MYSTICISM IN MODERN POETRY
A Perspective on the Poetry
of A. E.
DILIP CHATTERJEE
The spirit of mysticism, which was an
undercurrent in English poetry from the seventeenth century and which became
more manifest in the later nineteenth century poets due to their absorption of
various influences such as German Romanticism and the Eastern mystical thought,
continued in a new variation in modern literature. The modern world, with its
development of technology and the growth of urban civilization, created a nostalgia for the primitive harmony in sensitive minds.
The parched and thirsty dwellers in the modern waste land long to return to the
fountains of spiritual harmony. Modern man feels the miseries of the
one-dimensional existence, which the machine age has brought upon him. He loses
the feel of religion and communal life but depth psychology has opened before
him new possibilities. It is a commonplace now that the rational self does not
comprise the entire consciousness within man. There is in man a profounder, a
hidden faculty. This hidden power or “imprisoned splendour”,
man can regain by his own effort and he can go beyond his mundane
self in moments of heightened consciousness. Mysticism, therefore, goes beyond
its traditional meaning and is used in altogether a wider sense in the modern
age. In recent years mysticism has become the pursuit of the “intensity
experience”, “cosmic experience” or “peak experience”.1 Modern
mysticism is secular and it does not necessarily mean an identity experience
with God or the Absolute or any of such religious experience.
Among modern poets T. S. Eliot, who started
as a clinical analyst of the spiritually-dead citydweller,
discovered the potentiality of the new life in the rediscovery of the
“imprisoned splendour” in the modern waste land. Like
so many others of their time, he was uncomfortable with the tradition that
interprets the temporal world as a reflection of man’s fallen nature and he
sought a more congenial philosophy that would allow for a positive view of the
human condition. Coming to terms with this essentially modern dilemma be found
in the Eastern thought a way of transcendence that affirms man’s spiritual
nature by extending his capacity for contact with the Real in moments of
heightened consciousness. 2 T. S. Eliot cannot be called a mystic
but at times his gaze has approached mystical vision. His ‘
This form, this face, this life
living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for
that unspoken,
The awakened, lips
parted, the hope, the new ships.
Here by means of this symbolic identification
with Pericles the poet presents his urges for
communion with a higher reality. In this state of mystic rapture his lips are
parted and he is waiting for the unspoken word. The use of paradoxical language
such as “less clear or clearer”, “less strong and stronger”, “more distant than
stars and nearer than the eye” give the poem a tone and pattern we often come
across in mystic poetry.
In his Four Quartets Eliot takes us
right up to the threshold of a similar vision of a revelatory moment when the
protagonist is overwhelmed by the sudden unveiling of his past. This sudden
illumination is made concrete by the image of a shaft of sunlight in a rose
garden which transfigures the world:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even
while the dust moves,
There rises the hidden laughter
Of
children in the foliage.....
What the speaker intends to suggest here is
that any moment of time, however brief and insignificant, can be called back or
transfigured by a moment of illumination. Here the speaker rediscovers his past
experiences and a buried moment is recreated in a shaft of sunlight.
The vision of this revelatory moment in which
one could have a glimpse of the heart of light is once again presented in the
opening lines of the “Little Gidding,” Here the visionry brightness is sustained over a longer period of
time. But how is this vision of the heart of light achieved? The protagonist in the Four Quartets gives
the answer. He says that the “still point” or the timeless spiritual reality can be achieved by means of self-abnegation, by descending
lower - “into the world of perpetual solitude” – into the internal darkness. This descent into
the darkness symbolizes a descent into the night of the mystics. The mystic in
this journey into the dark night of the soul throws away one by one all his
possessions and burdens till he makes himself bare and naked; he dies but he is
reborn:
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through
the dark cold and empty desolation.
The speaker realizes that only in a state of
desolation can he commune with the world beyond time? For the achievement of
this spiritual pursuit he also accepts and emphasizes the spirit of selfless
action of the Bhagavadgita, one of his most favourite books:
But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us there is only the trying. The rest is
not our business.
Eliot’s Four Quartets provides us with the affirmative modes of
mystical consciousness. Through the record of this visionary experiences Eliot
tried to give back to the early twentieth century a world in which man lived by
fresh visions and to restore the moral dimensions of a universe in which
visions belonged. Eliot himself enjoyed only in frequent moments of revelation
but these were sufficient visions to initiate in him a new sense of the meaning
of life. 3
Eastern mystical thought provided a great
artistic stimulus not only to T. S. Eliot but Yeats
as well. Most of Yeats’ early poems bear the marks of
Indian mystical thought. His “The Indian upon God” is at once a denial of
materialism and a glorification of life and an assertion of the individual
soul. Even in his later years, in the sudden moments of intensity, Yeats experienced a kind of mystic rapture when he happened
to be sitting in a
My body of a sudden blazed,
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and
could bless. 4
This wisdom is the outcome of sudden illumination of an experience which lays the body asleep and brings the soul face to face with ultimate truth. This is an experience in which we get a sense of what G. K. Chesterton called “absurd good news”, the sudden feeling that everything is good, and that the human inability to see this is sheer stupidity, a kind of colour blindedness.
The fundamental mystical conception of the
reality of the one and the unreality of the many was realised
by Yeats through a personal intuition as recorded in
the following lines in another poem called” A Meditation in Time of War”:
For one throb of the artery,
while on that old grey
stone I sat
under the old-wind-broken tree,
I knew that one is animate
Mankind inanimate fantasy.
But this knowledge is not what he speaks. The
mystic’s ecstasy in merging himself with the one is not his quest. Yeats chose the phenomenal life of the “many” the frog
spawn of a blind man’s ditch rather than the one of complete absorption into
God.5 In some great poems of his later phase like “Vacillation” and
“A dialogue of self and soul” Yeats refuted the
renunciation of mystics and seers and affirmed the position of the hero or the
“swordsman” or in other words he would rather choose to remain “a sinful man to
the end.” The choice he suggests is between heroism and renunciation is a
mystic of which he unhesitatingly chooses the former.
Among Yeats’
contemporaries who had seriously taken to the Eastern ideal of the mystic and
who exercised an important influence in the Irish scene was George William
Russell (1867-1935). A. E., the first two letters of the gnostic
word Aeon, meaning heavenly spirit, was the pen-name
of George W. Russell. Indian mystical thought had a great hold on A. E.
Theosophical literature was one of the important sources of A.E’s
knowledge of Indian mystical thought. A.E. was the pivot of the Dublin
Theosophical Movement which made a great impact on the Irish literary revival.
It was under the influence of this significant movement that A. E. perused the
mystical teachings of the East and the psychology of mystical experience. Most
of A. E.’s poems like “Om”,
“Indian”, “
In his poem called “Om”
a Brahmin boy is seen to be chanting the word “
The word which Brahma at his dawn
Outbreathes and endeth at his
night,
Whose tide of sound go rolling on
Gives birth to orbs of
pearly light.
“
The voice of earth was stilled
The child was lifted to the wise.
A strange delight his spirit filled,
And Brahma looked through his shining eyes.
By means of prayer the boy is lifted to the exalted stage of a seer who
has realized Brahma within himself. The boy’s achievement of this vision and
the state of highest wisdom manifests itself through his shining eyes. In the
poem called “Indian”, A. E. portrays the same glory and splendour
of Brahma who “dreams the joys that throng in space”, that is, He is the sole
repository of truths of existences. A. E. seems to imply that this is a kind of
instinctive faith that reverberates in the soil of
In another poem called ‘Free” A. E. relates
such experiences with that of the ancient sages. These sages, he suggests,
lived in the quietude of the caves of the mountains and they worshipped God
neither with incense nor with flowers but with “the sense of wonder.” This is
the mode peculiar to the mystics. A mystic is often regarded as a heretic for
his denial of ritualism and formal religious codes, because he trusts only the
responses of his heart and exercises his soul to embody the truth of
experience. He is in the real sense free from all bindings that tie man to
conventions of time and history. The poem celebrates the heroic spiritual deeds
of the sages in a grand or lofty language. A.E. calls their deeds “heroic” not
in the sense of heroic action but in the sense of spiritual triumph. The last
two lines of the second stanza captures the typical
paradoxical expression of a mystic.
As still as the lips, of the lonely
Though burning with
dumbness of praise.
The glory of the creation is experienced to
the full but no utterance can be given to this ineffable experience. Here A.
E., like a true mystic, feels the inadequacy of language in persuasion of the
wonder of mystical experience. It is in this sense that Plotinus’
definition of mysticism as “a flight of alone to the alone” can be understood.
A. E. says that these free beings remain enraptured in their loneliness and
hide themselves in the unrecognizing but sure presence of God:
They fled to the lonely enraptured
And hid in the darkness
divine.
The images of the sages
sleeping in the caves of the mountains seems to have been drawn from
ancient Indian literature as well as from celtic
myths. The very title of the poem “Free” may be derived from the Indian concept
of the free souls, or the seers who accept complete Sannyasa
or renunciation.
That A. E. was soaked in ancient Indian
thought is evident in many of his poems. In “Evanescence” he echoes the famous Upanishadic dictum Tat tvam asi or that Thou art:
Could you and I whene’er
the light appears
Cry at the wonder, “I
am that”, as did the Vedic sages?
A. E. followed the footsteps of those ancient sages seeking light and
awakening through the adventures of the spirit. His poem called “The Robing of the King” presents his regret that he would not
prepare himself for death like an Indian Yogi, “leaving the body he chose”
instead of being thrust out of it. Here the poet described the ascension of an
old ascetic (presumably Indian) “wrinkled over by unnumbered years.” A. E. knew
that the Indian Yogis were capable of living as long as they liked and died
only when the spirit withered relinquishing its “faded dress” (an expression
from the Bhagavadgita) and then
returned to freedom in the sky. As a genuine mystic A. E. affirms that, though
a fallen creature, man is capable of such ascent through vision. For there is
an essential divinity in man which at times becomes conscious of itself and
feels at one with all souls.
In the innermost of his being A. E. knows
himself to be at one with all souls, addressing his inner self, he sets out in
a line the ulterior motive of his art and its distinction from the art of those
poets who celebrated only the aesthetics of joy,
..... some there be
seek Thee only for a song;
I to lose myself in Thee.
This absorption of the self into the
universal soul is the fundamental reality for the mystic. To the eye and the
ear of the mystic, the universe is one vast invitation from the Eternal spirit
to men tied down to material existence. In his poem called “Answer” A. E.
sings:
Out of the vast the voice of One replies
whose words are clouds and stars, and night
and day
when for the light the anguished spirit cries
Deep in the house of clay.
A. E. sees man as an anguished spirit crying within the bonds of his
clayey body for a lost glory or for a lost home. He believes in the ascension
of the human spirit to the pristine glory. He deplores the degrading state of
modern man in a machanized unspiritual society. In
his autobiography A. E promises that a new development in human consciousness
is imminent:
I would cry out to our humanity, sinking
deeper into
our Iron Age that the Golden world is about
us and
that beauty is open to all, and none are shut
out
from it who will turn to and seek for it.
6
It is the note of strong affirmation of the hope of a spiritual renewal
of the world or the great reversal as Yeats put it
which makes mysticism a radical force in modern thought. Sri Aurobindo, a
strong believer in this kind of development of spiritual life or Divine life,
thought the inspiration of Celtic Revival along with the spread of Indian
mystical thought were the basic sources of this new hope in the world. Sri
Aurobindo appreciated the subtler and spiritual vision of A. E’s poetry and he
asserts:
The subtler
element….is the most original,
the most unworked
and fruitful in promise for
the future and represents the higher
possibility
of a greater coming of poetry. 7
By this “Subtler element” Sri Aurobindo refers to the distinct
spiritual turn and the straining towards a deeper and more potent, “supra
intellectual and supra vital vision of things” in A.E’s
poetry. He regarded A. E. as one of the forerunners of this new spirit and the
new way of seeing.
The spiritual and visionary element of A. E.’s poetry was appreciated by Yeats as well who came to see in A. E.’s poems as essential components of the spirit of the Celtic Revival The symbolic charm and concern with the spiritual life most manifest in A. E.’s poetry appealed to Yeats as the two distinctive notes of contemporary Irish literature. During the ‘Nineties Yeats’ criticism was full of references to the emergence of spiritual concerns among the Irish writer’s and A.E. seemed to him the centre of this new hope. In his review of A.E ‘s Homewards: Songs by the way (1894) Yeats further affirms his belief in A.E.’s importance as the leader of this spiritual movement. “Home” to A.E. means the return of the soul to its source, the absorption of the spirit in the universal spirit. Most of the poems in this volume are the records of ecstacies which mark the search of the soul for the Infinite. In the poem called “Desire” We see the poet’s mystical yearning becomes a lofty aspiration,
And with what yearning inexpressible
Rising from long forgetfulness I turn
To Thee, invisible.
It is the genuine expression of a deep spiritual passion. This spirit of turning to the invisible or God is also expressed in the poem called “Star Teachers.” Here the poet looks at the starry sky and feels:
“Those myriad eyes that look on me are mine.”
And he believes that:
Wandering beneath them I have found again
The ancient ample moment, the divine,
The God-root within man.
To seek and realise this God-root within man
is the fundamental quest of A. E. as it is for all mystics. His poem called
“The Unknown God” in Homewards reveals the typical attitudes of a
mystic where mundane reality assumes transcendental height:
Far up in 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 and unheeded
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.
In the light and shade of the twilight the poet experiences the
communion with Eternal Beauty not seen by the poet’s naked eyes. It is revealed
only in the poet’s inner being and is realized not by physical senses but by
intuitive vision. The utter failure of our sensuous eyes to gain spiritual
apprehension of higher reality is what the mystics affirm in all ages. Here
A.E., like a true mystic, not only sees the vision of Eternal Beauty but he
participates in it as well. It is these mystical and visionary poems of A.E’s Homewards that drew James Cousins to him and
he became a disciple and keen follower of A. E. Cousins and A. E. were both
from Ulster but it was through their common interest in Celtic Revival
and Indian spiritual thought that united them into a bond of friendship. In his
autobiography We Two Together Cousins says:
I read the little book (Homewards) and
went
on fire with the realisation
that the Immortal
poetry had been given to Ireland. 8
It is the symbolic charms and the spiritual
approach in A.E.’s poetry that made Yeats call A.E. “the most subtle and spiritual” poet of his
generation, and a visionary who should find a place beside Swendenberg
and Blake. He also realized the importance of A.E. in the spiritual and
imaginative awakening of Ireland in the late ’Nineties of the 19th and early
’Twenties of the twentieth century and said:
Dublin is waking up in a number of ways and
about a number of things. Russell is doing a good part in the awakening. 9
In mystical poetry of the modern period A. E.’s is among the finest.
1 Colin Wilson: Poetry
and Mysticism (London, 1970). p. 331.
2 Rebeccah Kinnaman Neff:
“New Mysticism” in the writings of May Sinclair and T. S. Eliot. Twentieth
Century Literature (Spring 1980). p. 85.
3 Lyndall Gordon: Eliot’s Early Years (O. U. P.
1977 ). p. 139.
4 Yeats: “Vacillation” Collected Poems. Variorum
Edition. p. 284.
5 Yeats: A Dialogue of Self and Soul. Ibid., p. 479.
6 A. E.: The
Candle of Vision (U. S. A. 1965). p. 34.
7 Sri Aurobindo: The
Future Poetry (Pondicherry. 1953). p. 222.
8 James H.
Cousins: We Two Together (Ganesh & Co.,
Madras. 1950). p. 33.
9 Allan Wade, Ed. The
Letters of W. B. Yeats London, 1954). p. 306.