CHAPTER SEVEN

THE METAPHYSICAL VISION

KABIR, TRAHERNE AND VAUGHAN

Common to both seventeenth-century English religious poetry and Hindi nirguI)8 bhakti poetry is a certain metaphysical element due to the poets' philosophical consciousness of an intimate relationship between the individual self and the universe, between the human spirit and the cosmic Absolute Being. The religious sensibility that explores this relationship is manifested in a poetry marked by a constant tension, confliet, or fusion of thought and feeling. English religious lyrics from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries varied, from time to time, in their emotional and intellectual quality with the shifting emphasis on different aspects of the spiritual life. It has been shown above that the more obviously affective devotion of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century lyrics gradually admitted more of a reflective quality; and that by the end of the sixteenth century, SouthweIl's poetry passionately striving towards a human-divine communion, has a clearly metaphysical and didactic element. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries combined the emotional and speculative in longer poems of an allegoricalor explicitly didactic type most clearly seen in the poetry of Spenser and his imitators. There was also in this period, a more restless curiosity about the psychology of the human mind, which placed greater emphasis upon the analysis of mental and emotional processes. The "weIl-made" poems of Herbert show how the intellectual tone and the logieal progression of thought are combined with the devotional warrnth of his poetry. Nearer to Donne than to the rhapsodie Crashaw, in his control of the logieal development of a theme, he is nevertheless not quite so philosophieal as Vaughan and Traheme. Literary criticism, since World War 11, has tended to qualify the importance and range of the term "metaphysieal" as applied to the seventeenth-century English poets of the school of Donne, and to emphasise the devotional aspect in their more obviously religious 110 THE METAPHYSICAL VISION

lyrics. 1 It is true that the theory and practice of Christian meditation, deriving from the Middle Ages, play a large part in seventeenth• century religious poetry, as can be seen in the works of Herbert and Crashaw; but the term "metaphysical" in preference to "devotional", is useful in describing those religious poems of Vaughan and Traherne that were "inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and of the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence." 2 Commenting on this conception as characteristic of seventeenth-century English Metaphysical poetry, Miss White observed more than thirty years ago that "metaphysical poetry is no isolated phenomenon peculiar to the seventeenth century, but a recurrent aspect of universal poetry".3 She had in mind, of course, Sir Herbert Grierson's reference to the metaphysical quality in Dante and Goethe; and her application of "universal" was probably restricted to Europe. But an examination of Hindi bhakti poetry shows that the sphere of metaphysical poetry extends beyond the literatures that are derived from the European literary and religious traditions. Hindi sagulJa bhakti poets like Siira Däsa and Mlrarp Bat make the conditioned Brahman, manifested in the lives of the avatäras, the focus, of their worship, devotion and poetry. In contrast to them, nirgulJa bhakti poets aim at identification with the unconditioned Absolute, and their poetry generally expresses the search for an all• inclusive unity through the philosophical ideas of Vedänta, Buddhism and suggestions of SiifIsm. But these two schools of sagUlJa and nirgulJa poetry, representing the two main aspects of bhakti, cannot be contained in water-tight compartments. It has already been pointed out that in the poetry of sagulJa bhakti poets like Siira Däsa and TulasI Däsa, metaphysical ideas are expressed in works that are predominantly emotional and centred on the sectarian worship of Kr~l}.a and Räma. So, too, in· nirgulJa bhakti poetry there are strong traces of the influence of theism; for even though their belief is generally monistic the nirgulJa poets have recourse in some of their verses to the more sensuous imagery of Vai~l}.ava bhakti. In Western terms, the two schools of sagulJa and nirgulJa poetry may be said to follow broadly, in the one case, the path of affective devotion; and, in

I See, Mario Praz, "Baroque in England", Modern Philology, LXI, Feb., 1964. 2 H. J. c. Grierson, The Background 01 English Literature and Other Collected Essays and Addresses (London, 1925), p. 115.

j Helen C. White, The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience (New York, 1st ed., 1936, repr. 1956), p. 72.