The Traveler (reposted)

[Mike MacLeod]

I thought it might be appropriate to revisit this lovely poem. I forget who brought it here first, but thank you again.

The Traveler

A hundred years I slept beneath a thorn,
Until the tree was root and branches of my thought,
Until white petals blossomed in my crown.

A thousand years I floated in a lake
Until my brimful eye could hold
The scattered moonlight and the burning cloud.

Mine is the gaze that knows
Eyebright, asphodel, the briar rose.
I have seen the rainbow open, the sun close.

A wind that blows about the land
I have raised temples of snow, castles of sand
And left them empty as a dead hand.

A winged ephemerid I am born
With myriad eyes and glittering wings
That flames must wither or waters drown.

I must live, I must die,
I am the memory of all desire,
I am the world’s ashes, and the kindling fire.

by Kathleen Raine

[Michael Larkin]

You know, Mike, for some reason I mustn't have absorbed this very well the first time round. It is indeed a lovely poem, but more than that, it expresses very well the kind of experience that I think Goethe had when applying active imagination to the urphenomenon of the plant: when he was able to see "all as leaf" in its many variations.

The use of first person singular emphasises this, I think. It forces dis-identification with the little self and re-identification with something much, much bigger - all organic things, in fact, which represent myriad expressions of the one divine nature. A nature that is constantly creating, even from the “ashes” of destruction.

The "desire" of the last stanza is, for me, the Holy Spirit, the force that impels the universe to strive and to evolve. All the constantly changing and developing organic manifestations are the Son (whose only individual existence is as witness), through whose eyes the Father contemplates Himself. I keep saying it, but this is the first time on the new Hidden Recess:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
as tumbled over rim in roundy wells
stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
crying whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
to the Father through the features of men’s faces.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

I have had a similar experience occasionally; it is something that resolves, at the level of sensation rather than intellect, the seeming paradox of multiplicity in unity and unity in multiplicity. The image I sometimes think of isn’t as poetic, but I think it’s the same kind of thing. Imagine a huge inflatable with countless places where its surface is plastic and can protrude in all sorts of interesting shapes – different plants and animals and human beings. It is as if each extrusion thinks of itself as entirely separate from every other one, whilst in reality, it is all part of the same unity. It’s a clumsy analogy because it’s rather two-dimensional.

Raine’s poem gives an actual feeling of what the experience is like. I think we’ve all had it, however fleetingly. We’re so often caught up in the illusion of separation our hectic lives bring that we don’t take time to reconnect to the omnipresent dynamism we all are and share. Poems like Raine’s and Hopkins’ can do this right in the middle of all the hustle and bustle. They’re worth learning by heart and saying now and then as a kind of prayer of remembrance.