“A human being is part of the
whole called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and our
feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of
consciousness. This delusion is a kind
of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a
few persons nearest to us. Our task must
be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to
embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein1
INTRODUCTION
When I began this essay my original aim was to show how the
land influenced the poetry of Emily Bronte.
However, as I began to look more closely at her work, I began to be
aware not only of this influence, but also the connection between her poetry
and the poetry of others, that I knew to bear the name of mystical poets. The first poet I began to see a connection
with was Hafiz, a 14th century Sufi poet. His use of metaphors and images is similar to
those used by Bronte to describe the Holy Spirit, for example, breath, wind,
murmur, north wind, zephyr and also her use of star imagery. Whether or not she knew of the work of Hafiz
I did not, at the time know, however, as I began to delve further into work
written about the Brontes, I began to find clues. Juliet Barker had written in the footnotes to
her book on the Brontes’ childhood writings, called Charlotte Bronte Juvenilia
1829-1835, a brief explanation of Hafiz2. This was in connection to the fact that
Charlotte Bronte, Emily’s sister, had written a short story that mentioned the
work of this Sufi poet.
Stevie Davies, Emily Bronte: Heretic3, also
suggested that Emily Bronte could have been influenced by the work of the
German Romantic poet, Goethe. It seemed
sensible to read about him. I made
another connection, that of his admiration of the poetry of Hafiz, to the point
where Goethe had written about him in his work East West Divan4. To continue this investigation I dug deeper,
looking for any
connection to Hildegard of Bingen, another poet and mystic
whose work I thought resonated with that of Bronte’s and who wrote much of her
work during the times of the Crusades. I
discovered that Goethe, whom one critic thought was the reason for Bronte
learning German, went on a pilgrimage to this 12th century mystic’s
shrine at Bingen5.
I began to realise that what we call mystical experiences are
common, not only in religious followers, but also, amongst other people,
poets. But what is the connection
between loving and respecting the land and mysticism? Jonathan Bate, in his book, Song of the
Earth, describes how:
“… to dwell means you must be content to listen, to hear the
music of the shuttle … There is a
distinctive sound to every bio-region … but there is also an undersound, a
melody heard perhaps only by the poet, which harmonises the whole eco-system …
[eventually] we could come to understand that every piece of land is itself a
text, with its own syntax and signifying potential. Or, one should say: come to understand once
again, as our ancestors did. For the
idea that the earth itself is a text is a very old one.”6
Bate is saying here that each piece of land contains within
it, its own diverse life forms, particular to that place and that each life
form vibrates to its own note. It is
what the poet and writer Lawrence Durrell called, “the spirit of place.”7
The idea of the land being a text is something that the poet Henry Vaughan
would also have recognised. Throughout
this essay I have drawn on the work of Henry Vaughan because of the similarity
between his poetry and that of Bronte.
Whether or not she knew of his work, I do not know but I think it helps illuminate her poetry by
drawing upon what has become consciously, or unconsciously, part of our shared
cultural inheritance.
Henry, and his twin brother Thomas Vaughan, wrote some of
their work during the mid 17th century, at the time of the English
Civil War, which erupted in 1642. It
would appear that it is at times of personal or public crisis that mystical
experiences are felt and expressed, particularly through art and religion. This could lead us to suppose that it is a
purely physiological phenomenon, related to periods of intense emotional and
physical suffering that initiates the experience and not a spiritual one.
However, as we are, fundamentally, physical
bodies composed of emotions, thoughts, feelings and senses, it is difficult to
know where one body ends and another begins.
Although our thoughts are not physically tangible in the sense that you
cannot pick up a thought physically, in your hands, as you would a cup of tea,
we can make them tangible through works of art, religion, engineering and
science.
Poetry is one way in which we
try and make sense of the apparently chaotic world in which we live. It is also at times of crisis that we turn to
something other than ourselves in order to make sense of our fragmented
world. To do this we often look at what
we call nature, to provide us with answers to unanswerable questions.
For example, in “Ritual Entries: Some Approaches to Henry
Vaughan’s ‘Silex Scintillans’”, Michael Srigley describes:
“… how the insomniac
Vaughan [was] excited but perplexed as he gazes at the Ogham script that Nature
has incised upon these stones. The
landscape [of south Wales] is now internalised and is explored in a journey of
the mind. Both the stream flowing from
the mighty spring and the stones with their ‘broken letters’ point to a mystery
which is barred to profane human reason.
The intuition aroused by natural objects brings him tantalisingly close
to an answer, but it fails him, and the poet recognises his spiritual blindness. In ‘early day’ as the sun rises, ‘That little
light I had was gone’. The inner light
now fading into the outer light of day leaves his inner eye ‘eclipsed’.”8
In the following dissertation, expanding on the connections
between respect for the sacredness of the earth and mystical experiences, I
shall discuss four points:
- that the
land conveys a sense of interconnectedness, which flows through all
things, both animate and inanimate;
- in balance
with this influence towards transcendence and unifying experience is
Bronte’s intimate knowledge of the specificity and concreteness of
locality – the other realm of her poetry – the earth that leads to heaven
as interconnectedness;
- the way this
local specificity becomes an ‘inscription’, or text of sound – a known polyphony which forms the basis of
her poetry and
- the
inter-relationships, tensions and possible contradictions between these
three elements.
For example in “The linnet in the rocky dells” Bronte not
only reveals her strong, spiritual vision of the interconnectedness of life,
she also shares her intimate knowledge of the land and its inhabitants. I would go further and say that the moor and
the sky are canvasses and the life on the moor, under it and in it are its
inscriptions, its poetic voice into which Bronte tapped for her inspiration, or
which she heard in the silence when her own little voice was still and silent
and she allowed something else, something both herself and other, to
speak,
Perhaps as she grew
older and “the shades of the prison house began to close”9, she lost
that ability to listen simultaneously to inner and outer voice, lost that poise
where inner and outer landscapes met in a dynamic interplay and fusion and this
is what she tried hard to recover. It is almost as if she experienced an inner
conflict between the poet and the philosopher, the artist and the
scientist. This is apparent in the two
poems I shall discuss in Chapter II, The Night-Wind and Shall Earth no more
inspire thee? In Chapter III I shall
follow her inward journey, by looking at two poems, Stars and The Prisoner – a
Fragment. I shall begin by discussing
two poems in Chapter I, “The Linnet in the rocky dells” and “Loud without the
wind was roaring”.
Briefly, then, the poems I have
chosen express the journey of Bronte from her deep love of the land she knew
and cared about at Haworth, which was her familiar and family, through her
struggle to explore her inscape, her inner landscape that was being shaped by
her mature, more complex emotions. It
seems to me that she used the land to act as a vehicle for her explorations,
not only physically and emotionally, but also spiritually and mentally. The Belgian schoolmaster, M. Heger, commented
that Emily Bronte “should have been a man, a great navigator.”10 I agree with him, not that she should have
been a man, but in the sense that she was prepared and indeed seemed compelled,
to explore the dark, psychological landscape of herself, her inner nature,
using nature, that is the land, to do so.
Even the titles of the poems seem
to suggest a journey, a quest, an exploration of the mysteries of life and
death, using the land as an anchor when Bronte did venture into these dark
realms. The poem entitled “The Linnet in
the rocky dells” explores the death of a “lady fair” and how the wild animals
and birds live and feed on her breast.
The next two poems, “Loud without the wind was roaring” and “The
Night-Wind” use the wind to symbolise both a messenger and also a gentle, seductive
voice. In the poem “Stars”, Bronte uses
stars as a metaphor for her thoughts, exploring the boundless, inner
imagination, synonymous with the outer, spaceless, timeless universe. The poem called “The Prisoner – a fragment”,
explores the idea that the body is made of clay and that the spirit is chained
inside until death releases it. The
last poem I have chosen to examine, “No coward soul is mine” was written in the
most defiant tone of all the poems I will examine. The image of the holy spirit in this poem as
a dove is very powerful and the stanza,
“With
wide-embracing love
Thy
spirit animates eternal years
Pervades
and broods above,
Changes,
sustains, dissolves, creates and rears”
is possibly one of the strongest
she has written, apart from one in “The Prisoner – a fragment”, beginning,
“Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truths reveals.”
What I found interesting when I
began this journey of exploration, was the apparent reluctance on the part of
some recent critics to explore the idea of mystical experience, a tone of embarrassment
or cynicism crept in at any mention of the words soul, spirit, mystical or
visionary and I think this was perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of
this research.
However, rather than be afraid to
examine what is meant by a mystical experience, how it can relate to a sense of
dislocation and how perhaps in the 21st century we are still
searching for meaning in our lives, it would be more productive to ask why
there is a tradition of visionaries from very earliest human times and what
this tells us about us, as humans. Are
mystical experiences, poetry, art, music, dance, quantum physics and religion
ways of reconnecting us to the rest of creation? Do they act as ways of filling a gap we might
feel between ourselves and other creatures, the gap caused by
self-consciousness? These are questions
I held in mind as I worked through this research.
It is interesting to see how
critics have changed from one century, one generation to the next, depending on
trends. For example, in the body of the
essay I have shown how G. K. Chesterton, who was writing in the early part of
the 20th century, was comfortable discussing the mystical elements
of Bronte’s poetry. However, later
critics show a greater reluctance to engage with this aspect of her work. Such critics as Lucasta Miller, for example,
in her book The Bronte Myth discuss
the possible mystical influences in Bronte’s poetry in the following way, “As
Carlyle uses it, the word ‘mystic’ has a far more abstract, philosophical
resonance than it would have a hundred years later when applied to Emily by
populist twentieth-century mythographers keen to prove that her poetry derived
from paranormal out-of-body experiences she had up on the moors.” 11
The tone Miller uses is cynical,
as is her description of Bronte creating her poetry “from paranormal
out-of-body experiences she had up on the moors.” What it shows is how the meanings of words
change over the centuries, but that similar experiences we call mystical have
been around for a long time. Far from
being abstract and philosophical and/or out of the body, the mysticism I will
be examining in this essay is one grounded in the reality of our physical
bodies; that to know and experience what can be termed ecstasy, or heightened
awareness, is firmly rooted in the earth, which is why metaphors of sexuality
are used to describe a mystical experience.
The feeling we get of letting go at the point of orgasm, are akin to
that of letting go into what is sometimes called the cosmic, or greater self,
and can also be experienced as a moment when we realise that we are all part of
each other, and I am including the inanimate here as well as the animate. It is when we are more firmly reconnected to
our senses as animals that we have the potential to become spiritual beings.
Once we realise, as Einstein did,
that “our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its
beauty.” then I believe we will truly fulfil what it means to be human.
Dr. Geraldine Green, Ecopoetics Research Diploma, supervisor prof. Pam Morris. Originally written December 2002, re-read February 2013
Footnotes:
Albert Einstein 'The World Healing Project'
Juliet Barker 'Juvenilia' (London, Penguin Classics 1996)
Stevie Davies 'Emily Bronte Heretic' (London, The Women's Press 1994)
Richard Friedenthal 'Goethe his life and times' (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1993)
Jonathan Bate 'Song of the Earth' (Picador, 2000)
Lawrence Durrell 'Spirit of Place' (Faber and Faber 1969)
Michael Srigley 'Ritual Entries, some approaches to Henry Vaughan's "Silex Scintillans" (Scintilla 3 (Usk Valley Vaughan Association 1999)
Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter 'Norton Anthology' 1996
Stevie Davies 'Emily Bronte' (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1988)
Lucasta Miller 'The Bronte Myth' (Vintage Books 2002)
