The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 4 | Page 3

Bliss Carman
Spirit. In all this the poets have given
us the strongest help. The great poet cannot be oblivious of these
deepest themes. He need not be a dogmatician, indeed he cannot be, for
his business is insight, not ratiocination; but the problems which
theology is trying to solve must always be before his mind, and he must
have something to say about them, if he hopes to command the
attention of thoughtful men. Yet while we need not depreciate the
service that has been rendered by preachers and professional
theologians who have sought to put the facts of the religious life into
the forms of the new philosophy, we must own our deeper obligation to
the poets, by whose vision the spiritual realities have been most clearly
discerned.
It was Wordsworth, perhaps, who gave us the first great contribution to
the new religious thought by bringing home to us the fact that God is in
his world; revealing himself now as clearly as in any of the past ages.
The truth of the Divine immanence, which is the foundation of all the
more positive religious thinking of to-day, and which is destined, when
once its import has been fully grasped, to revolutionize our religious
life, is made familiar to our thought in Wordsworth's poetry. To him it
was simply an experience; in quite another sense than that in which it
was true of Spinoza, it might have been said of him that he was a
"God-intoxicated man"; and although his clear English sense permitted
no pantheistic merging of the human in the divine, but kept the
individual consciousness clear for choice and duty, the realization of
the presence of God made nature in his thought supernatural, and life
sublime. To him, as Dr. Strong has said, it was plain that "imagination
in man enables him to enter into the thought of God--the creative
element in us is the medium through which we perceive the meaning of
the Creator in his creation. The world without answers to the world
within, because God is the soul of both."

"Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence
the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs,--the consciousness

Of whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image and
through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised

From earth to heaven, from human to divine."
The mystical faith by which man is united to God can have no clearer
confession. And in the great poem of "Tintern Abbey" this truth
received an expression which has become classical;--it must be counted
one of the greatest words of that continuing revelation by which the
truths of religion are given permanent form:
"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of
thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of
humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To
chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with
the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far
more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the
mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things,
all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
We can hardly imagine that the religious experience of mankind will
ever suffer these words to drop into forgetfulness; and it would seem
that every passing generation must deepen their significance.
The same great testimony to the divine Presence in our lives is borne
by many other witnesses in memorable words. Lowell's voice is clear:
"No man can think, nor in himself perceive,
Sometimes at waking, in
the street sometimes,
Or on the hillside, always unforwarned,
A
grace of being finer than himself,
That beckons and is gone,--a larger
life
Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse
Of spacious
circles, luminous with mind,
To which the ethereal substance of his
own
Seems but gross cloud to make that visible,
Touched to a

sudden glory round the edge."
If to this central truth of religion,--the reality of the communion of the
human spirit with the divine--the poets have borne such impressive
testimony, not less positively have they asserted many other of the
great things of the spirit. Sometimes they have helped us to believe, by
identifying themselves with us in our struggles with the doubts that
loosen our hold on the great realities. No man of the last century has
done more for Christian belief than Alfred Tennyson, albeit he has been
a confessed doubter. But what he said of Arthur Hallam is quite as true
of himself:
"He fought his doubts, and gathered strength,
He would not make his
judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them;
thus he came at length,
To find a stronger faith his own,
And Power was with him in the
night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code

 / 96
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.