Anambas Island, Indonesia
Spiritual Sunday
If summer ends with Labor Day, then poems invoking childhood memories of water and sun seem appropriate. “It may be we shall touch those happy isles,” says a hopeful Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem, and Yeats, standing in a city street, hears the Lake Isle of Innisfree “in the deep heart’s core. In that spirit I share Frithjof Schuon’s haunting poem, “The Island.”
Schuon’s message is one that Milton offers up in the final stanzas of Paradise Lost. The Archangel Michael consoles Adam that he need not mourn his departure from Paradise because “[thou] shalt possess a Paradise within thee, happier far.”
The Island
By Frithjof Schuon
Islands of bliss and everlasting youth,
Floating like flowers on an endless sea
And never touched by sorrows from this world:
Such happy islands thou wilt never see.
Behold: what thou hast dreamt of may be real,
It is not elsewhere, it is what thou art
If thou rememb’rest God; then thou wilt find
The golden island in thy deepest heart.
The singing of a flute came from the sea;
The water vanished, and the flute was me.