“Tintern
Abbey” and “Ode on Immortality”
In the Light of Samkhya Dialectic
P. LAXMI NARAIN
Wordsworth’s entire
poetics is a mighty emotional outflow a sensuous effusion – a mystic incantation on the beauty and sublimity of nature.
Particularly his early and youthful poetry is almost a feasting on external
manifestations. It is a period of sense-celebration. The poet surrenders wholly
to sound and is deeply overpowered by the spell of colour.
There is hardly a hint
on articulation about the indwelling spirit. Nevertheless an aimless groaping
starts to identify it. Thus it is a total exposure to the frontal thrust of
exterior beauty and enchantment. But as years pass by this emotional exuberance
and poetic profusion mellows slowly into a serene spiritual maturity.
The poet outgrows his
obsession with sense-perceptions and starts experiencing the limitless
immensity of spirit and its intimations and subsequently achieves a harmonious
integration between these two polarities. This dualism or dialectic bears a
close correspondence to Indian Samkhya system of Prakriti and Purusha.
Prakriti is the
evolving phenomenon limited by time and space while Purusha is the noumena of
pure consciousness defying all causation.
Tintern Abbey and Ode on Immortality mark a definite
departure towards a higher gradation. These two poems perhaps stand out as
definite achievements in evolution and enlargement of poet’s vision. A serious
and sincere exploration starts to apprehend the presiding power behind the
facade of world process:
A motion and a spirit,
that impels
All thinking things,
all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all
things.
However we cannot
totally rule out the poet’s precise reference to an innate spirit in his early
poems. But in spite of an immature infatuation with sense-pleasures, there
lurks a deep and unconscious urge to go beyond colour and sound. There is a
feverish search for a totality. He fumbles for a fullness of experience and
existence. A sense of insufficiency flows in and through the lines of those
poems. There is a vague longing for a supra-sensuous experience. Its feeble
rumblings are heard here and there. But Tintern Abbey and The Ode bring
into a sharp focus the poet’s priorities and perspective. He matures into wide
sympathies and is further metamorphosed from a passionate poet into a profound
seer. The shift is from sense-gratification to spiritual illumination!
For I have learned
To look on nature, not
as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth;
but hearing often times
The still, sad music of humanity.
For Wordsworth nature is no more a treasure-house of sense-pleasures
but on the contrary it is too deep for tears and conveys human suffering.
The poet experiences a
flowering of new awareness. He comprehends a deeper turbulance beneath the
sights add sounds of nature and perceives a pervasive principle in the process
and flow of life. Now there is a deeper inspiration in the sleep of hills; a
different intimation in the silence of the sky. A new message from the mountain
springs and their haunting murmurs. Wordsworth’s poetry is a cyclic movement
caught between process and reality. They establish a philosophical equivalence
between Prakriti and Purusha. He finds no contradiction in their
mutual interaction. They compliment each other for an eternal flow and
progression of the universe.
Nature with all its
beauty and variety is not self-sufficient; it has to evolve to merge with the
ultimate reality. The mighty pattern of Prakriti includes the ebb and flow of
world-process. It is the prime-mover behind the inexorable drama of creation
and dissolution.
“The Prakriti creates
and evolves only for the Purusha. When the Purusha comes to know it, the
Prakriti vanishes. In this way it is better to rename Prakriti as ignorance or absence
of knowledge. It cannot be absolute and independent”.1
The whole world is a Parinaama
or transformation of Prakriti. It is subtle and invisible caught in the
flux and mutation of existence.
“... Prakriti.....It
is called Jada; in the form of unlimited but always an active force it is
called ‘Sakti’ while in the form of the unmanifested objects it is called
‘Avyakta’ or unexpressed”. 2
Prakriti represents a
process and potentiality. Distortion and disturbance constitute its inner
propelling. It includes human “Gunas”, as vagaries and variations.
Purusha is the
unchanging reality or the eternal existence, the ideal and the ultimate destiny
of Prakriti. The cosmic purusha is the eternal witness extending far beyond the
bounds of the universe. Purushasukta says:
“Thousand_headed was
the Purusha, thousand-eyed and thousand-legged. He, covering the earth on all
sides, stretched himself beyond it by ten fingers length. All this Purusha
along, whatever was and whatever shall be...one-fourth of Him. All beings are
(but) three-fourths of Him in immortal in the highest heaven”. 3 (Rigveda, X,
90)
The process and
reality constitute the two major strands in the poetic design of Wordsworth.
Coexistence of these contraries imparts structural symmetry and conceptual
harmony to Wordsworth’s poetry.
Tintern Abbey clearly reveals this dichotomy time and
again. The whole poem thrives on a harmonious opposition of this physical and
metaphysical principles. Thus sense and spirit are Prakriti and Purusha equivalents.
The Ode on Immortality
begins with a sad brooding
on the poet’s sudden depletion of emotional inspiration:
Whither is fled the
visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the
glory and the dream?
This poem is a clear
pointer towards the poet’s changed perspective. He searches for the very roots
of existence and finds out the essential divinity of man:
Our birth is but a
sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises
with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its
setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire
forgetfulness
And not in utter
nakedness
But trailing clouds of
glory do we come
from God, who is our
home:
Heaven lies about us
in our Infancy!
The Ode is an open
confession of the poet’s creative crisis. It gives us a glimpse into his inner
turmoil. He delinks himself from his former self. The previous emotional pull
gives way to an expansion of consciousness.
His growth does not
totally dismiss the validity of sense-experience. But he treats it as a
gradation in the upward advancement. In fact, sense and spirit are two
different dimensions of totality.
Wordsworth’s concept
of pre-natal existence is nothing but man’s unlimited absolute state of existence in its Purusha state.
The process of life
with all its inner conflicts and contraditions is contained
in provisional and limited Prakriti. The meeting of Prakriti with Purusha is the union of individual soul with
cosmic soul. Where illusion of Prakriti vanishes, the Purusha state alone
remains as an infinite totality.
Notes
1 R. N. Sarma; Indian Philosophy (Orient
Longman, 1972). P. 193.
2 Ibid: P. 189.
3 As quoted by Swami Krishnananda: Realisation
of the Absolute (The Divine Life Society, 1972). P. 101.