Mystical Power of Poems

For anyone interested in learning more about the inner life, about consciousness and mystical insight, the works of the poets are a great resource. To read their poems is to share their joy and peace, to discover extrasensory delights to learn metaphysical secrets, to awaken to the possibilities of enlightenment, to fall in love with the divine, to swing from universality, to the tender being of things here and now, and in the end to come to a larger understanding of ourselves.

In the past, when poets have written about mystical experiences, their work has been dismissed as mere imagination by an unmystical readership. But what seems fanciful to the uninitiated is to the wise a truthful description of the mystical reality.

Poetry is the natural speech of mysticism. Because the imagery and tone of a poem can convey more than ordinary words can express, poetic language is used to describe what would otherwise be inexpressible. Through image and tone, a poem can allude to an abstract experience or evoke a feeling that captures the aftereffect of a mystical moments even though the moment itself may have been beyond words. Poets, who have gifts of language beyond the ordinary can put into words what other people can feel but cannot express themselves.

Many cultures have made use of poetry to express mystical insight and the mind’s capacity For higher consciousness. In classical China and Japan, poetry was the natural accompaniment of the meditative life. Monks wrote poems to celebrate their awakening into enllghtenment, and among lay people the writing of poetry became a means to cultivate sensitivity to Buddha-nature. Throughout the ancient world, poetry was the natural mode of language for mystical and religious scripture. The Vedas, Bible, Buddhist sutras and Koron rely on verse. The mystical function of poetry survlves today in native cultures where poetry, praise, and prophecy are blended into one and verses learned by heart preserve metaphysical wisdom. It is no accident that the Eskimo word for poetry derives from the word for soul.

In studying the close associationbetween mysticism and poetry, French critic and theologian Henri Bremond concluded that poets conceive the germof a poem in a naturally mystical state of consciousness. He believed that poems stimulate the mind of their reader so that the reader is led into the same deep level of awareness from which the poems have sprung.

“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” said the great English poet Shelley. A poem is a revelation, revealing the gleam of consciousness that moved the poet to to write. Casting aside the confusion ofthe world a poem focuses our attention on the true nature of life and communicates an impression of its spirit.

Because poetry is a form of intimacy with the ultimate nature of life poetryitself is a form of mysticism. In Creative intuition in Art and Poetry (World, 195 3), Jacques Maritain called poetry ,”that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of thehuman Self which is a kind of divination”. The mystical intimacy comesto the poet through inspiration and to the reader through acknowledgment of the ultimate nature revealed in the poem.

Poetry is a way of knowledge. Both science and poetry can describe the world, down to the most minute particulars but only poetry can stretch to its sublime value. William Blake touched the sublime in Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wildf tower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour......

Compared with ordinary languaget a poem is more highly organized, more compact, more symbolic, and in its elegant economy of expression and harmony of sound, more beautiful. Plato called poetry ”coiled language” because in a poem there are many layers of meanings referring back one upon the other. The tools of poetry, such as imagery and sound and the resonance of each thought with the other thoughts within the poem all bring forth associations in the reader’s mind.

Poetic Consciousness

The language of a poem is evidence that it arises from a special mentalstate in which communication is of a higher order than the poet’s ordinary thinking or speech. In such a state the poet perceives an expanded meaning, a fundamental nature, and an importance in the images that come to mind. Snatches of memories of other moments of insight come together, related by sense of the present moment. Creative associations bring disparate thoughts together in similes and metaphors revealing what they have in common. The poet’s language becomes so ingeniously organized that it surprises even the poet, as meaning and form arise together in rhythmic lines and repetitions of letters and rhymes come spontaneously. The sound of the words seems perfectly suited to their meaning as though the phrases were animated by the same eternal truth they describe.

Where does this burst of greater creative intelligence come from? How is it that thoughts and language can arise spontaneously with such order and perfection? Many poets have explained the phenomenon of their own inspiration in terms of an intelligence greater than their own. The modern English poet and novelist D.H. Lawrence described the inspiration of a poem as “ life springing itself into utterance from its very wellhead." A century earlier in England, the poet Coleridge described inspiration as "the infinite I AM reverberating in the Imagination."

Inspiration surged so strongly in the English poet William Blake that he felt his long poems were being dictated to him by divine will. In a letter to a friend in 1803, Blake wrote:

“I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Tlme it has taken in writing was thus render'd Non Existent, and an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life, all produced without Labour or Study. I mention this to show you what I think the Grand Reason of my being brought down here."

In America the poet and essayist Ralph Waido Emerson also sensed the transcendent origin of inspiration. In his essay Tbe Poet. the author made a claim so fantastic that it bears a second reading

“It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns. that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy { as of an intellect doubled on itself by abandonment to the nature of things. that beside his privacy of power as an individual man there is a great public power on which he can draw by unlocking at all risks his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe . . ."

For T.S Eliot, inspiration was less sensational and more modern. Eliot found inspiration to be more like a flash of higher consciousness, a moment when the obstructions of stress and ignorance are remarkable by their absence, and consciousness is freed to function in a new way.

Eliot described inspiration as "the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of the breaking down of strong habitual barricrs– which tend to reform very quickly Some obscruction is temporarily whisked away”

Inspiration is a time of purity.. How ever impure the poet may be at other times in life, at the moment of inspiration, the ideal poet's mind becomes pure reflection of the true nature of life. The more innocent the poet is at the time of inspiration, the more natural the poem will be. The innocent reflection of reality–how well .it is captured in this anonymous poem, written long ago in eighthcentury China :

The wild geese fly across the long sky above.
Their image is reflected upon tbe chilly water below..
The geese do not mean to cast their images on the water;
Nor does the water .mean to hold the image of the geese.

All human beings have access to the same universal source of inspiration and creativity. But ordinary thoughts are like a dim view from distance. They view life from a vantage point far removed from the ultimate source..

Inspired thoughts are like a view close-up. The view is close to the source of life because the inspired poet's awareness has temporarily expanded to a fundamental level. So the poet sees closely into the fundamental nature, and that enables him to describe it vividly.

When we read poetry, the poet’s inspiration inspires us to dig down deep in our awareness to understand her communication on the level from which it came. Then we remember that this profound level had always been in us, only we had passed it by. We recognize the truth in the poets’ descriptions, because somehow we had already seen what they are describing but had not consciously appreciated it.

The ultimate nature of life, the poet's intimate view that becomes the poem, the reader's profound response–all three find common ground in one wholeness of existence. Together they reenact the eternal drama of consciousness knowing conciousness. In reading a poem we
draw closer to our own being.

The Reader’s Consciousness

Poetry cultures the mind by expanding awareness. Getting the gist of a poem is not merely a honzontal expansion of knowledge, like getting your facts stright. It is getting to a more profound level of consciousness where, says, Shelleyt “A poet participates in the eternal the infinite, and the one....”

As your mind moves in the direction of a more profound level, your intellect may not always follow You may be left wondermg why you like a poem, why it transports you as a beautiful piece of music transports you, why it has a significance that you cannot expresse. Without knowing why, you may feel a liberating joy as your awareness expands beyond its old boundaries.

How poetry stimulates the mind to transcend has been brought to light by Dr. Rhoda Orme-Johnson in a comprehensive article, “A Unified Theory of Literature”, published in Modern Science and Vedic Science (1987).

Transcendence may be triggered by meanings that take the mind inward to absorb them by swinging the reader’s attention from the concrete to the abstract by descriptions of higher states of consciousness that remind readers of their own experiences, or by literary techniques such as figurative language, gaps and rhythm.

In a poem, the figurativelanguage (in which one thing is associated withanother) “encounges the reader to transcend to a subtler, more intuitive, holistic level of consciousness in order toconnect the disparate objects involved,” Orme~~Johnson writes:

The “gaps” in the poem also encourage a shift in consciousness. The gaps may be gaps in meaning that the reader fills in, the juxtaposition of contrasting values, or the moments of silence built into the form of the poem, such as the gaps between the stanzas.

The silence is an important part of the structure and effect of the poem. In the pauses of the poem and in the special silence afterwards, the mind digests what it has read and has the “aha” experience of insight.

Another major influence on the reader is rhythm. The poem’s rhythm arises from its accented syllables, its pattern of vowels and phrases, and the arrangement of words on the page. Rhythm settles the mind and yet keeps it alert enough to have insights. The rhythm communicates the flow of the poets consciousness. It conveys an emotional tone and sometimes seems to capture the rhythm of life itself.

Inherent in the phrasing of a poem is a rhythmic breathing pattern that was there at the time the phrases and pauses were created and that reemerges as the most appropriate breathing pattern when the poem is read. As the state of the body and mind are related, so too are the rhythmic flow of breath and the flow of consciousness.

A vocal champion of the relationship between rhythmf breathing, and consciousness is the contemporary American poet Allen Ginsberg. In Paul Portuges’s book,The Visionary Poetlcs o Allen Ginsberg (Ross-Erikson, 1978). Ginsberg explains: “So you find in Blake or any good poetry a series of vowels which if you pronounce them in proper sequence with the breathing indicated by the punctuation....you find a yogic brearhing ...that will get you high physiologically...... And so l think that’s what happened to me in a way with Blake.”

What happened to Ginsberg with William Blakes mystical verses was an experience of higher consciousness. He was only 22 years old at the time, reading Blakes poetry in his apartment in New York. Ginsberg tells his story in Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb’s Talking Poetics from Naropa institute (Shambhala 1978):

“ I had my eye on the page and I heard a big solid solemn earthen voice saying Ah, Sunflower, weary of time. My voice now actually... reciting first. The Sunflower, then The Sick Rose and then The Little Girl Lost....At the same time, there was outside the window a sense of extraordinarily clear light......Everyday light seemed like sunlight in eternity....And then I looked further at the clouds that were passing over, and they too seemed created by some hand to be conscious signals.... I had the impression of the entire universe as poetry filled with light and intelligence and communication and signals.... Kind of like the top of my head coming off letting in the rest of the universe connected into my own brain. . . There was a sense of an Eternal Father completely conscious caring about me in whom I had just awakened. I had just wakened into his brain, or into his consciousness a larger consciousness than my own. Which was identical with my own consciousness but which was also the consciousness of the entire universe. So basically it was a sensation of the entire universe being completely conscious."

The value of reading poetry shows itself in a new appreciation of ordinary life. If a poetic mood lingers as you go about your day you may find that the clouds seem majestic as the breath of God the fruits at the market look like works of art, and the people waiting in line at the bank seem like characters in an endless story of evolution.

Reading poetry encourages an intimate appreciation of the sublime suchness of things. and a feeling of unity with them.

Is it any surprise that reading poetry puts one in a poetic frame of minds .Anyone who has attended a poetry workshop knows how reading other peoples work puts one in the mood to write ones own poems.

There are stories of grear poets who were so moved by reading the works of a fellow poet that they created a new poem in response. When Coleridge heard Wordsworth in person reciting his poem The Prelude Coleridge was inspired to write a poem To William Wordsworth to express the effect that The Prelude had on him

Scarce consious, and yet conscious of its close
I sate, my being blended in one thought
(Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolue?
Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound-
And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.

Coleridge raised an interesting point, which was echoed by Henri Bremond (author of Prayer and Poetry) and Allen Brockington (author of Poetry and Mysticism on a basis of Experience): for Coleridge, a minister's youngest son, the effect of an inspiring poem was akin to the mysticism of private prayer.

The great American poet Longfellow noticed a similar benediction. He wrote in praise of poetry in his poem The Day is Done

Such songs have the power to quiet~~^
The restless pulse of care
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Like the perfection of grace, the perfection of poetry is soothing. Poetry is a refuge from chaos. "The sense of wholeness, of everything coming together, of resolution– is one of the primary pleasures of poetry," writes Donald Hall in The Pleasures of Poetry

Its orderliness smoothes out knots of stress and quiets the restless pulse of care, replacing unease with a meditative state of quiet breathing, joy, and healthful wholeness. Keats put it beautifully in his poem Endymion which begins

A thing of beauty is a joyfor ever
It loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us and a sleep
Fuil of sweet .dreamts and bealth and
quiet breathing

I have described the poetic state of mind and body that the reader gains from contact with poetry, but ofcourse there is more–the meaning of the poems and their mystical insights. The wisdom of poetry should not be ignored although it may indeed clash with the conventional world view, because to ignore its mystic meaning is to ignore our own higher nature.

Like the best of teachers, poetry can communicate both knowledge and a heartfelt appreciation of that knowledge. This is the kind of wisdom which becomes a part of you.

Excerpted from Mystical Delights, by Hilary Huttner. Copyright 1996 by Frontline Systems, Inc.