سنڌي ورچوئل لائبرري

CHAPTER III WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

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Sir Walter Raleigh, in his life of Wordsworth, observes that there was nothing ‘Wordsworthian’ about the boy Wordsworth. If this means that a boy Wordsworth showed no marked tendency towards mysticism or idealism it is an obvious mis-statement. The child was father of the man. He lived a life of sport and adventure no doubt; but he was equally given to quiet contemplation and reverie which are the beginnings of mystical experience. He has himself told us that before he was ten years old, he had Nature’s ‘visitations’ to his soul, and that amid ‘fits and vulgar joy’ and ‘giddy bliss’, he felt “gleams like the flashing of a shield.”[1] In this respect he bears a striking similarity to Jami, the mystic poet of Persia. But whereas the latter maintained an exuberance of spirits throughout life, Wordsworth in later life was weighed down by the high seriousness which came to him form the conviction that he was the chosen mouth-piece of the deity. “I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing,” said he.[2]

Wordsworth’s Purgation:

Wordsworth not only showed a tendency towards mysticism form childhood, but did all he could to cultivate it. Its significance lay in the choice he himself made amongst the alternatives of life. He had no innate love of poverty and asceticism, and yet he practised them both deliberately. He retired into the quite of the country where he could feel “the self-sufficing power of solitude;” he was content with “Sabine fare,” just enough to keep the body and soul together’ he beat down with steady purposes all his passions, ambition and love of money; he regulated his emotions so that nothing moved him either to an unusual elation or undue depression of spirits. By the continuous practice of self-denial and ethical discipline, he became as Hamlet describes Horatio:

“For thou hast been

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;

Hast Ta’en with equal thanks.”[3]

And when he had attained to this inner poise, which he calls a ‘wise passiveness,’ or a ‘happy stillness of the mind,’ his soul came to be gradually illuminated. The Hindu mystic lays great emphasis on this quality, and considers it a sine qua non of spiritual illumination. “He who suffers not from violent elation or depression of the mind, has attained to ‘shama’ or ‘wise passiveness’. He looks with equal eye on all and grasps not eagerly or flings away anything. He touches all affairs with an intelligence refined and pure, and ever seeks the good of all and shrinks from causing pain. He does with wakefulness of duties of his life externally, but ever sleeps dreamlessly within. The mind of such a one evolves the radiates around peace from within itself as the stars radiate light. In such a one the Supreme Essence manifests Itself automatically.”[4]

It is well to state at the outset that this ‘wise passiveness’ on which Wordsworth constantly harps, is no more state of listless lethargy such as results from the use of intoxicants or narcotics, but is that absolute stillness of the soul in which the mind ceases to think and reason, in which all the petty worries of existence vanish into thin air, and the sense of being wrapt into an atmosphere which enfolds the entire universe within itself, as the calm clear depths of a mountain-pool do the imagery of the heavens above, steals over the inner man. It is the state of which the Psalmist sings: “Be still and know that I am God.”[5] In this state, as I have said previously[6] the soul becomes absolutely still, like a flame in a place where there Is not even the gentlest breath of wind, which means that the soul is not dull and sleepy, but fully alive and most keenly penetrating. Thus the soul combines in itself both keenness and stillness.

Wordsworth’s Reverie:

I have said that as a boy, Wordsworth was subjected to reverie. This is the initial stage in mystical experience. In reverie the mind revolves on itself. The perception of the external world is reduced to a minimum, but passive perception increases correspondingly. The senses become more receptive as their ordinary tension relaxes. Looking back on his own boyhood, when the subjective feeling and objective knowledge were blended together, Wordsworth tells us that he scarcely knew how to distinguish himself from his ordinary surroundings, and that many times, while going to School, he would grasp at a wall or a tree to recall himself from the abyss of idealism to reality.[7] During periods of reverie his thoughts and emotions ran along the customary channel; only the ideas that appealed to him most for the moment held the lead. Hence his reverie is of the sports and adventures which occupied his thoughts at this time.

Wordsworth has recounted three reveries which occurred him before he ‘had told ten birth-days’. In all these, his “mortal” nature did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.”[8] They were trivial and nightmarish, but they worked on his sensitive brain with “a dim and undermined sense of unknown modes of being.”[9] They were inchoate flashes of a deeper than sensorial perceptions and soon developed into a condition bordering upon trance.

Wordsworth’s Trance:

During his early morning walks around Esthwaite lake, while on his way to School, he would often sit on a jutting eminence among the woods, and view the fair and tranquil scenes in the peaceful vale beneath. In these moments a holy calm would spread over his soul, his physical senses would cease to function and the whole panorama of Nature would appear to him engulfed. From the account he has given these experiences, it does not appear whether they originated in his own mind being, to use the language of Psychical Research, mere uprushes of the subliming self into supra-liminal consciousness, or were due to the influence into his personality of a “superadded soul.”[10] But he does talk of the influx of an “auxiliary light” which, according to the professed mystics, is a beam of God’s own light cast into the mind by Himself, directly one simplifies his nature, and becomes detached from the things of sense.

It is not possible to classify and describe the various grades of illumination which Wordsworth experienced frequently at this time. In one of the experiences which occurred in his seventeenth year, under the stress of intense trance, he becomes more clairvoyant and clairaudient than before. He communes with all things in earth and heaven, and recognizes a bond of sympathy and brotherhood among the diverse objects of Nature, and perceives the universe in all its vastness and variety blended into one God, singing a chorus of halleluiahs and harping symphonies.[11]

Something akin to this, but perhaps more profound and exalted happened to him in his eighteenth year, while he was at Cambridge. He became like one possessed. His outward state, his gestures and looks led the onlookers to suspect that he was suffering form a sort of dementia. “Bereft of Reason, but filled with divinity,” he perceived a conscious, moral life embracing within its bossom, the totality of existence, including all “natural forms.”–rocks, fruits, flowers, and even the loose stones that covered the highway.

“the great mass

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.”[12]

There is a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita which records a vision similar to that of Wordsworth. Prince Arjuna prays the Lord Krishna to show Himself in the fullness of His divine nature. But physical eyes are not fitted for such a vision; and so Krishna opens the eyes of Arjuna’s soul and bids him behold.

“Then, O King! The God[13] so saying,

Stood, to Pritha’s Son displaying

All the splendour, wonder, dread

Of His vast Almighty-head.

Out of countless mouths commanding,

Countless mystic forms enfolding

In one Form; supremely standing

Countless radiant glories wearing,

Countless heavenly weapons bearing,

Drowned with garlands of star-clusters,

Robed in garb of woven lustres

Breathing from His Perfect Presence

Breaths of every subtle essence

Of all heavenly odours; shedding

Blinding brilliance; overspreading–

Boundless, beautiful – all spaces

With His all-regarding faces:

So He showed! If there should rise

Suddenly within the skies

Sunburst of a thousand susns

Flooding earth with beams undeemed–of,

Then might be that Holy One’s

Majesty and radiance dreamed of!

So did Pandu’s Son[14] behold

All this universe enfold

All its huge diversity

Into one vast shape, and he

Visible, and viewed, and blended

In one Body,– subtle, splendid,

Nameless–the All–comprehending

God of Gods, the Never–Ending

Deity!”[15]

The awful splendour of the divine vision grows and waxes, until, from sheer inability to behold it longer, Arjuna cries out in agony and prays that the glory may depart from him. So the vision vanishes.

Wordsworth too is in similar plight. He is dazzled and dazed, so he would not let the Sun penetrate ‘caverns’ within his mind. He lets its light enter in at ‘leafy arbours’.[16] His eye is not strong enough to gaze upon the naked splendour of the Fountain of Light; it wants a veil to soften and subdue the burning flame. Now, why was this? Because, the mortal limits of the self were not completely loosed. This is proved from Wordsworth’s own statement. He says that his bodily eye continued “searching out the lines of difference in all external forms.”[17] In other words, he retained a clear consciousness of the object as distinct from the subject. According to Rumi:

“He to whom God’s light is the guide

Should no longer be slave to external forms.”[18]

And Shabistari says:

“When its Lord appears in glory to the Mount of Existence

Existence is laid, low, like the dust of the road.”[19]

Wordsworth’s Ecstasy and Divine Urge:

We next meet with an experience in which Wordsworth gains the highest kind of intuitive knowledge. He stands out of normal consciousness for a while completely. All the activity of his mind ceases. The Hindu mystic says that the mind of man is like a millstone. If we put wheat under it, it grinds it into flour; if we put nothing under it, it grinds on until it grinds itself away. When this happens we enter into a condition of absolute passivity, in which we no longer “search out the lines of difference.”[20] Plotinus asserts that in this state, the soul is no longer conscious of the body or of the mind, but knows that she has what she desired, that she is where no deception can come, and that she would not exchange her bliss for all the heaven of heavens.[21]

Wordsworth tells us that though in his abstraction he saw little and remembered less, he gained “a glimmering view” of the Divine Sun. this immediate contact with Reality was productive of three important results. Firstly, it awakened his human affections which had laid dormant. He saw the heart of man in very bosom of God, consequently he felt a freshness in human life and loved

“deeply all that had been loved before,

More deeply even than before.”[22]

Secondly, he felt permanently braced up; rather he overflowed with divine joy. As I have said previously, joy is the essential nature of Reality, according to the Hindu mystic;[23] consequently man by becoming one with it shares this quality. Russell calls this blissful feeling “the true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man.”[24] In truth, Wordsworth used sometimes to feel “almost man with pleasure”, like Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist. And he declared joy the chief attribute of the poetic genius, and proclaimed poets ‘the happiest of men.’ Thirdly he felt an irresistible call to the poet’s office.

“to the brim

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were made for me.”[25]

Now, the words “to the brim my heart was full” are very significant. Patanjali says that in ecstasy the soul seems actually to overflow with divine energy.[26] Rumi likens ecstasy to a high tide, and its withdrawal to a low ebb.[27] The fact that Wordsworth describe this state in words identical with those of other mystics, coupled with the fact that ineffable bliss filled his soul, shows irrefutably that what he experienced at this time was ecstasy. Further, eh says that during this state “the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood is almost suspended.”[28] This is very often the case with other mystics also. For instance, Rumi describes one of his ecstasies thus:

“Know my eyes sleep, but my heart is awake;

My body, though torpid, is instinct with energy.”[29]

As regards Wordsworth’s divine urge to the poet’s office, we meet with a similar experience in the life of Hafiz. It is said that while he was keeping a vigil at a holy shrine in Shiraz, his native town, he saw a vision in which he was dedicated, in spite of himself, by the prophet Kihzr, the patron-saint of Persian poets, to the service of the Muse.[30]

Thus we can trace the development of Wordsworth’s mystical power from the simple glee and mild abstraction of childhood, the season of “glad animal movements,” through the period of “seed-time” when he grown up with gleams of insight into the heart of Nature, to the moment when, as a result of illuminating not only in Nature, but in man as well, he becomes ‘a priest of the inner shrine,’ linked to the Soul that is the ‘Eternity of thought’.

Temporary Withdrawal of Mystical Power:

Wordsworth’s mystical power seemed to desert him as he grappled vainly with social and political problems arising out of the French Revolution, and meddled with the sterile philosophy of Godwin.[31] His soul experienced a marked diminution of spiritual illumination, and entered what St. John of the Cross calls ‘the dark night of the soul.’[32] This is a state of extreme misery and intense dejection. The lives of mystics, both Eastern and Western, furnish many instances of this phenomenon. To mention one typical case, Mahomed, the Arabian Prophet, is said to have suffered from this ‘suspension of the soul’. He felt utterly wretched and forlorn, until from the very depths of his sorrow, the divine Sun once again shone upon him.[33]

But the mystic regards this event as a necessary stage in the ascent of the soul. Sa’di, the Persian mystic, says that the vision of God to the mystic consists of manifestation and occultation; He shows Himself, and again withdraws Himself.[34] Rumi calls these two phases “the smiles and frowns of the Beloved.”[35]

Restoration of Power:

At this crisis, Dorothy came to Wordsworth’s rescue. By encouraging intercourse with Nature and the simple lives of country people, she helped him out of the grip of what he himself calls “moral Disease”. Chastened and purified, he views the world in a newer light. He realises much more insistently than ever his real office upon earth, and feels a deep delight in creative function for its own sake. So he dons his singing robes to transmit “the vision and the faculty divine[36] to mankind.

The decade immediately following, when he lived with his sister in his little house, ‘Townend’ at Grasmere, subsequently called ‘Dove Cottage’ rich in the friendship of Coleridge, de Quincy and Southe, was, indeed, the flowering period of his genius, the one distinguishing feature of his poetry being mystical insight. Says Matthew Arnold: “Between 1788 and 1808 almost all his really first rate work was produced.”[37]

Complete Withdrawal of Power:

Wordsworth continued to sing, but his power was gradually leaving him. He did not belong to that happy band of mystics like Blake, in whom the light is maintained.

“Through every change of growth and of decay,

Pre-eminent till death.”[38]

The time came at last when he broke off “all commerce with the Muse.” Shorn of the divine influx, like Samson of his locks, the wears the laurel wreath of the Court poet, but “the Mind’s internal heaven” sheds no more “dews of inspiration on his lay.” Rumi says that it is mystic insight alone that imparts value and luster to poetry. Without it, it is best not to sing at all.

“The Word is become foul with mingled earth;

The water is become muddy; close the mouth of the well,

Till God makes it again pure and sweet;

Yea, till He purifies what He has made foul.

Patience will accomplish thy desire, not haste,

Be patient, God knows what is best.”[39]

And he who worshiped at Nature’s inner shrine, backsliders to formal faith, and becomes a pattern of conformity. The Oriental mystic regards such an event as a terrible calamity, and a sure sign of the withdrawal of mystic light. Mansure, to whom I have already made a reference elsewhere,[40] says that he who worships God by the light of ordinary religion is as one who seeks the sun by the light of the stars.[41] Referring to it in his Masnavi, Rumi says:

“He whose sanctuary is the mystical revelation,

Do thou regard his backsliding to formal religion an utter disgrace.

He who is exalted to the office of wardrobe-keeper to his king,

Brings but shame on his master by pretty huckstering.

He who is admitted to the royal presence-chamber,

Would show disrespect by tarrying at the doorway.

If the king grants him the privilege to kiss his hand.

It is a sin, if he prefers to kiss his foot,

Although to lay the head on the king’s foot is obeisance,

Compared with the former it is a fault and backsliding,

The king’s jealousy is kindled against him.

Who, after having seen the face, prefers the mere scent.”

William Hale white contends that after the crisis I have described above, there was no further backsliding on the part of Wordsworth.[42] I consider that there is ample evident to prove such backsliding. In the first place we have his own confession of lost vision in several of his poems. For instance, in the ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’, he asks:

Again in the ‘Ode composed upon an Evening of extraordinary Splendour and Beauty,’ he speaks of the “light full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored.” In the second place, whereas in the hey-day of his vision, he gives utterance to thoughts which lay him open to the charge of pantheism, with the loss of vision he conceives of God as a glorified Jehovah, by Whose grace alone man can be saved.[43] And in the third place, Coleridge who knew him more intimately than any other of his critics, does not hesitate to accuse him of backsliding.[44]

But even in this respect, there is a similarity between Wordsworth and other mystics. For instance, it is stated that the visionary power of the Italian mystic, Girolamo Savonarola lasted only eight years, at the end of which he groped about as in the dark, not knowing how to act or what to preach.[45] Similarly Joan of Arc seemed “a thing wholly divine, whether to see or hear” just for a brief space of one year, during which she saw her visions and heard her ‘divine locutions’. But when these ceased, she was a broken lute; her heart’s echoes rendered no song, and she felt her errand to be at an end.[46]

Wordsworth’s Theory of Knowledge:

(1) Senses and Intellect:

Wordsworth, is common with other mystics, denounce senses and the intellect. The latter is a “false secondary power” which merely multiplies distinctions. It cannot grasp the  unity behind them. We must, therefore, deliver ourselves from its officious slavery. The astronomer, who actuated by “strong and rapacious conceit”, endeavours to enlarge the scope of his physical senses with a telescope, “long as a barber’s pole” comes in for contempt and ridicule at Wordsworth’s hands.[47] He regards the man of science as:

“a fingering slave,

One that would peep and botanise

Upon his mother’s grave.”[48]

(2) Science:

Destructive analysis of the scientist is the roof of all evil to Wordsworth. Science is “smitten with an unnatural taint: Itts vain endeavour to see beyond the world of phenomena is, to his mind, typified by the statue of Newton in the antechapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is

‘The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.’[49]

1. Spence Watson seeks to show that Wordsworth didn’t denounce science.[50] It is true that he regarded it as an important realm of the intellect, but he did, as a mystic consider it as a hindrance rather than as a help toward understanding the enigma of the universe. Mystic life is that which passes beyond the realm of sense and intellect into that of the spirit. Rabindranath Tagore, the mystic poet of India says: “The man whose acquaintance with the world does not lead him deeper then Science leads him, will never understand what it is that the man with spiritual vision finds in these natural phenomena. The water not merely cleanse his limbs, but it purifies his heart; for it touches his soul. The earth does not merely hold his body, but it gladness his mind; for its contact is more than a physical contact, it is a living presence. When a man does not realize his kinship with the world, he lives in a prison-house whose walls are alien to him. When he meets the eternal spirit in all objects then is he emancipated, for then he discovers the fullest significance of the world into which he is born; then he finds himself in prefect truth, and his harmony with the All is established.”[51]

(3) Book Learning:

Wordsworth was out of sympathy with all ‘written lore.’ He says that to find a single valuable thought or idea, we have to wade through a mass of puerile fancy. According to him, books are but the repositories of “a dull and endless strife,” and vehicles of false conclusions of the reasoning power. They make the eye blind, and close “the passages through which the ear converses with the heart.”

Some of Wordsworth’s critics are of the opinion that his condemnation of knowledge and learning was merely a pose, and that he was fairly well endowed with them.[52] As against this, we have Wordsworth’s own confession that even as a boy he was “ill-tutored for captivity” to bookish lore. However, he did not slight it altogether at the time, but culled ‘such flowers of learning as might tempt a random choice.” But, in truth, it was this acquaintance with learning which brought him the irresistible conviction that it was a useless burden which must be thrown away, if one would have the vision of the Real. We find a similarity here between Wordsworth and several Oriental mystics. for instance, Rumi was the leading scholar, theologian, and divine of the day. But when Shams, who had been especially deputed to convert him to mysticism, put him the simple question whether all his learning had procured him releases from egoism and had given him a glimpse of the Real, he became at once convinced of its absolute worthlessness.[53] Referring to it in the Masnavi, he says:

“God says: ‘As an ass bearing a load of books’,

The knowledge which is not of Him is a burden,

Knowledge which comes not immediately from Him

Lasts no longer than the rouge of the courtesan.

Nevertheless, if you bear this burden in a right spirit

It will be removed, and you will rejoice.

But see you bear not this burden vaingloriously;

If you do, you cannot behold true knowledge within.

When once you have mounted the steed of true knowledge

Straightway the burden of bookish lore will fall from your back.”

Al-Ghazzali, than whom the Moslem world has produced no greater scholar, on the eve of his conversion to mysticism make the following significant observation with regard to his literary attainments: “Examining my actions, the most fair-seeming of which were my lecturing and professorial occupations, I found to my surprise that I was engrossed in several studies of little value, and profitless as regards my salvation. I probed the motives of scholarship and found, that in place of being sincerely consecrated to the attainment of truth, it was only actuated by a vain desire of honour and reputation. I perceived that I was on the edge of an abyss, and that without an immediate conversion I should be lost. On the one side, the world kept me bound to my post in the chains of covetousness, on the other side, the voice of religion cried to me, Up! Up! thy life is nearing its end, and thou hast a long journey to make. All thy pretended knowledge is naught but falsehood and fantasy. If thou dost not think now of thy salvation, when will thou think of it? If thou dost not break thy chains today, when will thou break them?”[54]

The Odes of Hafiz are full of skits on learning and learned men. He himself was a Professor of Divinity, and was reckoned in his day an accomplished scholar. In one of the Odes he says that the knowledge of the schools had made him a greater fool than ever before. Another Eastern poet has said the last word on the subject:

“In vast life’s unbounded tide

They alone content may gain

Who can good from ill divide

Or in ignorance abide–

All between is restless pain.

Before Thy Prescience, power divine,

What is this idle sense of mine?

What all the learning of the schools?

What sages, priests, and pedants? – Fools!

The world is Thine, from Thee it flows.

Hence, worldly lore! By whom is wisdom shown?

The Eternal knows, knows all and He alone.”

(4) Ignorance, the pre-requisite of true knowledge:

Like Dionysius, the pseudo-Areopagite, Wordsworth bids us “to abandon the senses and all operations of the intellect, all objects of senses and all objects of thought and ignorantly to strive upwards.”[55] When we have dived down into ‘the mystical darkness of ignorance,’ we may hope to recapture the glory which we bring with ourselves at birth from the spiritual world, and which in most of us shimmers into nothingness owing to the world being too much with us.[56] It is only by coming back into the shelter of the “cloud of infancy”, that “one moment may give us more than fity years of reason.” All the barriers set up by our “meddling intellect” are then broken down, and we can “see into the life of things.”

The “cloud of infancy”, says Wordsworth, is wrapped round us each night in sleep. As soon as our bodies sleep, our souls awake, and gain a momentary glimpse of the Real. The passage of ‘The Excursion’ in which this statement occurs is rather significant. It bears close resemblance to one of Rumi’s in the Masnavi. I shall give both:

“Thou, who didst wrap the cloud

Of infancy around us, that thyself

Therein, with our simplicity awhile

Might’st hold, on earth, communion undisturbed;

Who from the anarchy of dreaming sleep?

Or from its death like void, with punctual care,

And touch as gentle as the morning light,

Restor’st us, daily, to the powers of sense

And reason’s steadfast rule – thou, thou alone

Art everlasting, and the blessed Spirits,

Which thou includest, as the sea her waves:”[57]

Or from its death like void, with punctual care, 7

And Rumi says:

“Every night Thou freest our spirits from the body

And its snare, making them pure like raised tablets.

Every night souls are released from their cages,

And set free, neither ruling nor ruled.

But at break of day, with punctual care

Thou restorest them to this world of form.

The state of the mystic is such even while awake.”[58]

(5) Faculty of Perception:

Wordsworth calls this innate faculty of perception by different names, e.g. Imagination, inward eye, vital soul, absolute power, clearest insight, pure intellect, reason in her most exalted mood, spiritual love. it is the faculty by which “sense is made subservient still to moral purposes, auxiliar to divine,” the organ through which the soul becomes conscious of the world of spirit. It comes into play when the above described requisite conditions are present.[59]

All possess this faculty of perception, says Wordsworth. But whereas the ordinary man lets his “vital soul” remain unbreathed and unexercised, the poet not only gives it rein, but in virtue of his “creative sensibility”, he makes it produce a fountain of limpid song; or else he would be “like a false steward, who hath much received, and renders nothing back.”[60] Thus, a poet, as Wordsworth elsewhere says, is “a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness… than are supposed to be common among mankind.”[61]

I shall take this opportunity of pointing out that not a few of Wordsworth’s critics erroneously suppose that his mysticism is “grounded and rooted in the senses.”[62] In previous chapters, I have made it quite clear that mysticism is the deliberate introversion of the senses. It is the leading principle of all mysticism that independently of the senses and reason, man possesses an inward sense or intuition which conveys to him a knowledge of Reality by direct apprehension. “In the same way as reason constitutes a particular phase of existence in which intellectual concepts are perceived which are hidden from the senses, similarly, intuition is a special state in which the inner eye discovers, revealed by a celestial light, mysteries out of the reach of reason and senses.”[63]

“The spirit’s eye and ear possess this power,

The eye and ear of reason and sense lack it.”[64]

To say, therefore, that Wordsworth’s mysticism is “rooted in the senses” is a contradiction in terms, unless, of course, some fanciful meaning is assigned to the word mysticism. Rumi says that in the case of the mystic, even his physical senses are illuminated by the divine light, so that even with them he can perceive in external forms what others can not. That is probably the reason why Wordsworth could see in natural objects what escaped the notice of the ordinary man. Referring to this transformation in his Masnavi, Rumi says:

“The Light that lights the eye is the inner light;

The eye’s light proceeds from the light of the heart;

But the light that lights the heart is the Light of God,

Which is distinct from the light of reason and sense.”

Wordsworth’s Mystical System:

(1) God:

In his spiritual evolution, Wordsworth presents a close parallel to the ancient Hindu Rishis or seers. Like them, he passed most of his life in the serene companionship of Nature, began the contemplation of Reality with a tabula rasa, without any pre-conceived theories or ideas, and passed through three distinct stages in the construction of Reality. The earliest seers of the Vedic hymns had very little idea of God and religion. The phenomena of Nature arrested their child-like attention. They saw the sun, and could not understand what it was. Struck with reverence and awe they worshipped it. They say the storm and did not know how it came. They were filled with terror and tried to propitiate its fury. They saw the beauty of the heavenly bodies and burst out in hymns of praises and adoration. Everything that they saw filled them with wonder and admiration. Nature appeared to them a great mystery which they could not penetrate. Soon, however, reflection set in. an unconscious effort to penetrate into the inner nature of things resulted. They interpreted things on the analogy of human nature, and posited the existence of individual spirits behind physical phenomena.

Now, Wordsworth in the earliest stages of his mystical experience, in the days of “trances of thought and mountings of the minds”[65] derives from the contemplation of natural objects a vision of the “Powers, which of themselves our minds impress.”[66] The mountains wear a “grim shape”, rise up from their positions and pursue him. Dry winds shout in his ear, and the solitary hills are surcharged with “low breathings.”[67] The universe resounds with hidden murmurs like the hollow shell.[68] To every form of being an active principle is assigned.[69] The whole of Nature at this period appears full of powerful spirits to Wordsworth, in whose presence he feels over-awed. In ‘Nutting’, he asks his sister to move along in “gentleness of heart,” for there is a spirit in the tree. Numerous other instances from his poems may be cited to prove that this was his belief at the time.

The next step in the spiritual ascent of the Hindu seers is the recognition of universal order and law, deduced from the regularity which the natural phenomena repeat themselves. As soon as this is realised, there ensues a change in their attitude towards Nature gods. They all merge into one extra cosmic personal God. The sun is His eye, the sky is His garment, and the storm is His breath. Rivers flow by His command, the sun shines, the stars and the moon are kept in their courses through fear of Him. By His law heaven and earth are held apart. He is of fixed purposes. He is omniscient and, as such, knows the flight of the birds in the firmament, the path of the ships on the high seas the course of the wind. He is the one supreme God, The God of Gods. He conforms to an unalterable law which He Himself has established. As such, He is called Rta or Law. “The dawn follows the path of Law, the right path, as if she knew it before; she never oversteps its boundaries. The sun follows the path of Law. The whole universe is based on Law, and lives, moves and has its being in it.”[70] But He not only controls the planets in their orbits and maintains the stability of the universe, but reveals Himself as duty in man, and righteousness in the moral world. He shows severity to the guilty and clemency to the penitent, and makes righteousness triumph as surely as the sun rises each day.

Wordsworth too passes through a similar phase. In ‘The Primrose of the Rock’, he says that all the parts of Nature are bound together in fellowship by a lasting link let down from Heaven. They all perform their appointed tasks with apodictic certainty and mathematical necessity. The same law, says he, governs all things from “creeping plant to sovereign man.” In man it operates as an ethnical Spirit, whose Stern Daughter, Duty, legislates the rule of right, checks and reproves the erring, and calms the weary strife of frail humanity. It is no provincialism of this planet; it is known among the stars, it reigns beyond Orion and the Southern Cross. It is wherever the Universal Spirit is.[71]

The conception of unity realised in the idea of Rta paved the way for monotheism. But the inquiring spirit of the Hindu seers did not stop there. They were not satisfied with monotheism. They began to ask: “Who has seen the first-born?”[72] Indeed, this is the fundamental question asked by all thinking minds. What is the life or essence of the universe? We must feel and experience the spiritual reality, said they. And in their exalted consciousness, they ultimately discovered that God is not outside of Nature but in Nature; that He is not outside of man, but in man; that He is not extra-cosmic but intra-cosmic; that He is immanent and resident in Nature; that He is the soul of the universe, and that just as the human soul is the internal ruler of the body, so the Soul of the universe is the internal ruler of universe. He governs not from outside, but from inside. He is the Creator, not in the sense that He sits somewhere in heaven above the clouds and by a sudden fiat creates the universe out of nothing, but He creates by pouring out His own spirit in Nature and starting the evolution of that cosmic energy which the Hindu seers call by the name of ‘Prakriti’ or Nature. In truth, the cosmic energy forms the body of the Spiritual Being. Accordingly, God is both the efficient and the material cause of the universe, and therefore He is not only the Father but the Mother of the world. He is both ‘Purusha’ and ‘Prakriti’, i.e., Spirit and Nature, wedded in love and holy marriage. The individual souls and all natural objects result from their union and partake of their divine nature.

This conception gradually leads to a still higher one. The ancient seers, rising above all phenomena, realise that individual beings are not merely divine progeny, but essentially one with God. This is the highest revelation of Reality.

If we turn to Wordsworth, we find a similar process at work. He soon outgrows his earlier Naturalism. As soon as he discovers law and harmony in the universe, he perceives that the starry heavens and the broad earth, the sea and the everlasting hills are all “the workings on one mind.”[73] God no longer appears to him as a being apart from the universe. “an absentee God sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of his universe and seeing it go.”[74] Such a God now considers to be a type for finite natures.[75] At this stage, God to him is the underlying unity in all natural objects, the one that runs through all numbers, the thread on which all things are strung together. His “being is spread over all that moves and all that seemeth still.”[76] He is the force that sweeps the winds and rolls the seas; He is the power that lies behind the growth of eth wild flower by the roadside; He is the motion that impels the instinct of the brute; He is the spirit that vibrates through all thinking things. He is the one in the many, a “something deeply interfused,”[77] in and through the infinite variety of the cosmos:

“Spirit that knows no insulated spot,

No chasm, no solitude; from link to link,

It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.”[78]

This interfusion of the divine spirit is brought into relief by a story in one of the Upanishads. A disciple is asked by his teacher to put a lump of salt in a jug of water at night, and come to him in the morning. The disciple does as he is bidden. When in the morning, he goes to the teacher, he is asked to find out the salt. But he can not, whereupon he is asked to taste the water from the surface, then from the middle, and then from the bottom. The disciple does so, and finds the water saltish through and through. Then the teacher tells him that the salt, even though it seems to have disappeared, is still in the water and is permeating every drop of it. “Thus is that subtle Atman (Universal Self) immanent in the universe, whom we may not be able to see, but whom we must regard as existing as the supreme object of faith.[79]

Having progressed so far, Wordsworth makes a still higher ascent. He realises that the ultimate reality of existence is essentially lodged in personality. In ‘The Prelude,’ he often refers to this consciousness, e.g.

“What I saw

Appeared like something myself, a dream

A prospect in the mind.”[80]

Everything has vanished, all phenomena have disappeared, all relative existences have ceased all natural objects are to him as dreams. The whole universe now appears to him a sold mass of infinite and indivisible reality. A similar feeling was evidently experienced by Byron, although he was not a mystic, when he wrote:

“Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part

Of me and of my soul, as I of them?”

Now, this is neither pantheism nor “spiritual fetishism like that of St. Francis of Assisi,” as Herford alleges.[81] It is true spiritual monism, which is the acme of mystical experience. It occurs and the higher the intuition rises, the more penetrating is the vision, until at last the perceiver realisng his oneness with the perceived, sees the whole universe drawn into himself, and regards it as no more than a mere incident of his own being. Pantheism means that everything is God. But in such spiritual monism nothing exists. The particular phenomena are resolved into nothingness; the back-ground, the eternal canvas alone remains. Or, as Rumi has it, “all phantoms fade; Truth alone survives”.[82]

Wordsworth knew that every logical analysis, however subtle, every intellectual formulation. However, profound was but an obscuration and a limitation of the primal faces of this type of experience. The following lines of his, which have not received the attention they deserve, are very significant, and lend support to what I have said:

“For I must tread on shadowy ground must sink

Deep, –and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds

To which the heavens of heavens is but a veil.

All strength–all terror, single or in bands.

That ever was put forth in personal forms–

Jehovah– with his thunder, and the choir

Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones–

I pass them unalarmed. Not Chaos, not

The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,

Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out

By help of dreams – can breed such fear and awe

Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man –

My haunt, and the main region of my song.”[83]

It is said that when Wordsworth wrote these lines, his orthodox friends were scandalised by them, and he himself hardly knew what to make of them. All this is an incontrovertible proof of what I have been saying that Wordsworth did attain to a superconscious identity with Reality. Notwithstanding this, Wordsworth in his mystical system descends to ground more familiar, and therefore less offensive. His poems, as a rule, deal with “the whole compass of the universe,” as it is exhibited to bodily sense. In other words, he holds the transcendental doctrine in the background, and gives prominence to the immanent aspect of the divinity.

(2) Nature:

Some of the Classical poets conceive of Nature as all-present manifestation of God. For instance, Lecan says: “This seat of God is there where earth and sea and air and sky and virtue are. Why do we seek the gods beyond? Whatsoever you see, wheresoever you go, is Jupiter.”[84] To Wordsworth, Nature is not merely the theatre of God’s attributes, but is herself the Divine Presence, a living breathing power. She is an organism of which the Supreme Spirit itself is the life and power. And just as the human soul and body together constitute the individual person, so the Divine Soul and Nature combined make up the Universal Person. It is in this sense that Wordsworth speaks of Nature as a person. But as it is a travesty to identify the body with the man, so it is a travesty to identity Nature with God. In other words, though God is immanent in Nature, He transcends her. This is the idea of the ancient Hindu seers also:

“However great is Nature’s majesty,

The Spirit is yet higher raised by far,

Of it, but one foot do all beings make?

Three feet are immortality in Heaven”.[85]

This double aspect of God, viz. the immanent and the transcendent is beautifully brought out in the Bhagvad-gita. Therein we re constantly reminded that God is to be regarded as the causeless cause and the unmoved mover of the universe.

“He is within all beings – and without–

Motionless, yet still moving; not discerned

For subtly of instant presence; close

To all, to each; and yet measurelessly far;

Not manifold, and yet subsisting still

In all which lives.

The light of lights, he is in the heart of the dark

Shining externally.”[86]

 

(3) Unity of Life in Nature:

Nature being animated throughout, imparts a sort of life and soul to each one of its constituent elements. There is no inert, insensate, brute matter in the universe; everything is endowed with conscious life, is instinct with sensibility, and shares all the essential attributes of the Divine Soul. Nature breathes among the hills and groves; rocks and streams possess a presence and a personality; solemn voices issue from out the mountains’ heart; every form of created thing adores the Uncreated Being, singing the Sanctus in most audible sound; and every flower enjoys the air it breathes. The mystics of all faiths and creeds are at one in this belief. Even St. Paul says: “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”[87] So too we are told: “Raise the stone and there thou shalt find Me: cleave the wood and there am I.”[88]

1. A. Heard, in ‘Wordsworth’s treatment of Sound,’ remarks, that there was no reality corresponding to what Wordsworth heard with the ear of faith.[89] Rumi, while commenting on a text of the Quran in his Masnavi, viz., “Plants and trees bend in adoration,”[90] observes that all forms of being have a language of their own wherewith they sing the praises of their Maker in audible tones, which are heard and understood only by the mystic.

Sir J. C. Bose, the distinguished Indian Scientist, has now conclusively proved what was revealed to the ancient Hindu seers in their mystical visions, that life and consciousness exist everywhere in essence, and vary only in the degree and manner of their emergence and functioning. By means of delicate apparatus of extraordinary precision and accuracy, he has now shown that in their physiology both the living and the so-called non-living are identical. The plant possesses a nervous system which responds for stimuli exactly in the same manner in which the animal does. There is also a point of contract between the two, as regards conscious life. The plant not only breathes and dies, wakes and sleeps, but is subject to the feelings of pleasure and pain. There is a species of palm, called the ‘praying palm of Faridpur’, which bows down its head in prayer when the bells of a neighbouring church sounds the evening Angelus. As Bose says, “The plant is very human in its virtues and weaknesses. Plants like animals become exalted, grow tired or despond. An easy green house life makes them less than themselves, overgrown and flabby, incapable of response till they have become hardened by adversity to a fuller existence. A time comes when after an answer to a supreme shock, there is a sudden end to the plant’s power to give any further response. This supreme shock is the shock of death. Even in this crisis there is no immediate change in the placid appearance of the plant. Drooping and withering are events that occur long after death itself. How does the plant then give its last answer? In man, at the critical moment a spasm passes through the whole body, and similarly in the plant I find a great contractile spasm takes place. This is accompanied by an electrical spasm also.”[91]

Thus, what was but a poet’s vision has now become an actual scientific fact. That Wordsworth believed that plants like animals suffer the pangs of death, is proved from the fact that he recalls with a sense of pain how a thoughtless injury inflicted by him on a hazel tree brought its death.[92]

John Veitch complains that Wordsworth has not given us any theory of “the how of the connecting between the infinite and the finite” in Creation.[93] In the first place, as I have previously said, the solution of such a problem is outside the realm of philosophy.[94] In the second place, as a poet, Wordsworth was not concerned with setting up theories. Nevertheless, if we examine his poems, we find that he has not altogether omitted this point. The whole universe, according to him, develops in, through, and by means of the interaction between the finite and the infinite, the ‘Active principle’ and Nature, or Purusha and Prakriti, as the Hindu mystics say. “Whatever being manifests itself, the unmoving and the moving is due to the union of the active and the passive principle, the infinite and the finite.”[95] It is the creative joy that gives birth to the universe, which is not only separate from God, but also united with Him. Nature is a means for the manifestation of the Supreme Spirit, or as Tagore has it, “God finds Himself by creating”.[96]

(4) Evolution:

The world is the process of booming infinite. Human consciousness, animal life and inanimate objects are the different grades of the same Creative energy, stages of the same development. There is no impassable gulf dividing the one from the other. Hence, the least of things seemed to Wordsworth infinite.[97] Not merely because, as John Dowden, the late Bishop of Edinburgh, says, he recognised the divine power and presence in things great and small.[98] But mainly because, to him as to every other mystic, the struggle of the finite to reach the infinite was the all-important fact. He regarded Nature as something maturing, a becomingness. Every atom, under the constraining influence of eternal laws, passes through infinite Nature to infinite Being, thus regaining its pristine level.

“’Tis nature’s law

That none, the meanest of created things,

Of forms created the most vile and brute,

The dullest or most noxious should exist

Divorced from good – a spirit and pulse of good,

A life and soul to every mode of being

Inseparably link’d.”[99]

To Wordsworth, the process of evolution is typified by the silk-worm, “the little insect-artist,” who weaves its cocoon, “its silken tomb,” because it is intent on higher life. Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary’ loves all birds and beasts, even the reptiles, because man is bound by a long chain of evolution “descending to the worm in charity.”[100] It is for this reason that the Hindu mystic regards non-violence as a categorical imperative.[101]

“Kill not – for pity’s sake and lest thou slay

The meanest thing upon its upward way.”[102]

(5) Man:

In the process of evolution, man is on a higher rung of the ladder than the rest of Creation. Hence, he is “Earth’s paramount creatures.”[103] The end and object of his existence is assimilation to God, the fullest possible realisation in this life, of his divine nature.

“Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

Like harmony in music:”[104]

But how is he to achieve this? Wordsworth and the Bhagvad-gita join hands with each other in their answer to this question. The latter says that life, whether the worldly life or the inner life of the soul, is motion, action. Man must, therefore, do something “to help the rolling wheels of this great world,”[105] or stand still and let them roll over him. But action must go on.

“Therefore, arise, thou Son of Kunti![106] Brace

Thine arm for conflict, never thy heart to meet –

As things alike to thee – pleasure or pain,

Profit or ruin, victory or defeat;

So minded a gird them to the fight, for so

Thou shalt not sin!”[107]

If man shrinks from or declines to perform his allotted duty in life, he will earn disgrace and death. Beside, man can never be actionless by shunning action. The Gita throughout is a rebuke to all faint hearts who shrink from the world and its responsibilities. It is a challenge to all cowards and ascetics to face the whole of life, pursue it through to the end, and find all there is in it.

But action in the world, says the Gita, is not all. Man has also to live an inner life. He is in the world; but he should not be of it. While performing his daily task, he should cultivate his soul and keep himself unspotted from the world. But how is he to do this? Firstly, by purifying his passions; secondly, by doing disinterested actions: and thirdly, by communing with the Supreme Spirit either through the agency of Nature or through the service work, though He is self-contained and desireless. He acts for the sake of humanity, and has always something to accomplish.[108] Thomas Aqunias is in agreement with this view. Following the Aristotelian definition of God as sheer energy, he says that God is Pure action.[109] And similarly Philo held that God does not cease from action at any moment.[110]

Now, what does Wordsworth say? According to him the voice of duty is the voice of God echoing in the human heart. Duty and mathematics stand in close relation to each other. Both stand for right action and right thinking, truth, and disinterestedness; and both assert themselves with inevitable necessity.

“But, by the storm of circumstances unshaken,

And subject neither to eclipse nor wane,

Duty exists; –immutably survive,

For our support, the measures and the forms,

Which an abstract intelligence supplies,

Whose Kingdom is, where time and space are not.[111]

But we must not be content, says Wordsworth, with  mere duty as the ultimate and highest goal. It should serve as a means to make us feel our true relations to the world and to each other in order to realise our inmost selves.

“Denial and restraint I prize

No further than they breed a second Will more wise.”[112]

When we are wedded to the universe in disinterested “I Love and holy passion,” we may feel the presence of Beauty as a living presence everywhere.

It is in the province of all to attain to this exalted state, says Wordsworth. By right action, we can achieve ‘wise passiveness just as the muscles can be developed by a concentrated attention given to the slowest natural movements. Rest is not on earth. It is all action whether we will it or not. Why not therefore do it well?

“The eye it cannot choose but see,

We cannot bid the ear be still,

Our bodies feel where’er they be

Against or with our will,

Nor less I deem that there are Powers

Which of themselves our minds impress.

That we can feed this mind of ours

In a wise passiveness.”[113]

It is the prevailing notion in the minds of Wordsworth critics that this passage means that if only the eye and the ear open, and the mind free from pre-occupation and disquieting influences, Nature will do the rest: we have but to be passive.[114] In the light of what I have said, the passage should rather mean that neither God nor man can ever cease for a moment from action. The hand may be at rest, but the desires may be busy. His whole teaching shows that what matters is not the kind of work, but the spirit in which it is done. Man must perform right action only. The inner life of the soul is quite compatible with active life in the world. According to the Gita, right action alone is ‘wise passiveness.”[115] So too Wordsworth believes that the essential elements of God-realisation are not precluded by work, and the wayfarer are daily living this double life. They do their allotted work and at the same time live in communion with Nature. In this sense, Wordsworth regards them as undeveloped and unconscious poets.

(6) Pre-existence and Immortality:

Christianity and other religions derived from Semitics sources know but two lives for man, one on earth, and one to come. Not so Wordsworth. With the rest of the mystics, he believes in the gradual evolution of man carried through many lives. He speaks of “Life continuous, Being unimpaired.”[116] If man is to achieve his gola, if he is to rise from the finite to the infinite, and become “a pillar in the temple of God,”[117] one brief span of three score years and ten is by no means enough. For a finite being to achieve this, as Kant urges, even infinite time is not enough. And Bernard Shaw has recently emphasised this point in his “Back to Methuselah”.

Science has shown that even the human body is the result of a series of evolutions through countless years. It is a law of nature that the finer an organism, the more time is required for its evolution. The human soul which is the finest thing on earth, far from requiring just nine months for its formation, must demand a much longer period that the human body. The analogy of physical evolution points to a parallel process of spiritual evolution, –the gradual development of the soul by experience gathered in each life, and its re-birth in fresh lives, the extent of its development determining the position it occupies in each life.

In the ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality,’ Wordsworth clearly indicates that not only shall we live on after death, but what we have already lived before our birth “but a sleep and a forgetting.” But this is precisely the ever recurring objection against the doctrine. The Hindu mystic, however, argues that the phenomena of sleep and re-awaking, on the contrary, supply a proof of the doctrine. In relation to this problem they have a double bearing, viz. (1) they prove the continuance of individual consciousness even without the instrumentality of the body, and (2) they show the necessity of the body for the remanifestation of consciousness after its temporary suspense in death. In profound sleep, our individuality suffers a partial suspense, but there is no loss of its contents. On waking, every individual gets back what was his own. This fact proves that the contents of our conscious, individual life, can exist in the divine consciousness even in the absence of the body and its organs. It is neither the body, nor the brain, nor the nervous system which can be said to hold the contents of consciousness during sleep. They can subsist only in a conscious being. To say that they exist in an unconscious from, in a so-called ‘sub-conscious’ region, is a contradiction in terms. Thoughts can persist only in a thinking being, remaining conscious and self-identical in the midst of change. During the temporary lapse of consciousness in sleep all ideas are retained in the ‘Atman,’ who is the very foundation of life and consciousness. “unless there exists one relating principle in the past, present and future, one which is unchangeable and sees all things, the facts of remembrance, recognition etc., which depend upon mental impressions requiring time, space and causality, cannot be explained.[118]

But if the phenomena of sleep and awaking prove the continuance of individual consciousness in the ‘Atman’, and it independence of physical conditions for continuance, they also prove the dependence of individual life on such conditions for its actual manifestation. Sleep indicates the temporary exhaustion of nervous power. It is only when it is restored by sufficient rest, that the identity and continuity of individual consciousness are re-established. A valid induction from this is, that the re-appearance of individual consciousness after the dissolution of the present body, requires a fresh organism with essentially the same properties. Considered in the light of these facts, says the Hindu mystic, sleep and re-awaking prove the doctrine of rebirth.

That we have no recollection of any previous states of existence, does not prove that they never were. Indeed, the few years during which we forget about our past lives in proportion to the brief span of our present life, are a much shorter period than the hours of profound sleep in proportion to the total duration of our present life. Moreover, given the necessary conditions, we can recall our past lives. It is a common belief of the Hindus that children up to five years of age possess faint recollections of their past lives. Also persons characterised by purity and holiness are said to recollect their previous states of existence.

So far the Hindu theory and belief. Wordsworth is in agreement on all essentials. He too says that we bring with us faint recollections of a previous life that was radiant with divine splendour, but these grow dimmer year by year, as the things of this world more and more claim our attention. But when the ‘cloud of infancy’ is on us i.e., when we are either actually little children or have voluntarily come back to the simple state of childhood, we can transcend the limitations of time and catch a glimpse of the past. And in spite of the “world being too much with us,” we receive occasional intimations of the glory that belonged to us, as divine sparks, in our prenatal state, or as Rumi has it, when we “reveled in purity in the divine bosom.[119] In one of his odes, Hafiz also says the same thing:

“My soul is a sacred bird, and the divine bosom is its nest;

It has grown sick of this corporeal frame.

Now and again it hears the whistle of its divine master

Luring it back to its exalted home.”

The following statement by a modern Mahomedan mystic attempts to explain the phenomenon of forgetfulness which accompanies birth:

“Seventy thousand veils separate Allah, the One Reality, from the world of matter and of sense. And every soul passes before his birth through these seventy thousand veils. The inner half of these are veils of light: the outer half, veils of darkness. For every one of the dark veils, it puts on, an earthly quality. Thus the child is born weeping, for the soul knows its separation from Allah, the one Reality. And when the child cries in its sleep, it is because the soul remembers something of what it has lost. Otherwise, the passage through the veils has brought with it forgetfulness.[120]

Garrod says that although the ultimate source of the doctrine of pre-existence is Plato and the Neo-Platonists, Wordsworth received it at second hand from Coleridge.[121] And Hudson makes a categorical statement that Wordsworth did not at all believe in this doctrine, but he thought himself authorized “to make the best use of it he could as a poet.”[122] It is not doubt true that Wordsworth in a prose-note to the ‘Ode’, written in his later years, recanted the doctrine, but so likewise he backslided to formal faith. This was all due as I have said above, to the withdrawal from him of that higher consciousness in which alone his mystical system had its origin. When the ‘Ode’ was written, he was in the high tide of mystical experience, and naturally reached the highest levels of inspiration and truth. At that period, “Faith in life endless” was his sole sustaining thought.[123] It was but the inevitable corollary to his faith in infinite progress. Nor lest it be forgotten that since the days of Plato, an evergrowing number of Western minds is becoming convinced, on philosophical grounds, of the truth of this doctrine.[124] And many of the early Fathers of the Church subscribed to this belief. Origin himself was of the opinion that it was “more in conformity with reason to believe that every soul is introduced into a body according to its deserts and former actions.[125]

(7) Religion:

With Wordsworth, religion is essentially the realisation by man within himself of the Infinite. It is easy, says he, to despise the earth, but by doing so we cannot converse with heaven.[126] We should rather regard the earth as crammed with heaven. Even the commonest object on earth can be made a revealing agency, an opening gate to heaven. The whole universe is surcharged and penetrated by the Eternal Mind, and so it responds to the call of the human mind.

“How exquisitely the individual mind

……. To the external world

Is fitted, and how exquisitely too

The external world is fitted to the mind.”[127]

There is not a particle which is not divine, if we approach it in the right way. Anything can be made the channel of divine grace and communion. The tranquillising influence of Nature should be constantly invoked throughout life to keep alive the religious sense. Nature, says Wordsworth, gives of her wealth freely to those who seek her for her own sake; who commune with her in a ‘blessed mood,’ with a heart that watches and receives. She cannot be compelled to yield her secrets. She scorns “to be examined, pondered, searched, probed, vexed and criticised.”[128] He along shall find who seeks not; “and to him who hath not asked, large measures shall be dealt.”[129] If we can do this, then

“One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good

Than all the sages can.”[130]

Sa’adi, the Persian mystic poet sings exactly in the same key. “To the discerning eye, the foliage of the grove displays in every leaf, a volume of God’s wisdom.”[131]

Again,

“The meanest floweret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale,

The common soul, the air, and skies,

To him are opening paradise.”[132]

Shabistari, in his ‘Mystic Rose Garden,’ (Gulshan-i-Raz) says “In the valley of peace, the very bush will murmur to you, “I am Allah!” and Rumi, in his characteristic manner, gives expression to the same idea:

“I see Nature filled with bounties:

Limpid waters ever welling up from fresh fountains;

The music of those waters reaches my ears,

My brain and senses are intoxicated therewith.

Branches of trees dance like fair damsels,

And leaves clap their hands like minstrels.”[133]

In a word, the influence of Nature is enough to build up our religious sense. To see things truly, says Wordsworth, is to see them beautifully; and he who does this, will be spontaneously and “securely virtuous.”[134]

The religion of Nature is the oldest and most enduring of all religions. It was the religion of man in the infancy of society.[135] But as time went on, the intuitional religion of nature dwindled into the intuitional religion of authority, and the Church arrogated its powers “o’er heaven’s eternal door,”[136] with the result that apathy set in. It were better, says Wordsworth, to return to the superstitious days of pagan Greece, when men were more susceptible to the mysterious influences of Nature, and felt most deeply the presence of higher immutable powers behind its gorgeous Protean phenomena.[137]

(8) Evil:

According to Wordsworth, egotism is the root-cause of all evil. Our selfish desires are fetters, and our possessions are our limitations. “The world is too much with us.” Its delusive glamour has made us blind to our ultimate destiny. In our selfishness, we think that finite objects can satisfy the craving for the infinite within. The scramble for the nice things of the world may go on incessantly, with which the soul can never be satisfied by mere material success. Peace and quiet, inward happiness and joy will be still as distant as ever. “No man can be satisfied by riches alone,” says the Katha Upanishad. The larger the outer acquisition, the greater the inner discontentment. It is like feeling thirsty in the midst of water, as Rumi has it.[138] Or, as the Hindu mystic says we are always running as the deer runs for the mirage-water in the desert, and always do we find that water turning into sand at near approach.[139] The world is to be regarded, in the words of Al-Ghazzali, but as a wayside inn in which we, as pilgrims to Eternity, have to pass by on the road.[140] So long as we are lodged in it, we have to care for and nourish both the body and the soul. The flesh is not to be pampered at the expense of the spirit. We are liable to lust after all those external and temporal things which, when attained, profit a man nothing, if in the long run he loses his own soul. So far, therefore, as material things are a necessity of life, they are to be possessed, but if they drain away our vital sources, they are an encumbrance and a curse. A wise man, says the Buddha, is healthily balanced, his forces are equally blended.[141] It is only thus that evil will have no existence for us. In the words of Mathhew Arnold, we must “possess our souls before we die,” if we want to be free from evil and suffering.

However, says Wordsworth, sin and evil play a needful part in man’s evolution. There is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles all discordant elements.[142] The whole universe is pervaded by a God of love and mercy, who is also a God of justice. His love expresses itself by means of seemingly stern laws, which reprove the erring humanity and all it back to a sense of righteousness.

(9) Universal Love:

According to Wordsworth, love is the divine essence of the universe. It lurks in all her elements. Fountains, meadows, hill, and groves –all feel its quickening touch.

“Far and wide the clouds were touched,

And in their silent faces did he read

Unutterable love.”[143]

It is through this ‘spiritual Love’ that Nature acts on man, and frees his soul from earthly chains. For this reason Wordsworth, like Blake, was out of sympathy with morality, as it is commonly understood. Love to him was the purest and best of earth-born passions, on whose wings man may soar to heaven.

Nature, like a fond mother, not only turns on all beings the sweetest of her smiles, but shows an overwhelming sense of tenderness and pity for even the humblest of earth’s creatures. In ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, Scott indulges in what is called the pathetic fallacy that when “the Poet dies, Mute Nature mourns her worshipper.” But Wordsworth’s idea of love penetrates still deeper. He considers contempt and hatred for any living thing to be unlawful, and holds it truth with Blake that Nature mourns the death of “the meanest thing that feels” and warns us against “bending our pleasure or our pride with sorrow” to it.

“This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell;

His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

The Being, that is in the clouds and air,

That is in the green leaves among the groves,

Maintains a deep and reverential care

For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.”[144]

Wordsworth’s Position as a Mystic:

Wordsworth was not a born mystic like Blake. The latter, renouncing his self-consciousness at will, could penetrate into the inmost recesses of the adytum, and contemplate the divinity in all its pomp, glory and magnificence. With Wordsworth, communion with Reality, as he himself has told us in ‘The Prelude’ and ‘The Excursion’, is often a touch, a feeling a sentiment, an emotion. Occasionally it develops into an illuminating trance, in which his soul is caught up, rapt into immediate apprehension of a world in which God is all, and all is God. It is only once that he attains to ecstasy, and feels his oneness with God, and Nature. it is however, to be remembered that ecstasy which is the summit of the Mystic Way is not an easy thing to acquire. It came to even great mystics rarely. It is said that Plotinus enjoyed this experience only four times during his life, and Prophyry had it but once.[145]

Now the question naturally arises why Wordsworth was unable to maintain his stand on the peak of mystical consciousness. There are three reasons for this, so far as I can see. In the first place, Wordsworth was too much of a matter-of-fact Englishman of the North Country to shake off completely the ‘burthen of his unnatural self,’ for a sufficient length of time. So essential to the emergence of that new kind of life, in which the subject and the object being fused into an undifferentiated one, none but God contemplates the beauty of God. He always maintained a balance between unflinching grasp on the fundamental fact of individual Being, and overpowering sense of the presence of ‘some other being’. In the second place, he approached Reality through Nature. He did not look for it within the ‘unfathomed caverns’ of his own being, as did Blake. In Nature, as I have said elsewhere,[146] the divine light is diffuse and obscure, for which reason the full vision of Reality is rarely attainable through it. In the third place, Wordsworth, unlike Blake, was dependent on environment for his mystical experience; and during such season he was unduly absorbed in the beauty of outward forms. The state of ecstasy cannot be attained, unless there ensues a complete withdrawal of consciousness from outward acts as well as from inward states. But, as I have shown above, on the authority of Wordsworth himself, he often could not help distinguishing external forms and mental processes. Hence, as a rule, he could attain only to what the Hindu mystics call ‘dhyana’, but seldom to ‘samadhi’ or ecstasy, in which both the body and the mind become dead to all external impressions.

In short, Wordsworth may be likened to the lover in Rumi’s Masnavi who was once admitted to the presence of his mistress. But, instead of embracing her, he pulled out a roll of sonnets and read them to her, describing her perfections and charms, and his own love towards her. His mistress said to him: “You are now in my presence, and these sighs and cries are a sheer waste of time. It shows that I am not the real object of your affections, but what you really love is your own effusions and raptures. One who is really loved is the sole object of her lover, the Alpha and Omega of his desires, depending on the varying state of your own feelings, instead of being wrapped up in me.>

Emerson characterised this trait of Wordsworth’s character as “mental materialism”, and De Quincey cynically connected it with his sense of worldly good fortune. And it was this which evoked the sneering remark of Shelley that Wordsworth was

“a kind of moral eunuch,

He touched the hem of Nature’s shift,

Felt faint – and never dared uplift

The closest, all concealing tunic.”[147]

It is difficult to label and classify mystics. However, if we adopt the classification given in Chapter I, we may rank Wordsworth among intuitional mystics. Although, as I have said, he realised that man was to be loved as belonging to the great whole of Nature, he gave in his life few practical instances of this.

This sympathies were rather for men that with men.[148] It is said that when he lived among the peasantry of Westmoreland, he seldom mixed with it.[149] His chief interest in man was contemplative. He wanted to read the riddle of the universe by making both Nature and man the media of knowledge. Hence the fascination of the life of the people for him, hence his attempt to read the thoughts and experiences of “meek men, unpractised in the strife of phrase,”[150] hence his desire to look into the eyes of the tramp or wayfarer. And although he preaches the gospel of right action, ofr his own part, he preferred the quiet life of contemplation. “My whole life I have lived in quiet thought, “said he.[151]

Conclusion:

To sum up, communion with Nature constitutes the cornerstone of Wordsworth’s mystical system. He does not regard Nature as a huge machine with God standing outside of it, but as an organism aglow with life and motion. To him, nature is not merely the healer of all our maladies, the bestower of “the highest bliss that flesh can know”; it is the simplifiers of the enigma of existence, the divine messenger of momentous news “that we are greater than we know.”

But we must approach Nature not through intellectual elaboration, not in a spirit of idle curiosity, not in an attitude of admiring observation, but in a spirit of rapt adoration, with every faculty convergent on the point of attention, with an intense and rare simplicity of outlook, “with Indian awe and wonder.”

Wordsworth teaches us not only how to live a happy life on earth, but how to fit ourselves for a higher and holier life in Heaven. He is an ‘Ethereal Minstrel,’ even like his own skylark, whose humble nest, to use the words of Abraham Cowley, was built on the ground, but whose music roared above the clouds, pouring in its flight, a flood of harmony and joy upon the world beneath.

“Type of the wise who soar, but never roam,

True to kindred points of Heaven and Home.”[152]

 

[1] The Prelude, Book I.  586.

[2] Memories of W. Wordsworth by Christopher Wordsworth.

[3] Hamlet. III. 2

[4] Yoga-Vasishtha.

[5] Psalms. 46. 10.

[6] See Chapter I.

[7] Studies in Poetry and Philosophy by J. C. Shairp.

[8] Immortality. 151.

[9] The Prelude, I. 392.

[10] The Prelude Book II. 328.

[11] Ibid.

[12] The Prelude, Book III. 130-132.

[13] Patronymic of Arjuna.

[14] Patronymic of Arjuna,

[15] Chapter XI. Eng. tr. by Sir Edwin Arnold in ‘The song Celestial.’

[16] The Prelude, Book III. 245

[17] Ibin. III. 157.

[18] Masnavi.

[19] Gulshan-e-Raz.

[20] See Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras.

[21] Enneads. Eng. tr. by McKenna.

[22] The Prelude, Book IV. 279080

[23] See Chapter I.

[24] Philosophical Essays.

[25] The prelude

[26] See Yoga-Sutras.

[27] Masnavi.

[28] Lines written above Tintern Abbye.

[29] Masnavi.

[30] See ‘Memoirs of Persian Poets’ by Dawlatshah: Persian Text edited by E. G. Browne.

[31] See The Prelude, Book XI and XII.

[32] See Chapter I.

[33] Quran, XCIII.

[34] Gulistan, Book III.

[35] Masnavi; also see Chapter I.

[36] The Excursion, I. 79.

[37] Preface to ‘Poems of Wordsworth”, Golden Treasury Series.

[38] The Prelude, Book II. 264-65.

[39] Masnavi.

[40] See Chapter I.

[41] See Tadhkirat-‘l-Awliya by Farid-‘d-din Attar: Persian Text edited by R. A. Nicholson.

[42] See ‘Examination of the Charge of Apostasy against Wordsworth.

[43] See ‘Evening Voluntaries.’

[44] See his letter to Allsop in ‘Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge,’ Vol. 1.

[45] The Christian mystics by W. P. Swainson.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Star-Gazers.

[48] A Poet’s Epitaph.

[49] The Prelude, Book III, 62-63.

[50] See ‘Wordsworth’s Relations to Science.’

[51] Gitanjali

[52] e.g. See ‘The Prelude’ by E.De Delincourt.

[53] See Tadhkirat-ush-Shu’ara by Dawlatshah: Persian text, edited by E. G. Browne.

[54] Confessions: Eng. tr. by Claud Field.

[55] Hours with the Mystics by R. A. Vaughan.

[56] See Ode on Intimations of Immortality.

[57] The Excursion. Book IV. 83-93.

[58] Masnavi.

[59] This point has been fully discussed in Chapter I and II.

[60] The Prelude, Book I. 268-269.

[61] Preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads.’

[62] See. e.g. ‘Wordsworth: Lectures and essays’ by H. W. Garrod, ‘Wordsworth’ by Sir Walter Raleigh, and ‘The Early Life of William Wordsworth’ by M. Legouis.

[63] Confessions of Al-Ghazzali, Eng. tr. by Claud Field.

[64] Rumi: Masnavi.

[65] The Prelude. Book I. 19.

[66] Expostulations and Reply.

[67] The Prelude. Book I. 323.

[68] The Excursion, Book IV. 1141 et. seq.

[69] Ibid. IX. 3.

[70] Rig-veda, I. 24, 8; IV. 23, 9.

[71] See the Ode to Duty. Cf. Herakleitons: “All human laws are fed by one, the divine. For it prevaileth as far as it listeth, and sufficeth for all, and surviveth all.” (Fragments, XCI, Eng. tr. by Bywater). The Chinese sage, Loa Tsu also recognized a cosmic order or what he called ‘Tao’, which served as the foundation for his religion, ethics and philosophy.

[72] Rig-Veda, I. 4. 164.

[73] The Prelude, Book VI. 636.

[74] Carlyle.

[75] The Prelude, Book VI. 133.

[76] Ibid, Book II. 402.

[77] Lines written above Tintern Abbey.

[78] The Excursion, Book IX. 13-15.

[79] Svetasvatra Up. II. 17.

[80] The Prelude, Book II. 350-52.

[81] ‘Is there a Poetic View of the World?” by C. H. Herford.

[82] Masnavi.

[83] Preface to “The Excursion”.

[84] Pharsalia, Book IX.

[85] Rig-Veda, X. 90. 3.

[86] Chapter XIII. Eng. tr. by Sir Edwin Arnold.

[87] Ephesians. e. 5.

[88] Logia Jesu.

[89] See Wordsworthiana.

[90] Quran, LV. 5.

[91] Sir J. C. Bose: Address to the University of Bombay, on 31^st January 1918.

[92] See ‘Nutting’.

[93] See ‘Theism of Wordsworth.’

[94] See Chapter I.

[95] Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter XIII.

[96] Stray Birds.

[97] The Excursion, Book I.

[98] ‘The Beauty of Nature: A revelation of God,’ by Bishop John Dowden.

[99] Cumberland Beggar.

[100] Humanity.

[101] See Chapter I.

[102] Light of Asia, Book VIII, by Sir Edwin Arnold.

[103] The Prelude, Book V. 5.

[104] The Prelude, Book I. 340-41.

[105] Bhagvad-gita, Chapter II.

[106] Matronymic of Prince Arjuna.

[107] Chapter II. Eng. tr. by Sir Edwin Arnold.

[108] Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter II.

[109] Summa Theologiae.

[110] Works. Eng. tr. by G. D. Yonge

[111] The Excursion, Book iV. 71-76.

[112] Ode to Duty.

[113] Expostulations and Reply.

[114] See, for instance, Life of Wordsworth by Sir Walter Raliegh.

[115] Chapter III, 3; 42; VI, 33, 46.

[116] The Excursion, Book IV. 755.

[117] Revelation, III. 12.

[118] Sharirak-Bhashyam by Shankaracharya.

[119] See Chapter I.

[120] “The Way” of a Mohamedan Mystic, by W. H. T. Gairdner.

[121] Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays by H. W. Garrod.

[122] Studies in Wordsworth by Henry N. Hudson.

[123] The Prelude, Book IXV. 204.

[124] See, e.g. Re-incarnation by E. D. Walker.

[125] Con Celsum. 1. 32.

[126] The Excursion, Book IV. 131 et. seq.

[127] Preface to “The Excursion”.

[128] The Excursion, Book IV. 977-78.

[129] Ibid. 467-68.

[130] The Tables Turned.

[131] Gulistan.

[132] Gulistan.

[133] Masnavi.

[134] Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont.

[135] The Excursion, Book IV.

[136] Ecclesiastical Sonnets. I. 36. 3.

[137] Miscellaneous Sonnets: ‘The World is too much.’

[138] Masnavi.

[139] Yoga-Vasishtha.

[140] Kimia-e-Sa’adat.

[141] Dhammapada.

[142] The Prelude, Book I. 343.

[143] The Excursion, Book I. 203-205.

[144] Hart Leap Well, Part II.

[145] Hours with the Mystics: by R. A. Vaughan.

[146] See Chapters I and II.

[147] Peter Bell the Third, IV. XI.

[148] See ‘Remarks on the Personal Character of Wordsworth’s Poetry’ by Aubrey De Vere in “Wordsworthiana.”

[149] Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the Peasantry of Westmoreland by H. D. Rawnsley in Wordsworthiana.

[150] The Prelude, XIII. 268.

[151] Memoirs by Christopher Wordsworth.

[152] To a Skylark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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