murmur from the duns of men. I can enchant the trees and rocks, and fill The dumb brown lips of earth with mystery, Make them reveal or hide the god. I breathe A deeper jiity than all love, myself Mother of all, but without hands to healj Too vast and vague, they know me not.*

(CP, 37-8)

The enchantment, magic, and mystery found in the earth AE

attributes here to Dana, the Mother of all. But the concept

in the poem is, as Dana herself puts it, ’’Too vast and vague.”

.4 The poem does not so much express AE’s experience of this god­

dess as it expresses AE’s interpretation of the Celtic divin­

ity. AE’s myth of the Mighty Mother, however, is significant

only in relation to his personal mystical experience of the

supernature organized and concretized in the myth. There were

certainly many influences on AE and the Celtic is only one of

them. For instance, he was influenced by the Hindu concept

of Maya representing the world of material form. And in the

Hindu mystical philosophy the mystic can gain spiritual know­

ledge only when he overcomes the world of illusion, the world

of name-and-form. As illusion represents ignorance, AE uses

Plato’s idea of the cave of illusion in the symbolic story,

’’The Cave of Lilith,” referred to earlier. Maya, Plato’s

Cave of Illusion, and Lilith, all stand for ignorance and the world of name-and-form or appearance. But AE’s poem, "The

Veils of Maya," is altogether in a different key. Maya is 99

conceived not as a cheat but the Mighty Mother herself:

Mother, with whom our lives should be, Not hatred keeps our lives apart: Charmed by some lesser glow in thee, Our hearts beat not within thy heart.

Beauty, the face; the touch, the eyes, Prophets of thee, allure our sight From that unfathomed deep where lies Thine ancient loveliness and light.

(CP, 126)

The Mighty Mother speaks to us through her symbols, the

physical manifestations or veils. Most people are, however,

satisfied with the ’’lesser glow” of the Mother and live in

the world of appearance. The ’’Beauty, the face, the touch,

the eyes” of the Mother can lead the seeker to the ancient

’’loveliness and light.” In other words, the veils of Maya act

as both charioting and seducing symbols—it is for the seeker

to use the symbols the way he would like to.

AE was aware of the attitude toward earth of writers

like Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman who he thought had dis--

covered like him that the earth was a ’’living creature, an elder brother of the spirit, or a mother. The phrase "my­ self Mother of all" in AE’s poem, "Dana," reminds one of

Whitman’s line, "Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the mother of all," in his "Songs of Parting." Thus several influences may be traced on AE’s concept of the Mighty Mother. But in­ fluences are not important by themselves as AE’s conviction

10 G. E. Jameson, p. 44. 100 based on his personal experience through meditations and visions. The myth is not an external appendage on his poetry to concretize his vague premonitions of the divine mystery.

Mythical imagination was not only useful in giving a direction to his mystical experience but made it a deepdr and more meaningful experience worthy of communication through myth and symbol. And the myth of the Mighty Mother is the most important myth that AE developed as a mystical poet. The occurrence of this myth in other writers only emphasizes the universality of the myth and its archetypal nature as an ex­ pressive symbol. 101

CHAPTER SIX

THE MYSTICAL POET

0 friend! this body is His lyre; He tightens its strings, and draws from it the melody of Brahma. —Kabir1

Once grasp the great Form without form And you roam where you will With no evil to fear, Calm, peaceful, at ease. T m 2 —Lao-Tzu

According to a legend when a servant asked the Persian mystic Rabia on a spring day to come out and see what God had -3 made, she replied, "Come in and behold the Maker." The le­ gend illustrates two different approaches to God—one through his symbolic manifestation in nature and events and the other through a direct communion. These approaches correspond with what Charles Williams calls the Way of Affirmation of the images and the Way of Rejection which consists "in the renun- 1 2 3

1 "This Body, His Lyre," The Mystic in Love, p. 170.

2 ' - ' "Once Grasp the Great Form," Ibid., p. 89.

3 ' ' Editor’s Note, The Mystic in Love, p. 92. 102

< A elation of all images except the final one of God himself,.”*

But in practice as Williams himself notes neither of these ways can be exclusive.In the words of a critic of his, the

Way of Negation is built upon the ’’prior affirmation that there exists something to be rejected,” and the Affirmative

Way is "grounded in the rejection of complete identity between image and basis, and presses toward God who, being beyond all imagery, is in the strict sense unimaginable.In other words, there is a kind of Affirmation-Negation of images in mystical experience, and this is particularly true of AE’s mystical experience. One may say that AE’s mystic way is the way of images as he approaches the Way of Negation through the affirmation of images. We cannot say with conviction if ever AE attained the level of mystical experience that tran­ scends all perception. But his importance as a mystical poet is because of his interest in symbol and image. His experience of the Ultimate both during meditation and vision is on a perceptual level and his poetry approaches the unimaginable through imaginable terms. This places him in the mystical

4 Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (London, 1943), p. 8.

5 Ibid., p. 9.

6 M. M. Shideler, The Theology of Romantic Love (New York, 1962), pp. 26-27. 103 7 tradition of poets such as Dante and Blake.

AE’s interest in the world around him, however, was not limited to the imagery it supplied as an aid to his mysti­ cal perception and poetic expression. He was as much inter­ ested in mundane things such as the fertilizers, creameries, and cooperative farming as in the mystical concepts of Karma and Nirvana. Earnest Boyd reports that AE once surprised the members of "a certain society of intellectual pretensions in

Dublin" when on being invited to speak, "discoursed familiarly of fertilizers and creameries,.but said not a word of Karma 8 ! or Nirvana." George Moore rightly said of him that he was 9 as practical as St. Teresa. Writing poetry was only one of the many activities and involvements of this practical mystic.

Meister Eckhart said, "What a man takes in through contempla­ tion, that he pours out in love."^^ And writing poetry was one of the loved tasks that AE assigned himself and used as an expression of his mystical life. It may not be wrong to assume that the mystical and the poetic experiences can occur

7 For Williams Dante’s Beatrice was in some sense an image of God himself. See, The Figure of Beatrice, p, 7.

Appreciations and Depreciations (New York, 1918), pp. 26-27

9 • Hail and Farewell (London, 1926), II, p. 13.

10 Quoted in "Introduction," The Mystic in Love, p. 19. 104 on two different levels of consciousness in the same person.

As I. E. Watkins points out, most mystical poets write their poetry after the event, and the process is analogous to Word­ sworth’s concept of recollection and may be described as ’’mystical intuition recollected in the poetic.”11 Signifi­ cantly enough, mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross believed in the condition of double consciousness in themselves—one part of thé consciousness enjoying a ”de- 12 lightful rest" and the other busy in "many employments."

And writing poetry may be regarded as one of the "many em­ ployments." But this particular "employment" of one level of consciousness depends on the other for its materials. In this way the poetic activity may be said to be a bridge be­ tween the two levels of consciousness. The mystical poet then has two personalities co-existing in him—one mystical and the other practical—and his poetry is a result of collaboration between them.

Another "employment" of AE that collaborated with his mystical consciousness was painting. L. A. G. Strong writes:

He painted landscapes in which the material objects were often radiant with astral, light, and which showed in the foreground some ethereal figure who would not have been visible to normal eyes. He saw, or believed that he saw, figures of the earth gods, the spirits of light and air,

11 Poets and Mystics (New York, 1953), p. 15.

12 Ibid., p. 14» 105

and other embodiments.... Certain of his paintings give one a powerful and suggestive glimpse of something beyond common sight.13

AE’s interest in painting accounts for the predominant visual

imagery in his poetry. The ethereal figures and objects be­

yond the "common sight" abound in his poetry too, and often

appear as visual images concretizing abstract experiences.

The mountain wind ceases to be an abstraction when AE writes:

The cold limgs of the air Brush by me on the hill,' Climb to-the utmost crag, Leap out, then all is still.

("A Mountain Wind," CP, 319)

Here is the description of the poet’s soul appearing as the

Brother-Self in "The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty":

His face was rich with dusky bloom; His eyes a bronze and golden fire; t’His hair in streams of silver light Hung flamelike on his strange attire.

(CP, 202)

"Dusky bloom," "a bronze and golden fire," "streams of silver

light Hung flamelike"—all are visual images suggesting the

lustrous aspects of the soul. An abstraction like "peace" becomes a visual experience of veils and vistas in "Oversoul"

The east was crowned with snow-cold bloom And hung with veils of pearly peace: They died away into the gloom, Vistas of peace—arid deeper peace.

(CP, 8)

■"AE—A Practical Mystic," The Listener, III (March 10, 1955), P. 428. 106

Caroline Spurgeon said of mysticism that it is a

temper rather than a doctrine, and it is the temper of a

mystical consciousness that exerted its influence on all that

AE did or thought. He was as much interested in the happen­

ings of his times as in the problems of eternity. He believed

that ’’Civilizations are the externalization of the soul and 1 5 character of the races," and brooded on the relation the

"politics of Time may have to the politics of Eternity.

It is significant that the Editors of 1000 Years of Irish

Prose should prefer AE’s speech "A Plea for the Workers" to his mystical writings in their selection of AE’s prose. The

problems of his times were the major preoccupations of his

journalistic writings. Occasionally, these problems found poetic expression too. The Easter Rising of 1916 made him 17 write "Salutation" addressed to Pearse, Connally, MacDonagh, and other rebels. "Gods of War" which is about the First

World War, combines in it both the horror of war and AE’s

14 Mysticism indEnglish Literature (Cambridge, 1913), p * 2»

15 - The National Being (London, 1920), p. 3.

16 The Interpreters (New York, 1923), p. vii.

17 AE’s political poems are discussed at length in Richard J. Loftus, Nationalism in Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry (Madison, 1964), and in W. I. Thompson, The Imagination of An Insurrection (New York, 1967). 107 typical mystical approach of seeing things as events in

Eternity with their own spiritual meanings:

0 outcast Christ, it was too soon For flags of battle to be unfurled While life was yet at the hot noon. Come in the twilight of the world: Its kings may greet Thee without scorn And crown Thee then without a thorn.

(CP, 238)

Perhaps, the best poem in this group is the sonnet in irregu lar meter about the death of Terence MacSwiney, the mayor of

Cork, after a sixty-nine day hunger strike in Brixton Gaol during the Black and Tans War:

A PRISONER

Brixton, September 1920

See, though the oil be low, more purely still and higher The flame burns in the body’s lamp. The watchers still Gaze with unseeing eyes while the Promethean will, The Uncreated Light, the Everlasting Fire, Sustain themselves against the torturer’s desire, Even as'the fabled Titan chained upon-the hill. Burn on, shine here, thou; immortality, until We too can light our lamps at the funeral pyre; Till we too can be noble, unshakeable, undismayed; Till we too can burn with the holy flame, and know ' There is that within us can conquer the dragon pain, And go to death alone, slowly and unafraid. The candles of God already burning row on row: Farewell, light-bringer; fly to the fountain again.

(CP, 254-5)

The Promethean myth is used as the controlling expressive symbol. The political event becomes an act of profound spiritual meaning for the poet. The agony and torture that the body suffers is an indication of the fearlessness and 108

strength of the soul: "Burn on, shine here, thou immortality,

until/We too can light our lamps at the funeral pyre.”

AE’s interest in the events of his times naturally

leads us to his role in the Irish Literary Renaissance. His biographers, critics, and literary historians affirm that he was a major figure. Earnest Boyd wrote in his book published

in 1918: "The smallest pseudonym in Irish literature stands for the manifold, indeed, the greatest personality in Ireland 18 at the present time." A life-long friend of Yeats, Moore,

Lord Dunsany, and James Stephens, AE encouraged many young writers like Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, F. R, Higgins, and L. A. G. Strong. The production of AE’s play, Deirdre, along with Yeats’ Cathleen Ni Houlihan, ushered in the Irish dramatic movement. Yeats and AE were also the active partici­ pants in the Irish Theosophical Movement during its early years. Theosophy not only introduced AE to various mystical writings including the Upanishads, but also helped him approach the Celtic legend and belief with a larger perspective which made him see in it universal significance. But he felt his mystical endeavor would be thwarted if he were to associate himself with a cult .or society. This is clear from his letter to Madame Blavatsky:

I am not a proclaimed Theosophist. I do not belong to the Society.... I do not wish to be merely a metaphysical

18 Appreciations and Depreciations (New York, 1918), p.26 109

mystic. I am sadly afraid, however, that most of us followers of Theosophy are but just out of our swaddling clothes. We must have our. toys and picture books. My ideal is to worship the One God in spirit and in truth. Is that the aim of the T.S.?19

He also speaks in the same letter about the "almost certain 20 degeneracy of any Society or Sect formed by mortal hands."

James O’Brien in his unpublished study of the influence of

theosophy on AE, Yeats, and James Stephens recognizes the role

played by Theosophy in providing the Irish poets with a com­

parative mythology that helped them to interpret Irish legends 21 and the poetry of William Blake. But he testifies that

"most specific passages" in the works of these poets "cannot

be traced directly to the writing of A. P. Sinnett, Madame 22 Blavatsky, or other Theosophist." AE was not interested in

mystical theories which did not conform to his personal ex-

perience. He writes:

The soul of the modern mystic is becoming a mere hoarding place for uncomely theories. He creates an uncouth sym­ bolism, and blinds his soul with names drawn from the Kabala or ancient Sanskrit, and makes alien to himself

19 Letters from AE, pp. 6-8.

20 Ibid., p. 7.

21 "Theosophy and the Poetry of George Russell (AE), William Butler Yeats, and James Stephens," Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Washington, 1956, p. 340.

22 Ibid., p. 48. 110

the intimate powers of the spirit, things which in truth are more his than the beatings of his heart.23

The occultism and magic which demand the exercise of the will

for the control of matter and the psychical phenomena did

not interest AE as much as they interested Yeats, for their

goals were not related to mysticism. Yeats and Arthur Symons, however, regarded magical studies essential to poetry.2/1

References to Arthur Symons in AE’s letters are not happy

ones. In one letter he expresses surprise that Symons should

like his volume of poems The Earth Breath and adds, "I am

forced to the conclusion that he has a soul or only lately 2 5 lost it." Symons thought that the poetry of AE like the poetry of Yeats was an expression of the Symbolist Movement.2^

27 As Kermode points out Symons confused magic with mysticism.

His "magical analogy giving the symbol the same relation to 28 spiritual reality as the daemonic ’sign’ of the mage" is

23 Imagination and Reveries, pp. 188-189.

24 Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (New York, 1957). p. 110.

25 Letters, p. 27.

26 The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, 1958), p. xix. 27 Romantic Image, p. 109.

28 Ibid., p. 110. Ill

much different from the symbolism employed by AE. Symons

was associated with a movement which was primarily aesthetic

although it was ”a revolution” against the "contemplation and

rearrangement of material things" considered as "normal 29 art." AE’s symbolism has the characteristics of what C. S.

Lewis calls sacramentalism which implies that "the world

which we mistake for reality is the flat outline of that

which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimagin- 30 albe dimensions."

William Phelps wrote in his book on the advance of

poetry in the Twentieth Century that in the "modern tempest 31 of Ireland Yeats is Ariel and AE is Prospero." Yeats too

seems to have felt at a certain stage in his poetical career

that AE’s fame as a poet might surpass his. He wrote to AE

once: "I think you will out-sing us all and sing in the ears 32 of many generations to come." But later the literary his­

torians had a different story.to tell—the master of the island

29 Romantic Image, p. 109. 0 30 The Allegory of Love (London, 1936), p. 45.

31 Quoted in Mary Clare Mackinnon; "Mysticism and Some Irish Writers," Unpublished Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1928, p. 24.

32 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York, 1955),p.294. 112 vanished into oblivion while Ariel continued to entertain many ears with his songs. AE did not care much for literary success though he got it in his life time, butthe was almost forgotten after his death. Yeats took an interest in mysti­ cism, but his primary goal in life was not mystical illumina­ tion or the quest for the Ultimate. The Communicators in A

Vision come to give him "metaphors for poetry." It is true that he believed that the function of poetry is something more than just giving pleasure and he expected it to reveal through the metaphor and symbol the "hidden reality of the Otherworld."34 But this apparent mystical goal was really

3 5 what Symons calls "aesthetic disengagement." In the words of Richard Ellman, "Yeats used symbols primarily to hide the world rather than reveal another.This is especially ob­ vious in the world of beauty and perfection he creates in the Byzantium poems—a totally artificial realm of art. He sought the possibility of the Unity of Being not in life but

33 ' W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London, 1937); p. 80.

34 Loftus, Nationalism in Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry, p. 70.

35 The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 5.

36 ' Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York, 1948), p. 162 113

"in art, and in art of that kind called symbolic." 37 His

dislike of aging and preoccupation with it in his poetry con­ firm his inability to reach the spiritual realm that AE was able to, where the ravages of time have no real meaning. AE’s aesthetics of a mystic with concern for an intoxication with divine things and fundamental ideas of spirituality would not have interested Yeats who sought the Unity of Being purely in the realm of art. Sensual experience which is the basis of Yeats’ aesthetics was useful to AE as a charioting symbol in his mystical experience. Considering their major preoccu- i I pations while writing poetry, it may be said that the two major poets of the Irish Renaissance explored two different realms of human experience—sensual and spiritual. Each tried to use the images and symbols from the realm of the dominant experience of the other to accentuate the range of experience of his own realm. The principal difference between the two poets lies in their attitude to the Image. For AE the Image, is a means of controlling his elusive experience of the Ulti­ mate. As we noticed earlier his way of images shares the characteristics of the Way of Affirmation-Negation of the mystics who seek the Ultimate through the way of images. The

Image for Yeats was primarily an end in itself with its own aesthetic-magical accomplishment.

37 The Romantic Image, p. 54. 114

AE satisfies the definition of the artist as "the man who goes out into the empty space between man and God and takes the enormous risk of attempting to create in that va­ cancy a new fabric of connections between man and the divine power.In an age when the concept of alienation dominates all departments of life—"We think of the key, each in his prison/Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison"—AE speaks with a reassuring confidence about the unity of Man,

God, and Nature. But this perception of unity that AE arrives^ at is not through any theological speculation or philosophical study but through an inner knowledge. AE’s importance as a mystical poet is chiefly because of his ability to render in poetic terms what would otherwise be a subjective mystical knowledge. By relying on meditation and vision for both theme and image of his poetry, AE avoided the danger of writing poetry of abstract speculation about the nature of his mysti­ cal experience. The immediacy of the experience and the in­ timate nature of its communication in his poetry is tempered by the personal traits of AE. Stephen Gwynn speaks of the

"philosophy that radiated through his nature. It was in part a love of beauty, but more truly a love of humanity, of the

38 J.•H. Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 13-14.

39 ' T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land," 11. 413-14. 115 divine in human nature,"^ In his poem, "Krishna” (CP,

6l~2), the supreme deity who reincarnates in the human form combines in him the weaknesses of the flesh and the virtues of the spirit—all the opposing qualities of human life— youth and age, lust and love, drunkenness and sobriety, ugli­ ness and beauty, mortality and immortality. In his quest of the Ultimate, AE was rarely oblivious to the "loved earth things" such as the hearth and home, women, children, and the countryside. He used the loved things of the earth as symbols to reach what he called "Love’s own ways" and "Clothed the vast with a familiar face" (’.'Symbolism," CP, 47) in his poetry. And often his approach to "Love’s own ways" was tempered with the imagination and intuition of a child:

And one thing after another Was whispered out of the air, How God was a big, kind brother Whose home is in everywhere.

His light like a smile comes glancing Through the cool, cool winds as they pass From the flowers in heaven dancing To the stars that shine in the grass.

From the clouds in deep blue wreathing And most from the mountains tall, But God like a wind goes breathing A dream of Himself in all.

("A Memory," CP, 112)

40 Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language (New York, 1936), pp. 119-120. 116

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. AE’S WORKS

AE’s Letters to Minanlabain. Introduction by Lucy Kingsley Porter. New York, 1937.

The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy. New York, 1933.

The Candle of Vision. Introduction by Leslie Shepard. New ÿorky ig65.

Collected Poems. New York, 1926.

Co-operation and Nationality. Dublin, 1912.

Dark Weeping. London, 1929. I Deirdre. Dublin, 1907.

The Divine Vision and Other Poems. New York, 1903.

The Earth Breath and Other Poems. New York, 1897.

Enchantment and Other Poems. New York, 1930.

Gods of War and Other Poems, Dub1in, 1915.

The Hero in Man. London, 1909.

Homeward: SongsBy the Way. Dublin, 1894.

The House of the Titans and Other Poems. New York, 1934.

Imagination and Reveries. London, 1915.

The Interpreters. London, 1922.

Letters from AE. ed. Alan Denson. Foreword by Monk Gibbon. New York, 1961.

The Living Torch. Selected Prose. ed. Monk Gibbon. London

The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories. Dublin, 1904.

Midsummer Eve. New York, 1928, 117 The National Being. London, 1920.

The Nuts of Knowledge. London, 1903.

"A Plea for the Workers.” 1000 Years of Irish Prose. eds. Vivian Mercier and David Greene. New York, 1952.

Printed Writings by George W. Russell (AE)—A Bibliography. Compiler, Alan Denson. Evanston, Illinois, 1961?

The Renewal of Youth. London, 1911.

Selected Poems. New York, 1935.

Some Irish Essays. Dublin, 1906.

Some Passages from the Letters of AE to Yeats. Dub1in, 1936

Vale and Other Poems. New York, 1931.

Voices of the Stones. London, 1925.

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Abrams, M. H., ed. Literature and Belief. English Institute Essays 1957. New York, 1958.

Anwyl, Edward. Celtic Religion. London, 1916.

Arnold, Bruce, A Concise History of Irish Art. New York, 1968.

Atmananda, Swami. -Sankara’s Teachings In His Own Words. Bombay, 1958.

Ballantyne, J. R., and Govind Sastri Deva. Yogasutras of Patanjali. Calcutta, 1952.

Bax, Clifford. Some I Knew Well. London, 1951.

Beach, Joseph Warren. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth- Century English Poetry. New York, 1956.

. English Literature of the Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth Century. New York, 19(^2.

Bennett, Charles A. A Philosophical Study of Mysticism. New Haven, 1923. 118

Bergson, Henri Louis. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. New York, 1935.

Besant, Annie. The Ancient Wisdom. Madras, 1949.

Bevan, Edward R. Symbolism and Belief. New York, 1968.

Blacam, Aedh de. "Talks with AE," Irish Bookman, I (Feb., 1947), 13-19.

Blake, William. Poetry and Prose of William Blake. ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London, 1939.

Blavatsky, Helena P. The Secret Doctrine. 2 vols. Pasadena California, 1952.

Bose, A. C. Three Mystic Poets: A Study of W. B. Yeats, AE and Rabindranath Tagore. Introduction by James H. Cousins. Kolhapur, India, 1945.

Boss, Medard. The Analysis of Dreams. London, 1957.

Bowra, C. M. The Romantic Imagination. London, 1949.

______. The Heritage of Symbolism. London, 1959.

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______. Ireland’s Literary Renaissance. New York, 1916. Rev. edition, 1922.

______. Portraits: Real and Imaginary. New York, 1924.

Cassirer, Earnst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Form. Vols. I & II. New Haven,i960.

Clarke, Austin. Poetry in Modern Ireland. Dublin, 1951.

Clyde, William. M. A.E. London, 1935.

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Eglinton, John, (W. K. Magee). "AE and His Story," Dial, LXXXII (April, 1927), 271-281.

. Irish Literary Portraits. London, 1935.

.____ . A Memoir of AE. London, 1937.

. "The Poetry of AE," Dublin Magazine. XXVI (July- Sept., 1951), 5-9.

Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols; Studies in Religious Symbolism. tr. Philip Mairet. New.York', 1961.

Eliot, T. S. Essays Ancient and Modern. New York, 1936.

. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London, 1933.

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Evans, William V. Belief and Art. Chicago, 1939.

Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. Religious Trends in Poetry. Vol. V. New York, 1962.

Figgis, Darrell. AE (George W. Russell). A Study of a Man and a Nation. Dublin, 19l6.

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Grubb, H. T. Hunt. "AE, Poet, Painter and Mystic," Poetry Review, XXIX (Jan-Feb., 1938), 39-53.

. "Review of AE’s Selected Poems," Poetry Review, XXVII (Jan.-Feb., 1936), 51-62.

Gwynn, Stephen L. Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language. London^ 1930. "

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______. Mysticism in Religion. New York, 1947.

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. "The Place of AE in Irish Culture." Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. New York University, 1951.

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Oxford, 1939.

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