Survival Till Seventeen

I think it was good of our teachers to foster the poet in the child, rather than make a practitioner of him. Nor do I feel, as I succumb to middle age, that poetry was a bad thing, simply because it was not the best God has to offer. I know it was so much better than the lesser things children are now given in laboratories of learning, that I am not afraid to put it in its proper place in relation to that better form of knowing which the pure contemplatives enjoy.

But I will need the full maturity of my powers to show where poetry falls short of mysticism, and I need to do so precisely here in order to make a sort of celestial preparation for some further things to come. If the reader does not find this chapter very childlike in content, at least he will find it childlike in arrangement.

Poetry is another world, absolutely. When you are in it — in the throes of composition — you do not know what you eat, what you wear, what time it is, what day of the week. Some are prepared to say you are not responsible for what you do, but this cannot be admitted. Conscience is ultimately stronger than concentration.

Francis Carlin calls the poet’s state one of “fixed imagination.” And when the imagination gets into the habit of fixing itself to beauty, it begins to fix itself to other things, worries for instance. Poets are born worriers.

I prefer a deeper explanation of the poet’s misery than that offered by Francis Carlin. I think poetry is a case wherein that phase of us which was not destroyed by original sin tries to get back to its Paradisal state, and to see by simple insight in place of round-about logic. But alas, the escape is never complete because of the wound of original sin. The heavy fetters of iniquity hang on the wings of the mind trying to soar. And sooner or later the strain tells, and down we tumble to Earth, wounded and depressed. It is an awful price to pay, as only those know who have paid it.

The reaction to the writing of poetry is terrific, and history is strewn with the wrecks of those who could not stand the pace. But the real poets have got to stand it, and that is why, next to the mystics, they are the greatest heroes in the world.

The experience of the poets and the mystics is totally different. The poets go back to Paradise. The mystics go forward to the Beatific Vision. The hardship of falling forward from Paradise is not as great as that of falling backward from the Beatific Vision. Hence, the dark night of the mystics is even worse than that of the poets.

The poets admire the mystics and praise them. The mystics do not understand the poets, but in weaker moments they envy them.

The Devil hates the mystics, but he also hates the poets. He is determined that human nature shall go neither forward to the Beatific Vision nor backward to Paradise.

The mystics want the pure white light of the Divinity. The poets want it diffracted among creatures. Poets make wretched mystics, but mystics make even worse poets. Saint John of the Cross was a great mystic, but a poor poet. John Keats was a great poet, but no mystic whatsoever.

Poetry is an infinitely lesser thing than mysticism, but it is greater than ordinary thought. It is also, to some extent, a vocation. No one ever asked to be a poet, nor could he wholly escape the assignment once given. The writing of poetry is not its own reward. The poets suffer, and either Heaven awaits them or they shall have had Hell on both sides of the grave.

The poets work in perishable material, endeavoring to give permanent form to words, sequences and sounds. But all these babblings will be drowned one day in the music of a celestial noise. The poets know this in their deepest hearts, and yet they go on pretending not to know it. Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt, Virgil wrote; and another poet supposed he was convincing himself of a truth when he began:

No voice is ever drowned;

Nothing becomes a stillness that once was a sound.

What nonsense! Even a physicist could explode it. And yet what a haunting nonsense to indulge in! The poets deal in dangerous values. They are constantly trying to eternalize the temporal and make the hereafter seem like now. And they can fool us from time to time with their pleasant tricks. But the mystics refuse to be fooled. They know we have been banished from Paradise by an angel with a flaming sword.

The mystics work in the field of imperishable material, their own immortal souls. They give forms, perpetual and harmonious, to hidden masterpieces within. They are inarticulate, mostly, in this life. But when they do burst into song, their poetry will be found to be an integral part of the hosannas of The Blessed which will vibrate forever and ever.

The poets are dreadfully insincere, but they are never deceitful. “But she is in her grave, and oh, the difference to me!” sang Wordsworth of little Lucy. But after a time it did not make much difference. A mystic, bereaved of Lucy, would keep her as a perpetual part of his prayer, his suffering, his very life. It would always make a difference to him.

Yet the mystics, unlike the poets, are deceitful. I do not mean this by way of moral, but of supernatural inconsistency. If you ask the mystics how they feel, they will reply: “Excellently, thank God!” though they may be referring only to an excellent ache in the head or an excellent pain in the stomach. They appraise such things in the light of their direct relationship to God, and talk accordingly. The poet does not understand such subterfuge. If you ask him how he feels, he will answer “Rotten!” if such be the case. He knows nothing of the brave evasions of the mystics, just as he knows nothing of their unswerving loyalties.

What purpose does the poet serve in the frightening supernatural scheme of things to which we are consigned? Well, even at his worst, the poet is at least a document, illustrating, in its positive phase, the truth of original sin, proving that there was in the primal childhood of our nature a cognoscitive directness in the mind’s approach to truth never wholly destroyed by the transgression of our First Parents. The poet is one of the apples left over from Paradise, which, remaining unbitten, perished by blight.

I know there are those who want to pamper the poets and send them all to Heaven as a reward for mere æsthetic skills; but these persons are chiefly those who have never known by direct experience the emptiness of poetic achievement. To the honor of the poets be it said that very few of them have surveyed themselves with such a beatific stare. The best poets know well their own limitations, and are not ashamed to be saved by humility, as Chaucer was not, who, at the hour of death, begged Our Lord to be mindful, not of the excellence of the Canterbury Tales, but of the heinousness of his own sins, and to blot these out in the gentle Christian mercies.

If there is any point in which poetry is a good preparation for mysticism, I insist that it is neither in the object sought for as such, nor in the method of seeking it. The poet is seeking for created beauty, the mystic for uncreated. The poet is perfectly helpless without the instruments of the senses and the imagination. To the mystic the senses and the imagination ultimately become hindrances, obfuscating the clear vision of God’s essence.

But this much the poet and the mystic do have in common. Both look upon the object of their quest as an absolute, for which they are willing to make any and all sacrifices. The poet for the sake of his poem will starve, go sleepless, penniless, friendless, consign himself to solitude, and bravely endure the badgering, suspicion, misunderstanding which is the lot of all those who have a precious secret to hide. In brief, he practices asceticism of the extremest kind. The logic of asceticism he can see, and, conscious of its necessity in the realm of art, he is easily persuaded to admit its reasonableness in the realm of sanctification. He is sensitive also to the value of “form,” and is often led into the Church by his admiration for the liturgy. And as regards the full-time contemplatives in Religious Orders, the poet may be indifferent toward them, but he is rarely if ever intolerant of them, and that is more than you can say of the common garden-variety of men, even among Catholics. Mary seated at the feet of Christ is as thoroughly convincing to the poet as Martha cooking the dinner, though there is probably nobody in the world more desperately in need of a dinner.

Fortunately for the sake of poetry, the mystical state is one to which many are called but few are chosen, and so there is no particular danger of the poets surrendering their trade in favor of a higher urge. And once God the Father gets hold of a good poet, He seems intent on keeping him, in preference to giving him the added lift that is needed for mysticism. Furthermore, the poet is one of God’s best credentials, too valuable to dispense with. For if there are poets, there must be God. If there are those who can make words that fall so beautifully on our ears in time, there must be One Whose Word will reach us even more exquisitely in eternity. Therefore, God does not banish the poets, as Plato would. For God’s Republic is more generous than Plato’s. Others, besides the few, can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And, short of seeing God face to face, it is something to have trapped His vestige in a rainbow or His image in the eyes of a child.

Likewise, the poet offers most stubborn resistance to the efforts of the materialists to break down the dignity of our nature and formulate it in terms of the Guinea pig. The mystic, since his is a celestial secret locked in the heart, suffers an easy dismissal by the materialist, on the score of being frustrated, inhibited, and so on. Not so the poet, who sings an open and free song for all to read. The delicacy of the spirit’s tones is in it, and the materialist has no recipes for explaining this away. And so the poet, precisely because there is something in him that is of this world and something in him that is not, is one of the best defenses civilization has to protect itself against those whose education is pursued in terms of two epistemological criteria: suspicion and surmise.

Therefore, let the poets be kept, and let the mystics be kept, too, but with their differences properly noted in time, since they will be even more conspicuous in eternity.

In the pursuit of his eternity the poet has need, just as the mystic has, to go to the theology of the Church for counsel and direction. The mystics are constantly complaining that they have difficulty in finding suitable directors. They do not ask that these directors be mystics, but that they be those who have extended theology to the point where it can exercise its domain over them with understanding, rather than ridicule.

Likewise, I know of no poet who wants a poetical confessor. But he would like a confessor who at least knows of the existence of poetry, and this by way of appreciation, not condescension.

It would be well if the theologians would realize their importance as the last refuge of all of us, and with sure knowledge and generous sympathies save both mystic and poet from the horrors of private revelation.