From Coleridge Coeli Enarrant, (1830?).
The stars that wont to start, as on a chace,
Mid twinkling insult on Heaven's darken'd face,
Like a conven'd conspiracy of spies
Wink at each other with confiding eyes!
Turn from the portent -- all is blank on high,
No constellations alphabet the sky:
The Heavens one large Black Letter only shew,
And as a child beneath its master's blow
Shrills out at once its task and its affright --
The groaning world now learns to read aright,
And with its Voice of Voices cries out, O!
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From Coleridge Humility the Mother of Charity, (1830?).
Frail creatures are we all! To be the best,
Is but the fewest faults to have: --
Look thou then to thyself, and leave the rest
To God, thy conscience, and the grave.
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From Coleridge To William Wordsworth, 1807 (60-74)
Ah ! as I listened with a heart forlorn,
The pulses of my being beat anew :
And even as Life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains--
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ;
And Fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of Hope ;
And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear ;
Sense of past Youth, and Manhood come in vain,
And Genius given, and Knowledge won in vain ;
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers
Strewed on my corse (corpse), and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave !
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From Wordsworth The Prelude 1805, Book II (255-276).
In one beloved presence, nay and more,
In that most apperehensive habitude
And those sensations which have been deriv’d
From this beloved Presence, there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
All objects through all intercourse of sense.
No outcast he, bewilder’d and depressed;
Along his infant veins are interfus’d
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature, that connect him with the world.
Emphatically such a Being lives,
An inmate of this active universe;
From nature largely he receives; nor so
Is satisfied, but largely gives again,
For feeling has to him imparted strength,
And powerful in all sentiments of grief,
Of exultation, fear, and joy, his mind,
Even as an agent of the one great mind,
Creates, creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds.―Such, verily, is the first
Poetic spirit of our human life…..
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From Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, 1798, (75-91).
… I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetitie; a feeling and a love,
That hath no need of remoter charm,
By thought supplies, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. – That time is past,
And all its aching joys are no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, no mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. 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 …
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From Wordsworth The Prelude 1805, Book XIII, (52-65).
Meanwhile, the Moon look’d down upon this shew
In single glory, and we stood, the mist
Touching our very feet; and from the shore
At a distance not the third part of a mile
Was a blue chasm; a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through dark deep thoroughfare had Nature lodg’d
The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.
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From Wordsworth The Prelude 1805, Book XIII, (166-184)
This love more intellectual cannot be
Without imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute strength
And clearer insight, amplitude of mind,
And reason in her most exalted mood.
This faculty hath been the moving soul
Of our long labour: we have traced the stream
From darkness, and the very place of birth
In its blind cavern, whence is faintly heard
The sound of waters; follo’d it to light
And open day, accomplished its course
Among the ways of Nature, afterwards
Lost sight of it bewilder’d and engulph’d,
Then given it greeting, as it rose once more
With strength, reflecting in its solemn breast
The works of man and face of human life,
And lastly, from its progress have we drawn
The feeling of life endless, the great thought
By which we live, Infinity and God.
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From Wordsworth The Prelude 1805, Book XI, (258-265).
There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or ought of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired
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From Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, Book 1.
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome Messenger! O welcome Friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon City's walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchis'd and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? In what Vale
Shall be my harbour? Underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream
Shall with its murmur lull me to my rest?
The earth is all before me: with a heart
Joyous, nor scar'd at its own liberty,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.
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Wordsworth’s words are striking. From The Prelude, 1805, Book VI (525-537):
Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost in a cloud,
Halted, without a struggle to break through.
And now recovering, to my Soul I say
I recognize thy glory; in such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
There harbours whether we be young or old.
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I like these words of Coleridge from Self Knowledge, around 1832.
And heaven-sprung adage of the olden time!
Say, canst thou make thyself?—Learn first that trade—;
Haply thou mayst know what thyself hast made.
What hast thou, Man, thou darest call thine own?
What is there in thee, Man, that can be known?
Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought,
A phantom dim of past and future wrought,
Vain sister of the worm,—life, death, soul, clod
Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!
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I like these words from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude 1805 Book X (889-99) where he expresses the detrimental effects of rationalism:
Thus I fared,
Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith,
Like culprits to the bar, suspiciously
Calling the mind to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours, now believing,
Now disbelieving, endlessly perplex’d
With impulse, motive, light and wrong, the ground
Of moral obligation, what the rule
And what the sanction, till, demanding proof,
And seeing in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction….
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Rather than secondary, ornamental, or aesthetic renderings of the real; metaphor, symbol and story may be first order forms of discourse that need to be taken seriously as we seek to understand God, ourselves and the world. Poetry, for example, may be a fuller expression of truth than mathematical formulations and imagination may prove a reliable guide to the real over the unreal.
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I like these words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s What is Life? around 1805, where he expresses conflict like this:
Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight?
An absolute Self--an element ungrounded--
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?--
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death?
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We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue.
I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What role, if any, does imagination have in reading Scripture?
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According to Webster’s Dictionary the definition of imagination is as follows: a) the act or power of forming mental images of what is not actually present b) a foolish or unrealistic notion or idea akin to fancy, which is the mind forming images well removed from reality.
“Imagining is everything – it is the preview of life’s forthcoming attractions.” -- Einstein Read Psalm 97:1-7; Isa.11:1-9
Imagination is a fascinating topic of interest and debate in today’s world. The deeply significant issues of the real and the unreal have never been as evident as we find them in our own cultural context. Discerning between fact and fantasy, objectivity and subjectivity in our post-modern setting, means we have to deal with a new blurring of categories, which may threaten older precision crafted paradigms and previously settled ways of thinking. As we increasingly find ourselves in a culture that prioritizes the visual over all else, images can tend to dominate the landscape of life. Engaging the challenges of post-modern thought, for better or worse, may now suggest that we have to reassess our understanding of God, ourselves and the world. That which has been previously assumed to be real, might call for re-exploration.
Let’s face it, in the twentieth-first century we’re seduced by the magnetism of pseudo-reality technology, saturated in images, and coerced by subliminal messages that spike the imagination. Does it matter that sometimes we’re not even aware of what’s happening, yet our imaginations have been engaged, affected and culturally influenced in certain directions? Do we perhaps need to be alert to the possibility that our imaginations can and do provoke and affect our actions?
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