Tag Archives: Matthew Arnold

Emily Dickinson was an Observer of Life, a “Prophet” of Sorts

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One of my favorite quips from Emily Dickinson is, “Life is over there.  On a shelf.”  Part of what makes this thought so captivating for me is that I still have buried in my heart a “literal” lew mind/heart which, when reading an observation like that wants to exclaim, “Why hell!  That’s nuts!  Life is not ‘over there’ and certainly not on a damn shelf.”  That reflects the concrete-thinking that I spent the first two or maybe three decades of my life firmly ensconced in.  But now I completely understand what Dickinson was noting and simultaneously revealing about herself.  She was an “observer” of life; she paid attention to a life in which those around her were immersed to the point being oblivious of a “hidden” dimension that she captured with her poetry. Emily was alienated or detached, allowing her to grasp the human soul and put into words its machinations, those delightful as well as beastly.  There is sense in which poets might be described as prophetic, not in the sense of being able to foretell the future but being aware of the implications of the present.  She was aware, acutely aware.  She saw that bookshelf in her room and in her heart conjoined that image with a feeling of separateness and loneliness in life.

This division of the soul is problematic without looking beneath the surface.  Such a “division” makes one think of “schizo” as in schizophrenic.  The difference is that a schizophrenic is definitely “divided” but is lacking that substrate of the soul which provides an underlying unity.  Dickinson certainly felt the anxiety and despair that she conveys in her poetry.  Who would not if they were more or less “cloistered” in their father’s attic for the whole of their life.  But she found beneath the surface that “substrate” which anchored her and allowed her to offer the profound wisdom that blokes like myself can take comfort in.  (Btw, I could easily spell substrate with a capital “S.”)

I close with a relevant bit of poetry from Matthew Arnold:

I’d like to close with a relevant quote from another 19th century, Matthew Arnold:

The poet, to whose mighty heart

Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart

Subdues that energy to scan

Not his own heart, but that of man.

 

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Shakespeare has taught me so much and his teaching continues to delve more deeply into my heart as I gain more maturity and with that the ability to swim in the depths of metaphor. Shakespeare did not live in this world; he lived “on high” up in the aether as I often claim to myself. That is to say, he lived in his head. With that aloofness, that cerebral detachment, he could take the liberty of “mis-using” words to convey wisdom but “mis-use” them in such a deft and artistic manner that he could reveal to us so much about the depths of our heart. Just one simple example is in a lovely line from Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy when Hamlet noted that the intense passion and desire of his heart was often “sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought.” First of all, “sick” is not a verb and second how can words make anything sick even if you morph the word into “sicklie.” But by putting it this way he vividly described how one who is given too much to thinking…whose heart is beset with an over wrought inner critic…can find himself stymied by the thinking process itself.

Shakespeare knew that thought and feeling must work in tandem. If either is in too much control, there is a problem. Feeling run amok is lunacy but also thought…or reason…run amok is lunacy, the latter point noted so eloquently by Goethe when he noted in Faust, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” Just look at our contemporary linear culture and its egregious object lesson in the U. S. House of Representatives.

The Bard, like me, knew about “waging the war we are” as described in the 20th century by W. H. Auden. He was conflicted by myriad voices in his heart but wonderfully integrated by what I would describe as “the Spirit of God” so that he could harness the unleashed energy and convey to generations hence stunning revelations about our heart’s internal machinations. Matthew Arnold noted that the poet has great familiarity with “unleashed energy”, alleging that “the poet, in whose mighty heart heaven hath a quicker pulse imparted, subdues that energy to scan, not his own heart, but that of man.” Shakespeare did that. In terms of linguistics, he harnessed the energy of the “floating signifier” so artfully that many…but not all…can understand.

However, there is a price to pay for this aloof detachment, this cerebral, dispassionate view of the world and even of one’s own self—alienation and the feeling of loneliness…existential loneliness or solitude. But just this past week I discovered through a friend the writing of a contemporary spiritual teacher, Mary Margret Moore, who noted that discovering and embracing one’s solitude was one of the steps one must take in spiritual development. It is closely akin to St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul” or Dante’s going into “the dark forest”: or as Dante put it, “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

There one finds he/she is all alone and must explore who and what one really is which always entails a rendezvous with the boundaries of existence itself, an emotional/spiritual experience which in my culture is often described as “God” or by some as “the Ineffable.”

Our Debt to the Poets

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The poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,

Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man.

Matthew Arnold here describes what I love about poets. They have such tremendous insight, not only about their own heart, but about the human condition. For if you understand one human heart, you pretty well have a grasp over the rest of them. Yes, a poet’s heart bears the burden of a “quicker pulse” and he/she uses words to subdue that energy and translate it into meaningful, verbal form. Most of us lost that “quicker pulse” early in our life as our heart became organized into the “right” way of perceiving and understanding the world. We must depend on the poets…and other artists…to teach us about other ways of looking at the world.