William Blake: Platonist and Pantheist?

Kathleen Raine

Blake’s Jesus is the universal eternal Mind, or Spirit, which he calls the Imagination. “All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination”. Like a vine this Divine Body branches throughout all creation; “all Animals and Vegetations, the Earth and Heaven… contain’d in the All Glorious Imagination.” Blake’s Divine Body, or “Jesus, the Imagination” is the Imagination of God present in and to man: “God only Acts and Is in existing beings or Men” he declares.

When Blake declares his worship of “him who is the Express Image of God” he is speaking not of the historical Jesus but rather of the universal divine humanity. “Human nature is the image of God” and “Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man, as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness. But God is a man, not because he is so perceiv’d by man, but because he is the creator of man”. “It is the God in all that is our companion and friend… God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes; for he is become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remember’d that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man for our Lord is the word of God and every thing on earth is the word of God and in its essence is God”. This is why for Blake all life is holy. Blake’s Divine Humanity is not set against the rest of natural creation but includes it. Like the Egyptian Osiris, the dismembered fragments of whose body were scattered throughout the universe, “the Eternal Man”

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In this article, Kathleeen Raine, poet, critic, scholar and a leading twentieth-century authority on William Blake, interprets his work in a Platonic and pantheistic light, despite Blake’s own avowed hostility to both philosophies. The issue may be simply semantic. How does one define nature? How does one define God? For an alternate view on the topic, read The End of Nature:  Blake and Pantheism, by Rod Tweedy.

Paradise Seed

Kathleen Raine

Where is the seed
Of the tree felled,
Of the forest burned,
Or living root
Under ash and cinders?
From woven bud
What last leaf strives
Into life, last
Shrivelled flower?
Is fruit of our harvest,
Our long labour
Dust to the core?
To what far, fair land
Borne on the wind
What winged seed
Or spark of fire
From holocaust
To kindle a star?

The Return

Ezra Pound

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,          
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain      
Wavering!      

See, they return, one, and by one,              
With fear, as half-awakened; 
As if the snow should hesitate           
And murmur in the wind,      
            and half turn back;     
These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”         
            inviolable.       

Gods of the wingèd shoe!      
With them the silver hounds, 
            sniffing the trace of air!         

Haie! Haie!            
    These were the swift to harry;        
These the keen-scented;         
These were the souls of blood.          

Slow on the leash,      
            pallid the leash-men!
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In his book Stone Cottage, James Longenbach writes about Pound’s poem “The Return” as follows:  “[W.B.] Yeats knew what he was doing when in “A Packet for Ezra Pound” he quoted “The Return” to illustrate his belief that “every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one [side of the balance] sacred, the other secular, one wise, the other foolish, one fair, the other foul, one divine, the other devilish.”

T. S. Eliot also understood the coded message of “The Return” when he alluded to the poem in the final movement of “Little Gidding”:

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

And even Pound himself provided a gloss on the poem in a passage in Canto 113 which makes the movement toward the boundless ether explicit:

The hells move in cycles,
                                 No man can see his own end.
The Gods have not returned. “They have never left us.”
                                    They have not returned.
Cloud’s processional and the air moves with their living.”

Cezanne

The Card Players

R. S. Thomas

And neither of them has said:
            Your lead.
                        An absence of trumps
will arrest movement.

Knees almost touching,
hands almost touching,
                        they are far away
in time in a world
                         of equations.

                        The pipe without
             smoke, the empty
             bottle, the light
on the wall are the clock
             they will go by.
                                 Only their minds
                                 lazily as flies
                                            drift
round and round the inane
problem their boredom
                            has led them to pose.

More Than Enough

BY MARGE PIERCY

The first lily of June opens its red mouth.

All over the sand road where we walk

multiflora rose climbs trees cascading

white or pink blossoms, simple, intense

the scene drifting like colored mist.

.

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy

clumps of flower and the blackberries

are blooming in the thickets. Season of

joy for the bee. The green will never

again be so green, so purely and lushly

.

new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads

into the wind. Rich fresh wine

of June, we stagger into you smeared

with pollen, overcome as the turtle

laying her eggs in roadside sand.

The cat’s song

BY MARGE PIERCY
From:

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.

My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says

the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing

milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.

I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,

to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.

Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,

says the cat, although I am more equal than you.

Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?

Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.

My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.

My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings

walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally

as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.

I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg

and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Stone on High Crag

Kathleen Raine

Still stone
In heart of hill
Here alone
Hoodie and buzzard
By ways of air
Circling come.
From far shine
On wind-worn pinnacle
Star and moon
And sun, sun,
Wings bright in sun
Turn and return.

Centre of wing-spanned
Wheeling ways
Older than menhir
Licjen-roughened
Granite-grained
Rock-red
Rain-pocketed
Wind-buffeted
Heat-holding
Bird-whitened
Beak-worn
Insect-labyrinthine
Turf-embedded
Night-during
Race-remembered
Stand the known.

On this day in 1889, Anna Akhmatova was born

Anna Akhmatova is one of Russia’s most brilliant poets.

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Akhmatova’s parents were both descended from Russian nobility. Her family moved to St. Petersburg before she was a year old, and she started writing poetry at age 11. Her father didn’t want any of her work published under his “respectable” name (Gorenko), so the poet then adopted her grandmother’s Tartar name: Akhmatova.

At age 21, she joined a group of St. Petersburg poets called the Acmeists, which included the great poet Osip Mandelshtam and Nikolai Gumilyov, who fiercely encouraged her poetic endeavours. Akhmatova and Gumilyov married in 1910, and their son Lev was born in 1912. Their marriage, however, ended in divorce in 1918.

The young Acmeist poets stood apart from the dominant style of symbolism, critical of its vague themes and images. Instead, they focussed on precise language, beauty, clarity, culture and art.

Akhmatova flourished. Her poetry, unreservedly feminine and unabashedly intense, launched a new style not yet seen on the Russian poetry scene.

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Directions

R. S. Thomas

In this desert of language
            we find ourselves in,
with the sign-post with the word ‘God’
            worn away
                                    and the distance …?

Pity the simpleton
            with his mouth open crying:
                                    How far is it to God?

And the wiseacre says: Where you were,
friend.
            You know that smile
                                                glossy
as the machine that thinks it has outpaced
            belief?
                        I am one of those
who sees from the arms opened
                       to embrace the future
the shadow of the Cross fall
             on the smoothest of surfaces
                          causing me to stumble.   

The Excesses Of God

Robinson Jeffers

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.