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the sacred in literature
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THE SACRED IN LITERATURE ‘Sages Standing in God’s Holy Fire’: The Poet and Spirituality
suheil bushrui
temenos academy london 2010
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temenos academy papers no. 32 This paper was delivered to the Temenos Academy at the Royal Asiatic Society, London on 9 June 2009 First published 2010 by The Temenos Academy 16 Lincoln’s Inn Fields London wc2a 3ed www.temenosacademy.org Registered Charity no.1043015 Copyright Š Suheil Bushrui isbn 978 0 9551934 9 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any way without the prior permission of the authors and the publisher. Typeset by Caroline Johnston Printed in the U.S.A.
This lecture is humbly dedicated to Stephen Overy in grateful recollection for his many outstanding services to Temenos, and in gratitude for his wisdom and guidance, his generosity of mind and spirit, and for keeping the golden light of the Temenos Candle bright and shining.
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The Sacred in Literature ‘Sages Standing in God’s Holy Fire’: The Poet and Spirituality Underneath the throne of God lie treasures, the keys to which are the tongues of poets. Hadith
I The greatest paradox facing the writer in a treatment of spiritual themes is the task of attempting to express the inexpressible and to confine it in words. J.R. Watson in his study of Wordsworth – a poet who continually confronted this paradox – describes the presence of this inexpressible essence in life. Wordsworth’s lifelong sense of the poet’s duty, like a sacred calling, inspired him to reveal and interpret the inexpressible essence using words as the medium.1 Samuel Beckett also summed up something of the same message in a conversation we had in May 1987, not long before his death: The word is immortal. The word continues. What has helped me to continue to write is my faith in the word. And if the word comes to an end, everything comes to an end. The word is an anchor … . As he spoke these words, Beckett touched a page of the book in front of him in a manner which wordlessly conveyed a sense of the ‘living word’, the Logos found in many religious traditions such as in St John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.2 Or in the words of the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah: So is the word that issues from My mouth: It does not come back to Me unfulfilled, But performs what I purpose, Achieves what I sent it to do.3 5
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These words are as mysterious as they are familiar. They intimate in poetic verse the presence of a divine and unutterable Word that is the origin and ultimate founding principle of all things. In the words of Baha’u’llah: The Word of God is the king of words and its pervasive influence is incalculable. It hath ever dominated and will continue to dominate the realm of being. The Great Being saith: The Word is the master key for the whole world, inasmuch as through its potency the doors of the hearts of men, which in reality are the doors of heaven, are unlocked.4 Of course, this Word – ‘the master key … [to] the hearts of men’ – is the divine Word – the Logos – and is not to be confused with the words of ordinary speech. Though the words of ordinary speech proliferate and run on indefinitely, being combined and re-combined in every possible arrangement, the divine Word forever eludes men, silently transcending all that comes forth from the tongue or pen. Thus in the Holy Qur’an we read: If all the sea were ink for my Sustainer’s words, the sea would indeed be exhausted ere my Sustainer’s words are exhausted! And [thus it would be] if we were to add to it sea upon sea. (18:109) The whole created world is an expression. The Logos which is a manifestation of God is only an image, a reflection (although in very limited ways) of our ‘unknowable essence’ which is God Himself. This is beautifully and succinctly articulated by Ibn al-Arabi: When my Beloved appears, With what eye do I see Him? With His eye, not with mine, For none sees Him except Himself.5 In his celebrated work Genius: A Mosaic of the Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Harold Bloom defines this quality as being ‘the trait of standing both of and above its age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us and the gift of breathing life into what is best 6
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in every living person’. While he concentrates solely on the Western tradition, he could likewise have mentioned Jalal al-Din Rumi of Iran; Ibn al-Arabi and Ibn Sina of Arabia; Kabir, Ghalib, Mirabai and Tagore of India; LiPo, Tu Fu and Lao Tzu of China; and Izumi Shikibu, Basho and Dogen Kigen of Japan. In all regions and religions, it is fair to say, the presence of the divine is more readily experienced than described in words and the struggle to capture and define it is universal.
II The nature of the sacred is as elusive as it is powerful and the limited capacities of human perception can only sense it – let alone depict it – in a fragmented fashion. The greatest of poets and visual artists cannot hope to capture the essence of the divine. As Socrates says of the divine realm beyond the tangible cosmos, ‘[Of] this region beyond the skies no mortal poet has sung or ever will sing in such strains as it deserves’.6 Indeed, many religious teachings and myths of ancient civilizations contain warnings against attempting to perceive the full glory of divinity, and they describe various dangers and punishments awaiting those who disobey. Some also present outright prohibitions against trying to render the sacred visible by human art. For example, we may recall Semele, consumed by fire for daring to ask Zeus to reveal himself in divine form; Psyche, forbidden to see Eros who visited under cover of darkness and threatened with losing him forever when she disobeyed until she proved herself worthy through her courage and faith; the commandment against the making of graven images for worship which the children of Israel broke with such devastating results when they forged the golden calf in the book of Exodus; the ban imposed on the devout Muslim on creating likenesses of any living being, a privilege exclusive to Allah alone. Moreover, the humility of the true artist makes him immediately aware that even the most gifted invariably falls short of the genius needed to capture the image of the Supreme Being – except in the apocryphal story of the small child who, announcing that she was drawing God and being told by her teacher that nobody knew what He was like, confidently replied, ‘They will now …’. 7
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III In sacred literature we discover humanity’s awareness of the relationship with the divine and its powerful experience of a yearning for the spiritual. Inspired poetry uses ordinary words in extraordinary ways that produce intimations of that eternal Word that sustains all things. The idea that the writing of true poetry requires a spark of something like divine possession is widespread in many civilizations. In its most extreme form, this can lead to the poet being seen as temporarily or permanently mad; we may remember the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who spent many years in confinement after losing his reason in 1806 at the age of 36, as well as John Clare, the English peasant poet whose lifelong struggle with adversity and oppression reduced him to insanity and caused him to end his days in an asylum in 1864. We may also recall Robert Graves’s description of Sappho in his collection of essays The Crowning Privilege,7 pressed beyond the bounds of sanity by the double burden of incarnating the Muse and expressing her divinely-inspired utterances. Indeed, the inspiration of the poet is so powerful and all-consuming as to appear positively dangerous. This is in no small part bound up with the magical function of language. The ancient Druids, for example, acted not only as guardians of the sacred traditions of the Celts but as poets and teachers of an oral tradition too powerful to be trusted to writing because of the power which it gave its possessors to curse and blight as well as to bless and fructify. It might seem bizarre at first sight to claim common ground for Arabic and Irish literature, but both these cultures share an awareness of the ‘lawful magic’, known in Arabic as al-sihr al-halal, which resides in the music and texture of words and transcends their immediate meaning. This becomes clear in the passages from the Holy Qur’an: So when the truth came to them from us they said: this is surely clear enchantment.8
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Yeats expresses the same vision: And I would have all know that when all falls In ruin, poetry calls out in joy, Being the scattering hand, the bursting pod, The victim’s joy among the holy flame, God’s laughter at the shattering of the world.9 Elsewhere in the same play, expressing the religious quality of all true poetry, Yeats describes it as One of the fragile, mighty things of God – a concept close to the Arabic term i’jaz (language miraculously wrought), applied only to the Holy Qur’an itself as the highest literary expression. These glimpses of the sacred transcend the boundaries of time and space, culture and tradition and find further expression when Yeats’s imagination enables him to enter the ‘holy city of Byzantium’ – not the city of the impetuous young, driven by their senses, but a home of sages, ‘singing-masters of my soul’, prophets and teachers of a higher wisdom, true poets surrounded and inspired by ‘God’s holy fire’.
IV The terms ‘inspiration’ and ‘enthusiasm’ both indicate ways of perceiving the state of the poet as receiving the breath or spirit of the divine which renders him capable of a special form of creativity or as becoming the dwelling-place – however temporary – of a more than human entity. In such a state the poet does not lose his reason but transcends it and becomes capable of a form of expression higher than that of ordinary mortals in which great truths may be revealed to the rest of humanity. The utterances of the Sibyl of Delphi were delivered in enigmatic verse in a trance-like state and the devotees of Dionysus, a god of poetry just as Apollo was, owed their intoxication to divine frenzy as much as to wine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates aligns such prophetic possession with the divine madness of the poet and adds, ‘if a man 9
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comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman’.10 Such inspired poetry has the power to shape the soul. The power of the word has been proclaimed in both religious and secular traditions the world over but it is in poetry that mortal language reaches the ultimate limit of its power. Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of speech and writing, was later assimilated with Hermes in the figure of Hermes Trismegistus. In the Corpus Hermeticum, he is presented as stating that ‘The very quality of the speech and the sound of Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the objects they speak of’,11 or, as another translation renders this passage, ‘when the Egyptian words are spoken, the force of the things signified works in them’.12 Among mortals, it is the work of the poet to harness the power of words to illuminate the sacred. The sacred may reveal itself to poets who, like Thomas Hardy, reject conventional ideas of religious belief or practice; the deep pessimism which led him to pen the bleak Aeschylean conclusion of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and be accused of blasphemy and immorality for the views expressed in his final novel Jude the Obscure did not render him incapable of receiving and transmitting the message of ‘The Darkling Thrush’: That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. Throughout the whole of human religious experience poets have sought to reconcile the polar opposites of the sacred and profane, but no matter how widely separated they may at first appear, these two principles may be seen as leading to a common destination: the core of a perennial philosophy, as defined by Jonathan Shear in his article ‘On Mystical Experiences as Support for the Perennial Philosophy’.13 He outlines the theses of the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a transcendental ground, human beings’ capacity to attain immediate 10
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knowledge of that ground, their possession of a transcendental Self which shares the nature of that ground and the identification of this as the chief end and purpose of life. The poet’s task is, among others, to assist in this process and enable its fulfillment by conveying in language a spiritual wisdom gained through direct experience. It is in this sense that Kathleen Raine wrote that, ‘like Blake, Yeats was a metaphysician, for whom poetry was the language of spiritual knowledge’.14 Inspired poetry originates in experience of the sacred and with the precise choice of word, the cadence of its flow and the rendering of symbolic images it speaks directly to the core of the human soul; it insinuates its vision into the soul and opens the soul’s eyes to the presence of the sacred within and around it. In the words of Blake, the inspired poet opens the immortal eyes of the Imagination: … I rest not from my great task: To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of thought, into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.15 In opening our immortal eyes, the poet is also a prophet. As Kathleen Raine insightfully wrote, ‘As one who speaks from, and to, the Imagination, the words of the Prophet are not obscure; he addresses that very faculty all share, a universal conscience. Precisely in this lies the prophet’s power’.16 The soul-shaping power of inspired poetry led Plato to make poetry, together with music, essential to education in his ideal Republic, making these arts the ‘watchtower’ from which the guardians spread lawfulness through the city-state.17 But the influence of poetry and music on the soul also gave Plato reservations about their use in the Republic. So in Book III of the Republic he reduces Homer to ludicrous bathos by insisting on getting rid of all poetry that might encourage impressionable pupils to declaim it with undue fervor and identify with harmful emotions. We must remember that in the absence of canonical 11
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sacred texts the works of the poets occupied, for the Greeks, a position roughly equivalent to that of the Old and New Testaments in the Judaeo-Christian tradition or the Holy Qur’an in Islam. This, however, did not prevent Plato from criticizing them with a trenchancy not found again until the Enlightenment on the grounds that these descriptions of unheroic displays of ignoble feeling – unacceptable to the philosophical mind – and misleading portrayals of the gods were likely to corrupt the reader.
V At some point in late antiquity we may mark the beginning of a schism between the spiritual and the rational in art in Western thought whose damaging effects continue to be all too apparent. The emphasis on reason and rationality is often said to have begun in the West with ancient Greek philosophy. However, it is essential to note that from its pre-Socratic beginnings through to the flowering of ancient Greek philosophy in the Neoplatonism of late antiquity, there is no presumption that reason and spirituality have any intrinsic conflict; quite the contrary. For instance, the mathematical philosophy of Pythagoras and his followers was integrated with spiritual disciplines aimed at realizing the divine. One ancient commentator said of the Pythagoreans, ‘Every distinction they lay down as to what should be done or not done aims at communion with the divine. This is their starting-point; their whole life is ordered with a view to following God and it is the governing principle of their philosophy’.18 Indeed, the poem of Parmenides presents what is probably the first recorded application of pure abstract logic to problems of metaphysics in the words of a goddess revealing the ultimate unity of all being. Aristotle too, generally considered to be the ‘father of the science of logic’, states plainly that deductive reasoning must always begin from some starting-point and that the fundamental principles of all knowledge are known not through deductive reasoning but by Insight (Nous). Finally, Neoplatonists such as Plotinus and Proclus extensively discussed the transcendence of discursive rationality, the ascension beyond reason to its spiritual source 12
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– Insight or the Spiritual Intellect (Nous). In particular Proclus, the last great head of the Platonic Academy, wrote ‘[Discursive reasoning] traverses and unfolds the measureless content of Nous by making articulate its concentrated intellectual insight and then gathers together again the things it has distinguished and refers them back to Nous’.19 In addition to his mathematical, philosophical and theological works Proclus also composed many moving hymns to the gods. Perhaps it was because of his integration of these many modes of knowledge that Thomas Taylor called Proclus ‘the coryphaeus of all true philosophers’.20 Thus, the philosophical tradition that is generally considered to be the fountainhead of logic and deductive reasoning in the West is one in which deductive reasoning always was in the service of, and taken as subordinate to, direct insight into ultimate reality. Here one also thinks of the Eastern Orthodox spirituality of the desert fathers who sought to ‘stand before God with the mind (Nous) in the heart’.21 The confines of discursive reasoning must be transcended to behold ultimate truth. This was approached in an altogether different way in the festival of Dionysus, which was rooted in sacred intoxication, a rending-up of the individual reasoning self to something greater and more numinous which could not be grasped by reasoning alone. However achieved, transcendence of reason is akin to the state of mind in which the true poet creates. For instance, in Yeats’s ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, the soul summons the self to transcend thought: I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent, Upon the broken, crumbling battlement, Upon the breathless starlit air, Upon the star that marks the hidden pole; Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all thought is done: Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?22 This insight beyond thought from which poetry emerges was described by Robert Graves, not only a classical scholar and Professor of Poetry at Oxford but a true poet in his own right: 13
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I say magic, since the act of composition occurs in a sort of trance, distinguishable from dream only because the critical faculties are not dormant, but on the contrary, more acute than normally. (…) It is much the same with a poet when he completes a true poem. But often he wakes from the trance all too soon and is tempted to solve the remaining problems intellectually. Few self-styled poets have experienced the trance; but all who have, know that to work out a line by an exercise of reason, rather than by a deep-seated belief in miracle, is highly unprofessional conduct.23 This act of willing self-surrender demands an abnegation of reason which is increasingly difficult for the human race in the postEnlightenment scientific age. Indeed, the Dionysian rather than the Apollonian poet, to follow Nietzsche’s dichotomy, may commit actions or issue utterances which run directly counter to the dictates and rules of the conscious rational mind while in this trance-like state. This may occur in a religious arena rather than the purely spiritual where the ‘priests in black gowns’, whose strictures Blake deplored, hold sway whether clad in cassock, rabbinical coat or the robes of an imam and may produce effects which are unconventional or even shocking. Religious authorities have struggled to accommodate this in celebrations such as the mediaeval mystery plays and farces such as the Bohemian Masticˇ kárˇ where a quack doctor encounters the three Marys on their way to purchase ointments to prepare the body of the dead Christ for burial, the feast of the Holy Innocents where the Boy Bishop presided over a feast of misrule, the riotous jollity of Carnival before the solemnity of Lent, just as Judaism celebrates Simchas Torah – the Rejoicing of the Law – with gaiety, and Purim with games, feasting and children’s re-enactments of the story of Esther and Haman. However, these great religions have never found the easy accommodation of the sacred side by side with the scurrilous which the Greeks and Romans achieved in the plays of Aristophanes, the worship of Dionysus and Priapus and the Fescennine verses – the origin of satire which Horace so proudly claimed as ‘tota nostra’, a genuine Roman phenomenon.
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This severance, tragic in its consequences for art as well as for human existence, is well described by Philip Sherrard in The Sacred in Life and Art: … it is clear that if there is to be an authentic sacred art then metaphysical knowledge and artistic expression must be intimately conjoined, for the whole purpose of both is and must be to reveal the Truth. (…) But whether it is our reason that conceptualizes the Truth, or our imagination that images it – iconizes it—there is and can be no dichotomy between what our reason conceptualizes and what our imagination iconizes: each supports the other, the images of our imagination are intelligible, the concepts of our reason are interpretable in terms of images, for our imagination and our reason run together, in the same harness.24 This, as Sherrard explains, calls for the operation of the supreme cognitive faculty in man, known to Yeats as the spiritual intellect and to Dante as ‘our noblest part, the part that most of all is the object of the love rooted in us’. This results in a kind of poetry far removed from that which claims to be sacred merely by virtue of its subject-matter; one would not, for example, apply such a term to Pushkin’s Gavriliad, with its mischievously sensuous description of the Virgin Mary enjoying the attentions of Satan, the Angel Gabriel and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove in a single day (indeed, Pushkin himself consistently denied authorship of this poem because of the inevitable retribution which it would have earned from Nicholas I’s censors). The truly sacred in art proceeds from a deep perception of the divine nature of creation and a willingness to set aside the poet’s individuality and to become open to inspiration in its service, whatever form this may take. Moreover, the imposition of a conscious style, as Geoffrey Hill demonstrates in his book Style and Faith,25 more often than not serves only to show the almost insuperable difficulty of expressing deeply-felt spiritual impulses in terms of an externally imposed poetic diction, even by poets of the stature of John Donne, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan.
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VI Another stumbling block to reason is that poetry springing from such impulses may appear, as we have noted, scandalous in its disregard for convention, whether moral or aesthetic, or simply by its apparent naivety, as in certain poems by Blake or e.e. cummings: i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) 26 Experiencing the sacred does not require us to become childish and wholly unquestioning; rather, it requires trust and the ability to open oneself to the promptings of a force which does not undermine reason but transcends it. The poet therefore does not seek proof to verify his experience of the sacred – that experience is proof of itself – and in poetry he aims to express its content. As the theologian Leslie Weatherhead explains, ‘[The poet’s insights] are indubitable to him, not as the conclusion of a theorem of Euclid is indubitable, but as the beauty of a summer dawn is indubitable’; 27 and so, as prose is the language of everyday commerce, it is no accident that throughout the ages God has used poetry as the speech to reveal Himself to humanity. By doing so He imparted to it a means of conversing with Him and carrying out His purposes of teaching, transmission and revelation. This concept is identified by Shelley in his description of the true poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, which echoes the words of the ninth century Arab poet, Abu Tammam when he says: ‘Without high virtues by poetry laid down / No glorious deed by man can be achieved’. The great revelations expressed in the sacred texts of the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the poetic similes of the New Testament parables and the Holy Qur’an, the Hidden Words and the Seven Valleys of Baha’u’llah, the 16
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Hindu Upanishads, the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta and the enigmatic verses of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching have provided not only a lasting spiritual and moral foundation for great religions but an enduring source of poetic inspiration, enriching the many languages into which they have been translated with exquisite and expressive similes, powerful and penetrating aphorisms and mystic utterances capable of conveying profound truths beyond the compass of prose. In her discussion of Yeats’s ‘The Statues’, Kathleen Raine observes that ‘There are Gandhara Buddhist sculptures that seem to catch, as it were, the open eyes of the Greek Apollo in the very act of closing, of turning inwards from the Western scrutiny of an external, to the Eastern contemplation of an inner world’.28 But either way, whether the mortal eyes are opened or closed, if the immortal Eye of the Imagination is opened, the vision of divinity is revealed in all things. The imagination is replenished and nourished on poetry with the ultimate aim of attaining the vision that Thomas Carlyle expressed by saying that ‘the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God’, or what is described in the Corpus Hermeticum in the following: ‘And do you say “God is unseen”? Hold your tongue! Who is more visible than God? This is why he made all things: so that through them all you might look on him’.29 Such a vision has the power to awaken the inner conscience that enables one to regard all things as sacred and to treat other human beings with a respect that befits sanctity. At the other extreme from seeing God in all things is the spiritually impoverished perception which Philip Sherrard called a wholly desacralized world. In the Preface to the work cited above Sherrard states that the concept of a completely profane world – of a cosmos wholly desacralized – is a comparatively recent invention of the human mind and the attempt to establish it as the norm governing the organization of social, political and individual life still more so, with self-destructive consequences. These are only gradually becoming apparent, requiring ‘that we first blind our intellectual sight with a sacrilegious and hence totally fraudulent notion of the physical universe – with, in other words, the cataract of modern science’. We might compare this act of willful self-mutilation with the procedure proposed 17
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to Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s poetic drama as the price of his acceptance as the son-in-law of the king of the trolls, the Old Man of the Døvre, and a life of ease and comfort – the deliberate scratching of the lens of his eye to distort his vision, presenting ugliness as beauty and enabling him to live in accordance with the trolls’ maxim which is not ‘to thine own self be true’, but ‘Troll, to thyself be – enough’. In the nick of time he refuses to undergo this and narrowly escapes with his life and his eyesight – the integrity of his vision – intact. Sherrard continues, ‘… the attempt to recover the integrity of this thought and vision must begin with the removal of this opaque secretion’. This ‘can lead to a reversal of the present suicidal flow of things only if it is a consequence of and is accompanied by, the reawakening in ourselves of a consciousness of the meaning and presence of the sacred, in all its manifestations’. It is the task of the true poet, like Eliot’s ‘wounded surgeon’, to assist in this operation freeing the human mind from its thralldom to false norms to rediscover the sacred immanent in all creation, to reconcile reason and imagination which need never have been sundered, and to recover for themselves one of the most ancient functions of the poet, as of the Celtic bard whose craft, the product of long apprenticeship as well as divine inspiration, possessed the power to blast or to bless – not only that of a legislator or guardian but of a healer restoring to a sick and fractured world inner peace, balance and wholeness. It involves a quest for wisdom lasting a lifetime that costs ‘all that a man hath’ and may lead the poet through unexpected ways which he overlooked or actively rejected earlier, as in the case of W.H. Auden’s late conversion to the Episcopalian path of Christianity. The purpose of such a calling is summed up in T.S. Eliot’s sifting and picking for the truth remaining intact amid the broken images of The Waste Land and his final prayer for truth in the concluding section of Ash Wednesday: Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.30
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VII I have dwelt so far on the work of the great poets of the past and that alone would be unfair to the poets of today who have kept the sacred flame of that eternal word alive, the word of the spirit and of the sacred and who share the same passion and the same universal message with Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Blake, Tennyson, Yeats and most recently Kathleen Raine. I am thinking of the poetry of my friend Francis Warner. I have known Francis Warner for almost half a century now; our shared interest in W.B. Yeats brought us together and ever since my meeting with him in the 1960s in Sligo, Ireland we have built a friendship that has withstood the test of time. I have translated some of Francis Warner’s poetry into Arabic and have also had the great honour of writing a chapter on his poetry in Tim Prentki’s festschrift in honour of Francis Warner receiving the Messing International Award for literature in 1972. As early as that date I was most impressed by the way in which Francis Warner has triumphantly blended tradition with modernity and spirituality with practicality and brought us in spirit nearer to God. Francis Warner, perhaps the most English of the English poets of today, in his message of faith and universal love speaks not only to the English-speaking world but to the world at large and in whatever language his poetry is translated. In 1985 Francis Warner’s Collected Poems 1960–1984 was published by Colin Smythe Ltd and twenty-eight volumes of his poetry and plays have been published to date. Five of his verse plays have recently been or are being performed in the USA. One can only gesture towards such an output in a lecture: but what pervades all his poetry is a sense of the sacred, whether explicitly in such plays as Moving Reflections, which concerns the Roman Emperor Tiberius and Mary Magdalene’s meeting with him, or Light Shadows, on St Paul’s imprisonment in Nero’s house and Paul’s trials before the Emperor; or indeed, in Warner’s love poetry where that sense of the sacred pervades:
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Suddenly sensitive that we’re alone – Each movement stilled new in your arm or eye Aeons and civilizations cannot own Again; that you are holy and unique.31 His earliest poetry is strongly Neo-Platonic: Set the weary artist free, Sailing alone On the materialistic sea, Battered by vulgarity, Caverned in mortality: Sinew this bone.32 His first book, Perennia, 1962, is an epyllion or minor epic on the legend of Cupid and Psyche, a dream vision in Spenserian stanzas with a lyric climax, closing: And with her song still ringing in my ears, I woke beside the Box Hill stepping-stones … A bonfire flamed and crackled cheerfully Scenting the air with smoke, till in my bones I knew that I had seen reality Lying upon that bank beneath the rowan tree.33 An earlier poem ‘For a Child’ opens: I saw a squirrel on a tree And he laughing said to me ‘Funny human, tell me why You are so afraid to die’. ‘Little squirrel’, I replied, ‘Many, many folk have died; Yet not one’s come back to me Proving immortality’.
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‘Timid mortal’, said my friend ‘Do you think that death’s the end? Know the acorn, when it dies, Doubts an oak-tree will arise … ’.34 A later poem came to him when he was stuck at the traffic-lights in the centre of Oxford: I saw a shining lady stand In fields I could not recognize. Caught unawares in a strange land I stared at where her path would rise Across a nettled wilderness Shadowing ruin’s emptiness … . And all my heart was filled with light To see how she was safely held. The stones themselves stirred with delight And tears behind my eyelids welled. But when they cleared once more I found The Oxford traffic all around.35 Later, with much travelling in the Middle East with his young daughters, his Neo-Platonism widens. Here is his ‘Rubaiyat’ (Georgina is his little daughter): Ah, Georgie; you and I have travelled far To where the crescent meets the morning star; From citadel of David to the Sphinx, From Baalbeck’s sands to Karnak’s Amon-Ra; And when the Master of our Fates decides To show the glory that our frail flesh hides, One grove, one river in that Paradise, Will be our mirage where the Bedouin rides.36
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This range includes the Greek poets such as Pindar, whom he brought on stage in 1988 in Healing Nature: Man’s life is just one day; now here, now gone – A shadow’s dream: but when this darkness falls, A strong sun shines for them below, where fields Of golden fruit and scarlet roses gleam Through the bright incense at the immortal walls.37 He has recently written the words for six anthems, the sixth for performance in 2009 on the feast of Christ the King (22 November) by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge in King’s Chapel. This ‘Anthem’ appears below. However, to sum up what I have been illustrating in various extracts, I wish to quote first the words which Francis Warner has chosen for his epitaph: Ah, gentle friends, who stay your thoughtful pace Where my bones find their final resting-place, May flowering nature’s endless harmony Bring joy to you. It gave me melody. And now this poet’s voice, by nature’s law, Calls up the brave and beautiful no more, Take you the path we English poets trod, And, loving nature, find a loving God.38
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Anthem for Christ the King Sunday next before Advent Not in a crown of gold but with the stars, With oceans as his coronation drums, Not in a crown of thorns but lightning’s wars The maker of the universe, Christ comes. Yet to the heart of suffering he plumbs. The past torments us, what’s to come dismays. His understanding pity draws our praise. The resurrected Christ, King of Creation, Whose flags are branches, coach a donkey’s trot, Who fills relationship with love’s elation, Who chose straw in a stable for his cot, Answers our anguish as our bodies rot: ‘Lord, in your kingdom reach us through our vice!’ ‘Today you’ll be with me in Paradise’. He turns our royal pageants upside-down, Subverts earth’s power structures into dust. Blest bride and bridegroom close the General’s frown, For dew of youth lasts not by laws but trust, And open homes dissolve the beggar’s crust. The margin is the centre. Losing all, We find grace comes back like a waterfall. Magnificence, ruler of seas and shores, Music and joy of life, whose flaming force Turned timid men into world conquerors, Your spirit’s light reflects back to its source, Praying within us, healing our remorse. Come Holy Trinity, your kingdom won: Lover, belov’d, and love itself, in one. Francis Warner 28.iii.2009
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notes 18 See F.M. Cornford, ‘Mysticism and Science in the Pythagorean Tradition’ in The Presocratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alexander P.D. Mourelatos (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), p.140. 19 Proclus: A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s ‘Elements’, trans. Glenn R. Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p.3. 20 Thomas Taylor The Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p.449. 21 See The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 4 vols, 1979–1995). 22 The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983), p.234. 23 Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1955; reprinted 1970), pp.90–91. 24 The Sacred in Life and Art (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1990), p.133. 25 New York: Counterpoint, 2003. 26 e.e. cummings, XAIPE, 65 (1950). 27 The After-World of the Poets (London: Epworth Press, 1929), p.19. 28 ‘Blake, Yeats and Pythagoras,’ in Yeats The Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Writings of W.B. Yeats (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986), p.326. 29 Corpus Hermeticum, xi.22, trans. Brian P. Copenhaver in Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.42. 30 Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 1974), p.95. 31 Francis Warner, ‘Experimental Sonnets’, Sonnet xiv in Collected Poems 1960–1984 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1985), p.94. 32 ‘Prayer’, ibid., p.43. 33 ‘Perennia’, ibid., p.69.
1 Wordsworth's Vital Soul: The Sacred and Profane in Wordsworth's Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1982). 2 King James Version of the Bible, John 1:1. 3 Tanakh, A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985): Isaiah 55:11. 4 Tablets of Baha’u’llah, p.173, referenced in Nabil I. Hanna, Promises Fulfilled (Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, Inc., 2006), p.96. 5 Quoted in Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc., 2002), p.117. 6 Plato, Phaedrus 247c, in Plato: Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p.52. 7 London: Cassell & Co., 1955. 8 The Holy Qur’an, x:76. 9 W.B. Yeats, ‘The King’s Threshold’ (1904) in Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1960) p.114. 10 Phaedrus 245a, op.cit., p.48. 11 Corpus Hermeticum xvi, trans. Brian P. Copenhaver in Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.58. 12 Corpus Hermeticum xvi, trans. Walter Scott in Hermetica Vol. 1, (Boston: Shambhala, reprint, 1993; original, 1924), p.265. 13 The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lxii/2. 14 Kathleen Raine, ‘Blake, Yeats and Pythagoras,’ in Yeats The Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Writings of W.B. Yeats (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986), p.304. 15 Jerusalem, Pl.5, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprint 1988), p.623. 16 ‘Blake: The Poet As Prophet’ in Essays & Studies 1982: The Poet’s Power, ed. Suheil Bushui (London: John Murray Ltd, 1982), p.79. 17 Republic iv, 424d.
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‘For a Child’, ibid., p.26. ‘I saw a shining lady’, ibid., p.130. ‘Rubaiyat’, ibid., p.239. Nightingales – Poems 1985–1996 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1997), p.64. 38 Ibid., p.105.
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TH E TEM ENOS ACADEMY patron hrh the prince of wales
An Academy for Education in the light of the Spirit The Temenos Academy is an educational charity which aims to offer education in philosophy and the arts in the light of the sacred traditions of East and West. The word ‘temenos’ means ‘a sacred precinct’. Each year the Academy runs up to 100 lectures and seminars, and occasional film screenings and readings. These range from major public events to small study groups. Our activities are based in London and are open to all. The Academy publishes a high quality journal, the Temenos Academy Review and other publications in the Temenos Academy Papers series. Over three hundred lectures are available on tape. By these means those unable to attend meetings in London can have access to our work.
The Temenos Academy P O Box 203 Ashford Kent tn25 5zt United Kingdom Telephone +1233 813663 www.temenosacademy.org