A Chapter from My Book on 'The Poetry of Roger White'

(iii)

ONE BIRD ONE CAGE ONE FLIGHT, 1982

Roger White's poetry, for all its unmistakable religious flavour, is part and parcel of world literature. Like Pushkin and his work, which signalled the emergence of Russian literature on the world stage, White's work possesses a balance and harmony, an artistic and intellectual versatility, a formal perfection and vigour, "not to be found in the details of his biography."a It was White, among several other writers in the twentieth century, who helped to forge what could be called a Baha'i consciousness in world literature. This consciousness has certain special peculiarities, a certain spiritual identity, a certain global perspective, a particular wide-angled lens. The emergence of this consciousness became apparent at the very moment when the Baha'i Faith was itself emerging from an obscurity in which it had existed for a century and a half. -Ron Price with thanks to aMarc Slonim, The Epic of Russian Literature: From Its Origins Through Tolstoy, Oxford University Press, NY, 1975(1950), pp.96-7.


In 1983 White's novella A Sudden Music appeared from George Ronald and One Bird One Cage One Flight was published by Naturegraph Publishers Inc., Happy Camp in California. This was the slimmest of White's volumes thusfar, although a collector's edition of a small selection of his poems, Whitewash, also came out in 1982 under the name of an editor, Reuben Rose, who lived in Haifa. An equally slim account of martyrdom, The Shell and the Pearl, was published in 1984. White was consolidating the newfound popularity of his poetry with little volumes.

One Bird One Cage One Flight however slim gave White, in what he called on the cover a "homage to Emily Dickinson," an opportunity to commune across a century of time with the spirit and the mind of a person who may very well have been the greatest female poetic genius that America and the world has ever produced. Perhaps it was more an effort to resolve some of the questions about her poetry, about her metaphysical perspectives and about his own soul's aspirations. Perhaps it was part of White's way of dealing with the beguiling leisureliness of life's journey to death, his various preoccupations associated with death and its deceptive, always somewhat obscure but potentially wondrous purpose. Perhaps it was his identification with a poet who tried to distil "amazing sense/From ordinary Meanings," or, in the words of Mircea Eliade, tried to reveal "the essence of things," life's immense and many mysteries with an obsessive devotion to her vocation as poet. Perhaps it was simply White's way of expressing what was a qualitatively different poetry than any of the verse written by Baha'is before.

According to Yale's literary guru Harold Bloom, whose theory of poetry, a theory of poetic influence, a poet is engaged in a struggle with the poet who has gone before, whose presence exists in the legacy of that dead poet's works. There are many relations, mostly revisionary, of a quasi-filial sort which can prevail between a poet and a precursor. One sort of poetry completes the poems it follows, those poems in that legacy, sometimes by altering them, by rewriting them, by interpreting their subject matter differently. The poetry of a past, a previous, poet actively intervenes in the present and must be dealt with physically, as if in Oedipal revolt against 'the poetic mother', that mother symbolizing that poet, that precursor. Poetic creation, the animating force in poetry, writes Bloom, involves a desperate wrestling with one's forebears, one's precursors, one's poetic fathers and mothers. This is the core of Bloom's theory. If any body of poetry has a canonical status or quality, it derives that status from a strangeness and a certain idiosyncratic originality. White's poetry, for me, is canonical. His poetry is 'the poetic father' I struggle with. He is my major poetic inspiration and the poet I also write 'against' in Bloom's sense as outlined above briefly. One could argue that the poet White argues against is Dickinson.

Whatever White's purpose, One Bird One Cage One Flight contributed a clever and original addition to the White corpus and to the literature written on Emily Dickinson in the first hundred years since her passing in 1886. There remains for us, for our world with its insatiable interest in the psychology of the individual, a corpus of poetry in which White speaks in his own person or for Emily Dickinson. One is never quite sure. But, more importantly, for many of his readers anyway, he speaks for us. The poems are intensely personal, often moralizing and peculiarly characteristic of White. He often dramatizes a spiritual situation in which he is participating and speaking in the first person, though the other actors and the setting belong to the world of story, metaphor or parable. White puts into practice here an approach to poetry by one of the twentieth century's great poets William Carlos Williams: My idea is that in order to carry a thing to the extreme, to convey it, one has to stick to it……Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic, or what you will, everything adjusts to that point of view; and the process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for the poet in flux, as it should be for the poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility. A single manner or mood thoroughly matured and exploited is that fresh thing.

There is in these poems a mastery of repetition. The full effect of the poetry comes from this repetition, a repetition of what could be called a 'Dickinson/Baha'i perspective.' There is an extraordinary evocation of aspects of the life of Emily Dickinson and of the Baha'i Faith. Poem after poem interlaces Dickinson, the Baha'i Faith and White himself. The repetitions are of course variations. Readers, I'm sure, will find a sameness in these poems but the change comes in the context of this sameness. It is, as Williams notes above, "a single manner or mood thoroughly matured" in such a way that it becomes, again and again, "that fresh thing." I have found over the last twenty years, since I first began reading White, that some of his lines have become memorized simply by the force of another type of repetition. Sometimes, when out walking for example, quite involuntarily a stanza occurs to me and, if I am alone, I recite it. There is something mysterious about the reciting that keeps the poem fresh. The following stanza is perhaps the most commonly recited of White's poems in this volume:

I wind my thoughts in knotless skein,
Unspoken mile by mile-
A league from immortality
Lay down my wool and smile.

It seems to me that we can say of White's poems in this volume, if not in all his volumes, but especially in this volume, that they are at once autobiographical and universal, personal and impersonal, ironical and passionate, wounded and integral. White does not hide behind some literary mask, some persona. For the most part, the "I" in White's poems is White himself.

On opening One Bird One Cage One Flight we see the first lines stamped with the magic of style, of a style that obeys its own laws of grace and beauty and inner harmony. But it is precisely its quiet passion and spiritual tenderness that tells us that here is a poetry of a rare order. "Here is a poetry," as Goethe referred to it two centuries ago, "of a true real natural vision of life." It possesses, he continued, "descriptive power of the highest degree rendering a poet's pictures so lifelike that they become actualities to every reader." Here are those first lines, the first poem:

Spring Song

My hope put out white petals
In tentative delight,
But twice there came concussive frost,
Obliterating blight

Which, blotting out my April,
Stirred wisdom in my root.
Should another burgeoning come
Will twig renew? 'Tis moot.

White recognized in Dickinson his twin, at least someone whose inquiring mind was excited by the unknown expanse of immortality, its perplexity, its mystery and, ultimately, its intimacy. Indeed there is an intimacy in Dickinson's work that the reader finds in White's, but White's is gentler, simpler, far more penetrable. The intimacy is paradoxical in both cases because what we actually learn about the person, the poet, has little to do about their daily life in a direct, explicit sense. There is an anonymity about the person, the poet. The focus is squarely on the poem, on the poetry, not on the poet’s daily life. The reader does not learn what White did during the day, the year, the decade, during his middle age, with his wife, inter alia. But, however simple White's poetry is from time to time, it needs to be read and re-read far more carefully than its not infrequently humorous, deftly-drafted surfaces suggest. There is no getting rid of a certain apprehension that not all of his ore will have been extracted by a cursory read. White changes a poem's direction in a few lines or a few words. He may, in fact, be pursuing a wholly different direction to the one the reader is ostensibly following. But whatever direction he is going in, the reader feels, as Dryden did of Chaucer, that here is God's plenty, here is a perpetual fountain of good sense. Part of the experience of this fountain lies in the fact that readers can return again and again to White's verse without exhausting their interest or the quiet imaginative spell of his verse; their imagination reaches back to White's imagination and the two enfold. At least that is how I experience his poetry and I'm sure many others have a similar experience.

Poetry has been described by one literary critic as ‘a unique representation of some mental situation, some acute awareness, part of a cult of sincerity.’ Inspite of this representation, this exposure, of their heart's and mind’s most subtle secrets, the examination of the phenomenon of their individual consciousnesses, the persona in their poems, at least in the case of White and Dickinson, frequently address us with perceptions that we sense are ours as well as theirs. There is what you might call an externalization of the poet’s experience in an attempt to make it valid for others. This is how Joyce Carol Oates sees Emily Dickinson and her work. And there is some value in this perspective for our study of White. It is in this way that the poet, in this case White, defines or makes an epoch, perhaps the third and forth of the Formative Age.

In the above poem Spring Song, we find in the poet's wondering that there is a tone of purest anonymity or perhaps universality, as if the poet, speaking out of his "tentative delight" with "wisdom in (his) root" were speaking of our condition as well. There is in White's words a speaking from the interior of a life as we might imagine ourselves speaking, gifted with White's delightful way of putting things and not bound by the merely local and time-bound nature of our life. "If anonymity is the soul's essential voice," as Oats writes describing Dickinson's, "then Emily Dickinson is our poet of the soul." And White is for me--and my particular perspectives--the poet of my soul who addresses and helps create my unknowable interior. And this is no small achievement given the importance of that "inner life and private character" upon which the very success of our teaching Plan depends.

White, like Dickinson, offers readers riddlesome, obsessive, haunting, sometimes frustrating poetry. But, for the most part, White's poetry is much simpler and easier to understand than Dickinson's. White does not ram words onto lines with a force that in Dickinson often shatters the syntax, cramps the structure and "pinches the words like a vise." There is a romance of epic proportions in both poets but, with White, the heroic sense is softened by the humour, the light touch, which runs through poem after poem. The far simpler language and word patterns and a focusing of the heroic in history amply mixed with White's(and ours) ordinary self give these epic proportions a human, an everyday, touch. The world that White lives in certainly requires a heroism, but it is of such a different kind than the one which required martyrs in Iran in the nineteenth century or the one which Emily Dickinson occupied in her intense and private poetic, in her clearly eccentric life-style of virtually total isolation, for the most part during the years of Baha'u'llah's Revelation.

White creates a poetry of transcendence, the kind that outlives its human habitation and its name. In One Bird One Cage One Flight White does this through a repeated focus on Emily Dickinson and her life. The following poem, Emily's Song, is a good example. So much simpler than so much of Dickinson, who is also interested in transcendence, this poem begins:

Had hearts the art of porcelain
The mending were small feat
But I have owned one whose repair
Earth's craftsmen can't complete.

Had love asked only giving
The donor were content
But I have known a stealthy hand
Twice prove our loves are lent.

Had death comprised mere dying
The handiwork were sweet
But I mark its keen audition
In every eye I meet.

There is for many readers the benefit of clearly feeling and of deeply enjoying White's work, classic poetry in the right meaning of that word, work belonging "to the class of the very best." There may, of course, be weaknesses, failures, poems that come short, poems that slip out of the net of the very best either because of an immense complexity and obscurity as in the case of Dickinson, a similar complexity or an irrepressible tongue-in-cheekness which the reader is not able to appreciate due to the so very idiosyncratic nature of humour, as in the case of White. If the reader or critic is enabled to obtain a clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment of a poet through some negative criticism then, as Arnold argues, that activity is no mere "literary dilettantism." The enjoyment of the poetry should be that much increased, refined, deepened. Not every poem will delight or stimulate the intellectual and sensory emporiums to the same extent. The personal proclivities, affinities and circumstances of a reader have great power to sway the estimates of a poet's work, often attach more importance to a poem than it really possesses or diminish the real worth of a poem in various degrees due to a host of reasons. The language of encomium, of praise, for example, that I attach to White's work may be somewhat exaggerated or overrated, what Arnold calls a 'personal fallacy.' The language of oprobrium or simple lack of appreciation can be attached to White's poetry equally easily.

All physical activity is capable of revealing mysteries. Like Dickinson, White is fascinated by the mystery of death. Perhaps that is ultimately why he has chosen to focus on Dickinson in this volume of poetry. White, like many poets of old, is charting his, and our, progress toward his/our ultimate destiny. Here is an outline of more of that journey in the last three stanzas of Emily's Song:

Had heaven held sure solace
To hasten there were wise
But I, grown timid, cautious,
Search for ambush, man's and sky's.

One day I'll meet fate's boldest stare
And ask its harsh command
My apron full of gentian and
Lone daisy in my hand.

Till then, like Jonah in the dark,
I ride the journey out
And count truth's ribs, bemused that faith
So multiplies my doubt.

It has been the view of many writers throughout history that literature is the voice of a particular soil. The voice of the Russian soil was for long the power of abstract ideas over concrete reality. The flood of illumination in relation to the work of a particular writer comes to some readers only after intensive study. Middleton Murray's study of Dostoevsky was one such example. My own study of the poetry of Roger White is, for me anyway, another. The poetry of White is not so much the voice of a particular soil as it is the voice of a participation in the life of a community "which preserves in living shape certain treasures of the past and certain expectations of the future." These treasures have multiple roots in an environment, a community, where White and his poetry now form a natural part. White deals with abstract ideas but they are contextualized in history, in the lives of people, in nature, in the seasons and in the ordinarily ordinary. For White philosophy, ideas, the text and texture of his poetry are a species of voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious autobiography. That is why White urged his readers to read his poetry if they wanted to know about him. The poem, Emily's Song, tells a great deal about how White found the journey of life. But he tells about his journey 'slant.' In the process he tells the story for many of his readers, many who have come to love his work because he speaks so quintessentially of their own lives.

But all is not philosophy and ideas in his poetry. The simple, the quotidian, the ordinary is as poetical as the transcendent, if it is treated right. White brings to poetry a lively sense or feeling for situation and so he can treat any theme, however mundane or lofty, as he pleases. Indeed, the more prosaic the vesture of everyday life appears, the greater is his triumph in seizing and representing the enduring human interest of its familiar features. Perhaps this is partly, if not mainly, due to White's sense of vision. Even the most eccentric divagations in human conduct can be exhibited in their true spiritual perspective by the poet-psychologist of insight. One such "eccentric divagation" was Emily Dickinson's almost total withdrawal into herself which for many analysts of her life and poetry amounted to an illness, more than agoraphobia. Here is one of White's poems on the theme:



The Beloved

I could not spell your name, my love;
No letters could contain you.
Embarrassed was the pen that tried
To address or to name you.

I could not paint your portrait, dear,
Whose face defied all palettes;
The shrinking brush, despairing hand,
Lacked craft to truly tell it.

I could not match your praise to song-
Unfit my voice and cadence,
Nor music ever was composed
Adequate to radiance.

Death came before I found the means
To spell or paint or sing you.
My silent soul which all inscribed
I hasten now to bring you.

In many of White's poems it does not matter whether the reader shares the same religious faith as White. The poems are universal in the fullest sense and will appeal to the secular spirituality so pervasive in western society as the new millennium begins its long road ahead. But many of White’s poems, both in this book of verse and in his others, will simply be uninteresting and irrelevant to people for whom the very idea of commitment to a religion—and in this case the Baha’i Faith--is inimical to their tastes. They will not make much of a good deal of White’s poetry. That was also true of the work of Emily Dickinson—and she had no commitment to a specific religion at all. The reader, as in reading any poetry, must be willing and able to assume the perspective of the person writing the poem. There is much in this poem that could be autobiographical, could be an expression of White's own spiritual/personal experience vis-à-vis the exalted Founder of the Baha'i Faith, Baha'u'llah. I read this poem in quintessentially person terms and find rich meanings unfold.

Art is, at least some of the time, an experience of tension and the poetry White writes is an art of strain, the nerves held tight but relaxed from time to time due to the presence of some dispassionate intellectual tentativeness, a tentativeness where humour can make its appearance free of what is often the dangerous romance of passionate intensity. It is as if White was saying "perhaps" after every expression of conviction: 'perhaps' the wisest word of all the words, 'Abdu'l-Baha once said in a story for children. It is not a matter of the free expression of truth, but more a matter of how to work toward the truth. In the case of White's poetry, the language is: private, allusive, teasing, idiosyncratic, delicate, partly unfathomable to the ordinary mind. So, too, was the poetry of the nineteenth century American poet, Emily Dickinson, only more so.

So White would agree with Dickinson's sentiments in her poem:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise.
As Lightning to the Children eased
With expression kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--

White is the poet who comes at things, at readers, with indirection, with glimpses, through the subtly distorting mirror of art. But he comes at things after he has thought long and hard and what he gives, as Wordsworth once wrote, is "the spontaneous overflow," "an emotion recollected in tranquillity" and, finally, "a release from emotion." After a lifetime of pondering some of the questions regarding the afterlife and this one(White had another dozen years to live after he wrote most of the poetry in this volume ) , after some thirty-five years as a Baha'i, White does not parade his simple certitudes before us in these stanzas. He approaches the next world with: caution, doubt, timidity, some grief, daily readiness, humility. Should one ask more?
Emily's Song, among his many poems involving the subject of death, and Dickinson's words above, are an honest expression of White's inner life, his inner attitude to much that is life and death and, for many of his readers, of theirs.

White distances his poems from his personality, as Robert Hayden had done before him. Poetic thought and emotion should have their "life in the poem and not in the history of the poet: such was White's view regarding the writing of poetry. The emotion of poetry, for White, was essentially impersonal." This was the position of the New Critical Movement in poetry that had its beginnings at the turn of the century. The writer of the poem is not delivering a personal letter but, rather, he is the medium of an experience. He ceases to exist and it is the experience that belongs to all who can read and understand. The poem often, if not always, has its origins in the history, the life, of the poet, but the poet tells it 'slant,' indirectly and his words become, for the attentive reader, theirs.

Virtually all of White's poems are a reflection of this spirit, this critical attitude. In The Sermon and Ladies' Verse, one could site many more examples, like Dickinson, White frequently writes of death, the afterlife, heaven and hell, God, the soul. Some might say that, like Dickinson, he is obsessed with these subjects. But, given that this book of poetry is a "homage to Emily Dickinson," it is only fitting that White should be concerned with the same subjects that concerned Dickinson in her 1775 poetic oeuvre. White often sees things in ways his readers have not seen before. He asks readers to look at things they might not want to, face realities they might not want to. Without quoting from poem after poem, I shall content myself with some simple ideas and perhaps a few illustrative lines.

In The Traveller White writes throughout most of the poem of the excitement, the pride, the cheering, the jostling throng, the enthusiasms associated with much of life's short-term goals. For me, I could not help but reminisce over the rich experience that has been my Baha'i life since the 1950s, but White finishes the poem on a note of quiet realism. For the generation of Baha'is who, like White, have been working in the Baha'i community for between thirty and fifty years or more the note, expressed in the last two lines, is just right:

But one seeks New Jerusalem
And knows the journey long.

Anyone who has worked in this Cause for most of the last half of the twentieth century knows that the road is 'long, stony and tortuous.' The wondrous new buildings on Mt. Carmel are certainly a sign of the 'New Jerusalem.' There is much reason for celebration, for cheering but, in the end, he or she knows the journey is long and will require all they have in the midst of the darkness both in the world and, from time to time, in their own dear lives.

Ostensibly, so much of White's poetry is, as I said above, about immortality, death and eternity. But Baha'is learn a great deal about their Faith or, to put it more precisely, White writes so superbly about their experience that they understand their lives more fully than before. And that is enough to make White a much loved poet. In the poem Disclosure , for example, White begins by describing the process of Baha'u'llah's Revelation perhaps as beautifully as anyone has hitherto described it:

The hieroglyphics gouged in air
By an impatient fire-gloved hand

And the purpose of this Revelation, these hieroglyphics, White tells us

Are given as our library---

Baha'u'llah has 'ordained for our training every atom in existence and the essence of all created things,' as He writes in the Hidden Words; or, as He writes in another context, if we look at the atom we will find the sun. There is wisdom both 'from on high' in His Words, in the Revelation and in all of existence. White continues:

We, star-affrighted, gaze to land

Where furnished in an atom's tome
Is erudition of the sky---

The reader can interpret these words in various ways to translate their meanings. For my money I see the 'star-affrighted' individual turning to the world of phenomenal existence, the 'land', where he will find a world of learning and meaning. Such an individual turns to this material existence and away from the stars, the Writings, because they are too awesome, too mysterious. The individual finds 'erudition' in the land and misses the erudition of higher forms: the Writings, the stars, the sky. The reader, of course, can unpack these lines in other ways. To each his own. This is part of the very beauty of poetry.

White continues:

The dust-affronted student lifts
A blank uncomprehending eye.

We are one and all 'affronted' by the 'dust,' the overwhelming, the pervasive, aspect of our existence and we, thus, exhibit 'A blank uncomprehending eye.' One can only understand a small portion of the entire world.

And swivelling will not read the book
From which his glance will dart again,
Though it's indexed in his jugular
Where love annunciates its name.

This 'uncomprehending,' 'dust-affronted' individual---and there are hundreds of millions of them---swivels away on his chair from the Baha'i book he was loaned. Or he looks at the book for a short time, but 'his glance' darts away 'again.' The idea that the Baha'i message is meant for everyone to hear is expressed so graphically in the phrase 'indexed in his jugular.'

And, finally, the last stanza:

Will not admit magnificence
Which looms a startled blink away
To bleach with gold the retina
Resigned in arrogance to grey.

I find the metaphorical significance, indeed beauty, of what White writes here helps to put in focus the teaching process that I have been engaged in for over forty years. White is easy to underestimate because his metaphors are so stunning, so gentle, so elegant. The Baha'i writings, White is saying here, can ' bleach with gold the retina,' but most people are 'resigned in arrogance to grey' because they "Will not admit' the wonder, the grandeur, the 'magnificence' of this newly emerging world religion. What a world of meaning in the words 'resigned in arrogance to grey!' Disbelief is a rejection of divine reality; it implies a refusal of grace. White is expressing here, in words that echo Baha'u'llah's utterance in one of His tablets: 'Woe betide him who hath rejected the grace of God and His bounty, and hath denied His tender mercy and authority.'

Like Dickinson, White knows that the highest perceptual ecstasy comes just as the object vanishes from sight. The more fleeting our perceptions the greater their distinctiveness. The transience and formlessness of experience give lustre to what we do achieve. Expressing that lustre in the form of a covenant, an "exquisite bond," and introducing his poem with the words from one of Emily's letters: "everyday life seems mightier," White writes:

Life gives so strong a covenant
Who shall not sign in trust?
Its smallest clause empowered to
Bind atom-sun or dust.

To all-compelling contract
Though codicil be pain
Adheres the constant signatory
Till only God remains.

All that fidelity attracts
A lenient bench reviews;
Sealed by the very hand of God
Exquisite bond renews.

Unlike Dickinson, who "delineates a oneness that is really a seething competition of irreconcilable opposites," who can not see any divine plan in this overwhelming, omnipresent cosmic oneness, for whom unity collapses under her genuinely tragic gaze, White has found such a unity, a basis for unity, and has examined its basis for over thirty years before he came to write this poem. He has believed and sought to understand in the context of a quite literal 'covenant,' a covenant that binds all of creation. He accepts that pain is at the heart of life, at the heart of this covenant and that fidelity is a crucial aspect of this 'exquisite bond,' this covenant.

For White there is no separation of the “active” and the “contemplative” facets of our lives, no more separation of “mysticism” from “practicality.” There is a oneness of vision and form and he gathers the powers of his mind and imagination to serve the establishment of a spiritual kingdom. He strives to do this in a language that is “moderate, tempered and infinitely courteous,” and not filled with “dissent, discord and disdain.” In so doing he whispers in our bones and arteries and “the isolated and speechless elements in a community” can find their voices in his poetic harmony. White becomes, for many of his readers, “the clear song of the hidden bird” in their own hearts. Part of his ability to do this derives from the grounding of his awareness in his own shortcomings, his own vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This tempers his voice and trains, in the words of Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, “his vision with compassionate tolerance.”
The 'death poetry' of Dickinson and White needs to be given some special attention in any essay on One Bird One Cage One Flight. Both poets characterize death with images of light. In the last poem before the epilogue, a poem entitled Last Words, for example, White writes about a radiant, unbearable and burning light

and a rank, radiant as light,
a rank of angels--
Oh what a dear confusion!
.....
and God's face bright, not angry
......
and the gleaming City, white and past imagining,

Dickinson frequently balanced the visionary optimism she occasionally expressed with a rather grim picture of death. Not so with White. He often muses on death with a sadness and a tongue-in-cheek:

That solemn artist death
Left her portrait on the pillow--
Detail complete, save breath.

Or:

I wind my thought in knotless skein
Unspoken, mile by mile,
A league from immortality
Lay down my wool and smile.

Like Dickinson White explores the affects of death upon human perception. The ability to perceive is the most cherished aspect of human identity so that, when perception is gone at the point of death, what might the experience after death be like when we are 'sucked into its deep'? White offers us none of 'her secrets.' Death's lips are sealed 'with stone.' This is about as cold, as indifferent, as horrific, as White gets.

Death is like the ruthless Nile--
The scaled beast it gives keep
Will, careless, swim its dark coil's length
Till sucked into its deep.

Who'd tell its gulping treachery,
Irrevocably gone--
While down indifferent centuries
The blanching Sphinx looks on

And none may pry her secrets--
Her reason overthrown--
The horror fixed her mindless stare
And sealed her lips with stone.

In another context, somewhat softer, when death comes with its 'fang,'

It gives no cause to weep
That greater pen enfold the lamb
In everlasting keep.

Here our perception of death, our view of its meaning, is the very source of our identity. Death has no horror; indeed, it is inviting. As the poem closes death turns us toward life and forces us to admire and cherish it:

Then ring the bell and call the flock
Ingather all that stray
But mark the beast intractable
The fields invite to stay.

White's unflinching acknowledgment of death provides him with a tragi-comic view of life. With Dickinson the reader is presented with her enhanced perceptions of life. With White we laugh and, almost in the same breath, we view the tragic but the tragic has soft edges:

Till then, like Jonah in the dark
I ride the journey out
And count truth's ribs, bemused that faith
So multiplies my doubt.

Doubt for White is, as it clearly is for William Hatcher in his several articles about science and religion, the logical concomitant of faith. Explanation does not dispel mystery and doubt. Progress is the product not only of transcending the old, but it is also an appreciation of perspectives old and new. So often it is how we view things that inhibits our capacity to wonder. White, viewing things sub specie aeternitatis, views them with irony in a context of eternal struggle, an eternal struggle, that is accepted as part and parcel of the reality of life itself:

Across his soul's scarred battlefield
Where all his pride was slain
The legions of his enemy
Prepare to strike again.

The lines he writes are only a slight "palliative" for the "ravages of grief" when they come. He will continue to "hobble on the page for ease" and doubt will continue to be part of his human experience:

A mosquito buzzes round my faith
I think to name him doubt.

This small book of poems is divided into four parts of between twenty-five and thirty-one poems each with an epilogue of three poems. Fifteen pages of notes and a bibliography are included to guide readers through the life of the woman whose journey and poetry has inspired White. Each section opens with a quotation from the Baha'i writings or the Bible. A simple drawing also embellishes both the cover and the opening page of each section. A tone of childlike simplicity is conveyed by these drawings. It is a tone that is also one of the many outstanding qualities of White's poetry.

Many of the poems are preceded by quotations from the more than seven hundred extant letters that Dickinson wrote between 1865 and 1885. It is not the purpose of this essay to examine the life of Emily Dickinson, rather the purpose is to examine the poetry of White and Dickinson, to the extent that each of their respective works throws light on the other's.

The first section of the book, some twenty-nine poems, takes us through Emily's years eleven to nineteen, her adolescence, and is called 'Spring Song.' Most of the poems are written in the abcb rhyme pattern and some in the aabb style. The rhythm is iambic tetrametre and trimetre. They are usually quite easy to read compared to Dickinson's poetic complexity, ambiguity and her often seeming chaotic meandering. While Dickinson's universe often seems to be 'a cosmos in tatters,' White presents a world that seems balanced, cogent, elegant, elevated, graceful and, most importantly, familiar. Humorous, perspicuous, satirical and sentimental, his poetry rarely seems far away. On a clear day White can smile forever, especially through the mundane:

Deliver me from cooking stoves
From kitchens, pots and pans;
The only meal I select
Is that which heaven plans.

Only unbearable stress can extract the precious essence of life. Dickinson and White both know this. White puts it this way:

Attentive is the scholar
That Master, pain, instructs;
A vivid erudition
His tutelage inducts.

White knows life is a battle. In the following stanzas he shows his understanding of the battle in life and a desire to be rid of it:

Long has the chaffing struggle raged
And God alone can know
When might the captive, fervour gained,
Slip his lax chains and go.

There is an anguish, a depth of passion in the occasional tormented lament. There is the story of pain endured and of life’s travail in White’s poetry but, for the most part, this experience seems to have bred “an ancient dignity,” and some amalgam of that robust and virile quality that is part of the very stock of White’s ancestry and that gentleness and wisdom which has come, it would seem, from a lifetime’s association with the newest of the world’s religions.


Dickinson's attitude to God was, at times, suspicious, fearful and resentful. White's is one that sees a danger in death, but a warmth and fulfilment in the long haul, in the heavenly experience. He contrasts death's "stone" and "iced, mean bone" with heaven's "kinder home" and its "pillows with fulfilment." And meanwhile, in this earthly life, death "stalks across" his "choicest day" and plunders everything he sees. There is clearly a gentle side to death's ambience in White's poetry.

In the latter stages of Dickinson's life 'the pearl' comes to occupy the symbolic centre-stage of her poetry. Dickinson seems to deal more effectively with existential loss in her latter years. In White's work light comes to occupy the centre of his mise-en-scene. These, too, are White's latter years. Nothing stains the white radiance of eternity in this climactic poem Last Words:

Oh Father, calling, calling--and the light!
The light of immolation! Unto Thee lift up mine eyes...
Oh this lifting, lifting--
lifting beyond sense,
past doubt and why and how!
Bright Presence, lift me now!

Between this consummation in part four and many of the opening poems discussed above in part one we have the core of the book: the summer and autumn seasons. The most prolific years of Dickinson's life were the 1860s, especially the early 1860s. White gives us some thirty-one poems in this section, the years 1860 to 1869, the most of any of the four seasons. They were also Dickinson's most prolific years.

"The life of action," says Stephen Spender in his The Making of a Poem in the Creative Process, "always seems to me an act of cutting oneself off from life."
That was unquestionably true of Dickinson who is now seen down the corridors of time as the eccentric recluse who increasingly shut herself off from the world as she got older. White captures the terror of her reclusiveness and the elusiveness, fear and potential intimacy of the Divine Who is always waiting at our metaphorical door with His 'hello', as The Caller:

The lady's tread upon the step,
Her hand upon the bell,
And all the rattling house grows wise
As when a solemn knell.

The lady, here, is the Divine Caller Who comes for us at our death. When She does

My heart knifed by insistent ring
I steel myself to go
With dread swamped pulse to swing the door
Upon her fraught hello.

White gives his readers, through the window of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, a series of perspectives on death that are consistent with the Baha'i writings but provide insights that are refreshing in their profundity, their wisdom, their sheer delight.

"Talent perceives differences," wrote W.B. Yeats, "genius unity." A major concern in Yeats' life was to hammer his thoughts into unity. Whites, possessing a philosophy of unity, draws quintessentially on the everyday and articulates a poetic with unity at its centre. But it is a unity surrounded by an immense diversity and a certain anguish:

To everything but anguish
The mind will soon adjust:
Uninvited, that marauder,
Invading, trails with dust

About the scrupulous household
The tidy mind maintains
Sets soiling boots on ottoman,
Remotest chamber gains--

Wrenches down the damask curtains,
Break's housewife's favourite bowl
And storms up faith's chaste stairway
To bed the baulking soul.

The context for this anguish is the simple everyday reality, a reality we all understand only too well, for anguish is unquestionably a universal experience.

Part two(1860-1869), Part three(1870-1879) and Part four(1880-1886) deal with their respective sections of Dickinson's life. Her particular cosmology, her world view, plays with a Calvinistic Christian orientation and a personal vision embodying the imagination at its centre. White's play is with an imagination sharing "a path or circuit of things through forms and so makes them translucid to others." White attempts to wed the powers of mystic and poet in a process of perpetual motion back and forth across all points of the sphere, so to speak. He tries to fuse vision and form. Light for him is a unifying idea. Some of his work can be appreciated quickly, but the depths do not reveal themselves quickly. His poetic art only opens up to readers with patience and time. White had another decade of poetry to give to his readers. Many had been hooked on White before reading this his third main book of poetry. But most of his readers had yet to arrive on the scene.

There is a humility that graces so many of White’s poems. It has nothing to do with a creeping submissiveness. Although he is quick to point out his own lack of loyalty and obedience to the divine Message, he takes no perverse pleasure in making himself out to be a scoundrel. Sober self-knowledge, a low estimate of his own worth, a reliance on God’s love that is so confident that it overcomes his despondency, a beauteous character that shines through his poetry like light through clear glass, an ingenuousness, qualities that, for me anyway, produce a complex human being. He had his inner conflicts, as we all do, and his poems are partly an expression of these conflicts. Yet at times he wrote with a childlike, lucid, simplicity with the voice of true innocence, an innocence that one can only find on the far side of experience.

He did not simply acquiesce in his creed. He grasped it imaginatively and presented it to his contemporaries with a storehouse of symbols familiar to their worlds. In the process he forged for himself a style that was unmistakable and inimitable. If a poet can do this, he is not obliged to do anything else.