Mysticism
in Wordsworth’s Poetry
RAJENDRA PRASAD ACHARYA
William Wordsworth was
the supreme pioneer and founder with Coleridge of the English Romantic Movement
that momentous and epoch-making movement that broke the cult of dry, sterile
rationalism in English poetry and ushered in a new era by establishing and
vindicating the primacy and sovereignty of intuition and imaginative vision in
literature as well as in life.
Romantic imagination, as
conceived and cultivated by the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Blake and Shelley, etc., is something unique and unparalleled in its kind. It
is essentially what Joubert called “the eye of the soul.” It is not a playful
will-o’-the-wisp - not the vague, frivolous, capricious fancy indulging in
utopian reveries or fairyland fantasies. It is that sublime and crowning
faculty of human spirit through which we can penetrate the ultimate mysteries
of human life, of the soul of man as well as of the cosmos. It is that by which
we may be able, to quote the pregnant lines of Blake,
“To see a world in a
grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild
flower,
Hold infinity in the
palm of your hand,
And eternity in an
hour.”
–Auguries
of Innocence
In the Romantic
viewpoint, imagination is the only way of perceiving and realizing the one in
the many, the abiding behind the flux, the infinite behind the finite, the
eternal behind ephemeral, and the transcendent behind the immanent. And thus
William Blake, the great Romantic poet and visionary, aptly observed: “One
power alone makes a poet – imagination, the Divine vision.” Romantic vision
upholds and vindicates the ultimate priority and ascendancy of imagination over
the logical and speculative reason of the human mind while not denying or
belittling the limited value and utility of the latter in human life. It
cherishes the view that there are higher realms of experience, ultimate
verities of life and baffling phenomena of the universe which the frail, finite
human reason cannot explore and comprehend or only do it too inadequately and
imperfectly. And it is only the imagination which can offer fleeting flashes of
profound and penetrating insight into the heart of the reality. Imagination
based on direct intuitive insight or flashes of immediate awareness is a
faculty that transcends but does not reject the reason and intellect of man.
Emphasizing the supreme importance and power of imagination. Wordsworth very
perceptibly says:
“…..Imagination,
which, in truth,
Is but another name for
absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude
of mind,
And reason in her most
exalted mood.”
–Prelude,
Book IV
While reason divides,
disrupts and dissociates things, imagination links, unifies and binds them
together. Thus in sharp contrast to the Cartesian metaphysics of Descartes
which maintains a dichotomy between matter and spirit, microcosm (man) and
macrocosm (universe), the Romantic imagination finds in the entire universe –
between the sentient living beings as well as inanimate objects, a bond of
all-embracing unity, solidarity and fellowship. Another distinctive feature of
the Romantic imagination is the experience of owe, wonder, ecstasy or rapture
and reverence aroused in the perceiver’s mind when it contemplates and communes
with the things of the universe. Such awe inspiring or rapturous supernatural
(or numinous) experience is a vital factor in Romantic experience and the prime
source of its vitality and intensity.
William Wordsworth had
not only the exalted and inclusive imagination of a great Romantic poet but was
also supremely endowed with the illumined spiritual vision of a mystic. In the
Wordsworthian mysticism the Romantic imagination found its finest flower, its
crowning revelation and consummation. Mysticism is the quintessence of
Wordsworth’s poetry, the ultimate and unfailing source of its inspiration.
Mysticism, broadly
defined, is a state of sublime imaginative and spiritual experience in which
one has direct, immediate and intuitive perception of an all-embracing infinite
and eternal reality – the immanent-transcendent Absolute Being underlying and
pervading but also transcending the sensible material universe. It is the sense
of “God in all” and “all in God.” It is this sense of one ultimate Divine
principle permeating all things and all life of the universe as well as
guiding, cherishing and sustaining them that inspires the mystic to conceive
the vision of the ultimate divine unity of the universe, of all life. Mystic
imagination sees a living relationship between the soul of man and the soul of
the universe – a vision of cosmic unity, fraternity and fellowship.
The mysticism of
Wordsworth is something unique in its kind, though it shares some
characteristics common to all modes of mysticism. It is a type of
Nature-mysticism. Though it hears a certain degree of affinity to Spinozistic
pantheism, it is not absolutely alike to it, for unlike the latter it does not
regard Nature as the be-all and end-all of the universe or equate and identify
it with the Supreme Divine Spirit. Wordsworth’s mysticism also differs from the
Neoplatonic mysticism of Plotinus or the Christian mysticism of St. John of the
Cross and St. Augustine. But it has something of the sublime beatific vision of
Blake or the glowing paradisal vision of Dante. Like all true mystics
Wordsworth believes that human life has a divine origin and divine destiny. As
he said in his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”:
“Our birth is but a
sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with
us, our life’s star
Hath had elsewhere its
setting
And cometh from afar;
But trailing clouds of
glory do we come
From Gold, who is our
home.”
Man is an essentially divine and immortal spirit,
the “Pilgrim of Eternity”, the “Child of Immortality”–such is the fervent and
glowing faith of Wordsworth, as of genuine mystics of all ages and climes. He
said very aptly: “Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, I Is with infinitude, and only there”; and that “the great
thought by which we live” is “infinity and God.”
Wordsworth not only
loved Nature but glorified, deified and divinized it. Unlike Shelley who at
times spiritualized Nature in the manner of Wordsworth and at other times
attempted to intellectualize and conceptualize it – transforming the object of
Nature into some dogmatic socio-political doctrine, ideology or an abstract
idea, as in “Ode to the West Wind”, Wordsworth’s vision of Nature was
constantly and consistently spiritual.
To him the vision of
Nature always vouchsafed the vision of the indwelling Divine spirit, the vision
of that Cosmic Being, whom Shelley in a true Wordsworthian spirit has described
in his illuminating and soul-stirring lines:
“That Light whose smile
kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all
things work and move,
That Benediction which
the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not,
that sustaining Love
Which through the web of
being blindly move
By man and beast and
earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as
each are mirrors of
The fire for which all
thirst: .....”
–Lament
for Adonais
Wordsworth’s worship and
adoration of Nature was never inspired by passion for aesthetic beauty,
elegance and splendour. All forms and objects, aspects and appearances of
Nature whether graceful, lovely and magnificent or sombre, awe inspiring and
forbidding – alike stirred and stimulated his visionary imagination, for they
all of them were to him equally the living emblems and images of the Divine
spirit, the hieroglyphics of divinity. How even the dreary, appalling and
awesome spectacles of Nature could bring intimations of the Divine Reality and
profoundly impress on his mind its sublimity, majesty and grandeur is vividly
revealed in one of the celebrated passages of “Prelude” in the description of a
scene on the Alps:
“Black drizzling crags
that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in
them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of
the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds
and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the
darkness and the light–
Were all like workings
of one mind, the features
Of the same face,
blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great
Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of
Eternity,
Of first, and last, and
midst, and without end.”
–
prelude, Book VI
And this passage
represents a profoundly moving and glowing description of one of the most
memorable of his mystic experiences.
The fundamental traits
of Wordsworthian mystic vision is also amply highlighted in those moving lines
of his, where he speaks of
“One interior life
In which all beings live
with God, themselves
Are God, existing in the
mighty whole,
As indistinguishable as
the cloudless east
Is from the cloudless
West, when all
The hemisphere is one
cerulean blue.”
-
From a fragment found in a
Ms.
notebook containing Peter Bell
or when he refers to
“…..the
sentiment of Being spread
O’er all that moves and
all that seemeth still;
O’er all that, lost
beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to
the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to
the heart;
O’er all that leaps and
runs; and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome
air; O’er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea,
in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of
waters.”
–Prelude,
Book II
All objects, high or
low, sentient or insentient are to him suffused with the living presence of the
Divine and instinct with life and feeling and even with consciousness and will
of their own. This is movingly expressed in the following memorable lines of
his–
“To every natural form,
rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones
that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I
saw them feel,
Or linked them to some
feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a
quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired
with inward meaning.”
–Prelude,
Book
III
It is because of this
perception of “One interior life” in all by Wordsworth that even on ordinary
and apparently trivial thing of Nature could kindle his vision and fill him
with lofty and elevated thoughts–“Trances of thought and mountings of the mind”
leading him to the sublimely reverent and profoundly mystic contemplation of
the Divine immanent in all creation.
“To me the meanest
flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often
lie too deep for tears.”
–Ode
on Intimations of Immortality
And he says that even
the smallest things of Nature seemed infused and irradiated with a paradisal
splendour and sublimity.
“The earth, and every
common sight
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial
light.”
(Ibid)
The childhood “Spots of
time” with its fits of wild joy, frolic and pastime, so vividly and glowingly
depicted by Wordsworth in “Prelude” were also punctuated by fleeting flashes of
mystic vision–“Gleams like the flashing of a shield,’ as Wordsworth so
exquisitely put it.
Since Nature aroused in
Wordsworth’s mind a profound vision of the Indwelling Deity or the “Wisdom and
Spirit of the universe” as he calls it in the “Prelude”, he regarded it as the
living fountain of his poetic inspiration and of moral and spiritual
enlightenment and vision. He acknowledged that he was
“Well pleased to
recognize
In nature and the
language of the sense
The anchor of my purest
thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian
of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
–Tintern Abbey Re-visited
All objects and things of
Nature had for him some sublime and mysterious moral and spiritual message to
convey:
“One impulse from a
vernal wood
May teach you more of
man,
Of moral evil and of
good.
Than
all the sages can.”
–The
Tables Turned
It is the fundamental
faith of a mystic that “the heart of light is the silence.” In the true spirit
of a mystic, Wordsworth set a supreme value on silence and contemplative
stillness or, as he called it, “wise passiveness” and “meditative peace” and
was conscious of its profound and immense spiritual potentialities for bringing
him divine revelation and for enabling him to penetrate into the ultimate
cosmic mysteries. Amidst his visions of Nature, there came moments of such
profound and hallowed stillness of “transcendent peace and silence” as
Wordsworth called it that through his imagination Wordsworth attained the highest
peak of his mystic vision gaining insight into the heart of reality. It was in
moments of “that peace which passeth understanding” that Wordsworth tells us:
“……Gently
did my soul
Put off her veil, and
self-transmuted, stood
Naked, as in the
presence of her Got”
–Prelude,
Book IV
In moments of such holy
calm and peace, his mind was transported to a state of sublime ecstasy, an
ineffable trance-like consciousness.
“Oft in these moments
such a holy calm
Would overspread my
soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten,
and what I saw
Appeared like something
in myself, a dream:
A
prospect in the mind”
–Prelude,
Book V
Emphasizing those moments of sublime stillness and
serenity and their inestimable value and significance, Wordsworth in a pregnant
and illuminating passage in “Tintern Abbey Re-visited” says:
...that serene and
blessed mood,
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.”
and also in “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”:
“Hence, in a season of
calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of
that immortal sea
Which brought us
hither.”