Creative Unity | Page 5

being towards a truth which is ever to be revealed in its own endless creation.
In dogmatic religion all questions are definitely answered, all doubts are finally laid to rest. But the poet's religion is fluid, like the atmosphere round the earth where lights and shadows play hide-and-seek, and the wind like a shepherd boy plays upon its reeds among flocks of clouds. It never undertakes to lead anybody anywhere to any solid conclusion; yet it reveals endless spheres of light, because it has no walls round itself. It acknowledges the facts of evil; it openly admits "the weariness, the fever and the fret" in the world "where men sit and hear each other groan"; yet it remembers that in spite of all there is the song of the nightingale, and "haply the Queen Moon is on her throne," and there is:
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine, Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves; And mid-day's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
But all this has not the definiteness of an answer; it has only the music that teases us out of thought as it fills our being.
Let me read a translation from an Eastern poet to show how this idea comes out in a poem in Bengali:
In the morning I awoke at the flutter of thy boat-sails, Lady of my Voyage, and I left the shore to follow the beckoning waves. I asked thee, "Does the dream-harvest ripen in the island beyond the blue?" The silence of thy smile fell on my question like the silence of sunlight on waves. The day passed on through storm and through calm, The perplexed winds changed their course, time after time, and the sea moaned. I asked thee, "Does thy sleep-tower stand somewhere beyond the dying embers of the day's funeral pyre?" No answer came from thee, only thine eyes smiled like the edge of a sunset cloud. It is night. Thy figure grows dim in the dark. Thy wind-blown hair flits on my cheek and thrills my sadness with its scent. My hands grope to touch the hem of thy robe, and I ask thee--"Is there thy garden of death beyond the stars, Lady of my Voyage, where thy silence blossoms into songs?" Thy smile shines in the heart of the hush like the star-mist of midnight.
IV
In Shelley we clearly see the growth of his religion through periods of vagueness and doubt, struggle and searching. But he did at length come to a positive utterance of his faith, though he died young. Its final expression is in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." By the title of the poem the poet evidently means a beauty that is not merely a passive quality of particular things, but a spirit that manifests itself through the apparent antagonism of the unintellectual life. This hymn rang out of his heart when he came to the end of his pilgrimage and stood face to face with the Divinity, glimpses of which had already filled his soul with restlessness. All his experiences of beauty had ever teased him with the question as to what was its truth. Somewhere he sings of a nosegay which he makes of violets, daisies, tender bluebells and--
That tall flower that wets, Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth, Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears.
He ends by saying:
And then, elate and gay, I hastened to the spot whence I had come, That I might there present it!--Oh! to whom?
This question, even though not answered, carries a significance. A creation of beauty suggests a fulfilment, which is the fulfilment of love. We have heard some poets scoff at it in bitterness and despair; but it is like a sick child beating its own mother--it is a sickness of faith, which hurts truth, but proves it by its very pain and anger. And the faith itself is this, that beauty is the self-offering of the One to the other One.
In the first part of his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Shelley dwells on the inconstancy and evanescence of the manifestation of beauty, which imparts to it an appearance of frailty and unreality:
Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled.
This, he says, rouses in our mind the question:
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom,--why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?
The poet's own answer to this question is:
Man were immortal, and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
This very elusiveness of beauty suggests the vision of immortality and of omnipotence, and stimulates the