Detail of Dieric Bouts’s “Weeping Madonna”
Spiritual Sunday
As I continue to grieve America’s rejection of Barack Obama’s dream of tolerance and inclusivity, I find comfort in this Emily Bronte poem. Strictly speaking it’s not a religious poem, but she speaks of the spiritual comfort that can be found in the Imagination. She says that Reason will not save us—as a professor currently mired in gloom, I can testify to this only too well—and Truth will “rudely trample down” any shallow fancies that we indulge in.
When Bronte contrasts Imagination with Fancy, she is drawing on Samuel Taylor’s Coleridge’s distinction in Biographia Literaria. Imagination, as Coleridge saw it, puts us in touch with “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception.” In the “finite mind” of the artist, we see a “repetition” of “the eternal act of creation.” Fancy, by contrast, is just a mental act of association.
The “Benignant Power” that is the Imagination can be a “solacer of human cares” and a “sweeter hope, when hope despairs.” So if the election results have plunged you into darkness, turn to a beloved poet, novelist or playwright. The forces that flow through them to give us King Lear and Intimations of Immortality, The Brothers Karamazov and, yes, Wuthering Heights, are more vast than the resentments and tribal hatreds that fuel our electoral politics. May they help you regain your bearings.
The Imagination
By Emily Bronte’
When weary with the long day’s care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost, and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While then canst speak with such a tone!
So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.
What matters it, that all around
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom’s bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?
Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature’s sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:
But thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o’er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death.
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.
I trust not to thy phantom bliss,
Yet, still, in evening’s quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!
Further observation: Notice that Bronte doesn’t look to the Imagination just to make her happy, what she describes as a “phantom bliss.” It goes deeper than that. It reassures her that there is a benign power in the universe that whispers with “a voice divine” that there is a “sweeter hope, when hope despairs.” The Imagination is how she imagines God.
