Mysticism in Modern Poetry

MYSTICISM IN MODERN POETRY
A Perspective on the Poetry of A. E.

DILIP CHATTERJEE
Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College, Calcutta

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 ‘Marina”, for instance, describes the vision of spiritual awakening. The speaker in this poem awakens to the possibility of concrete realisation of the spiritual within himself through the objective correlative of Pericle’s finding of his lost daughter.

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 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 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 London tea shop:

My body ofa 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”, “Krishna” and “Free” are sufficient indication of the spell of Indian mystical thought upon him.

In his poem called “Om” a Brahmin boy is seen to be chanting the word “Om” in an Indian vale at dawn. The boy murmurs the holy sound with a tender heart, and his eyes glow like the morning sun in expectation of a communion with Brahma or the “Ancestral Self.” “Om” is the beginning and the end of the universe.

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.

“Om,” the word of God, is the breath of life in the universe. It is the source of the whole cosmic reality. In the next stanza the poet suggests that beauty, wisdom, love and youth – all such attributes of Brahma - are seeking the truth of perfection through “many a cycle’s ebb and flow” or evolutionary changes of every­thing to reach the state of perfection. The boy in the poem seems to have attained this state when:

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 India.

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 ofa 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 fromUlster 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.

References

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.