All the birds of Oxfordshire

There is a whole spectrum of poetry that is the outpouring of spiritual experience, from simple lines that hint at something spiritually experienced to poems from some plane above the mind, that have simply used the poet as an instrument.

My good friend and mentor Sonia Dyne has pointed out that “so-called ‘spiritual poetry’ does not have to deal specifically with ‘spiritual’ themes: it can be a celebration of nature, an expression of religious belief, or simply a deeply felt outpouring of emotional response without any intellectual quality as in purely devotional poetry. The essential thing is recognition, overt or implied, of a hidden oneness uniting all human life with the life around us in Nature and the poet’s response of wonder and awe or delight or gratitude.

There seems to be a type of spiritual poetry where the spiritual is understated, restrained, almost covert. Consider Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

A matter-of-fact description of the station scene observed from the train that has stopped there is followed by Thomas tuning into the sound of birdsong, starting nearby with a blackbird, but then hearing the chorus of ‘all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’, a physical impossibility but in the wider state of consciousness he has entered, a different and more sublime sense of reality unbounded by the specific and literal. O million d’oiseaux! This is the touch of the spiritual that can invade us in a silent moment of true experience of nature and is perhaps felt by many without even realising it or considering that it has been in any way a spiritual experience.

Or even more understated, consider ‘Early One Morning’ by the Auroville poet Navoditte (Norman Thomas):

The sun got up; so did I,

slow and cosy, half in sleep.

Stumbling out, I sat upon the step:

receiving nothing from the night

I expected nothing from the day.

There was a tree in flower,

A scratching dog,

the sun was shining on the sea.

But then, at half-past by the clock,

the world turned over….flip!...

and changed all that.

And when it all had settled down,

resplendently I saw:

a tree in flower,

a scratching dog,

and the sun O shining on the sea.

Navoditte describes, in a simple, matter-of-fact way, the experience of waking up, still sleepy, observing what he sees. But then quite suddenly he has an experience at some undescribed other level that totally and resplendently transforms the same scene. He does not describe what he has experienced, only its after-effects.

Henry Reed’s ‘The Naming of Parts’ presents an experience in which we are amusingly confronted with the banality of our normal, adult world whilst yet we find ourselves simultaneously being aware of a truer, more beautiful world around us.

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,

We shall have what to do after firing. But today,

Today we have naming of parts. Japonica

Glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens,

And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this

Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

Which in your case you have not got. The branches

Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released

With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me

See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy

If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms

Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it

Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

They call it easing the Spring.

Consider now Dylan Thomas’ well-known poem ‘Fern Hill’

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among waggons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Would you have thought of this as a spiritual poem? Yet it is a psychic cry for the lost glory and innocence of childhood and a statement of defiance against what seems like the imprisonment of the adult world.

But what is the difference between the psychic and the spiritual overhead planes? Sri Aurobindo from Letters on Poetry and Art: “the tone of the psychic is different from that of the overhead planes – it has less of greatness, power, wideness, more of a smaller sweetness, delicate beauty; there is an intense beauty of emotion, a fine subtlety of true perception, an intimate language. The expression “sweetness and light” can very well be applied to the psychic as the kernel of its nature. The spiritual plane, when it takes up these things, gives them a wider utterance, a greater splendour of light, a stronger sweetness, a breath of powerful authority, strength and space.”

Amal Kiran was a poet at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram whose significant talents were lovingly nurtured by Sri Aurobindo himself. In his poem ‘This Errant Life’, Amal yearns for ‘sky-lucent bliss’, the pure high spiritual experiences which are at the summits of the overhead spiritual planes and yet still pleads, with an intensity of psychic emotion, for the Divine to express the love Amal yearns for in actual human experience.

This errant life is dear although it dies;

And human lips are sweet though they but sing

Of stars estranged from us; and youth’s emprise

Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.

Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For ‘tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

Perhaps the most sublime, the perfect perfection of spiritual poetry is Savitri, which Sri Aurobindo wrote over a period of forty years, regularly revising the poem as his own consciousness rose to ever higher levels. This poem is “The lines that tear the veil from Deity’s face”.

In Savitri we have the detailed record of Sri Aurobindo’s inner journey, of his experiences in all the subtle and occult worlds. It is an account of the events and process of the transformation of human consciousness. But Savitri is also a poem that relishes in the joy of language whilst still depicting events and observations of life and nature seen both from the here and now and yet simultaneously seen from ‘some eternal eye’, rising to poetic magnificence with lines like:

I caught for some eternal eye

The sudden kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool

Now consider these lines from Book Three, Canto Four of Savitri, which seem to describe in symbolic terms the current chaos of the world and might be considered to be prophetic of the events that they are in process of leading to:

I know that thy creation cannot fail:

For even through the mists of mortal thought

Infallible are thy mysterious steps,

And, though Necessity dons the garb of Chance,

Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps

The slow calm logic of Infinity’s pace

And the inviolate sequence of its will.

All life is fixed in an ascending scale

And adamantine is the evolving Law;

In the beginning is prepared the close.

This strange irrational product of the mire,

This compromise between the beast and god,

Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.

I know there shall inform the inconscient cells,

At one with Nature and at height with heaven,

A spirit vast as the containing sky

And swept with ecstasy from invisible founts,

A god come down and greater by the fall.

A Power arose out of my slumber’s cell.

Abandoning the tardy limp of the hours

And the inconstant blink of mortal sight,

There where the Thinker sleeps in too much light

And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye

Hearing the word of Fate from Silence’ heart

In the endless moment of Eternity,

It saw from timelessness the works of Time.

Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,

Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:

The unfolding Image showed the things to come.

A giant dance of Shiva tore the past;

There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;

Earth was o’errun with fire and the roar of Death

Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;

There was a clangour of Destruction’s wings:

The Titan’s battle-cry was in my ears,

Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.

I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

Forerunners of a divine multitude,

Out of the paths of the morning star they came

Into the little room of mortal life.

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world

And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,

The messengers of the Incommunicable,

The architects of immortality.

Into the fallen human sphere they came,

Faces that wore the Immortal’s glory still,

Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,

Bodies made beautiful by the spirit’s light,

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,

Approaching eyes of a diviner man,

Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,

Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.

High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,

Discoverers of beauty’s sunlit ways

And swimmers of Love’s laughing fiery floods

And dancers within rapture’s golden doors,

Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth

And justify the light on Nature’s face.

For most poets of the spiritual, their inspiration arises from a momentary visitation of light from above the lid of mind, or from some passionate outburst from deep within or a calm, quiet expression of the psychic being, the soul. In Savitri we constantly get lines written from such a permanently vast and luminous station of consciousness above the mind that it was said of Sri Aurobindo that he had a mind of light:

It saw from timelessness the works of time.

This is the summit of consciousness from which the past and the future are seen as a single panorama, from which prophecy is manifested and the truth and fullness of things is effortlessly seized.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri traces the journey of the soul through its life experience and traces the exploration of the subtle worlds that are encountered by seekers, ending in the debate of Love and Death in which Love conquers Death. It is in a way our own story. Our lives are the debate of love and death.