Mystical Poetry

by Dr Vinod Sena

The function of true art is to harmonise the soul of man with the immense universe surrounding him, in which he divines a procession which is orderly, an order which is harmonious, a procession, an order, a harmony which obey, as law, a will, infinitely above him, infinitesimally careful of him – the many million-millionth part of a speck of dust, yet sentient.

Great thinkers have all recognised this order. Indeed they must, for it conditions their thinking. If the universe were a chaos, which is anarchy, any connected thought would be impossible and we no better but worse than blind men jostled about by a crowd.

The poets, and philosophers with poetry in their souls, attempt by many parables to convey their sense of this grand, harmonious, universal orchestral movement.

In Plato there is a story of Er the Pamphylian, whose relatives after ten days sought his dead body on the battlefield, and found it without taint of corruption; and how on the twelfth day, being laid on the pyre, he came back to life and told them where he had wandered in the other world, and what seen; but chiefly of the great spindle on the knees of necessity, reaching up to heaven and turning in eight whorls of graduated speed – and on the rim of each sits a siren, who revolves with it, hymning a single note; the eight notes together forming one harmony.

Hearken to Milton: –

Then listen I to the celestial Sirens’ harmony that sit upon the nine infolded spheres and sing to those that hold the vital shears, and turn the adamantine spindle round on which the fate of gods and men is wound such sweet compulsion doth in music lie, to lull the daughters of necessity and keep unsteady nature to her law, and the low world in measured motion draw after the heavenly tune.

This parable presents a truth, and one of the two most important truths in the world – the universe is not a chaos but a harmony.

Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that this macrocosm of the universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended at all except as it is focussed upon the eye, intellect and soul of man, the microcosm. All systems of philosophy inevitably work out to this, that the universal harmony is meaningless and nothing to man save in so far as he can apprehend it and that he can apprehend it only by reference to some corresponding harmony in himself. He is, but the million-millionth atom of a speck. Nonetheless that atom, being sentient, is reflective, being reflective, draws and contracts the whole into its tiny ring, impercipient, what were we but dead things?

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks, and stones, and trees.

Percipient – solely by the grace of percipience, we are inheritors of it all, and kings. To quote one of the poets, Traherne, with whom I am to deal:

But little did the infant dream that all the treasures of the world were by: and that himself was so the cream and crown of all which round about did lie, yet thus it was; the Gem, the Diadem, the ring enclosing all that stand upon this earthly ball, the Heavenly Eye, much wider than the sky, wherein they all included were, the glorious, Soul, that was the King made to possess them, did appear a small and little thing!

Hear another, Henry Vaughan:

I saw Eternity, the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless Light, all calm, as it was bright; and round beneath it, time, in hours, days, years, driv’n by the spheres, like a vast shadow mov’d.

In that shadow he sees men of all sorts and conditions – the lover, the ‘darksome statesman,’ the ‘fearful miser,’ the ‘downright epicure’ – pursuing their particular cheats of shadow:

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, and sing and weep, soar’d up into the Ring; but most would use no wing. ‘O fools! – said I – thus to prefer dark night, before True Light! To live in grots and caves, and hate the day, because it shows the Way, the Way which from this dead and dark abode leads up to God, a Way where you might tread the Sun, and be, more bright than he!’ But as I did their madness so discusse, one whisper’d thus, ‘This Ring the Bridegroome did for none provide, but for his Bride.’

So we have two rings – the immense orchestral ring of the universe wheeling above and around us, and the tiny percipient ring which is the pupil of your eye or mine threaded to a brain – infinitesimal and yet infinitely capable. But there is one thing more to be said – and a thing of first importance concerning this little soul of man. It instinctively aspires, yearns to know the greater harmony, if only to render it a more perfect obedience; and it aspires, yearns, through a sense of likeness, of oneness, of sonship. Man is, after all, a part of universe and feels in himself a harmony correspondent with the greater harmony of his quest.

Traherne writes:

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.

Similarly, in Browning, we read ‘Johannes Agricola’:

There’s heaven above, and night by night I look right through its gorgeous roof; no suns and moons though e’er so bright; avail to stop me, splendour-proof; I keep the broods of stars aloof for I intend to get to God, for ‘tis to God I speed so fast, for in God’s breast, my own abode those shoals of dazzling Glory, passed, I lay my spirit down at last.

The question now is ‘how is it done’?

Well it is not done by the way of philosophy. The quarrel between philosophy and poetry is notorious and inveterate; the patronage of poetry by philosophy is as stupid as it is solemny recognisable. For philosophy attempts to comprehend God’s purposes into some system or another.

God,

says Heine,

created man in his image – and man made haste to return the compliment.

The poet is more modest. He aspires, not to comprehend but to apprehend, to pierce, by flashes, to some point or other of the great wheeling circle. The poets are of more delicate mental texture than their fellows, and their minds have exquisite filaments to intercept, apprehend and conduct, stray messages between the outer mystery of the universe and the Inner Mystery of the individual soul.

Still you may ask: ‘How is this apprehending done? What is the process?’

There is trinity in man: What does, what knows, what is. Now through what is lies the way to Spiritual Understanding, as all matter attracts all matter so all spirit attracts all spirit. It is only by becoming like them, by being like them, that we apprehend the Spiritual Truth in them. The Kingdom of heavens is within us. A lost province though. May be, but we know today, how a lost province will remember its parent state, how hard a road the parent will travel to recover that which was lost. Herein lies the central tenet of the mystics. Man and the universe and God are in nature One. Unity – if we can find it – runs through all diversities and harmonises them. Therefore to know anything of God Himself we must be, to that extent, like God; therefore, too, the best part of revenge upon an enemy – think of it, in these days – is not to be like him.

But still you ask: ‘What is the process ?’

Surely that lies implicit in what has been said. Man has in him – I will not say a ‘subliminal self’ – but a soul listening within for a message; so fain to hear that sometimes it must arise and tip-toe to the threshold:

News from a foreign country came as if my treasure and my wealth lay there; so much it did my heart inflame, ‘t was wont to call my Soul into mine ear; which thither went to meet, the approaching sweet, and on the threshold stood, to entertain the unknown good, it hover’d there, as if ‘twould leave mine ear, And was so eager to embrace, the joyful tidings as they came, ‘t would almost leave its dwelling-place to entertain that same.

But the news comes from without, in its own good time and often in guise totally surprising. One must await the hour and trust the invitation, neither of which can be commanded. The poets do not read the Word by vigorous striving and learning as philosophers do. Nor do they wrestle with God; but wait, prepare themselves and say:

Be it unto me according to Thy Word.

They wait in a wise passiveness.

The eye – it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where’er they be, against or with our will. Not less I deem that there are powers which of themselves our minds impress; that we can feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness. Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum of things for ever speaking, that nothing of itself will come, but we must still be seeking?

And again, this same Wordsworth, in his ‘Tintern Abbey’ tells of that serene and blessed mood wherein:

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.

The way of the poets then is not to strive and cry. It is enough for them to wait, receptacles of the Divine passing Breath. The poet merely by waiting and trusting arrives per saltum at truths to which the philosopher, pack-laden and varicose upon the military road of logic, can never reach.

There yet remain two things to be said about mysticism. The first is that all mystics howsoever diverse their outlook or inlook, have been curiously gracious and yet more curiously happy men. They have found, if not contentment itself, the way of contentment and an anchorage for the soul. They possess it in patience. They are the pure in heart and blessed because they see, or believe they see, God.

The second is that, possessed with a sense of unity in all things, likeness in all things, every mystic has a propensity to deal in symbols.

A word must be said upon a tenet of the mystical faith which naturally flows from the two principles. If the universe be an ordered harmony, and the soul of man a tiny lesser harmony, vibrating to it, yearning to it, seeking to be one with it; if, again of recollection it knows itself to have been as some time one with it, though now astray upon earth, a lost province of the Kingdom of God; why, then, it follows that the king himself passionately seeks to recover, to retrieve, that which was lost. The idea of a Christ bruising His feet endlessly over stony places, insatiate in search of lost man, His brother, or the lost Soul, His desired bride, haunts all the mystical poetry. It haunts Quarles, but with Quarles it is rather the cry of the soul, the Bride, seeking the Bridegroom :

So I my best-Beloved’s am: so he is mine.

That is a refrain of Quarles, and his constant note.

Why dost thou shade Thy lovely face? Oh why does that eclipsing hand of Thine deny the sunshine of the Sun’s enlivening eye? Without Thy Light what light remains in me?

Thou art my life; my way, my light’s in Thee; I live, I move, and by Thy beams I see. Thou art my life, – if Thou but turn away, my life’s a thousand deaths. Thou art my way, – without Thee, Love, I travel not but stray. My light thou art; without Thy glorious sight. My eyes are darken’d with eternal night. My love, thou art my way, my life, my light. Thou art my way; I wander if Thou fly. Thou art my light; if hid, how blind am I. Thou art my life; if thou withdraw’st, I die. My eyes are dark and blind; I cannot see: to whom or whither should my darkness flee, but to that Light? – And what’s that Light but Thee? If I have lost my path, dear lover, say shall I still wander in a doubtful way? Love, shall a lamb of Israel’s sleep-fold stray?

And yet thou turn’st away Thy face and fly’st me! And yet I sue for Grace and Thou deny’st me! Speak, art Thou angry, Love, or only try’st me? Dissolve Thy sunbeams, close Thy wings and stay! See, see now I am blind, and dead, and stray! – Oh Thou that art my life, my light, my way! Then work Thy will! If passion bid me flee, my reason shall obey; my wings shall be stretch’d out no farther than from me to Thee!