Poetry

[Nayana]

"Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself--and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory."

Prometheus, Lord Byron

[Mimesis]

Extract from Prometheus Unbound
Percy Shelley

The Earth to Prometheus....

I am the Earth.

Thy mother; she within whose stony veins,
To the last fibre of the loftiest tree.
Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air,
Joy ran, as blood within a living frame,
When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud.
Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy!
And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted,
Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust.

And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread,
Grew pale, until his thunder chained thee here.
Then, see those million worlds which burn and roll,
Around us: their inhabitants beheld,
My sphered light wane in wide Heaven; the sea
Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire,
From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow,
Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven's frown;
Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains;
Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads.

Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled:
Where Plague had fallen on man, and beast, and worm,
And Famine; and black blight on herb and tree;
And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass,
Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds.
Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry,
With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained.

[Mimesis]

A Wreath
George Herbert

A wreathed garland of deservèd praise,
Of praise deservèd, unto Thee I give,
I give to Thee, who knowest all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherein I live,—
Wherein I die, not live; for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to Thee,
To Thee, who art more far above deceit,
Than deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know Thy ways,
Know them and practise them: then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give Thee a crown of praise.

[Mimesis]

Death, be not proud
John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

[Heith]

Death, be not proud
John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Oh, this was fantastic. Thank you.

[Mimesis]

Prolong the Night
Renee Vivien

Prolong the night, Goddess who sets us aflame!
Hold back from us the golden-sandalled dawn!
Already on the sea the first faint gleam
Of day is coming on.

Sleeping under your veils, protect us yet,
Having forgotten the cruelty day may give!
The wine of darkness, wine of the stars let
Overwhelm us with love!

Since no one knows what dawn will come,
Bearing the dismal future with its sorrows
In its hands, we tremble at full day, our dream
Fears all tomorrows.

Oh! keeping our hands on our still-closed eyes,
Let us vainly recall the joys that take flight!
Goddess who delights in the ruin of the rose,
Prolong the night!

[obnoxion]

This is not a poem, but an important opinion from that famous English poet of Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1884). Even those less interested in poetry might have felt his influence through Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner".

In a letter Coleridge has written something that pertains, I think, to both Poetry and Occultism:

"Never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature without connecting it, by dim analogies, with the moral world proves faintness of impression. Nature has her proper interest, and he will know what it is who believes and feels that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life. A poet's heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearance of nature and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal similes."

I do not think that I would as readily find a paragraph from a religious or a philosophical - or from an occult - treatise, than from an artists' letter, that would crystallize the aim and method of the unification of the Left and Right hands.

P.S. I will continue our discussion in this topic, frater Omoksha, when I have had enough time to formulate my thoughts.

[Mimesis]

"Never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature without connecting it, by dim analogies, with the moral world proves faintness of impression. Nature has her proper interest, and he will know what it is who believes and feels that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life. A poet's heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearance of nature and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal similes."

I do not think that I would as readily find a paragraph from a religious or a philosophical - or from an occult - treatise, than from an artists' letter, that would crystallize the aim and method of the unification of the Left and Right hands.

Thank you so very much for sharing this. I had not heard or read of Coleridge saying this, although I have taken other valuable things from his literary writing and commentaries.

I stand so very strongly and whole-heartedly behind this statement.

Interesting to relate the right and left hands directly to the heart and the intellect, and as Coleridge recognises, to combine and unify them intimately to reach the fullest of understanding and experience. This being the responsibility of the poet(s).
This is such a profound, yet essentially simply truth, that is found so more pure here than in so many of the lengthy treatises one can study.

Although I do not in essence like or appreciate the book or the author as a whole, some of the few statements that I do resonate with from Peter Grey's 'Apocalyptic Witchcraft' remind me a lot of this.
To give a few I found from briefly skim reading it:

"The poets do not repeat, they reconnect."

"....poetry is a better guide to history than the flayed documents of the scholars."

[Mimesis]

Actually, having just decried Peter Grey's 'Apocalyptic Witchcraft' in my post above, I must recommend just one chapter from it; 'A Spell to Awaken England'.

In the context of this thread, it is very relatable. In it, Grey considers the role of the poet(s) to be very intimately involved in reaching abstract and profound truths that solely intellectual works cannot, and in uniting and combining what he refers to as white and black paths - and at times directly to magic - but which we/one could consider the left and right hand paths.

He also relates a lot of Shakespeare's work - predominantly his poetry - to occult themes, which I took some joy from.

[Mimesis]

I am not sure in what context he wrote it - I think it may have been from 'Myth and Education', in which he writes of where vitality and death enter into his poetic work from - but I have just remembered and read again the following statement from Ted Hughes:

"We are simply the locus of their collision. Two worlds with mutually contradictory laws, or so they seem to us to be, colliding every second, struggling for peaceful coexistence. And whether we like it or not our life is what we are able to make of that collision and struggle."

This could relate to many things, as I cannot remember or re-find the original context, but it is dealing with the work and position of the poet(s). So in this context, it could well be used as a bold comment on the left and right hand paths - heart and intellect - and the role of poet in uniting these both abstractly and practically.