Creative Unity | Page 5

No doubt it is
so, but only because its ambition is not to shackle the Infinite and tame
it for domestic use; but rather to help our consciousness to emancipate
itself from materialism. It is as indefinite as the morning, and yet as
luminous; it calls our thoughts, feelings, and actions into freedom, and
feeds them with light. In the poet's religion we find no doctrine or
injunction, but rather the attitude of our entire 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