Some reflections on spiritual poetry.

The Songs of Mystic Poets
By John Herlihy

“It is in vain to hang them, they cannot die.” (A gypsy saying)

Think of the romantic poets and Robert Burns comes to mind, whose love is “like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June”. Born of a flight of imaginative fancy, these dreamy images find their basis in sensuous facts, at a safe distance from the deep well of a latent and far more profound human experience. Sacred poetry, on the other hand, draws upon a super-sensual wealth of symbolic images that abound in nature, allowing the sun, moon and stars—and the world of nature they drench their light upon—to send messages of extraordinary beauty and depth to the sensibility of the poet who stands and waits to become the transmitter of their rich, subtle mystery. As a medium of a deeper and more revelatory communication from the Divine to the human, the verses of spiritual poetry give expression to the eternity out of which they are born. In this sense, the poets themselves become a part of the eternity they drew upon; they cannot die.

Indeed, as long as they continue to be read, mystic poets will continue to inspire people with a spiritual message that spans the generations and transcends time, opening the door of the reader’s heart to an unexpected awakening. There is a poet in every one of us by virtue of the human capacity not only to respond to the symbolic language that poetry draws upon, but to feel the sudden inrush of some experience vaster than ourselves coming as though from another world and a higher self. As the compendium and conduit of a hidden message cast within beautiful linguistic forms and echoing the natural cadences of rhythm and rhyme, the poetic words lend wings to the reader and transport them farther and higher than they could ever imagine on their own.

Spiritual poetry is houses under a celestial ceiling producing a diverse variety of soul songs, giving birth to a fearless, soaring progeny that reflects the beauty of the poet’s soul across a broad spectrum of spiritual traditions. The mysterious tone of the koto echoes an unearthly sound “from within my own breast”; our trifling human fears are “among the lilies fading”; my heart, taking any and every form, becomes “a pasture of gazelles” and a “pilgrim’s Kaaba”; we have within us the “singing flute that came from the sea”; we learn to die “in time”, while Time will die “in eternity”. Only in the ethereal realms of such mystical poetry can we become as Bedouin tent-makers in some desert clime where the body is “a tent” and the soul “a sultan from the eternal world”. The poet sings intuitively and wildly, turning the evanescence of misty clouds into flowers of the mind and heart. Why shouldn’t thoughts and impressions that are strange and beautiful and true to the poet resonate their harmonies within the soul of the reader so they too can participate in the sublime messages of nature? In compensation, perhaps nature’s peace will shine its mercy down upon them and flow into their aspiring souls as sunshine flows into trees.

Succinct and summative are the traditional symbols evoked in spiritual poetry that shake the cords of the heart and shatter the foundation of the soul, especially modernite souls of today made complacent and dull by the false promises that underpin the modern world. When a poet such as Rumi cries “We are the flute, our music is all thine; we are the mountains echoing only Thee”, we come to understand that we are not ourselves. There are elements in nature such as the wind whispering thru the pines or the echo of a distant flute that have qualities that remind us of the best of ourselves and have the power to transport us to other worlds by the very suggestion of their sounds. When we learn that “poor Yunus fills the earth and sky, and under every stone hides a Moses,” it reminds the unwary reader that we may be more than we make ourselves out to be, that there is a living presence within us that makes us what we are, that there is greatness awaiting discovery.

The images abound, unrelenting and incisive, that for sheer splendor create a diversity of forms that unite under no true difference. What is the world but “moonlight reflected in dewdrops”; who is standing there “divinely dignified” but the solitary pine tree; the desires of a human life are reflected in the sockets of “his earthly lanthorn” and all life’s glory “unto ashes must”. Rain “whispers of reality” to an unheard ear; fog arrives “like a spring dream” and departs “like the morning clouds” and there is no way for us to own these things. Nature calls upon us to remember, sweetly and insistently, and then leaves us on our own.

Mystic poems span many centuries and a diverse range of personalities like a grand, mythic bridge. The reader has access to a broad range of spiritual emotions that cut across time frames and geographic cultures, creating a timeless quality to the material that transcends the strictly human norm. Like ghostly votive lamps illuminating the history of soul searching, spiritual poems reflect the sense and sensibility of many different poets and their individual attempts to cast all the knowledge and love of the Divinity into a single metric flow that captures the essence of a feeling that is basically intuitive and often inexpressible.

Spiritual poems are songs of the heart because they attempt to express the ineffable sentiments that emerge from some secret niche within the human being somewhere between the heart and the soul. As an individual expression of the poet’s most heart-felt yearning, the poem becomes the human kingdom with the power not only to imagine, but also to feel the knowledge of God as a living presence. A poet lies secreted within every one of us by virtue of the human capacity not only to see the inner reality, but also to internalize the inner meaning of that reality through symbolic language. In addition to the actual words of the poem, we also have a piece of the paradise, come down to us in the form of heart songs of the poets and spiritual masters of a former time, revisited during these post-modern times as votive candles in the deepening dusk of the present era.

The mystic poet is a person with the power to quicken the heart because his own heart has awakened to the realm of pure feeling. He traverses whole realms of experience of which other people only dream. In cloaking depth emotions in symbolic imagery, they come one step nearer to perceiving something more than any other person who has passed the same way. They look out into the world of nature and see that between human nature and earthly nature there is one interlocking thread binding them as a single unity. In highlighting the archetypal meaning of the symbol, the poet does not give entrance into a land of hidden meaning; instead, the sacred symbols of nature and the meaning they contain enter us. They are poems written from one heart to another with no intermediaries or boundaries, creating a place where people can roam freely by virtue of their participation in the land of the poem itself, a land that knows no borders.

Images of the old master sitting, “a rock, in Zen” and the desire to witness “in huts and on journeys the great day that dawns” are specters of the eternal because they contain an eternal ethos that lives forever as truth and comes down into the realm of the earthly as a sweet remembrance of a higher order. We are “lattices” in the niche of time “through which the One Light shines.” Few men and women ever perceive these things on their own; they rely on the largeness of the poet’s mind that sees the archetypes of a grand order reflected in the symbolic images of nature and humankind. We cannot escape the world; not many people want to these days. But we can take leave of the world for a few moments through the rarefied perceptions conveyed by these seed-words of the soul, representing an outpouring from the sacred ground of one heart, followed by an in-pouring into the sacred ground of another soul, namely the mystic poet.

Within Nature, the voice of thunder peels across the firmament, the sound of the wind whispers through the pine trees, the dawn mist creeps silently through the valley, night and day chronicle the procession of time. Whenever snow falls or birds fly, whenever the river flows into the sea, whenever the seasons change or twilight descends into darkness, the poet captures these images in seed-words of beauty and light as a remembrance of an omni-present order of Reality that lifts us up and takes us away, out into the open sky, where the vision of the one Reality has freedom to roam and the sound of the eternal music can send forth its celestial harmonies until they come down to earth and find their way into human ears as an inspired poem.