CHAPTER II EXAMPLES OF VISION I EFORE we analyze these two kinds of thought, however, BE and their differences, we had better take some actual examples of them and their products-at any rate of the second, -because the practical one is constantly in use, perfectly familiar, and needs no elucidation, except as any mental process may require it. We employ the mind in this practical manner whenever we plan, work, or attend to business, and when we write in the purely prosaic or scientific way-that is, during most of our waking hours. Sometimes, however, and perhaps oftener than we think, we lapse from directed thought into a state of abstraction or meditation. The poet is apparently a man to whom such abstraction is frequent, even habitual. The poet lives, not constantly of course, but more frequently than ordinary men, in a world of his imagination; he is a seer; he has a gift of vision. What is meant by this vision we shall consider closely in the next chapter; here I shall only give some examples of it, in order that we may have before us, clearly and in the concrete, the kind of phenomena the student of poetry is called upon to explain. We may take the following as typical. Wordsworth saw, as he tells us in a note, a "multiplication of mountain ridges produced either by watery vapors or sunny haze-in the present instance by the latter cause." These he must first have observed in the ordinary prosaic way in which he thus describes them. But then he must have begun to see them in the imaginative or visionary way, transforming them, with a recollection of one of Allston's paintings, into "a kind of Jacob's ladder, leading to Heaven": Yon hazy ridges to my eyes Present a glorious scale, Climbing suffused with sunny air, To stop-no record hath told where! -Wings at my shoulders seem to play; On those bright steps that heavenward raise So Wordsworth records his vision. Such an imaginative operation may affect only a mild transformation, modifying, brightening, or coloring; or it may go all the way to complete hallucination, to a "vision" in the popular sense. The ordinary man possibly thinks of vision as a rare privilege of poets-as common in biblical times and vouchsafed to saints in the middle ages, but denied now to most of us, or at best an anomalous visitation coming once in a lifetime. He expects too much. I suppose most of us have at times shared with the poet in his visionary attitude toward objects in nature. On some evening of extraordinary splendor and beauty, or even on an ordinary one, we walk alone, become abstracted, and without looking for it, suddenly find the scene before us, fields, trees, and sky, clothed in a strange appearance, colored by a strange light, taking us back to childhood or forward to another world, we hardly know which; this strangeness hovers for a moment and then as we revert to our everyday concerns, departs, leaving an indescribable pleasure. Most of us have occasionally, with Tennyson, "followed the gleam." Such an experience is not different from the poet's vision in kind, though it may be in degree. But it is clearly different from our ordinary thought. 1"An Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty." Closely allied to the visions of the poet are the mild visions which we all experience in reverie or day dream. We give up work perhaps tired, sit by the fire, see the flames catching and the smoke rising, and so far we are thinking in the ordinary way,but presently we are gazing fixedly, and transforming the shapes and colors into whatever scenes we wish. Or we stand before the window looking out at the actual scene, and presently we are abstracted or transported; we become for the moment seers or visionaries. To illustrate we may take another familiar poem of Wordsworth-which we may regard either as describing a day dream of "Poor Susan" or as a poetic production in the mind of Wordsworth, putting himself imaginatively in her place. As often happens the illusion starts from an actual sensation-the song of the bird-lasts momentarily, and then fades. At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide, She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, The transition thus described, from practical thought to vision and back again everyone has experienced. A careful consideration of it is therefore possible for us, though we may be unable to conceive the visions of the poet. Upon such consideration I think the reader will feel that the working of the mind during the moments of vision is entirely different in character from its ordinary operation. As the words day dream and reverie suggest, it has more in common with that producing dreams in sleep than with ordinary thought.1 We may next take examples of a kind of vision less familiar but common enough from the earliest times to the present-that of religious mysticism or ecstasy. The saint, like the poet, is carried by strong feeling into a new mental state, a rapture, in which the imagination is freed. To the religious excitement is sometimes added, through fasting and vigilance, a mortification of the flesh, a sensuous deadening or fatigue, which is also conducive to the mental operation in question. Sometimes there is a kind of auto-hypnotism through fixed gazing upon an object of worship. Many such visions are recorded in the Bible. In Acts, for example, Peter goes up upon the housetop to pray, becomes hungry, falls into a trance, and sees heaven opened. In the poetical book of Revelation are recorded visions which came to John in Patmos while he was "in the spirit on the Lord's day." Examples might be taken from the lives of most well known religious leaders, St. Simeon or St. Jerome, Savonarola, Luther, or Swedenborg. Indeed this kind of vision, like the poetic, is apparently universal, appearing in ancient times, when poetic and prophetic vision were one, but also in the most modern, among Christian and non-Christian, civilized and uncivilized peoples. The following from St. Julian of Norwich, of 1373, is a mediaeval example. "My curate was sent for to be at my ending, and by that time when he came I had set my eyes, and might not speak. He set the cross before my face and said: 'I have brought thee the image of thy Maker and Savior: look thereupon and comfort thee therewith.' Methought I was well (as it was) for my eyes were set uprightward unto Heaven, where I trusted to come by the mercy of God; but nevertheless I assented to set my eyes on the face of the Crucifix, if I might, and so I did . . . After this my sight began to fail and it was all dark about me in the chamber, as if it had been night, save in the image of the Cross, whereon I beheld a common light; and I wist 1 The French word, petit roman, suggests a relation between this reverie and a variety of literature. not how . . . In this moment suddenly I saw the red blood trickle down from under the garland hot and freshly and right plenteously, as it were in the time of His passion, when the garland of thorns was pressed on His blessed head. I conceived truly and mightily that it was Himself showed it me, without any mean."1 From the full account of this vision it is somewhat uncertain whether it appeared to the saint while awake or asleep. This, however, is of little consequence. The more one studies the literature of this subject, the more one feels that, while there is a comparatively clear distinction between ordinary thought and waking vision, there is no such line between the latter and the vision of sleep; one blends so naturally with the other that it is often impossible to tell from the record of them which is which. There is the same blending in one's own mental experience. The mind often passes into a dream-like state just before falling asleep or just after waking, giving rise to what the psychologists classify as hypnogogic and hypnopompic illusions. These are akin to day dreams, if not identical with them; on the other hand they are often confused in recollection with the dreams of sleep. Poe describes them, calling them "psychal fancies" or "impressions," as arising in the soul "at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams." They have in them a "pleasurable ecstasy" which Poe regards as "a glimpse of the spirit's outer world." He has learned to control them so far as to be able to induce them and to convey them, "or more properly their recollection, to a situation where he can survey them with the eye of analysis." They are all but beyond the power of words, but "even a partial record of the impressions would startle the universal intellect of mankind by the supremeness of the novelty of the material employed, and of its consequent suggestions."2 Here evidently we are at one of the sources of Poe's grotesque and arabesque. Probably much of Poe's strange material came also from the 1 Quoted by Inge, English Mystics, p. 55. 2 Works, Virginia ed., vol. xvi, p. 88. |