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Some
Portraits Of Early Ideas Leonard
Feeney, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1941) X. THE
POETS AND THE MYSTICS I think it was good of our
teachers to foster the poet in the child, rather than make a practitioner of
him. Nor do I feel, as I succumb to middle age, that poetry was a bad thing,
simply because it was not the best God has to offer. I know it was so much
better than the lesser things children are now given in laboratories of
learning, that I am not afraid to put it in its proper place in relation to
that better form of knowing which the pure contemplatives enjoy. But
I will need the full maturity of my powers to show where poetry falls short
of mysticism, and I need to do so precisely here in order to make a sort of
celestial preparation for some further things to come. If the reader does not
find this chapter very childlike in content, at least he will find it
childlike in arrangement. Poetry
is another world, absolutely. When you are in it — in the throes of
composition — you do not know what you eat, what you wear, what time it is,
what day of the week. Some are prepared to say you are not responsible for
what you do, but this cannot be admitted. Conscience is ultimately stronger
than concentration. Francis
Carlin calls the poet’s state one of “fixed imagination.” And when the
imagination gets into the habit of fixing itself to beauty, it begins to fix
itself to other things, worries for instance. Poets are born worriers. I
prefer a deeper explanation of the poet’s misery than that offered by Francis
Carlin. I think poetry is a case wherein that phase of us which was not
destroyed by original sin tries to get back to its Paradisal state, and to
see by simple insight in place of round-about logic. But alas, the escape is
never complete because of the wound of original sin. The heavy fetters of
iniquity hang on the wings of the mind trying to soar. And sooner or later
the strain tells, and down we tumble to Earth, wounded and depressed. It is
an awful price to pay, as only those know who have paid it. The
reaction to the writing of poetry is terrific, and history is strewn with the
wrecks of those who could not stand the pace. But the real poets have got to
stand it, and that is why, next to the mystics, they are the greatest heroes
in the world. The
experience of the poets and the mystics is totally different. The poets go
back to Paradise. The mystics go forward to the Beatific Vision. The hardship
of falling forward from Paradise is not as great as that of falling backward
from the Beatific Vision. Hence, the dark night of the mystics is even worse
than that of the poets. The
poets admire the mystics and praise them. The mystics do not understand the
poets, but in weaker moments they envy them. The
Devil hates the mystics, but he also hates the poets. He is determined that
human nature shall go neither forward to the Beatific Vision nor backward to
Paradise. The
mystics want the pure white light of the Divinity. The poets want it
diffracted among creatures. Poets make wretched mystics, but mystics make
even worse poets. Saint John of the Cross was a great mystic, but a poor
poet. John Keats was a great poet, but no mystic whatsoever. Poetry
is an infinitely lesser thing than mysticism, but it is greater than ordinary
thought. It is also, to some extent, a vocation. No one ever asked to be a
poet, nor could he wholly escape the assignment once given. The writing of poetry
is not its own reward. The poets suffer, and either Heaven awaits them or
they shall have had Hell on both sides of the grave. The
poets work in perishable material, endeavoring to give permanent form to
words, sequences and sounds. But all these babblings will be drowned one day
in the music of a celestial noise. The poets know this in their deepest
hearts, and yet they go on pretending not to know it. Sunt lacrimæ rerum,
et mentem mortalia tangunt, Virgil wrote; and another poet supposed he
was convincing himself of a truth when he began: No
voice is ever drowned; Nothing
becomes a stillness that once was a sound. What nonsense! Even a physicist could explode it. And yet
what a haunting nonsense to indulge in! The poets deal in dangerous values.
They are constantly trying to eternalize the temporal and make the hereafter
seem like now. And they can fool us from time to time with their pleasant
tricks. But the mystics refuse to be fooled. They know we have been banished
from Paradise by an angel with a flaming sword. The
mystics work in the field of imperishable material, their own immortal souls.
They give forms, perpetual and harmonious, to hidden masterpieces within.
They are inarticulate, mostly, in this life. But when they do burst into
song, their poetry will be found to be an integral part of the hosannas of
The Blessed which will vibrate forever and ever. The
poets are dreadfully insincere, but they are never deceitful. “But she is in
her grave, and oh, the difference to me!” sang Wordsworth of little Lucy. But
after a time it did not make much difference. A mystic, bereaved of
Lucy, would keep her as a perpetual part of his prayer, his suffering, his
very life. It would always make a difference to him. Yet
the mystics, unlike the poets, are deceitful. I do not mean this by way of
moral, but of supernatural inconsistency. If you ask the mystics how they
feel, they will reply: “Excellently, thank God!” though they may be referring
only to an excellent ache in the head or an excellent pain in the stomach.
They appraise such things in the light of their direct relationship to God,
and talk accordingly. The poet does not understand such subterfuge. If you
ask him how he feels, he will answer “Rotten!” if such be the case. He knows
nothing of the brave evasions of the mystics, just as he knows nothing of
their unswerving loyalties. What
purpose does the poet serve in the frightening supernatural scheme of things
to which we are consigned? Well, even at his worst, the poet is at least a
document, illustrating, in its positive phase, the truth of original sin,
proving that there was in the primal childhood of our nature a cognoscitive
directness in the mind’s approach to truth never wholly destroyed by the
transgression of our First Parents. The poet is one of the apples left over
from Paradise, which, remaining unbitten, perished by blight. I
know there are those who want to pamper the poets and send them all to Heaven
as a reward for mere æsthetic skills; but these persons are chiefly those who
have never known by direct experience the emptiness of poetic achievement. To
the honor of the poets be it said that very few of them have surveyed
themselves with such a beatific stare. The best poets know well their own
limitations, and are not ashamed to be saved by humility, as Chaucer was not,
who, at the hour of death, begged Our Lord to be mindful, not of the
excellence of the Canterbury Tales, but of the heinousness of his own
sins, and to blot these out in the gentle Christian mercies. If
there is any point in which poetry is a good preparation for mysticism, I
insist that it is neither in the object sought for as such, nor in the method
of seeking it. The poet is seeking for created beauty, the mystic for
uncreated. The poet is perfectly helpless without the instruments of the
senses and the imagination. To the mystic the senses and the imagination
ultimately become hindrances, obfuscating the clear vision of God’s essence. But
this much the poet and the mystic do have in common. Both look upon the
object of their quest as an absolute, for which they are willing to make any
and all sacrifices. The poet for the sake of his poem will starve, go
sleepless, penniless, friendless, consign himself to solitude, and bravely
endure the badgering, suspicion, misunderstanding which is the lot of all
those who have a precious secret to hide. In brief, he practices asceticism
of the extremest kind. The logic of asceticism he can see, and, conscious of
its necessity in the realm of art, he is easily persuaded to admit its
reasonableness in the realm of sanctification. He is sensitive also to the
value of “form,” and is often led into the Church by his admiration for the
liturgy. And as regards the full-time contemplatives in Religious Orders, the
poet may be indifferent toward them, but he is rarely if ever intolerant of
them, and that is more than you can say of the common garden-variety of men,
even among Catholics. Mary seated at the feet of Christ is as thoroughly convincing
to the poet as Martha cooking the dinner, though there is probably nobody in
the world more desperately in need of a dinner. Fortunately
for the sake of poetry, the mystical state is one to which many are called
but few are chosen, and so there is no particular danger of the poets
surrendering their trade in favor of a higher urge. And once God the Father
gets hold of a good poet, He seems intent on keeping him, in preference to
giving him the added lift that is needed for mysticism. Furthermore, the poet
is one of God’s best credentials, too valuable to dispense with. For if there
are poets, there must be God. If there are those who can make words that fall
so beautifully on our ears in time, there must be One Whose Word will reach
us even more exquisitely in eternity. Therefore, God does not banish the
poets, as Plato would. For God’s Republic is more generous than Plato’s.
Others, besides the few, can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And, short of
seeing God face to face, it is something to have trapped His vestige in a
rainbow or His image in the eyes of a child. Likewise,
the poet offers most stubborn resistance to the efforts of the materialists
to break down the dignity of our nature and formulate it in terms of the
Guinea pig. The mystic, since his is a celestial secret locked in the heart,
suffers an easy dismissal by the materialist, on the score of being
frustrated, inhibited, and so on. Not so the poet, who sings an open and free
song for all to read. The delicacy of the spirit’s tones is in it, and the
materialist has no recipes for explaining this away. And so the poet,
precisely because there is something in him that is of this world and
something in him that is not, is one of the best defenses civilization has to
protect itself against those whose education is pursued in terms of two
epistemological criteria: suspicion and surmise. Therefore,
let the poets be kept, and let the mystics be kept, too, but with their
differences properly noted in time, since they will be even more conspicuous in
eternity. In
the pursuit of his eternity the poet has need, just as the mystic has, to go
to the theology of the Church for counsel and direction. The mystics are
constantly complaining that they have difficulty in finding suitable
directors. They do not ask that these directors be mystics, but that they be
those who have extended theology to the point where it can exercise its
domain over them with understanding, rather than ridicule. Likewise,
I know of no poet who wants a poetical confessor. But he would like a
confessor who at least knows of the existence of poetry, and this by way of
appreciation, not condescension. It
would be well if the theologians would realize their importance as the last
refuge of all of us, and with sure knowledge and generous sympathies save
both mystic and poet from the horrors of private revelation. |