That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets

Copyright © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Kathleen Raine

Preface © 2017 by Wendell Berry

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available.

Jacket design by Kelly Winton

Book design by Megan Jones Design

eISBN 978-1-61902-987-3

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

I:

THE PRESENCE OF POETRY

What Is the Use of Poetry?

The Writing of Poems

II:

THE WISDOM OF POETRY

What Is Man?

Premises and Poetry

The Inner Journey of the Poet

On the Symbol

The Use of the Beautiful

III:

THE WITNESS OF POETRY

Innocence and Experience

Wordsworth: A Remembered Experience

Shelley as a Mythological Poet

The Chamber of Maiden Thought

Hopkins: Nature and Human Nature

Yeat’s Holy City of Byzantium

Ash Wednesday

Edwin Muir

The Poetry of Vernon Watkins

PREFACE

For a long time, our world has been dominated by a scientific—hence economic and political—materialism, which knows that all of reality can be, and finally will be, explained by physics. A theory of everything, a truth of the universe, will finally be derived from the observation of parts and particles. And this has involved a paradox increasingly obvious and fearful: the material world, which ought logically to be cherished by materialists, has instead by their influence and their processes been wasted, deformed, poisoned, and made ugly.

This has been accepted, even abetted, by a conventional religious dualism that involves another cruel paradox: many Christians and Christian sects, which ought logically to cherish this world as the approved work of God and thus as a good gift and a privilege, regard it instead as a trap or prison from which the soul must escape by repudiating its earthly life and accepting a formula for salvation. This sort of spirituality is little more than materialism’s second face, for it abandons the world and our economic life in it to the materialists.

This curious alliance is opposed, and perhaps is opposable only, by the vision of the completeness of reality that is said to underlie the traditional cultures and religions of the world. This vision—attested by scholars and authorities far more learned than I am, though certainly confirmed by my own experience and reading—sees the outer world as continuous with and dependent upon inner realities such as love, reverence, goodness, and beauty. These realities, though they have belonged always to the actual lives of most people, the materialists dismiss as intangible and therefore unreal. The religious dualists see them perhaps as real enough, while, like the materialists, seeing them also as irrelevant to the natural life and human economy of this world.

The consequent estrangement of body and soul, Heaven and Earth, time and eternity, leading to the further estrangements of utility and beauty, work and pleasure, and all the rest of the divisions and divorces of our mechanical civilization, is owing to the loss of the ancient unifying vision by which we have been enabled to see in the world the eternal light that everywhere informs it. This vision, this immemorial knowledge and way of knowing, survives only marginally in the modern world. Inherently opposed as it is to the radical simplifications of the materialist explainers and devisers, it is assuredly the losing (though never the lost) side. And yet its diminishment or depreciation is just as assuredly consequential in the lives of people and the world.

Kathleen Raine wrote in one of her essays, Waste Land, Holy Land, that T. S. Eliot discerned in our world an absence—of all things the hardest to discern, still harder to identify. The death of God, the death of the soul—name as we will the withdrawal of the inner vision from the outer world—lays waste the earth. Eliot situated the profane world in that place in the soul’s order of values to which it belongs—in the hells, the kingdom cut off from life.

True of Eliot as that passage is, it can stand also as a fair summary of Raine’s own vocation and her work as both poet and scholar. All her long life, she was experiencing and attending to our suffering of the absence, in the waste lands of the modern world, of the inner vision. In Blake and Tradition, she traced the ancestry of that vision as William Blake inherited and realized it in his work. And in many essays she showed us how the same sustaining vision, the same responsibility, has survived in the lineage of English poets from Spenser to Blake and Yeats, and on to her contemporaries, David Jones, Edwin Muir, and Vernon Watkins.

This survival has been little noticed in our time because most of the keepers and teachers of our economic life, of the Christian gospel, and of the arts have not known where to look for it and would not have known what to make of it had they found it. And so by publishing this selection of Kathleen Raine’s essays, her friend and editor, Brian Keeble, and Counterpoint have filled a need much felt though little recognized, and so have rendered a distinguished service to writers and readers of our time.

These essays speak more than capably for themselves and need little comment from me. But because I fear it may be necessary, I want to draw attention to their practical import. When she spoke of the inner vision whose absence lays waste the earth, Kathleen Raine meant what she said. When she wrote an essay on the use of the beautiful, she was thinking, and asking us to think, as seriously as possible about questions that are in part practical. The issue is that of context, as with anything that is of use. A thing that is useful cannot exist for its own sake. Beauty, moreover, is not an attribute of parts and fragments, but of the whole, or the wholeness toward which the arts and our human lives aspire. It is ultimately the wholeness of that immeasurable, hardly nameable reality that we call creation, or life, or world. And so the context of the beautiful is the whole world and our need for the world’s wholeness.

Within the context of our departmented schools within the context of our departmented economy, there is an exhilarating boldness in Kathleen Raine’s demonstration of the use of the beautiful. She wrote that the beautiful is an order of wholes, and of wholeness . . . Insofar as they remind us of this paramount order and our need for it, and insofar as they embody such order in themselves, works of poetry and the other arts are necessary for our survival; survival, that is, as human beings . . .

The arts, in their fullness, teach us to live and so to survive in the fullness of our humanity, as living souls, not as the brainiest of the apes. The alternative is our present materialist struggle to survive by means of technological and political solutions, or technological destructiveness of the world’s order of wholes. We are betting our lives on the triumph—in the future, of course—of our small cleverness.

But our problem, as Kathleen Raine understood and made clear, is not technical and political, but cultural. It is poverty of soul. We destroy the world’s wholeness and our own because we have forsaken the ability to see the order of beauty, which is wholeness and good health and holiness. William Blake wrote that everything that lives is holy, and nothing more practical in its force and implication was ever written. If we believed, if we saw, the holiness of everything that lives, a principle sufficiently corroborated by the Bible, our economic lives and all our work would become immediately better, because they would become consciously subordinate to the order of beauty, which is the order of wholeness and holiness, which is the order of the world.

But one cannot learn the holiness of everything that lives by dissecting a frog. The holiness of frogs, and of the rest of us creatures, can be revealed only to imagination and by the works of imagination. Of the many gifts we receive from Kathleen Raine, surely one of the best is her understanding of the use, the life, and the learning of the imagination in its highest, truest sense. The power of imagination exactly, in the poetry she loved and served, and in her own poetry, is to see that everything that lives is holy.

—Wendell Berry

Introduction

We are in need of a counterbalance. In a world that is in relentless pursuit of a quantitative evaluation of everything, an age that has forgotten that a phenomenal world necessarily entails a noumenal that is transcendent to it—a recognition that every existent being is the effect of a preceding cause—there must arise from time to time a voice to reaffirm the timeless, universal order that relates the one world to the other: joins the realm of ultimate principles to the manifest world where we find the embodied wisdom of our imaginative life in which things are known sub specie aeternitatis . Such a voice was that of Kathleen Raine.

To read the essays presented here is to find oneself negotiating a spiritual and intellectual landscape far removed from the preoccupations of what we currently think of as ‘culture’: those diminishing returns of ‘self-expression’ we call ‘art’ sustained by a new elite of purveyors and explainers of banality, anxious to convince us of its superiority to our common-sense reaction, in the face of it, of uncomprehending bewilderment. For this ‘culture’ the imaginative arts are limited to the expression of the mundane through personal emotion as having a legitimate claim to be the substance of art. What has become entrenched is the exclusive idea that the arts can no longer meaningfully relate to anything beyond such evidence as the senses might suggest. This follows from what has been the cumulative acceptance, based on the material sciences, that reality is in essence quantitative and that any appeal to a higher order of thought is at best mistaken, at worst amounts to a subversive heresy. It is a type of prejudice that chooses to ignore the obvious fact that it is in the intuition of conscious awareness, not itself available to scrutiny, that we know all that we can know, and in which all things possess any reality they can be said to possess. All such diminishments these essays challenge head on.

How has this narrowing of the possible accomplishment of the arts as a depository of beauty and wisdom come about? In keeping with the order invoked in these essays it is necessary to recognise the metaphysical depreciation of history; the entropy inherent in the passage time as it is taught (though not exclusively) in the Hindu theories of the unfolding of the cosmic cycles. Each complete cycle’s unfolding is divided into four Yugas and with the passing of each Yuga a quarter of reality is removed from common apprehension until the complete cycle is exhausted—from the highest qualitative possibilities to the lowest: from the ‘golden age’ to the age of metaphysical poverty in which material qualities are the determining measure of all values, in which state, as Kathleen Raine often points out ‘ignorance passes judgement on knowledge’. At this point the higher, qualitative wisdom is excluded from contributing to the contextual understanding of the arts of life. As becomes evident from, for instance, her essay ‘On the Symbol’, in addition to its inherent presence in the ‘learning of the Imagination’ of the poets studied herein, the guiding source of the teaching of the perennial wisdom the author draws upon she found in René Guénon’s seminal text The Reign of Quantity.

The Hindu teaching of the Yugas, as Kathleen Raine pointed out in her monumental study of the sources of William Blake’s iconography (Blake and Tradition, 1969), allows us to infer ‘that the natural world may . . . degenerate and withdraw its qualities and powers from degenerate civilisations like our own, following the loss of certain faculties of (qualitative) perception’. This seemingly bleak assessment is none the less, on the evidence, a realistic one, and the poet did not shy away from its wider implications in her attempt to demonstrate the deforming of the arts of our time when isolated from the perennial wisdom. In her essay ‘Poetic Symbols as a Vehicle of Tradition’ (not included here) the poet asks whether or not ‘we are the last of the old’, and wonders if it is at all possible that there could yet be a late flowering from the seed of the ancient knowledge in the degenerate civilisation we have created by default, according to the prevailing deprecatory conditions. T. S. Eliot went so far as to suggest our civilisation might perhaps be the first to leave behind no culture.

In the same essay Kathleen Raine posits, of the cosmic decline of the gradual movement from qualitative to quantitative possibilities, that it is not from a ‘failure to be or become what they should be, but rather through their own fulfilment, when all the seeds sown at the beginning have come to fruition’, and the ‘governing spirit’ (as Plato called it) of the universe recedes. The Platonic teaching is fully in accord with the Hindu in its metaphysical essence.

Transposed to the study of European culture, the poet repeatedly traced (as she does in her essay ‘On the Symbol’) the line of descent of the life-giving learning of the traditional wisdom in the West, from Plato and the Neoplatonists to the Florentine renaissance to Edmund Spenser and beyond to the poets studied in the following pages, each in their way making a stand against the unfolding diminishment of the temporal exhaustion. Far removed as they might seem, such desiderata lend a powerful advocacy to Kathleen Raine finding in Eliot the most eloquent spokesperson among her contemporaries of the loss of vision of the sacred that is the hallmark of what Henry Corbin called modern man’s ‘agnostic reflex’. A revealing indication of the gradual erosion of the transcendent as a vital attribute is in the absence in contemporary arts of a sense of hierarchy as the embodiment of beauty informing the creative process.

The further we go back in history the more readily we must acknowledge that the arts immemorially served as the means by which man integrates himself within the total cosmic fabric in accordance with their reciprocal spiritual nature. In her essay ‘The Use of the Beautiful’ Kathleen Raine points to this rejection of beauty in the contemporary arts as indicative of the unconscious reaction to the absence of any relation to the total cosmic reality. Beauty, the poet suggests, possesses an inherent reproach, which reproach—given the active presence of an adequate perception—harbours a proof that the essence of our human state lies beyond the limitations of mundane reality. In the sensory consolation that beauty offers we might find some intimation of our perfection in the eternal. Perhaps it should be said, in parenthesis, that it is not so much a rejection of beauty in the modern arts, so much as that beauty simply becomes beyond the reach of the artist for want of its adequate perception. The consequence is clear. The all too evident ‘realism’ of the demotic unfailingly equates the human condition with the lowest possibilities rather than the highest. Its stock-in-trade is to reflect the least significant dimension of our common experience, founded as that is on no more than the ‘fortuitous concourse of memories accumulated and lost’, as Blake pertinently observed.

Time and again in these essays, in arguing for the value of poetry as a living presence in ‘the house of the soul’ (the phrase is I. A. Richards’s) the poet questions whether the arts of ‘self-expression’ can serve any purpose, beyond being a minor diversion from the business of maintaining our economic survival.

The comprehensiveness of the author’s standpoint enables her to point up the terms by which the arts might enhance and enrich the human condition, but also the terms on which they debase and pervert that condition.

Despite their commitment to the perennial wisdom, which nonetheless includes a recognition of its by now almost complete obsolescence—at least so far as the arts are involved—these essays are offered in the hope of retrieving some reverberation of the archetypal order in which knowledge is a vital, intuitive state of being rather than an accumulation of observed and rationalised information largely handed down, often on questionable authority and rarely verified in the direct understanding of the knower. The essays underwrite a recognition that ‘culture’ is much more than the outcome of ‘what people do’.

They are a reminder that the word culture has its semantic roots in the notion of cultivation (the horticultural world is an honourable exception in this respect); and what is to be cultivated is, precisely, the potential spirituality of the integral human state.

The traditional hierarchy of values that comprises the perennial wisdom cannot, by its very nature, be destroyed. ‘Reality’, as the poet reminds us, ‘is always and everywhere itself.’ According to the primordial wisdom the soul and the world are mirrored in each other. Man looks into nature to find the soul of the Creation so that the world is apprehended as a living presence, an incarnational immediacy of Being that is experienced as the world’s noumenal significance. The living source of love that makes this mutual embrace possible is timelessly captured in Kathleen Raine’s poem ‘Amo Ergo Sum’, among others.

In the poetry of each of her chosen subjects there is the implicit acknowledgement that the function of poesis is to guard the inviolate world of Imagination as the bond that joins the transcendent to the concrete. In her commentary on these poets the author relentlessly points to the catastrophe that is the abolition of poetry’s guardianship in the modern world. The crisis is stark and unequivocal: the Creator can be found only in and through the reciprocal love of the Creator and the Creation. Even more: in the final, metaphysical analysis there is only God: there is only God to witness God. The materialism against which the poet was embattled does not present us with a ‘face’ of the real with which we might conduct a dialogue concerning the divinity of our personhood. All cultural meanings and values rest, finally, on such an exchange. In the world view, based on sensate awareness of modern science, as the poet writes in the essay on Yeats, ‘the age old search for truth and beauty and the good has been replaced by the observable, the immediate, and the process of change as values in themselves’.

%

Arguably the most important overarching theme of Kathleen Raine’s thought is that of the nature and function of Imagination. Whether explicitly or implicitly these essays raise the broader question: What is the ontological status of an image held in the mind?

It will not escape the attentive reader’s notice that throughout the essays the word imagination is given a capital initial. For the poet, as for her master, Blake, Imagination is the supreme faculty by which true poetic vision achieves the fulfilment of its intrinsic quality as the agent of spiritual perception. Here we are far from the commonplace idea of imagination as simply the passive mirror of images drawn from the sensorium, a view that leaves unanswered the question, in what sense can it be said that such images are ‘real’ or ‘unreal’?

For Kathleen Raine Imagination is theophanic vision and is thereby a transcendent faculty. The capital indicates the distinction. In Imagination we are the very act of apprehending the Sacred in participative mode in and through images that render cognitive experience as inherently meaningful. True Imagination does not invent or impose meaning. In the truly Imaginative image the soul arrives at the necessity to inhabit experience as an act of participative Being, facing the Presence of its meaning in relation to the Supreme Reality—an act of ultimate sympathetic correspondence. This is not to suggest that the poet’s conception of Imagination is illustrated in her poems. I would draw attention to, for instance, her ‘Northumbrian Sequence’ as a poem that inhabits the conception outlined above.

These essays are nothing if not an impassioned argument for the recovery of the poetic image as an authentic approach to sacred reality. The author’s argument starts from Blake’s assertion that active Imagination presents images of ‘what eternally exists, really and unchangeably’. But from that position to confronting the materialist bias of the modern mind for which imagination is a passive faculty, and for which anything that is not quantitative substance is in some way unreal—in other words, a fiction—involves a considerable leap.

Although the concept of a spiritually active Imagination, largely learned from Blake, is present in the poet’s earlier scholarly work, in the essays of her later years the poet took strength from the work of Henry Corbin. Expounding the Sufi doctrine of the mundus imaginalis, based mainly on the Illuminationist School of Persian mysticism (Suhrawardi, Ibn cArabi and Mulla Sadra), in order to recover for the West the true cognitive status of the Imagination, Corbin showed how mundus imaginalis is an intermediary domain in the mystic’s journey to the One ‘where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual’. It provides therein the essential link that joins in total continuity the forms of the corporeal world as subsisting in the forms of the spiritual substance or the intelligible world. The mundus imaginalis, so understood, Corbin called the ‘exultation’ of the Imagination.

There is no doubt room for a close scrutiny of Kathleen Raine’s appropriation of the concept of the imaginal world (Corbin himself invented the term mundus imaginalis to denote the realm in which imaginative consciousness is spiritually active) in order to counter the modern acceptance of imagination at having a merely passive function. This appropriation does give rise to certain problems, the most serious of which is the danger of divinising Imagination itself. I must leave others better qualified to examine the problems that arise in any attempt to transpose from the cadre of Islamic spirituality a framework for understanding the spirituality of the poetic Imagination. However that may be, it should be clear why the poet made use of Corbin’s studies.

In light of this it is not difficult to see what the ultimate aim of Kathleen Raine’s challenge to the materialist premises as to the nature of mind was. The imaginative discourse of the poet, if it is to have an authentic spiritual status, must have a place from which to speak of the ‘unseen’ realities that inform the significance of the world of sensible appearances. And that discourse must possess a language whose voice is capable of embracing and therefore speaking of things beyond the transient world. In short the language of the poet must identify with the ultimate source of which it speaks. This is the alchemy of metaphysical analogy. It has always been acknowledged that the voice of the poet occupies the highest eminence when it comes to articulating the intrinsic spiritual aspirations of man to inhabit his ultimate home. It is where he locates the meaning of his mundane life. As the poet states in ‘The Inner Journey of the Poet’, ‘to the Imagination everything in nature speaks of the mind which it reflects’.

As Kathleen Raine has argued in her essays and has presented in her poetry, and from a position within a literary convention so long confined to the ephemeralities of ‘self-expression’, it seems likely that the only dependable way to the restoration of the poet’s true vocation is through heightened perception in a manner akin to the experience of the contemplative mystic providing a sort of template as to how forms of the natural world are to be truly perceived. Certainly, mystical experience has in all cultures been taken to be evidence of how ‘nature’ is illuminated in being a shadow of the supernatural. We are back to those bright shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave. Perhaps the question of whether the poetic symbol can ever have quite the ontological status of the imaginal image must remain unanswerable. Be that as it may, these essays, devoted as they are to the ‘learning of the Imagination’, cogently suggest that such study can support the transmutation if guided by the predilections of the illuminated soul. In a world of impermanence it is the nature of mind to arrest the fleeting: to find confirmation beyond sensory perception, not a substitute for the real, but the Real itself; a world made evident through the poetic language of symbolic discourse. As Frithjof Schuon has pointed out, ‘the symbol is a suggestion aiming at an intuition, not an explanation addressing a thought’.

Each of the poets featured here took their stand against the secularism of their time which, as Kathleen Raine puts it in her comments on ‘Ash Wednesday’, seeks ‘to obliterate from modern experience the old vision of human love as something holy, sacramental’. These pages are not so much a contribution to ‘literature’, but to an enlargement of our being as a corrective to those diminishments that have ended up converting imaginative consciousness into cyber-space where there is no principle or measure of significance and where profundity and platitude are indistinguishable.

We can hardly doubt that this is largely the reason why the arts now fight to secure a modest territory from which to make a meaningful contribution to the quality of life. With each generation the gulf between the cultures that gave us, in Yeats’s phrase, ‘monuments of unageing intellect’ and contemporary culture grows wider. At the same time ever more sophisticated means of retrieval and storage of those past cultures is pressed into service. This making available in curatorial form the material remains of so many past cultures is paradoxically accompanied, not by a sense of illumination as to their spiritual wealth, but a pervasive sense of surfeit and exhaustion. In the light of this it hardly seems audacious of Kathleen Raine to suggest that we live in the first society to build no environment for the arts—that is to say worthy ‘monuments’ of our own. Do these essays hint at the coming barbarism? Without what is signified we are mere creatures of biological process. If so by what principle of permanence do we measure the flow? Without a value of permanence what must be the obvious function of intelligence, to evaluate, is neutralised in the face of an incomprehensible mystery. At the end of an earlier essay on Vernon Watkins (not included here) the poet noted:

What we did not know thirty years ago was how extreme would be the isolation of those who hold to tradition. It then seemed that there were at least some values which were agreed upon between the profane positivist world and the world of the ‘ancient springs’. . . . We can no longer deceive ourselves. It seems that there no longer exist any common terms or values; beyond a certain point of divergence communication becomes impossible. . . . Tradition, which recognises a difference between knowledge and ignorance, cannot come to terms with a world in which there are no longer any standards by which truth or falsehood may be measured.

We are living the ever-widening divergence.

That there could never be a return to the old order of cultural values should be perfectly obvious. It would, were it even remotely possible, amount to such a reversal of premises as would rend what, over countless generations, we have recognised to be the properly human fabric of life. The ‘signs of the times’ are that the unfolding cycle must exhaust all its possibilities, the lowest not excluded, before a new cycle can begin. Are we then to conclude that our lot is one of unabated confusion and further degeneration? Is there nothing we can do to alleviate the now almost total erosion of even the humanist culture, itself an attrition of the traditional cultures founded, ultimately, on sacred principles? Are we to be forever imprisoned by the futility of living in a world where our subjectivity is bound within a closed circuit of accounting and measuring its existential substance without recourse to its ineffaceable source? The poet offered her response to such questions in the final paragraph of ‘What is Man?’ For all our failings we remain human and on that evidence it is worthy to believe that to recognise an ‘end’ is already to acknowledge a criterion that transcends whatever powers carry us to the end and is not itself a component of the final collapse.

%

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) was a prolific essayist. Collected, these would fill several volumes. In making the present selection I have followed two guidelines: that the essays should be relatively unavailable, and that the book should have a structure that reflects the values that the author, throughout her long life, upheld in her elucidation of the individual poets whose voices she was heir to. There is no exaggeration in pointing out that these essays are addressed to the soul of the reader. They are not academic exercises in erudition as a contribution to ‘Eng. Lit.’

In her essay ‘On the