The Theory of Re-incarnation in English Poetry

I

It is often said that, though the Romans conquered the Greeks, the culture of the Greeks held the Romans captive. A similar thing has happened in the case of the conquest of India by the English, and of this the intrusion of the theory of reincarnation into English Poetry isa good instance.

II

By the theory of re-incarnation I mean the Indian doctrine that the human soul isre-born in the physical world. There are some English poets who, without being influenced by this Indian doctrine, have declared that the human soul existedas a soul before it appeared on earth. One of them was Wordsworth. Modifying Plato’s doctrine of pre-existence and reminiscence so as to suit Christianity, Wordsworth taught that the human soul lived in the heaven-world before it came down to earth to inhabit a human body, and that during infancy man remembers to some extent his previous existence inheaven but gradually forgets itas he grows older. Everyone must remember the passage in his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, which rus:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, out life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy. . . .

But Wordsworth did not preach the doctrine of a succession of future lives for the human soul, whether inthis world or in other worlds. So he cannot be placed amongst those who taught the doctrine of re-incarnation as known to India. The same is the case with Tennyson and Browning. They did not speak of a past life in this world for the human soul; and though they spoke of a succession of future lives, it is not at all clear that they did not mean a succession of embodied or disembodied lives in other worlds. Tennyson seems to have believed in creationism, that is, the view that God creates a human soul from His General Life and sends it down to inhabit the human cell formed in the physical world. Thus, in the poem De Profundis written on the occasion of the birth of his eldest son, Tennyson, referring to God and addressing the child, speaks of God as One

Who made thee unconceivably thyself
Out of his whole World-self and all-in-all.

In his In Memoriam Tennyson speaks in several places of future lives for man thus created. One must remember the lines:

Eternal process moving on,
From state to state the spirit walks,

In another passage Tennyson says that he can follow the spiritual progress of Arthur Hallam in the future ages, but will be himself ever "a life behind."

Though following with an upward mind
The wonders that have come to thee
Through all the secular-to-be
But evermore a life behind.

As for Robert Browning, in his One Word More in the series "Men and Women" dedicated to his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he said that in his life in this world he could dedicate to her only his achievement in verse, but that in other lives it was possible he could attain success in other fine arts and dedicate his achievements in those arts to her.

I stand on my attainment.
This of verse alone, one life allows me; ...
Other heights in other lives, God willing–
All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!

But in spite of the use of the word "lives" in the plural, one is bound to agree with Stopford Brooke when he says that there is nothing either in Tennyson or in Browning to show positively that they believed in the Indian doctrine of the return of the human soul to this physical world. Though some would like to speak of them as "re-incarnationists," I hesitate to do so.

III

But there are undoubtedly English poets who believed, or wrote as if at the moment of inspiration they believed, the Indian doctrine. The treasure-houses of Indian thought were first revealed to the Western world in the first quarter of the 19th century when the great orientalists translated the Indian epics and philosophical writings. As could be expected, Indian culture was not immediately rated high in England which had conquered India. But in America, where there was less of prejudice, the Indian doctrine at once caught the imagination of the two great poets, Walt Whitman and Emerson.

Walt Whitman was a daring and unconventional poet. His acquaintance with Indian literature is shown in passages like the following: -

I see the falling of the Ganges over the high rim of Sankara,
I see the places of the idea of Deity incarnated by avatars in human form.

(Salute Au Monde)

According to Whitman, death comes for the relief of man. When in this life he cannot evolve any further, man is like a woman with a dying or dead child in the womb, who becomes free and feels relief when the child is removed. Death is the accoucher or doctor who assists the woman in the removal of the child. So does man become free to live his life again when death destroys his physical body. Apostrophising death and the embrace of death, Whitman says:

And as to you, Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to alarm me. To his work without flinching the accoucher comes.
I see the elder-hand pressing, receiving, supporting.
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

(Songs of Myself)

In the same poem, apostrophising Life, Whitman says:

And as to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.

In the "Children of Adam" Whitman refers to himself thus:

Ages and ages returning at intervals,
Undestroyed, wandering immortal,
I, Chanter of Adamic songs.

In one place in his "Songs of Myself," Whitman writes:

Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety.

And all these extracts are from Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass" first published in 1855.

V

Next comes Emerson whose theory of the Over-soul shows his acquaintance with the Vedanta philosophy. In his poem "Brahma"he makes God say that the murderer cannot kill the real self of his victim, as the self is indestructible and, passing into other worlds, returns again to this world.

If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways.
I keep, and pass and turn again.

In fact the above lines are based on the familiar Gita passage about the indestructibility of the soul. There is a poem of Emerson written on the occasion of the death of a child. It is entitled Threnody. In it he said that the genius of the child was so brilliant that, when the child looked at the sun and moon, we might take it that it came to its own world of glory; that the child, however, needed the sustenance of beauty from the objects of nature in this world for its growth; and that, because they could not feed the child with the brilliance that it required, the child went in scorn to the other world, intending to come after an age and thus giving Nature another chance.

They could not feed him, and he died,
And wandered ward as in scorn,
To wait an aeon to born.

VI

The next set of poets to be attracted by the Indian doctrine of re-incarnation arose in Ireland. The Irish sympathise with Indian aspirations in general, and it is not surprising therefore that they should appreciate Indian thought. For my purpose I shall not speak of poets still living such as Dr. Cousins and Mrs. Eva Gore Booth. I shall refer to the departed poets, George Russell (A. E.) and W. B. Yeats who are generally accounted the greatest amongst the poets of the Irish renaissance.

VII

George Russell had friends in Theosophical circles and was probably a member of the Theosophical Society at one time. In his small poem, Forgetfulness, supposed to have been written at nightfall, he wrote that, just as the night was lustreless and blind without a single star, .he too was blind of vision so far as his past lives were concerned:

The hills have vanished in dark air;
And night, without an eye, is blind.
I too am starless. Time has blurred
The aeons of my life behind.

In another small poem entitled A Farewell he makes a dying man bid good-bye to the earth, not forever, but for an incalculable number of years:

I look on wood and hill and sky,
Yet without any tears.
To the warm earth I bid good-bye
For what unnumbered years.

The poem proceeds to say that the man’s incarnations were so frequent that, just as one does not remember the details of acts frequently done, he could not say whether life beyond the grave was a life of gloom or sunshine.

So many times my spirit went
This dark transfiguring way,
Nor ever knew what dying meant,
Deep night or a new day.

Russell’s poem entitled "Babylon," in which he says that he fell into a reverie one afternoon in Ireland and his vision went to his life thirty centuries ago in Babylon, is very pretty.

VIII

W. B. Yeats, who wrote a book on Yoga in his last days, was very familiar with the Vedanta philosophy. There is a small but complete poem of his on Death, where he says that, unlike a dying animal which exists in the present but cannot think of the future, self-conscious man dreads the future but hopes for the best.

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all.

The poem proceeds to say that man has many incarnations and that even when attacked by murderers a man truly great of soul thinks nothing of the destruction of the body, as his soul is indestructible.

Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath.

The poem ends by saying that man knows death fully, because it is his creation, the product of his imagination coming into existence when he identifies himself with his body and under the influence of Maya thinks that what has happened to his body has happened to himself,

He knows death to the bone–
Man has created death.

The same idea occurs in section 3 of his poem entitled "The Tower,"In the poem "Mohini Chatterjee,"Yeats says that lovers, who may not find an opportunity in a single life for the complete satisfaction of their love, will have re-births, succeeded by the inevitable deaths, which will give them the opportunity denied by time in any single life.

Old lovers yet may have
All that time denied–
Grave is heaped on grave,
That they be satisfied,
Over the blackened earth.

IX

It is not surprising that at long last even poets in England should be influenced by the doctrine of re-incarnation and make it the theme of their songs. It is sufficient to speak of the present Poet-Laureate, John Masefield, who in his poem, A Greed,wrote:

I hold that, when a person dies,
His soul returns again to earth,
Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise,
Another mother gives him birth;
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again.

The word "hold" in the authorised edition of his poems now stands corrected into "held." But the correction does not improve his orthodoxy, because he has not corrected lines such as,

‘These eyes of mine have blinked and shone
In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon.

The poem deals also with the doctrine of Karma.

X

Going in time, no account of the theory of re-incarnation in English Poetry can be complete without a reference to Shelley. Shelley was not a student of the Vedanta Philosophy like Emerson or Yeats. But his genius thought out the Vedanta. From Plato Shelley imbibed idealism; and as a reaction from the Calvinism of the 18th century he adopted a pantheistic view of life. The result was that Shelley’s philosophy became, to use Stopford Brooke’s phrase, "idealistic pantheism"–a synonym for the Vedanta. As the doctrine of re-incarnation was known to the Greeks, Shelley borrowed it and introduced it in his poems in at least two places. One such is one of the choruses in "Hellas,"a poem written when the Greeks were trying to free themselves from the tyranny of the Turks; and the other is his poem entitled "With a Guitar to Jane."The latter poem is addressed to Jane Williams, the partner of his friend Edward Williams. Shelley sent a guitar to Jane along with the poem; and in it his fancy makes him declare that Jane is Miranda (of Shakespeare’s Tempest) re-born, while Edward Williams is the re-incarnation of Prince Ferdinand. Shelley calls himself the fairy-spirit Ariel who cannot die like mortals but whose happiness consists in serving Miranda in all her incarnations. He refers to himself thus: -

Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who
From life to life must still pursue
Your happiness.

The poem then goes on thus:

When you die, the silent moon
In her interlunar swoon
Is not sadder in her cell
Than deserted Ariel.
When you live again on earth,
Like an unseen star of birth,
Ariel guides you o’er the sea
Of life from your nativity.