A GREAT PIONEER OF YOGIC POETRY:
AN APPRAISEMENT OF AE'S INSPIRATION
It was in starlight that I heard of AE's death. I do not know if he died also under the stars, but there could have been no better time to hear of his passing. For often he must have shut his eyes in tranced forgetfulness of earth at this deep and passionless hour: he was one of those to whom meditation and self-communion was the truest life, and he has told us how those little gemlike songs of his early days came to him pure and perfect out of the profound hush into which he had plunged his mind. I remember my own joy on first realising what his poetry disclosed — a cool unpretentious flowering grace, yet laden with a glimmer of mystery rooted beyond our earth's transiences. Tiny they were, his poems, but I felt that their smallness was an illusion produced by the great distance of soul-height from which their inspiration glowed upon us: they were small like the stars — immense worlds that were pin-points because of the farness of their flame.
AE's work is remarkable for the unique spiritual experience by which it is kindled: an experience of many colourful changes resolved by a certain underlying movement of mystical aspiration into a single-shining mood. The colour and change were not valuable to him for their own sake; they derived their intensity, their appeal, from something hidden and invisible, an essence of eternal beauty secretly one behind all its magic myriadness. And the presence of this sacred simplicity AE suggested not only by his words but also by a simple spontaneousness of metre; his rhythms, bare and whisper-like, seem to spring from a chaste unaltering calm. That is at once his merit and his defect. Defect because his technique is prone to be monotonous and his creation to lack vigour and wideness; if he had commanded a more flexible and conscious artistry he could have embodied with a finer verisimilitude many realisations which are now lost by
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his poems in a sort of enchanted emptiness. Still, at his best the sense of a primal peace, a white tranquillity dreaming vaguely behind the veil of multi-hued vision and emotion gives his work a Spirit-touch found nowhere else. Blake may have a deep suggestiveness born of the simplest phrases but he has the clairvoyance of a wise child, not the remote, the ultimate, the transcendental gleam. Though Wordsworth catches a vastness as of the Spirit, the philosopher in him often preponderates over the mystic. Even Shelley's wizard tunes float in an ether different from AE's. The world of AE is not the rarefied mental with its abstractions and idealities come to life under the stress of a lyrical feeling, but an occult atmosphere of mind out of reach for the normal poet and open only to those who follow a discipline of concentration, a yoga of insight such as the Orient has always prescribed. To a sensitive Celt like AE, in whom the old Druid race with its reveries was still alive, the practice of yogic concentration was bound to be fruitful. No doubt, he also lives in iridescence and not in the full Spirit-sun; but the shimmering haze of Shelley differs from his diffuse illumination in that Shelley sees hazily from an aching distance while AE sees diffusely from very near. And it is the satisfied nearness which imparts to his verse the Spirit-appeal peculiar to it. There is a more intimate, more effulgent poetry possible, but this is the first expression in English literature of a close relationship with some sovereign Splendour through a poetic yoga transfiguring both thought and image.
Almost the whole mood of AE's mystical desire is summed up in his Alter Ego:
All the morn a spirit gay
Breathes within my heart a rhyme,
'Tis but hide and seek we play
In and out the courts of time.
Fairy lover, when my feet
Through the tangled woodlands go,
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'Tis thy sunny fingers fleet
Fleck the fire dews to and fro.
In the moonlight grows a smile
Mid its rays of dusty pearl —
'Tis but hide and seek the while
As some frolic boy and girl.
When I fade into the deep
Some mysterious radiance showers
From the jewel-heart of sleep
Through the veil of darkened hours.
Where the ring of twilight gleams
Round the sanctuary wrought,
Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
We are one yet know it not.
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces; some there be
Seek thee only for a song:
I to lose myself in thee.
Four psychological motifs are to be observed in these lines. AE seeks the Divine with love's happy instinctive heart; then, he wanders in search of this Divine through a various world of occult brilliances, either suffusing earth-vistas or in their native cosmorama opening to the sealed eyes of trance; but the master-passion is not a wanderlust of the mere occult, it is an amor dei athirst for an all-absorbing contact. Not for any gift of vision or inspired voice does AE follow the Great Magician — he yearns for the Magician's being of beauty rather than for his many-coloured miracles. The divine display too is a valued experience; yet it is not the goal of desire. As a poet, AE cherishes the wealth of inspiration scattered from the Unknown, but his soul goes inward with hands that hunger to clasp the Supreme and not to beg
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of Him a boon of music or magnificence. For, the mainspring of the whole psychic process is an intuition that the lover is craving to gain consciously what he already holds somewhere in the buried places of the subliminal. As the penultimate stanza hints, he is at heart one with the Divine; only, he does not remember with an entire certainty this ecstatic fact. An obscure feeling is all that he has; but the feeling is pregnant with fate, and its sleeping seed determines the blossom which shall crown his life.
There is, without question, an earth-self in AE which takes interest in the passing phenomena of time; it is drawn by human faces, but in them also he is ever visionary enough to trace the hidden Beauty. Along the rays shot here in the mutable world he travels home to the centre of light in the inner heaven. Sometimes the inner meanings call so imperiously across the outer symbol and suggestion that he has no sooner loved than lost the mortal and the tangible. In that plunge into the deep, the human starting-point looks well-nigh an illusion:
What is the love of shadowy lips
That know not what they seek or press,
From whom the lure for ever slips
And fails their phantom tenderness?
The mystery and light of eyes
That near to mine grow dim and cold,
They move afar in ancient skies
Mid flame and mystic darkness rolled.
O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows
In tender yielding unto me,
A vast desire awakes and grows
Unto forgetfulness of thee.
At other moments, there is a balance between the known and the unknown: the truth is seen without the appearance
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being destroyed — the phenomenon assumes a secondary place but is not robbed of its warmth and its right of response:
I did not deem it half so sweet
To feel thy gentle hand,
As in a dream thy soul to greet
Across wide leagues of land.
Untouched more near to draw to you
Where, amid radiant skies,
Glimmered thy plume of iris hue,
My Bird of Paradise.
Let me dream only with my heart,
Love first and after see;
Know thy diviner counterpart
Before I kneel to thee.
So in thy motions all expressed
Thy angel I may view:
I shall not on thy beauty rest,
But beauty's self in you.
There is also another phase of AE in answer to earthly contacts. It is an idealistic acceptance of the clay's caress; the human is given a reality, a justification to exist in its own nature just because that nature is regarded as an echo of some divine drama enacted on the higher planes. Beauty's self is here visioned as projecting its own glories below rather than absorbing those of the earth and drawing the poet's consciousness beyond:
We liken love to this and that; our thought
The echo of a deeper being seems;
We kiss because God once for beauty sought
Within a world of dreams.
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We must not, however, commit the mistake that the echoes of a deeper being are the flesh and bone of one brief life; these are the outmost vibration, so to speak, of the "mirrored majesties". The true correspondence is between some heavenly game of archetypes in the Eternal and the play of soul with soul down the ages. A believer in reincarnation, AE makes poetic use of the meeting again and again of souls in sympathy with one another; and the earthly love he praises at times is the flame leaping to flame across clouds that change with each rebirth. Perhaps the most attractive turn taken by this inner romance is in Babylon:
The blue dusk ran between the streets: my love was
winged within my mind,
It left today and yesterday and thrice a thousand years
behind.
Today was past and dead for me, for from today my feet
had run
Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of
ancient Babylon.
On temple top and palace roof the burnished gold flung
back the rays
Of a red sunset that was dead and lost beyond a million
days.
The tower of heaven turns darker blue, a starry sparkle
now begins;
The mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and
the sins
Come back to me. I walk beneath the shadowy multitude
of towers;
Within the gloom the fountain jets its pallid mist in lily
flowers;
The waters lull me and the scent of many gardens, and I
hear
Familiar voices and the voice I love is whispering in my
ear.
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Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is
laid;
The wave of phantom time withdraws; and the young
Babylonian maid,
One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that
tide,
Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by
my side.
Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal
things.
In this poem we are struck with a richness and a variety of movement which are not so frequent in AE of the earlier years but which develop as he grows older. His art undergoes a change owing to a more alert mastery, though the seeds of that development were already there in his young days, as proved by pieces like that veritable quintessence of Vaishnava insight, the poem entitled Krishna. Artistically, Krishna and Babylon are the most opulent things he has done, opulent in the sense of not only jewelled phraseology but also rhythm-modulation, the technique of pause, stress and changing tone. The poet and the artist are fused: AE's inspiration had tended to be lyrical cries subdued in their rhythm, theirs was an intensity of feeling but not of art, an intuitive appeal was in them which almost made us forget that it came on word-wings, the language was like a breath of air laden with perfume and we got dreamy with the strange scent of the spirit and did not notice the medium by which it was conveyed. Surely such a transparent inspiration is precious; but it gives by constant recurrence an impression of tenuity no less than monotony, and the greatest poets have, besides the direct touch of intuition, a life and strength of language, a palpable motion of that word-body as well as the soul's sign from afar. This means that not merely the subtle mind or the inner vision but at the same time the energy of the full waking consciousness is employed to catch inspi-
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ration. What is thus created acquires a certain impetuous diversity; and in AE the new movement comes when he begins to write with a more open-eyed intelligence. Formerly he used to draw upon trance-depths, now he listens with the same inward ear but without dissolving into trance. He does not shut his eyes, as it were, but watches the turn and thrill of his poetry, so that it grows clearer and stronger under his gaze, modulating itself sufficiently in order to satisfy the observing artist-conscience.
We can gauge the new alertness from the fact that he actually turned to blank verse where the grip on the medium must be most steady. Even a poet like Milton who was born with a blank-verse genius had to revise and polish in daytime what Urania had whispered to him in the still hours. With Shakespeare the art was immediate but because he was the most wide-awake, the most out-gazing and conscious of all poets, his nerves ever on the qui vive to respond to sense-stimuli. Yeats's blank verse can float in a half-light and seem a sudden birth from secret worlds — and yet is in fact the most deliberate perhaps of all recent poetry; for Yeats writes with an unsleeping vigilance over words — to such a degree that, occultist though he is, he does not incline to accept AE's description of how his own songs were snatches heard verbatim from the recessess of his meditative mind. Of course., poetry composed with deliberate care is as much really heard from within; only, it is heard after effort of the consciousness to tune-in to the soul-ethers and it is received sound by sound instead of in a running strain. Blank verse especially is accompanied by a wakefully inspired intelligence, though its composition may be slow or rapid according to the poet's power to grasp the suggestion out of the subliminal. And AE's resort to this form of self-utterance shows the awakening word-artist in him and from that coming to grips with the language are evolved a force and a versatility absent before. Indeed many of his efforts are not wholly successful and the majority of his work lies among the simple voices with which he began; nevertheless, the innovation is worth weighing
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because of a few astonishing triumphs.
Being contemporaneous with Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley, the two poets who have influenced modern blank verse most, he models his with rather a free and quick hand, pushing nervously the idea-vision into the language when he might achieve a better result by teaching the language to respond organically to the creative glow. There is, in consequence, an unassimilated look about many of his lines even if they are metrically normal and not inlaid with truncated feet, trochees, anapaests, tribracha and cretics. Poems like The Dark Lady are full of a metricised prose, rich and puissant though that may be; but the new will-to-power, when put in tune with older types of blank verse, brings forth fine rhythmic swings and expressive strokes. AE's most ambitious work in this line is The House of the Titans, wherein he sets to potent use a Celtic myth for embodying his conception of the worlds of light and darkness born from the Absolute, the descent of the Soul with its heavenly godheads and powers into earth-consciousness, their slow oblivion of the heights whence they derived but ultimately their recalling that high home and their destiny to transform chaos into a divine image. Despite unfinished versification in several places and even limping lines like
She heard first the voice of the high king,
or,
If thou
Hast from pity come to help us, fly —
and despite drops again and again into a half-kindled style, The House of the Titans is a notable performance. There is a reflection of Keats, naturally enough since the theme is affined to that of Hyperion where also grand music is made from the falling of Titana. Especially the start, after the first five lines, is reminiscent of Keats's picture of Saturn stone-
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still in the lightless woods with Thea by his side. Keatsian too are the lines:
Her weeping roused at length the stony king,
Whose face from its own shadow lifted up
Was like the white uprising of the moon.
Quite original, however, are the manner and the movement in the vehement unwillingness of Armid, the fallen king's companion, to let the memory of heaven die in order to cut short the nameless grief in her heart:
"Let it not die," cried Armid flinging up
In fountainous motion her white hands and arms
That wavered, then went downward, casting out
Denial.
And boldly individual like that famous Homeric comparison of the elders on the walls of Troy to thin-legged squeaky grass-hoppers is the image:
And as a spider by the finest thread
Hangs from the rafters, so the sky-born hung
By but the frailest thread of memory from The habitations of eternity.
But the choicest passage in this poem packed with AE's peculiar Celtic clairvoyances is the speech of Dana the Goddess of beauty, the mysterious all-mother:
I am the tender voice calling away,
Whispering between the beatings of the heart,
And inaccessible in dewy eyes
I dwell, and all unkissed on lovely lips,
Lingering between white breasts inviolate,
And fleeting ever from the passionate touch,
I shine afar till men may not divine
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Whether it is the stars or the beloved
They follow with rapt spirit. And I weave
My spells at evening, folding with dim caress,
Aerial arms and twilight-dropping hair
The lonely wanderer by wood or shore,
Till, filled with some vast tenderness, he yields,
Feeling in dreams for the dear mother heart
He knew ere he forsook the starry way,
And clings there pillowed far above the smoke
And the dim murmur from the duns of men.
I can enchant the rocks and trees, and fill
The dumb brown lips of earth with mystery,
Make them reveal or hide the god; myself
Mother of all, but without hands to heal,
Too vast and vague, they know me not,
but yet I am the heartbreak over fallen things,
The sudden gentleness that stays the blow,
And I am in the kiss that foemen give
Pausing in battle, and in the tears that fall
Over the vanquished foe. And in the highest
Among the Danaan gods I am the last
Council of pity in their hearts when they
Mete justice from a thousand starry thrones.
My heart shall be in thine when thine forgives.
AE had nothing to learn in blank verse style when he burst into so exalted a cry; and it is very probable that had he lived he would have reached often this consummate eloquence. As it was, he could not keep the sustained mastery vouchsafed to him in this moment and though telling periods and unforgettable flashes of poetic vision are frequent he could not be said to have mobilised fully the fine energy and prophet-passion that was in him and that had not found deliverance in the intonations of his usual mood.
He will, therefore, take his place in the poetic pantheon as a pioneer of yogic art mainly for his ability to cast brief exquisite Spirit-spells. A fair amount of his work will go to
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Limbo owing to an ambiguous phantasy, a thinness of imaginative wash with no clear articulate thrill. Nevertheless, what remains is destined to mark the beginning of a novel epoch in verse, an effort to clothe sense and sound with strange radiances or shadowy raptures drawn from an inner mystical life lived constantly by the poet unlike the fitful dips made on rare occasions into the unknown by former bards. There will be, ultimately, a tremendous outburst of spiritual fire, poems that bear the full frenzy of that "multitudinous meditation" which is the Soul; but before the unearthly day breaks we shall have a constellation of singers whose voices float in a dim sky, the divine darkness heralding the divine dawn. Of such, AE is the leader, the evening star first plumbing the secret regions beyond the mere mind and the life-force. And among his achievements will rank, side by side with his early poems, the variations he played on that simple tone when the urge for diversity came to him. This urge took two channels — on the one side blank verse and on the other a freer handling than before of rhymed metres, a less repetitive form, a poignancy shaping itself with an innocent caprice and not falling into a rigidly regular pattern. Many failures are noticeable here, the inspiration is frequently lost in a too outward shifting of rhythm and word but essentially as excellent as the old uniform lilt or chant are the subtle changes rung on a simple movement and style as in The Outcast:
Sometimes when alone
At the dark close of day,
Men meet an outlawed majesty
And hurry away.
They come to the lighted house;
They talk to their dear;
They crucify the mystery
With words of good cheer.
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When love and life are over,
And flight's at an end,
On the outcast majesty
They lean as a friend.
The seeds of this modulated simplicity, like those of the variegated richness of other poems of AE's old age, were not absent in his period of youthful sowing, but they were less perceivable because the tendency then was towards transfiguring by sheer subtlety and depth of feeling a steady run of iambics or trochees, the modulations occurring chiefly with an anapaest touch now and again to obtain some particular effect. In The Unknown God, however, mere anapaests do not sway the metre: many deft unexpected modulations of two and three and, if we count the feminine endings, even four syllables combine in a suggestion of lovely star-flicker as well as of ecstatic heart-beat:
Far up 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 unheeded,
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.
It is not easy to reward such a gem with adequate praise — the intuition is so perfectly kindled and with the most economical elegance. Indeed AE is always a wizard when he faces poetically his favourite hour of dayfall: masterpiece on miniature masterpiece issues from his pen as one by one the planets flower into sight, and I believe that though men can no longer see the intense and far-visaged form that moved among them for a while, their hearts will be drunk to the end of time with the song-creative beauty of his soul.
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