Poetry as Prophecy

Kathleen Raine speaking at Chisholme House, 21st August 1988.

I give you the end of a golden string only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at heaven's gate built in Jerusalem's wall. [Blake]

Living at a time when materialism was surpassing spirituality in Western social values William Blake believed that it was the duty of the artist to awaken people from the 'sleep' of physical existence and to 'lead' them towards a realisation of something greater. In this essay, Katheleen Raine explores the significance of Blake's conception of his poetry as prophecy and its message 'from the spirit innate in all to the spirit innate in all'.

[Due to the fact that this was transcribed from a tape recording we regret that a small section of the talk is missing at the point the tape was changed. This is indicated in the text.]

To speak of prophecy is to enter regions of thought unfamiliar to, indeed alien to, the mental world so firmly established in the modern West by three centuries of virtually unchallenged scientific materialism, or shall I say simply materialism? – why blame science? Every civilisation may be seen as a development from certain ideas, certain premises from which certain consequences necessarily follow, while others are precluded. The impressive material discoveries of technology and power which have characterised our own civilisation have nevertheless, as we are at this time beginning to discover, been at the expense of other excluded areas of experience and knowledge. Western Science equates reality with the material universe. This world can be weighed and measured and quantified in terms of the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small, and only the quantifiable is deemed real. Indeed, this phase of civilisation has been described by René Guénon in the title of his most famous book, as The Reign of Quantity. The world of poetry itself can in such a system be accorded the status only of the imaginary, of make-believe, a game for children who have not yet acquired real, that is factual, knowledge of the nature and causes of things. Prophecy claims also to be a revelation of truth, but of a truth for which a materialist worldview has no place. It is a concept relegated to the limbo of ‘history of ideas’. A prophet, according to the Oxford dictionary, is one who speaks for God, another meaningless concept in terms of materialist ideologies but one upon which great civilisations have been established which hold the ground of reality to be not matter, whatever that may be, but mind or spirit of which indeed matter may be but one manifestation. William Blake (who described his poems as prophecies at the end of the eighteenth century) reaffirmed, in the face of materialist ideologists already gaining ascendancy in his time, and whose supremacy is being called into question only in our own, the prophetic role which speaks from and for this living spirit which is the true agent of all we perceive as nature. Instead of deeming the universe a mechanism, the sensible world is seen to be a system of appearances inseparable from the mind or spirit, which in perceiving, also creates what it perceives. Everything is, in Blake’s word, ‘Vision’ and every natural effect has a spiritual cause and not a natural, for a natural cause only seems.

What then, in terms of a world of spiritual realities and spiritual causes, are we to understand by the word ‘prophecy’? In materialist terms the word could, at most, be understood in the popular sense for telling the future. To Blake it certainly meant something more than, and other than, the foretelling of events such as we might read in the daily papers. Prophecy is concerned with other levels of reality than such things, as Nostradamus and others have perhaps foretold. Blake writes:

Prophets in the modern sense of the world have never existed. Every honest man is a prophet. He utters his opinion of both private and public matters. Thus, if you go on so, the result is so. He never says such a thing shall happen, let you do what you will. A prophet is a seer, not an arbritrary dictator.

Truth of the prophetic order comes from the perceptions and judgements of the imagination. It is not like second sight, a faculty possessed by a handful of exceptionally endowed people, but it is latent in all. Like poetry, it is a gift of seeing and understanding the world, people and events in terms of the imagination. Blake’s writings, first and last, are a proclamation of the primacy of the imagination which he calls ‘the True Man’, as against the materialist view that man is his physical organism. ‘The worm of 60 winters’ is Blake’s term which, according to the philosopher Locke (and the same view persists in the American school of behaviourism to this day) is, in Blake’s words “naturally only a natural organ subject to sense”. This Blake vehemently denied: “The poetic or prophetic character,” he affirmed, “is the True Man.” Later, he substituted the term ‘imagination’, identifying the imagination with the God within of the Protestant tradition in which he himself stood, and he named that inner presence “Jesus the imagination”. Jesus is, for Blake, the name of the universal and innate creative Spirit experienced as a person, and called in the Indian sacred tradition the Supreme Self. It is from this Supreme Self and not from the senses that knowledge derives. Nor does Blake use the term ‘poetic genius’ or the later term ‘imagination’ in the limited sense of the poet’s muse but in a far more comprehensive sense as the inspiration and knowledge, not of the arts alone but of all humankind’s deepest intuitions. He understood religions themselves to be of the same nature as poetry and he writes, “the religions of all nations are derived from each nation’s different reception of the poetic genius which is everywhere called ‘the spirit of prophecy’.” Religious differences therefore are merely cultural as all men are alike, though infinitely various, so all religions as all similars have one source. The True Man is the source, he being the poetic genius.

Thus, imagination in Blake’s sense does not mean the imaginary, that is to say unreal make-believe, but signifies on the contrary the principle of reality itself. Coleridge held the same view, distinguishing between imagination and fancy or make-believe. Perhaps I do not need to remind you of Coleridge’s famous definition: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I am’.” Henry Corbin, the great Ismaili scholar, has introduced the word ‘imaginal’ to signify this reality, in contradistinction to the word ‘imaginary’ which has come, in popular parlance to mean ‘unreal’. Coleridge stopped short of Blake’s identification of the imagination with the God within, but Blake’s term ‘the Divine Humanity’ is not however his own but derives from the sixteenth-century Swedish mystic Swedenborg whose system is the ground of Blake’s.

To return then to our original argument, that the very conception of prophecy is incompatible with modern scientistic ideologies, I must repeat that a view by which mind, spirit, imagination becomes the cause can by no means equate reality with Newton’s measurable universe, which Blake calls an ‘abstract void’, but with immeasurable life. Blake declared that his own great task was 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. I am told that the Hebrew word for prophecy signifies bringing forth out of oneself, and that is also Blake’s meaning. When Blake wrote that “Jesus is God”, he spoke, as do mystics of all religions, not of a historical supernatural person but of that universal, indwelling, divine presence. His “Jesus the imagination”, is Swedenborg’s “Grand Man of the Heavens”, that is, that which is of the inner worlds who is the many and one and one in many of the innumerable multitudes of eternity. All humankind, past, present and to come, true Divine Humanity is at once a person and a universe, since that universe is a region not of space but of being. This world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetative body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal. There exists in that eternal world the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetative glass of nature. All things are comprehended in their eternal forms in the Divine Body of the Saviour, the true Vine of Eternity, the Human Imagination.

Imagination is called ‘the Saviour’ because it saves us from the limitations of natural life and steps beyond these limits into the boundless eternity of Immeasurable Being.

To some, conditioned as we all are by the current assumptions of our society to a materialist paradigm, such affirmations may seem incomprehensible; to others I may seem to be labouring the obvious. What is self evident in terms, for example, of Indian and Far Eastern philosophical thought (and I must here add Near Eastern philosophical thought also), there is in any case no question of Blake’s Divine Humanity in any way resembling or preparing the way for the purely secular nineteenth-century exaltation of the natural man in what is termed ‘humanism’. The supremacy of ‘Jesus the Imagination’ resides solely in the reality of the God within. Blake speaks as a mystic who universalises the divine human nature which the Church attributes only to the historical Jesus. In his last years the diarist Crabb Robinson, who was a friend of Wordsworth also, questioned Blake on his opinion concerning the imputed Divinity of Jesus Christ. He had his doubts about Blake, obviously. Blake replied, “He is the only God” but then he added, “and so am I, and so are you. We are all coexistent with God,” he said, “members of the Divine Body”. Humanism exalts the natural man, whom Blake calls “The worm of 60 winters”, who accumulates knowledge through experience. By virtue of the imagination, the universal cosmic knowledge is available to whoever, poet or prophet, and raises his mind into those regions. “One thing alone makes a poet,” Blake affirmed, “imagination, the divine Vision.”

Blake thus stands centrally within the Protestant tradition which he inherited when he declared that “henceforth every man may converse with God and be a king and priest in his own house.” To Blake the Protestant conception of conscience, the word of God universal, was no mere abstract theological concept but a continuous state of awareness of the Divine Presence. And he writes:

He who waits to be righteous before he enters the Saviour’s kingdom of the Divine Body will never enter there; I am perhaps the most sinful of men. I pretend not to holiness yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily, as man with man, and the more to have an interest in the Friend of sinners.

The religious associations of such terms as ‘the Saviour’ and the ‘Friend of sinners’ with the evangelical Christianity of Blake’s day with, for example, Methodism, should not confuse us, for Blake’s meanings are mystical and universal. We may read Blake no less in the light of the Bhagavad Gita than of the words of Jesus who proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is within you. Others may find Blake’s thoughts illuminated by the psychology of C.G. Jung whose recognition of a collective unconscious or transpersonal self within and beyond the individual has revolutionised the modern West’s understanding of realities of the human psyche. Of course, only up to a point. I think of him very much as the Virgil of the West who carried Dante so far on his pilgrimage but could not enter the paradisal universe. Blake’s own type of ‘the Inspired Man’ is the poet Milton who gives his name to Blake’s prophetic book which is entitled ‘Milton’ [Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, 1804–8] in which he proclaims the supremacy of the innate law of the imagination over the moral law of this world imposed by the empirical ego who, for Blake, is Satan, the selfhood. Satan is identified with the self in the same way as Jesus is identified with the imagination, and Satan is the prince of this world. Milton, great poet of the imagination, was in Blake’s sense of the word a divinely inspired prophet whose Paradise Lost [ca. 1670] describes eternal realities of the imagination. On factual truth, Blake poured scorn –  “as if public records were true!” he indignantly exclaims. In Paradise Regained [1671], Milton’s Satan tempts Jesus by discoursing on the school of Plato, Aristotle and the latest Stoics, Epicurus and the rest, and suggests that by acquisition of learning, Jesus – who is surely here the prototype of Blake’s ‘Jesus the Imagination’ – can prepare himself to be a King complete. Jesus refutes Satan in truly Protestant terms claiming light from above; he says, “Think not that I know these things or think I know them not, nor therefore am I short of knowing what I ought. He who receives light from above from the fountain of light, no other doctrine needs, though granted true. But these are false or little else but dreams, conjectures, fancies built on nothing firm. The first and wisest of them all professed to know this only, that he nothing knew.” That is of course Socrates.

Milton is affirming that inspiration transcends learning: “However many books wise men have said are wearisome, who reads incessantly and to his reading brings not a spirit and a judgement equal or superior, and what he brings what need he elsewhere seek, uncertain and unsettled, still remains deep versed in books and shallow in himself.” Jesus then praises the prophets of Israel as “men divinely taught, who excel all the oratory of Greece and Rome”. Thus it is with good reason that Blake sees in Milton the type of the inspired man, that is to say the poet prophet. Blake’s Milton (the Milton who appears in Blake’s prophetic book of that name) even more explicitly and eloquently denounces human wisdom in the name of inspiration and is a portrait that only draws in clearer lines the author of Paradise Lost. If, for Milton himself, Jesus was not explicitly identified with the innate imagination, he is implicitly so, for Milton’s “light from above from the fountain of light” is that same God within as Blake’s ‘Jesus the Imagination’. Blake’s Milton also confronts and renounces Satan who tempts the poet with acquired knowledge and comes into the world renouncing the empirical selfhood; his knowledge comes through the senses and through recorded history:

The poet comes in self annihilation and the grandeur of inspiration to cast off rational demonstration by faith in the Saviour. To cast off the rotten rags of memory by inspiration. To cast off Bacon, Locke and Newton from Albion’s covering. To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with imagination to cast aside from poetry all that is not inspiration.

Bacon, Locke and Newton, those cultural heroes of materialist British Culture and Scientific Materialism: they are the enemies of the innate knowledge of the living imagination. “The murderers of Jesus” Blake declares, Jesus being the Imagination, “are those who mock at eternal life, who pretend to poetry, that they may destroy imagination by imitation of nature’s images, drawn from remembrance.” The prophetic spirit as understood by Blake – and here again he stands firmly within the Protestant mystical tradition he inherited – is by no means remote but that Friend with whom Blake conversed daily, as man with man.

During the nineteenth century poetry and the other arts were to become ever increasingly wedded to nature’s images and expressive of the finite individual on the natural plane as at best in the narrative poems of Browning and Tennyson; as also the novel, the literary form which above others narrates the annals of natural life. The tide began to turn once more at the end of the century and, by way of Gilcrist’s Life of William Blake [1863] which was completed by William Michael Rossetti, the brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Blake’s thought came to influence first the pre-Raphaelites and, through them, the young William Butler Yeats who was to become, with Edwin J. Ellis, a member of that same pre-Raphaelite circle, the first editor of Blake’s prophetic books. The school which proclaimed the doctrine of art for art’s sake may seem remote from Blake’s vision of the indwelling imagination as the Divine Presence, yet there is a connecting link in Blake’s identification of poetry and prophecy. Blake made no distinction between poetry of the imagination and prophecy nor, in this sense, between art and religion. Near the end of his life he inscribed on his famous engraving of the Laocoön group his deepest beliefs in this matter: “A poet, a painter, a musician, an architect, the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian”, and indeed follows with the identification of Jesus with the Imagination, “Prayer is the study of art, praise is the practice of art. Fasting, etc. all relate to art. The outward ceremony is antichrist, the eternal body of man is the imagination, that is God Himself, the Divine Body of Jesus, we are His members.” It manifests itself in his works of art. In hisBook of Job, Blake depicts in the first plate Job and his sons and daughters sitting as on a pious Sunday doing no manner of work beneath a tree whereon hang musical instruments unheeded. In the last plate, the same men and women are present but each playing on one of these instruments or singing or reading from a scroll representing, perhaps, poetry – poetry, painting and music, the three powers in man of conversing with Paradise which the flood did not sweep away. But a secular conception of art for art’s sake, in exalting art as a supreme value while taking no account of its sacred source, is paradoxically a diminishment, just as natural man is diminished when he with his empirical skills and acquired knowledge is exalted to a supremacy that he can possess only as the bearer of the Divine Image.

Yeats as a young man seems poised on a knife-edge between the aestheticism of his contemporaries, Pater and Wilde and the pre-Raphaelites, and the prophetic vision of Blake. In an essay on ‘William Blake and the Imagination’, Yeats describes Blake as having announced a religion of art of which no man dreamed in this world about him. And this is true. Yet, as Yeats expands the theme, we are aware that there has been a subtle sleight of hand. Yeats writes: “In his, ” that is in Blake’s, “time, educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination but that they made their souls by listening to sermons or by doing or not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets they were hard put to do it, for lack of good reasons. In our time we are agreed that we make our souls out of some of the great poets of ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth or Goethe or Balzac or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser order; or out of Mr Whistler’s paintings while we amuse ourselves or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul by listening to sermons or by doing or not doing certain things. We write of great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed an unholy beauty with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept for the Beatitudes and Mysteries of the church, and no matter what we believe with our lips we believe with our hearts that beautiful things – as Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse – ‘having lain burningly in the divine hand and that when time has begun to wither, the divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity’.”

The sleight of hand lies in the very different senses in which both turns of the phrase ‘a religion of art’ were understood by Blake the prophet and the Aesthetes who were in the nineteenth century preaching against the philistines in the name of ‘Taste’. Would Tolstoy and Flaubert and Whistler, would Balzac have seemed to Blake to have been inspired by the daughters of inspiration or by his daughters of memory? True, Blake was himself aware of the difficulty of making hard and fast distinctions for he admits that the work of the latter, the daughters of memory that is, is seldom without some vision. But the distinction has to be made, Blake insists, for the sake of eternal life. Because, that is, works inspired by vision originate in the eternal life of the imagination, whereas secular art is mere imitation of nature’s images. Yeats himself falls short of Blake though less so than a host of his contemporaries who made a religion of the secular as such. It is all too easy to blur the distinction so clearly seen by Blake, for whom the source of true art lay always beyond the reach of all those acquired talents and skills which may be learnt in the schools of human wisdom. Not all poetry is inspired from the sacred source, and a work, which in purely technical and literary terms may seem comparable, may originate in very diverse realms of the inner worlds. However, in fairness to Yeats, we must say that the whole of his subsequent poetic life was an attempt to attain Blake’s vision for whom it was so simple a matter to converse daily, as man with man, with the God within. Blake had written those lines we all know: “I give you the end of a golden string only wind it into a ball / It will lead you in at heaven’s gate built in Jerusalem’s wall.”

Yeats, by magical techniques, psychical research and other means, had attempted to discover that gate. Mystic[ism] may be the direct way, [but] great poet though he was, Yeats followed magic as a means to unbar the gate, not only between the sleeping and the waking mind but between our own minds and the one Great Memory, the memory of Nature herself. He believed, as an article of magical faith, that this Great Mind and Great Memory can be evoked by symbols – magic as an enchantment depending on the seemingly transitory mind, made out of many minds. And the poet or musician is an enchanter who creates or reveals images from beyond the doors or gates between ourselves and that greater mind. “Poets or musicians in former times,” Yeats writes, “kept the doors to of those less transitory minds, the genius of the family, the genius of the tribe or it may be, when he was mighty-souled enough, the genius of the world.” Yeats goes on to contrast that imaginative activity with the workings of the modern secular mind:

Our history speaks of opinions and discoveries but in ancient times when, as I think, men had their eyes ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and revelations. They looked as carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and its thunders as we look towards parliaments and laboratories. We are always praising men in whom the individual life has come to perfection, but they were always praising the One Mind, the perfection of all perfection.

To Yeats, what Blake calls ‘Jesus the Imagination’ becomes the Memory of Nature, a storehouse of images of all that has been, and he comments:

It is perhaps well that so few believe in it, for if many did many would go out of parliaments and universities and libraries into the wilderness to so waste the body and to so hush the unquiet mind that, still living, they might pass the doors the dead pass daily. For who among the wise would trouble himself with making laws or in writing history or with weighing the earth if the things of eternity seemed ready to hand?

(Perhaps they ought to have come to Chisholme House? Well, they have!)

Again one wonders exactly what Blake meant: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”, Blake wrote, “and to me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.” Blake could see “a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, eternity in an hour.” But Yeats the poet-magician seeks to penetrate the frontiers of anima mundi and of the world of discarnate spirits as though the realities of the imagination lay beyond, not in the here and now. Blake looked not with but through the eye at all times whereas Yeats, understandably indeed, sought for proofs and evidence of the supernatural. High as Yeats stands as a poet, Blake’s sublime simplicity eludes him. Blake did not for a moment doubt that there are other worlds, other levels of reality beyond the world of generation, but for him there were no frontiers to penetrate.

We owe it to Jung that whole areas of knowledge of inner regions of the mind, long discarded by materialist science as meaningless, within the terms of natural science, have been again illuminated by a recognition of the order of things to which they belong. All cosmologies of the realm of the mind and spirit recognise the mental realm as basically fourfold, as Jung has rediscovered and redefined as the worlds of feeling, reason, sensation and intuition. These four universes were likewise known to Blake whose four living creatures, so named from the Book of Revelation, the zoas, [and which] he has characterised and personified so vividly in his prophetic books. These four are to be found in all ancient mythologies. In Egyptian mythology is found a prototype, as Jung points out, of the angel, eagle, lion and ox of St John’s vision in the four-faced humanity of Ezekiel’s vision, the four-faced Gods of India and so on. Blake understands them as at once regions of consciousness and persons:

The four living creatures, chariots of humanity divine, incomprehensible in beautiful paradises expand. These are the four rivers of paradise and the four faces of humanity, fronting the four cardinal points of heaven, going forward, forward irresistible from eternity to eternity, creating space, creating time, according to the wonders divine of the human imagination.

When Blake is difficult to understand it is never that he is vague and imprecise, but rather that he speaks clearly of what to him was plain and simple, although within the terms of materialist thought, meaningless. Nothing could be plainer than the six lines in which Blake describes his fourfold vision:

Now I a fourfold vision see, / And a fourfold vision is given to me / Tis fourfold in my supreme delight / And three fold in soft Beulah night / And twofold always may God us keep / From single vision and Newton’s sleep.

To how many of those of us who know these lines, perhaps by heart, do they communicate those realities which he names? Yet, to many systems known to Blake himself, that paradigm is fundamental. Plato knew four worlds: from the First Cause descending to the Intelligible World to the Archetypal, to the World of Souls, with the Natural World as the lowest of the series; not, as from materialist theories, the cause and origin of higher things but the effect of these. The Jewish Tree of God, the Kabbalistic paradigm, likewise recognises the transcendent world of Ein Sof (the Infinite) with three lower hierarchies and the created world is the lowest term. Swedenborg knew the celestial, spiritual, in the sense of spirits as souls that is, and the world of generation. Blake’s four correspond to the Swedenborgian orders with ‘Newton’s sleep’ as an abstract and dead world which is, as he says, outside existence, the fourth and lowest. When vision is twofold we experience the natural world as a living world; ‘soft Beulah night’ is the individual soul’s world of love, of feeling; and the supreme delight of the fourfold vision is the total experience as things as they appear when illumined by the Universal Spirit. According to Swedenborg, the natural and spiritual and celestial orders differ not in degree but in kind. And Yeats, commenting on Blake and Swedenborg, in the essay preface to Ellis’ and Yeats’ explanation of Blake’s symbolic system, sees in this difference the very basis of symbolism for, “If the worlds differ in kind and not merely in degree,” Yeats writes, “no mere analysis of nature as it exists outside our minds can solve the problems of mental life.” Within each world there are continuous degrees which Swedenborg likens to the degrees of visual clearness, decreasing as it recedes from the flame which is its source until it is lost in obscurity. But degrees that are not continuous differ, as do cause and effect – that which produces and that which is produced. “The materialist thinker,” Yeats goes on to explain, “sees continuous where he should see discrete and thinks of the mind not merely as companioning but as actually one with the physical organism. Everything is of the same order of reality, but you cannot,” Yeats insists, “demonstrate one degree from another, and no increase of natural observations and sensations could, in itself, awaken to Being or open the intellectual faculties.” Only by way of metaphor, or as Swedenborg terms it, ‘correspondence’ do perceptions of one order relate to another by a transformation that lifts them into a new world. “In Swedenborg and Blake,” Yeats continues, “the difference between the two kinds of degree is symbolised by perpendicular and longitudinal motion. We pass upward into higher discrete degrees and merely outward into continuous ones.”

“Study science ‘till you are blind, study intellectuals ‘till you are cold”, Blake wrote in the margins of Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Wisdom, yet science cannot teach intellect, much less can intellect teach affection. For Blake, as for Swedenborg, Love was the highest rung of the ascent of the fourfold ladder:

Thus we receive knowledge not from one level alone but from four. Each in turn higher, in the sense of a more illuminated, more inclusive, more expanded state of consciousness than that of mundane awareness, the light of common day.

All these levels are, as Blake knew, present all the time. But according, as we expand or contract, to what Blake calls our infinite senses, so we are attuned to lower or higher worlds. Only if we recognise that there are multiple levels of being, lower and higher worlds, can we speak of inspiration. Nor does all inspiration derive from the same world but may come from the vital or the level of the individual soul or the still higher source, the Universal Spirit. The prophetic genius to which Blake laid claim brings its knowledge from the source itself. To most these things must seem mere hearsay, or perhaps occasionally glimpsed from afar, yet Blake himself believed and affirmed that the prophetic spirit is not given only to a few but is innate in all, though unawakened in those whom Blake, following Plotinus, calls ‘sleepers’ – asleep that is to higher worlds. The prophet is one who summons us to ‘Awake!’ Milton, his type of the prophetic poet, Blake calls ‘The Awakener’ who speaks from the spirit innate in all to the spirit innate in all. Such is the supreme poetry of the Bible, or of Shelley or Blake’s own, or the music of Schubert or Bach or Beethoven, and such supreme poetry and music paradoxically causes us no surprise but rather recognition, as if we had always known these things, as indeed the Divine indwelling Spirit in us does know all.

There is much fine poetry on the natural level. Nature poetry like that of John Clare or Gerard Manley Hopkins, enhancing, celebrating the sensible world and its creatures ... [tape change] ... rarely but unmistakably another voice, as from an order that would once have been called the celestial hierarchies, Rilke wrote in our own century of the great angels behind the stars whose communications are universal and mysterious. Summoning us, as it were, from beyond our individual selves into those regions of supreme delight that Blake knew. There is, on the other hand, much so-called nature poetry which does no more than recall the observations of single vision and ‘Newton’s sleep’, and which progressively dissolves nature into a formless chaos of impressions and denudes its forms without resonance from higher worlds of meaning and qualities. It’s a nature without beauty. I am sorry to say, I think our Poet Laureate is responsible for a good deal of poetry of that kind. It is a diminished, de-sacralised nature: one has only to look at so much modern poetry and painting, music also, to realise that with the loss of Beauty, the spirit has gone. Such indeed has been the story of the progressive invasion of our society by materialist ideologies, and the arts, which in their very nature exist to reflect the higher worlds in terms of correspondences, of symbol and metaphor, have become opaque to these worlds, and which, when forgotten or denied become inaccessible, out of earshot. In Yeats’ words, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” We live in such a time in which the prophetic voice is unheard, since the poets themselves no longer listen or transmit the message of the wisdom that might be heard if we listened. “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” Nature has grown opaque and the soul’s world of feeling, unilluminated from those higher regions of the mind on which that world depends, becomes a closed world of egoistic narcissism leading progressively from trivialisation to nihilistic despair. Only when each degree is open to that upon which it depends can the universal life circulate and flow within the tree whose roots are above and whose branches are in the lower world. According to the Mahahbarata we experience in this age, the Kali Yuga, only a quarter of ever-existent Reality.

I repeat, therefore, that the prophetic voice is out of earshot of the closed frontiers of a materialist’s ideology. The poetry consistent with such an ideology can rise no higher than a perhaps impassioned or accurate description of current affairs seen in the light of political or other current values, and which the daily press could voice just as well or better. Poetry – and poetry alone – operates on the vertical axis of the four worlds, opening a way of communication between lower and higher, narrower and fuller experience. Logically, there can be no place for poetry in terms of a materialist view of mankind in our universe, for it is precisely to communicate the values of higher degrees or worlds that the arts are empowered.

The critical writings of Sri Aurobindo in his book The Future Poetry, and elsewhere in his writings, doubtless arises naturally from the traditional Indian view of man as a being whose spiritual body comprises, like that of archetypal man, three bodies or worlds. He was a student of Tantrism with its psycho-physiology which recognises three bodies or sheaths of the spirit, whose life informs all, from the mental, the vital and the dense physical body. Educated in England, English literature was familiar to him, yet he was able to speak of English poetry in terms of the traditional Indian view: to view our culture with its beauties, but also its limitations from a standpoint other than that of western materialism; to respond to the presence or the absence of resonances, not only of the voice of the soul, but of what he calls, using Emerson’s term, ‘the over-soul’ or ‘over-mind’, beyond the frontiers of the personality. Those in whom the higher degrees are open must always listen for that voice which speaks in poetry at its highest reach and which moves us like sublime music to our own heights and depths when we hear it. We may find it difficult on the evidence to share Aurobindo’s view that poetry must evolve from the natural degree to a poetry of the over-mind, expressing humankind’s highest and innermost degree. He himself was a Yogi and was as such fully aware of our human potential. Yet Yeats’ prophetic voice spoke otherwise of this age in which the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Not all poets are prophets since each writes only from that level or degree to which he is open; nor are all prophets poets in the narrow sense of the term. Yet poetry and prophecy derive from the same source. “The true Man is the source,” as Blake says, “the human imagination.” The prophet does not speak for God from outside and beyond our humanity, but from within it. From Swedenborg’s and Blake’s ‘Divine Humanity’, on whom Yeats comments “The man he speaks of is the inner and not the outer being, the spiritual and not the physical, the highest ideal, the human form divine, as he calls it, and not extrinsic body.” Yeats continues:

The mind or imagination or consciousness of man may be said to have two poles, the personal and the impersonal. When we act from the personal we tend to bind our consciousness down as to a fiery centre; when on the other hand, we allow our imagination to expand away from this egoistic mood, we become vehicles for the universal light and merge in the universal mind.

Thus we must regard prophecy in terms of that cosmology which holds man to be himself coextensive with the cosmic pole, and prophecy to be at once our own highest expression and that voice of the God within, affirmed by the mystics of all traditions. To quote Yeats once more,

The mood of the seer, no longer bound by the particular experience of the body, speaks out and enters into the particular experiences of an ever-widening circle of other lives and beings. For it will more and more grow one with that portion of the mood essence that is common to all that lives. The circle of individuality will widen out until other individualities are contained within it and their thoughts. He who has thus passed into the impersonal portion of his own mind perceives that it is not a mind but all minds. Hence Blake’s statement that Albion or Man once contained the starry heavens, and his description of their flight from him as he materialised, when once a man has entered into this, his ancient state, he perceives all things with the eyes of God.

Yeats does not, like Blake, continually speak from those highest regions, yet at times he did transcend those regions or moods depicted in his phases of the moon, to glimpse those things Blake saw continually “with the eye of God”. As he says, “In its nature, we cannot attempt to define the prophetic voice. At most we can listen for its utterance. Like the wind, man heareth the sound thereon and it is gone.” Yet we understand prophetic words because they speak from and to the universal mind that all share and they awaken in us a knowledge we already possess. The prophetic voice speaks not from the trivial daily mind, yet it speaks of this world, viewing, to use the Irish mystic AE’s phrase ‘the politics of time’ from the standpoint of the politics of eternity. In this sense, Blake is a supremely political poet as was Milton, as is Shelley and Yeats too. As indeed were the Biblical prophets of the Jewish theocracy. Blake’s prophetic books, for so he called them, deal with the Revolutions of his time, in France, in America; they denounce war, injustice, the cruel moral law that is not grounded in an understanding of the nature of the Divine Humanity but sees man only in terms of the natural laws. “Everything that lives is holy,” was Blake’s message to his nation. Conscripting armies, setting the poor to work at mechanical tasks, punitive laws from crimes against property, oppression of women and children – these he denounced, not as a politician, but as one who saw in his native London that “human awful wonder of God”; not a city of bricks and mortar but the spiritual fourfold London among whose chartered streets and blackened churches walks the ever-living imagination. He saw the golden builders who labour always to build Jerusalem, the city of the soul, the invisible city within the hearts of its inhabitants. He saw the reality of which those dark satanic mills of industry are only the reflection; the mentality of Newton’s sleep which sees the universe as a lifeless mechanism, a mill with complicated wheels, thereby enslaving the myriads of eternity to machines made in the image of that falsehood. Yeats, both in his greatest poems and in his remarkable work of vision – evoked as it seems from the transpersonal mind he sought to penetrate by magical evocation – views this world from a standpoint from beyond the gyres of history within an all embracing unity, a vision as concerned with the underlying laws of the successive rise and fall of civilisations and European history during the last 3000 years.

And between Blake and Yeats stands a third poet who may have known certain of Blake’s prophetic books and who was for Yeats the supreme English poet – that is, Shelley. Blake had known Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Shelley’s second wife Mary, daughter of Godwin the political economist. Probably Blake’s ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ was inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, two of whose books Blake had illustrated, and it is not hard to suppose that a copy of Blake’s book might have been in Godwin’s library. Blake’s championing of the cause of free love and the cause of woman seems like a bridge which unites Blake’s with Shelley’s proclamations of the freedom of the soul. For Shelley’s supreme poem on the realm of love, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, likewise discourses not on the politics of this world but sees earthly things with the eyes of the soul from a higher degree in the scale of being.

When Matthew Arnold called Shelley an ‘ineffectual angel’, he spoke as a man of this lower world to be applauded only by those who have little understanding of the power of angels to affect events through those inner worlds which are the soul’s native country. ‘Prometheus Unbound’ is concerned not with some political utopia but with the eternal reality of the universe of love that we all recognise in our heart’s-desire, and which those only who enter can attain imaginally that universe Shelley describes, whose freedom is not one that can be conferred by any change of existing laws. “All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil,” Shelley wrote, whose freedom, like Blake’s, was a state of the soul. In ‘Hellas’, Shelley wrote of the Greek struggle for independence from the Turkish empire, the same struggle as that in which his friend Byron gave his life, as the type of all historic struggles in which the politics of time is overcome by the politics of eternity. In that dramatic poem, the prophetic genius is personified as the deathless figure of Ahasuerus who possesses the cosmological knowledge of universal mind:

... so old 
He seems to have outlived the world’s decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he; – but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The Present, and the Past, and the To-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery,
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-adamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin. 

Enoch, the soul son of Adam who was exempt from death. Thus is Shelley’s potent archetypal figure of the over-mind, his knowledge is not personal but cosmic, ageless. Shelley excels in his gift of creating personae for such archetypal figures as Ahasuerus and Prometheus, who like Blake’s Urbian, is the universal humanity. Asia and the lady of the sensitive plant are figures of the anima or soul and, besides those, symbolic rivers, caverns, mountains and isles, wind and light. Shelley is a supreme master of symbolic thought and so can only be fully understood, beautiful as are many of his poems, in terms of their natural description – the only level this age comprehends. (Asia, by the way, is the soul of Prometheus – I think there we must understand that Shelley is saying that the soul of the west, Prometheus, is Asia the spiritual civilisation which must be the counterpart of the western.)

Shelley’s ‘Mahmud’ wishes to learn from Ahasuerus that worldly knowledge which Milton’s Satan had offered Jesus in Paradise Regained. And Mahmud speaks: “Thou art an adept in that difficult law of Greek and frank philosophy, thou numberest the flowers and thou numberest the stars, thou severest element from element, the spirit is present in the past and sees the birth of this old world, through all its cycles of desolation and of loveliness and when man was not and how man became the monarch and the slave of this low sphere and all its narrow circles.” But Ahasuerus replies: “Sultan! Talk no more of thee and me of the future and the past but look on that which cannot change, the One, the Unborn, the Undying.” And he speaks in words that suggest those of the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, the Eternal Self. “All is contained in each, Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup is that which has been or will be to that which is, the absent to the present. Thought alone and its quick elements: will, passion, reason, imagination cannot die.” The four again. “They are what that which they regard appears, the stuff whence mutability can weave all that it hath dominion o’er. Worlds, worms, empires and superstitions. What has thought to do with time, or place or circumstance?” Indeed, one hears echoes of the teachings of the Gita in Blake before Shelley, as we do in Yeats after him. Of all English poets, it is Shelley who was the most learned in the literature of the Platonic and neo-Platonic, the western branch of the universal and unanimous tradition of the perennial philosophy which in Vedanta finds its supreme expression.

Shelley’s ‘Mahmud’, a prince of this world, is concerned only with prophecy in the narrow sense of past and future. But for Shelley the significance of the Greek war of independence was rather that it might bring again the values of an earlier Golden Age: “In sacred Athens near the fane of Wisdom, Pity’s altar stood. Serve not the unknown God in vain but pay that broken shrine again. Love for hate and tears for blood.”

Shelley, like Blake, knew that it is in the world of imagination that meanings and values have their origin. As Blake praised mercy, pity, peace and love, so Shelley praised those virtues and values by which all the acts and events of time are to be judged:

We have heard the lute of hope in sleep, we have known the voice of love in dreams, we have felt the wand of power and leap as the billows leap in the morning beams.

Shelley and his poetry evokes through the use of symbolic language, grounded alike in nature and in sacred tradition, prophetic knowledge of regions of the mind which have become unconscious. It is not simply in order to paint a Turneresque twilit seascape that Shelley writes of sunset and twilight, cave and meteor and sudden wind. Ahasuerus, the transpersonal mind, must be summoned: “ he dwells in a sea-cavern / ‘Mid the Demonesi’”, and must be called forth from his twilit mysterious world, between the sleeping and the waking mind, as Yeats has described the crisis of genius. Shelley’s art seems to epitomise all that Coleridge meant when he wrote of the imagination as essentially vital. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate. Fancy, on the contrary, the merely imaginary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory, emancipated from the order of time and space, while it is blended with and modified by the empirical phenomenon of will which we express by the word ‘choice’.

Fancy belongs merely to the natural world. Imagination such as Shelley’s employs nature’s images as a language, humanity’s primordial language, older than words to speak of realities of soul and spirit. Shelley does not assemble his images by choice as it seems, but summons his magical world as a whole, like a dream which is its own meaning, and in which every part, as in music, is essential to the whole. So with Ahasuerus:

He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream
Of Ocean sleeps around these foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prowe within the sapphire water,
Then will the lonely helmsman cry aloud
‘Ahasuerus!’ and the caverns round
Will answer ‘Ahasuerus!’ If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmara, and a wind
ill rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet...

It is not hard to understand – such passages as those describing Ahasuerus – why, for Yeats, Shelley, rather than Blake himself even, is the supreme poet, uniting in his symbolic virtuosity meaning and beauty from the three worlds. What as natural descriptions could surpass ‘the fiery shadow of a gilt prowe within the sapphire water’, or ‘the faint meteor and the wind that will rush out of the sighing pine forest with a storm of harmony’, or ‘the sunset where the stream of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles when the young moon is westering’? With what virtuosity does the poet use these images from nature as the language of correspondences in the soul’s realm of symbols. One may read this passage as one might read dream symbols. The time is twilight between the light of day and the mystery of darkness, the sleeping and the waking mind, as Yeats has described the place of poetic inspiration. The summoner of the secret wisdom must go in solitude to the sea cavern which doubtless signified for Shelley Porphyry’s famous cave of the nymphs, the emergence of life itself from a source hidden in darkness. That mysterious darkness inhabited by the Demonesi Daemons, messengers between worlds, intelligences, those same angelic beings who, on Jacob’s ladder, ascend and descend between heaven and earth. Shelley was learned in Greek mythology which for him was the language of his imaginative discourse and uses the Greek term ‘daemon’ which is free from religious connotations. Ahasuerus himself – whose knowledge embraces all worlds, the entire cosmos – is a figure who may remind us of Jung’s archetype of the wise old man who is often a bringer of such knowledge to the human dreamer or searcher of the inner realms of psyche. Ahasuerus knows that the present and the past are idle shadows of thought’s eternal flight and admonishes Mahmud to “commune with that portion of thyself which was ere thou didst start for this brief race whose crown is death”.

So the resonances of meaning emerge by way of Shelley’s potent symbols from that mystery on whose frontiers we live and which none can approach without that awe, that sense of the sacred, which can be experienced but never defined, The prophetic voice speaks from that mystery which is in its nature beyond comprehension. The symbol can resonate or evoke meanings beyond the scope of verbal definition.

Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Raine was an independent scholar, professor, poet, recipient of numerous awards and honors, founder of the periodical Temenos, and later, in 1990, the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, a teaching academy that stressed a multistranded universalist philosophy.

She was born in Essex in 1908, bought up in Northumberland, and later went on to study at Cambridge before becoming a professor there. She specialised in the works of Coleridge, Blake and Yeats, with the latter heavily influencing her own poetry.

Her poetical works include Stone and Flower (1943), Living in Time (1946) and The Pythoness (1949), and the notable work of literary criticism, Blake and Tradition (1968). Her most recent Collected Poems was released in 2000; the same year in which she was made both a CBE and a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She died in 2003.