Emergence of a Bahá'í Consciousness in World Literature:
The Poetry of Roger White

by Ron Price

chapter 6

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chapter 8

Chapter 7

ANOTHER SONG ANOTHER SEASON, 1979
THE CANADIAN WHO LIVES HERE

The supreme test of a book is that we should feel some unusual intelligence working behind the words. Roger White possessed such an intelligence, at least there is a coterie of readers who sense that intelligence when they read the several books of his poetry. It is not my desire to make White into a poet of some inevitable and complex profundity, but for me there is certainly a wondrous intelligence that I sense behind his poetry. White's is a poetry which, in the words of Lionel Trilling, "goes on existing beyond our powers of explanation." "The aesthetic effect," Trilling goes on, "depends in large degree upon intellectual power."^[1] Part of our pleasure with White, too, is that we are not under any illusion that White has conquered the material he directs his attention toward. Like the great writers of this century White raises many questions about the social and political landscape of ideas in our liberal and democratic West. Like some of the great writers White, too, simply wanted to get something off his chest.^[2] In so doing he orders what for most of us are partly ordered, insufficiently ordered or disordered in our minds. He creates a self-contained cosmos with its own centre of gravity. I think each of us might define that centre of gravity a little differently. For me it is that mystic centre at the heart of the religion both White and I share in common.

I aim in this book to convey some of White's subtle and not-so-subtle intelligence as I survey the major volumes of his poetry and examine some special subjects in his poetry toward the end of this book in what could be seen as one long essay. I hope in the process not to overestimate the values and virtues of White's work, to be overly approving or, in the words of literary critic David Daiches, to exhibit the dangers of an excessive catholicity It is easy for me to do this because I thoroughly enjoy White's poetry. White provided the kind of poetry I needed to teach me the use of my own voice. Until White's verse appeared in Another Song Another Season when I was thirty-five such verse did not exist for me. I also think his poetry is underestimated by the wider Bahá'í community and so, in part, this study is an exercise in establishing a balance and bringing into greater light a writer who speaks with particular directness or exaction to our present age. In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, when it is more than reverie or an indifferent appetite born of boredom, reading is a mode of action.^[3] We engage its presence and allow it to enter our inmost consciousness, imaginations and desires. White passed away just a few years ago but, for some, he is still alive and well. He is alive in his style, a style which involves having the 'proper words in their proper places,'^[4] as Coleridge once wrote, having a certain rhythm and voice and a certain aesthetic which Panofsky defines as an abandonment to the objects or ideas being perceived.^[5] He is alive, too, to the generation that emerged in the sixties, that had worked hard at defining itself but often inarticulately. White helped that generation and others along on the long road to being articulate, to finding words for the immense complexity of existence. Perhaps, then, this essay, this exploration of White's first major book of poetry, will help to enlarge public literary taste, produce a finer discrimination and flesh out what often becomes a mere impressionism. For a simplistic chatter about personal likes and dislikes, when rampant, can be fatal to any critical appreciation of poetry or literature in general and in relation to White's total oeuvre in particular.^[6]

I trust that new readers can come to sense the intelligence behind this remarkable poetry and old readers, who have not really given White the full study he deserves, can come to see him anew. Many read Shakespeare, Gibbon, Toynbee, indeed many of the great writers of history and do not come away enriched. That is not the fault of the writers. The meanings and the relations between words are the outcomes, in the final analysis, of the genuinely creative activities of the individuals reading those words at a given time in history, in a given set of historical and personal circumstances. The reader, the individual, is the sole bearer of meaningful interpretation. The combustion takes place within readers who read White's work in a meditative way. Once the poet has written, only the reader can give the poem meaning. The discipline required by the reader is as great as the discipline that was required of White to write the poetry in the first place. Just as the poetic idea provides the generative kernel of a poem for White, so does the reader have to find some equivalent generative kernel, either easily and quickly as is the case in some of White's poems, or slowly and tortuously as in others. For, as Edwin Muir puts it in his discussion of the analytical intellect in relation to poetry, "no matter how brilliant an analysis of a poem, that is not enough, and that is not even relevant....This is not what poetry was made for." The mystery of the poem is in the readers; the poem is not 'a problem to be solved.'^[7]

Poetry is not an answer book. If the reality of man is his thought, then the reality of Roger White is his poetry, for his poetry is his thought. The qualities of mind and of literary excellence which appear prominently and consistently in his poetry, these are White's endowments, these are the revelations of his powers. But White was incredulous about reading his life and personal character out of his poems. To him, the two were quite separate. Both life and poetry are an endless succession of engagements with people who are only partly explainable and with an experience which is only partly understandable. With White there is a rich coherence, a complex embedded comment and the cumulative effect of this comment is to predispose the reader in favour of a particular interpretation of self and society. Behind the facts of history and of his life, White is conscious of a swarming mass of causes on which he can turn his poetic microscope. This sensitivity to minute causality produces a sense of amazement at the road both he and others have travelled on, a sense of the difficulty, the toil, with which performance struggles after ideal and a sense that much of the massive facts of our lives and of history are just too immense for our intellect.

But he strives. What Samuel Johnson wrote about the poet Alexander Pope could have been written about White, although White would probably be embarrassed to acknowledge its truth. But now that he has left this mortal coil we can more comfortably pour all the encomium we want onto White's shoulders. "A mind active, ambitious and adventurous, always investigating," wrote Johnson, "always aspiring; in its wildest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do."^[8] There is little doubt that readers of White see the results of a vigorous mind on a large landscape, an immense canvas, a panorama that consists of the first century and a half of the history of what Bahá'ís believed to be the emerging
world religion of the coming millennium. White enlarges the boundaries of the understanding and conquers new intellectual regions, of the Faith many of his readers have become associated with. He leads them back to their lives and their experience, after a journey through his particular experience and what, for me, are often quite exquisite intellectual pathways. Poetry can not be expected to accomplish anything more.

Writing in an age when religious controversy is conducted with violent bitterness and for millions often with disinterest and indifference, White quietly describes his own way of life, his modus vivendi, his religious ethos, without trying to put those who differ from him in the wrong. He takes his many stands firmly, grounded as they are in the Bahá'í writings, its history and teachings. The metaphorical character of his language springs, in part, from his constant tendency to harmonize contraries, to co-ordinate polarities, to find commonality in divergence, to express a fluid and functional unity rather than a fixed and irrevocable one. His vital poetic norms move from equivalence and reciprocity to identity and fixed agreement. His poetry was his invitation to others and always it was with an awareness of the interdependence of diverse points of view rather than the totality of a single vision.

White does not always pass a verdict on every issue he takes up. He views his evidence from many standpoints. He opens up questions, looks at things from many angles, opens up imagination's active window to enlarge the narrow circle of our days. His questions become a form of answer, which itself contains the seeds of another question. But, however complex the questions and however difficult the road, the journey and history's maze, he suggests to the reader a perspective, a direction. However awkward and tangled the reality of the material he deals with, he does not soften it by impoverishing the facts or discounting them. In White's hand the power of the past to elude the net of language must struggle with White's subtle strength and humour. The immensity and wonder of the century and a half of history, perhaps the most awful scenes in the history of man's religious experience, White deals with in lively images and with a commitment to his own narrative voice. He stocks his mind with fresh and original impressions from a storehouse of an inexhaustible variety. For it is his view that all of reality exists for our training, all of nature is itself "a dispensation of Providence."^[9] The critic's function, my function in writing this book, is to interpret White's work in light of all that I know and to struggle, as best I can, to understand his work in terms of literature as a whole, the religion he seeks to examine and the society within which both that literature and that religion operate.

The first book of his poetry was Another Song Another Season published in 1979. For many thousands of Bahá'ís this book 'rocketed White to astonish,'^[10] as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas described the effect his own poetry had four decades before. And White would astonish again and again in his last dozen or so years with book after book of poetry, from the age of fifty to sixty three. It was not the power of incantation, the rolling vigor of a voice or its melodic subtlety, the overwhelming lyric purity which characterized Thomas' work and style--and made him the most persausive reader of his day, the most famous poet on radio. It was the power of insight into the nature and reality of the Bahá'í Faith, its history and teachings. It was the vigorous intellect, the superb turn of phrase, a simplicity and complexity all rolled into one, a vein of humour and delight that appealed to high brow and low brow, indeed all brows, that made White a household name through parts of the Bahá'í world. White was part of that movement in poetry whose aim and whose effort was to bring poetry closer to the people, not through a watering down due to an apparent public disregard for poetry, but through a belief that poetry had something of vital importance to offer society and its several, its many communities.

Another Song Another Season gave to the Bahá'í community its first book of poetry written in a contemporary idiom. In the words of David Hofman, who wrote the introduction, the book was written in modes of common speech and everyday concepts, although it does rise occasionally to a certain grandeur especially with the aid of metaphor which White seems to take a special pleasure in using. His poetic style had been worked out in the three decades before Another Song Another Season was published. "All a writer's qualities," wrote Lionel Trilling about the same time White put his first poem on paper, "have their truest existence, in his style."^[11] It was a style especially suited to Bahá'ís. White became, consequently and quickly, a possession. He was our first Bahá'í poet, up-to-date with living and breathing colloquialisms. It was Eunice Brown's view, expressed among the several testimonials on the back cover, that White's poetry was not obscure.^[12] It could be read and enjoyed even by those who previously had got little or nothing out of poetry. This was because White translated the experience of Bahá'ís into words, perhaps for many for the first time. Perhaps, too, some of the pleasure readers derived from his poetry was their sense that White's writing, as the poet Samuel Johnson once wrote, 'reposed on the stability of truth.'^[13] There is little doubt that part of White's motivation in writing poetry, as is the case with many a poet,^[14] was a desire to help people live their lives and understand the world they lived in. Undoubtedly, some of the pleasures readers derived was White's success in achieving these goals.

But for many it was necessary that they read White again and again, far more carefully than his humorous and often simple lines initially implied. For often his lines were dense with meaning and the ore just could not be extracted in a once-over-lightly reading. Sadly, as another poet, Alexander Pope, noted three hundred years ago, readers "care not to study or to anatomize a poem but only to read it for their entertainment."^[15] If these readers were to get more understanding of the Bahá'í Faith from reading White's poetry than they could from many hours of patient study of other Bahá'í texts, as Marzieh Gail suggested they could,^[16] they would require the patience to persist through difficult passages, the same patience that is required when working though a play or sonnet of Shakespeare. As one literary critic put it, readers need to keep their knowledge "in a servile relation"^[17] to their human response to what White's poetry was saying. Otherwise they would often simply miss out on White's sometimes secular, sometimes sacred, urbane, deeply touching and exhilarating voice with its quick changes of pace and tone, its blend of vigorous thought with subtle emotion, its tough reasonableness beneath a lyric grace. They will miss out on White's true greatness: his power to tell the truth.

Often the distinguished, the genuine, in art, in poetry, is uncommon and not accessible to the many. It is different; it must be different and so, in the process, provokes some hostility or simple incomprehension in the many. Over time the social, the intellectual, response to the received material is often softened and what was initially a puzzled lack of understanding becomes enjoyment without the effort, the demand, that initially turned the student off. Some of White's first poems puzzled and exasperated readers. They either did not appreciate his humour or simply did not understand what he was saying due to the demands he made on his readers' literary capacities. Much of the poetry in the twentieth century was difficult for readers. Indeed, a certain obscurity is one of the hallmarks of the entire tradition of poetry going back to Chaucer in the fourteenth century.

It has been more than two decades since White began to become somewhat of a household name in many communities of the Bahá'í world. Perhaps that first decade, 1979 to 1989 was White's peak season. With a business and a private address for all these years at: C/-The Bahá'í World Centre, PO Box 155, Haifa Israel, 31 001 many Bahá'ís who bought his poetry felt quite at home with White. And many Bahá'ís around the world wrote to express their appreciation to him for his poetry. And now, in this small volume, I seek to express my appreciation of White by examining his perceptions, his wisdoms, and seeking to understand their contemporary relevance.

"Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian,"^[18] wrote the famous nineteenth century biographer Lytton Strachey. For it is ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, selects and omits with a placcid perfection. It is the beginning of a method. It is crucial, especially for the Bahá'í with pretensions, deserved or undeserved, to knowing a great deal about his or her Faith. Often, I think, a poem of White's is lost on a reader because the reader feels he already knows about the subject at hand and, therefore, could not learn anything more. Ignorance is bliss, to express the starting point in relation to White colloquially. Readers must also be aware of another warning of Strachey, namely, that "human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past."^[19] This applies to obscure as well as eminent lives. White makes the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. He brings a genuine breath of fresh air into so much of Bahá'í history, its philosophy and its teachings. He often takes what is quite obscure in a life from the exigencies and details of history to give us insight into what Henry James called the "truth of private experience."^[20]

Like Wordsworth's first and very successful decade, 1798 to 1808, White's first years in the public eye brought an enthusiastic response. His fame rose quickly. Unlike Wordsworth who lived another forty two years after that first decade, White would be gone four years after that first decade of renown. He could not refine his style in his years of late adulthood and old age because he left this earth just as the years of late adulthood(60-80) arrived. He passed away at 63. Perhaps the refining of his style was done in the years before 1979, in the three previous decades with its several chapbooks and life's steep learning curves.

As White himself put it, referring to Another Song Another Season "the Bahá'í community was ready for a book of this sort when it appeared and someone or other had to write it; I drew the card."^[21] I am reminded of the poet William Carlos Williams' words in relation to his famous poem Paterson. He wrote that it was a poem "crying to be written; the time demands it."^[22] The Bahá'í community in 1979 was just beginning to emerge from an obscurity that had enshrouded its history. White happened along somewhat serendipitously at the same time as the Iranian revolution was giving the Bahá'ís a media profile they had not enjoyed since the previous religious persecution in the mid-1950s. White provided somewhat of a seriously unserious note for a dozen years or so. It was timely that the Bahá'ís should have a poet. With the great number of new books that had come into Bahá'í book shops in the years since the beginning of the Ten Year Crusade when this new Faith was taken around the world, there was little that was poetic in a modern idiom, little that was light. White fitted into a high seriousness, but he also brought something new, a Voltairian irreverence. He also brought a certain erudition but, for the most part, he avoided its display in his poetry. His poetry was not tortuous, did not possess a harsh complexity in his phrasing or in the subtlety or vigour of his thought. His lively poetic intelligence was within the reach of an educated reader. But he made his readers work.

Like all good poets White conveyed much more than his poems dealt with explicitly. Yes, there was a Voltairean irreverence in his work. Some, like those who reacted to the visually eccentric poetry of e.e. cummings back in the 1920s, were not able to cope with White's revulsion of the meretricious, the sanctimonious and the pi.^[23] Hofman's reaction to White's words as far back as 1978 was apt: "his poetry was spiritual and religious but not didactic and obscure." The influence of the Bahá'í Writings on White's work cannot be measured by an accurate notation of their echoes, by a quantification of Bahá'í themes, in his poems. Rather this influence can be deduced from the ease with which White embarks upon his frequent colloquy with his Lord. The tenderness and the playfulness, though, are all White.^[24] He packs a lot in, too; many ideas often exist within a small compass. The subtlety with which he often makes transitions from one aspect of the subject to another and the sureness of his emotional control, are in some ways just aspects of his wit, his clever use of language and his alert intelligence dealing as it does with poignant and complex issues.

Perhaps the first quality of White's poetry that deserves to be emphasized is the sense of liberation, happiness, delight and joy. There is a comic faith which runs like a golden seam of intensity suffusing the body of his poetry. White continues a tradition which began, perhaps as far back as Aristophanes in the fifth century BC or some of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. White's criticism, his activism, though trenchant, is not a vociferous demand for aggressive assertion. White's voice is tempered with his own compassionate tolerance and a knowledge that arose out of study, his own vulnerability and weakness. The voice of the intellect is, as Freud once put it, a soft one. But, however soft, White uses his intellect to make his readers work, as I've said above. There is a quiet and relentless scrutiny of his motives and, by implication, his readers'. Perhaps this is inevitable in verse with a high religious content. There is an emotional honesty which strengthens the fabric of his poetry and it is often expressed in everyday language.

There are so many examples to choose from in this first major volume of his poetry to illustrate some of the things I am saying. Some poetry critics choose to quote an author, a poet, extensively in their essays; some hardly at all. I shall choose a middle path and leave it to readers to go to White on their own, hopefully encouraged by what I write here. For many readers White's poems need no comment at all; they establish a basic correspondence between writer and reader; they do not require the trappings of explanation. Other poems, on the other hand, will need rather more than I could ever give. Between these two extremes readers will find my reactions to the sound of the new voice I heard in White nearly twenty-five years ago now.

One poem well known to White fans, which I have selected somewhat at random, is called The Pioneer.25 There is a humorous vein running all the way through its more than three pages. To Bahá'ís, who see teaching the Cause as the dominating passion of their lives, their role as pioneers is described with lightness, delight, joy and that comic faith I mentioned above. Often, of course, that is not how Bahá'ís actually experience the process of teaching; often it acts as a weight in a secularized, pluralistic society whose members are either little interested in religion or already are committed to one of many others. White does not sing one note, one light and humorous song, or the poem would lose its impact. If he did the poem would be little more than a joke to add to the already endless pile occupying the social scene. There is seriousness in this poem The Pioneer, a high seriousness. The poem ends on a very serious note. After many light phrases that lift the reader into lighthearted and cheery territory, the reader is left contemplating the profundity of the exercise of 'teaching the faith.'

The moment is selected.
You will not see all heaven's angels,
all ancient good,
the very weight of history
rush to her support as she gathers breath
.........
Have you heard the message of Bahá'u'lláh?
nor will you know that God Himself
through all worlds
gives ear to your reply

I tell you, she is dangerous!

You will not see any of this-the angels and the weight of history-but the irony is that this is just what happens from a Bahá'í perspective. White continues a religious tradition begun by Erasmus, Swift, Rabelais and Sterne, four ordained clerics who belong to the congregation of satirists, the literary world of the comic imagination.^[26] He presents human life in the context of drama and mirth, among other contexts. This context of the dramatic and comic deals with suffering, in some ways, more effectively than the tragic. The comic takes away from tragedy its dominance, its often dangerous romantic grandeur. In seeking temporary pleasure, what might be described as the tragi-comic transcends the tragic. White does this again and again. Humour for centuries was associated with the devil,^[27] with the sinful nature of humanity. Gradually over recent centuries it has come to be seen as part of his blessedness. Humour for White is a very disarming form of seriousness itself.28 For White the humorous provides diversion from the serious; a gentle irreverence provides balance. White apotheosises language. He grins like the satirist and loiters like Socrates. Plato knew he was dangerous and would not allow him into his utopian Republic in the fifth century BC.

The following poem, The Appointment,^[29] is not humorous, but its idiom, its tone and flavour convey a lightness of touch, of thought. It possesses a seriously unserious style, an apparent colloquialism, a language of simplicity which runs through six pages. Running through these short poetic lines, the force, the strength of the words comes from the slow build-up of simple ideas. The reader is slowly caught up with a philosophical idea, an historical experience, of some detail and significance. The reader is given, if he persists, a new perception, a fresh insight, into the past, into himself. He comes, in the end, to make more sense of life, his life. An event in history, the building of the temple in Chicago, is given a whole new meaning. the familiar is made unfamiliar; the unfamiliar is made familiar.

White touches us with his vision and his understanding. He touches us frequently and we feel the texture of his touch, although we may not know the detailed architecture of his vision. But the more we read his poetry the more familiar we become with the particular choreography of his vision, his mise en scene. Unlike T.S. Eliot's immense poetic panorama of futility and anarchy, White's poetic panorama stretches before the reader the possibilities in existence that are based on a potentially integrated human being and a world view that is sensitive to the problematic nature of our age and the need of affirming a unified vision of life for all men.

In all his sketches and portraits of martyrs, pioneers and ordinary people White reveals a tender world, a world born of wisdom and sympathetic understanding. His words half conceal and half reveal the soul, as Tennyson once put it. His words also rescue the life, the situation, under examination from the abstraction of myth and the complexity of history. The brittleness and fragility of of history and civilization as well as its polish and gloss are part and parcel of White's poetry so that the reader can reach out, touch it, bring it back from what might have been its rusty home in memory, or know it for the first time.

Fujita With Pilgrims is one such poem which has been analysed by literary critics before.^[30] It illustrates what I am saying here about White's historical pieces so very well. It's not that we learn something about Fujita who may have lingered obscurely for us in a place in our own interpretive schema of history, rather it's that we learn something about particular virtues that help us understand life. Fujita made 'Abdu'l-Bahá laugh; such is the focus of the first stanza. The gift of being able to make someone else laugh is a treasure that, in some of life's contexts, is just about priceless. The priceless value, too, of loneliness and isolation White brings to our minds in the second stanza:

Acquitted of triviality by a pain and loneliness
that might instruct us,
rescued a halo's-breadth from isolating sainthood
by an exonerating intolerance and his need for us
but still a holy man.

These few lines need unpacking. If you read them quickly you're likely to miss the point or points. A lot of White's poetry is like this. There are many meanings in many of his poems. Each reader reads his own soul's meanings. Often, too, a reader grasps a poem of White's without realizing how much they hold in their hand. 'A book on a page,' I often think, is what White gives us in some of his poems. Fugita With Pilgrims is such a poem and each time you come to it you take away a new depth. White's poetry needs to be kept at arm's reach and not gathering dust on your shelf after a quick flick. He needs to be tasted over and over again for his pithy and many layered poetry.

It's not so much that Fujita was lonely and isolated from much of human society, that 'fact of history' could be debated, but what is the relevance of this loneliness--assuming that he was? Its relevance(one could argue) is that, if we too want to join the short line of saints, we might also have to endure loneliness and pain. Along that path to sainthood, we, too, may develop an intolerance of others and a paradoxical need for their company. Is this too high a price for sainthood, one might ask? These lines are a good example of how White packs a great deal into a short space. They are a good example of the necessity on the part of readers to study White's words closely. In the end you often find yourself questioning your own interpretation of a poem, wondering at the mystery it contains. I'm only suggesting, here, some lines of inquiry into this poem.

White captures something of the essence of this first Japanese believer, this

mikado of mirth
the Servant's servant

And we, having examined Fujita, are left standing....

disconsolately tracing our distance from the goal,
churning the weightless air
with our questions and our words,
our endless words.
Someone asks: Did you take his picture?

It is easy to miss the point in this mixture of delicacy and directness. Fujita reminds the poet, and hopefully the reader should he need reminding, of the poet's distance from his spiritual goal in life. The poet is left churning the air with his words. The image is graphic and profound in its own right. The poet has taken a snapshot, a long exposure, of the outer personality and inner soul of Fujita by means of his poetic shaping. The tourists in the group may have forgotten to take Fujita's photograph and, however accurate the poet's analysis of Fujita, he and his readers are still left "churning the weightless air" with their questions and their words. For, in the last analysis, we are all left with our endless words in the face of so many of life's mysteries.

I could continue the analysis here. For White says a great deal in a few words. Reading quickly is for most of us the norm and to savour words, to read a passage several times goes against our grain. But often this is what we must do if we are to truly appreciate White's poetry, indeed a great deal of poetry written over the ages, including much of the Revelation that inspired White in his lifetime.

White wrote imaginative portraits like the one above partly as dialogue of his own mind with various people who stood out in Bahá'í history, partly as ironic detachment, partly as studied dispassionateness and partly as a flirtation with ideas and the meaning of life and history. In the process, a character, a person, was created, disclosing to his readers a new capacity for knowing themselves. White takes us deep into history at many of its points. His poems become moral and psychological instruments of communication. His poetry is often simpler than God passes by, slimer and apparently easier to read than Nabil's Narrative. White is light, but you've got to do some digging if you want to get to the roots of what he is on about. What might occupy anywhere from several pages to a whole book of history, White deftly deals with on a page, in a poem. And many of White's readers learn more about that history, often, in that page.

The Bahá'í community had gone from 69,000 localities at the start of the Five Year Plan in 1974 to 96,000 localities at that Plan's end in 1979. There had been a massive expansion of the Bahá'í community in the quarter-century ending in 1979 from perhaps two-hundred thousand believers to about three million. White had arrived on the scene with his Another Song Another Season at a timely juncture. White's critical dialectic, his delicate and gentle but provocative and witty words suggested a direction for dialogue for the decades ahead. White was, perhaps, a mid-wife of an idea whose time had come. He provided an imaginative interpretation of Bahá'u'lláh's vision as it applied to living in today's world. He was more than a popularizer. His deceptively easy, sometimes acutely complex, passages of poetry sometimes require a dictionary to deal with his wordy wonders. White is a subtle quotient.

History and experience cry out to be recognized and understood as they spread out in their burgeoning, anarchic and often heart-breaking confusion before us. White helps us in this process, taking us a step toward understanding the metaphorical nature of physical reality, toward seeing the fragments of the past, of history and of everyday life, as part of a whole. Such an exercise requires a conscious effort of the mind and of the imagination on White's part and on ours in the rag-and-bone shop of everyday life. And we do not always win. Poetry, reading, much that is life, cannot be communicated easily, if at all, inspite of our efforts. We often lose. White is no facile optimist who believes you can do anything you want as long as you believe and persist long enough. Our love, White writes in Songs of Separation,31

..................will pass unnoticed into time
And history not record our name or cause,
Nor future lovers weep to read this rhyme,
The hastening crowd not give it thought or pause;
Yet must I write these lines for my heart's ease.

White does not leave it here, however down-to-earth, however realistic, however much these words are an accurate statement of human experience. More needs to be said. Perhaps White is writing of someone's love, his lover, his former wife, the world. Several lines later in that same poem he is writing

Had I but known that exile were the toll
Still would I offer that committed kiss,
Release you then to God for His Own role
Though death itself were paler deed than this.
In banishment, I learn that this is true:
I gave Him all, thus gives He ever you.

This optimistic-pessimistic-realistic note is, though, not the last word in this difficult poem. In the last stanza White writes, after expressing his wish that life was simpler and sweeter,

......................................................................but we
Are wrenched, torn, flung as unremembered leaves
Driven in doleful patterns the wind weaves.
Glad days are gone. A bastion given each
The long nightwatch begins.

We are back in the battleground of life, if we ever really left it, as the poem comes to an end. The poet awakens "from fitful dreams" in "choking screams." Whoever it is that is his love, she or it is "beyond the reach" of his "caress and comfort." She or it dies and the poet can do nothing. Is this love part of that 'vapour in the desert which the thirsty dreams to be water?' Is it part of life's 'mere illusion?' However illusory life may be, however much it was a prelude to a fuller existence, White does not underestimate the worth, the value, the importance of this earthly life.

In another poem that honestly admits to human incapacity, to human inadequacy, Suppliant Bahji,32 White writes:

Is this then all there is, a simple garden,
And a silence that displaces need for words?
What portent in the blood-red poppy?
What message in the music of the birds?

The hero's heart is hoisted on the Cypress,
the saint's is softly folded as a rose:
But mine is shattered here among the pebbles
On the only path the fainting coward knows.

Perhaps the note here is humility combined with a sense of awe. One is reminded of the words of the mystic Thomas a Kempis that you should consider none so frail as yourself, or the words of Shakespeare in the last lines of his play The Tempest.

My ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer
Which pierces as it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.^[33]

I have tried, throughout this essay and the ones following, to get behind White's poetry, to suggest the world that exists within the content of particular poems and White's poems in general and to point toward some underlying principle or principles. In so doing I have tried, as Samuel Johnson tried, "not to oversimplify what is complicated but to be faithful to the complex richness and variety"^[34] of the poet's mind. As White himself was to write several years later, "Attempting to apply a divine principle is usually a creative and dangerous act...one of those 'iffy things'.'^[35] There is nothing so complex as a principle. I have tried, too, to suggest how readers might come to know White intimately as a friend. Knowing him it is impossible not to love him. But I have my doubts, as Wordsworth did, about the value of literary criticism compared to the kind of inventive lines one finds in poetry, especially White's poetry and especially if one is in the game of trying to induce love of the poet.

"Original composition," said Wordsworth speaking of poetry, does "infinitely less mischief."^[36] Let us hope there is little mischief here. Perhaps I should have stuck with writing poetry which I have come to enjoy in the last decade. Readers will certainly find little overt criticism of White's work in these essays. I do not have that view of White, for example, which Arnold had of Wordsworth even though he loved and admired Wordsworth, namely, that Wordsworth's poetry would have been richer, more complete and varied if Wordsworth had read more books. Some of White's creative power comes from his being in the right place at the right time, when there were the materials and the basis for the emergence of a Bahá'í consciousness in world literature. Like Athens in the mid to late fifth century BC, the mid to late twentieth century provided the milieux provided the glow of life and thought for world literature to make its first major strides. White happened to be there at the start. It was not the start of democracy, or the breakdown of the architecture of the Middle Ages and the first stirrings of modern science, that led to the literature of Sophocles or of Shakespeare, it was the start of a world literature and the first imprint of a new, a democratic theocracy, a vision with the future in its bones, that had just stuck its head above the ground and enshrined that priceless jewel, the world civilization, of which this infant Faith White had joined was "the sole begetter."^[37] White was well read, but not the scholar or academic, not the serious student with that rich, deep and varied reading behind him that Arnold would have liked Wordsworth to possess. But for me that is not important; indeed, I think, like Shakespeare, White is better for the freshness and spontaneity he brings to ideas, to his poetry, and the absense of an erudition.

We all see White through the prism of our own experience, perception and knowledge. For me, White provides a strong, a solid, antidote or counterweight to so much of the superficial thinking that drifts over the intersticies of our existence, from the power of positive thinking to astrology, from the occult to a vague emphasis on intuition, from so many of the superficialities of pop psychology and media hype. White's interpretive schema, his view, his vision of this emerging new religion on this planet accords with my experience and my views. We like people who see things the way we do. It's natural. He also gives me so much more, so many fresh insights into my own life, my religion and the complex realities of the world.

Another Song Another Season is divided into six parts. The classification or sectional names for the parts are ingenious, suggestive and provide a useful organizing principle for the poetry in the book: portrayals, lines from a Persian notebook, songs and sonnets, the confused muse, a twist of lemon. The division is natural, not artificial, as poetic categories often are in books of poetry. White was to use this method in all his books of poetry, except his last, his The Language of There. In Another Song there are fifty-nine poems, four letter sketches and ten pages of notes and bibliography; together they fill some 180 pages. They are dedicated to White's parents. The pattern of introducing both individual sections and poems with quotations from the Bahá'í literary corpus and the writing of famous and not-so-famous people is established in this first major book of White's poetry. It was a pattern that would remain with all White's volumes of poetry. The cover of the book looks like somewhere in northern Ontario. It reminds Canadians that White is one of them. White, indeed, was "the Canadian who lives here,"^[38] here being, of course, Haifa. And White was able, perhaps due to the imparting of some expansion and sensation to his mind, some heightened consciousness, to experience propitious poetic moments while in Haifa. He had been there for eight years by the time Another Song was published. Unquestionably many of his insights were associated with developments on Mt. Carmel and the very atmosphere of the place. Inevitably, too, what animated the mass of his knowledge was a bright and active imagination. Another Song was his first major poetic result. White was fifty.

White had been away from Canada for thirteen years by the time Another Song Another Season was published. He had been "precipitated into homesickness" many times. "Images of northness, seasonality, spaciousness, magnificence, extravagant teeming abundance," still supported his reality in "the relentless Hebrew sun" with its "unalleviated glare."^[39] But one does not get that sense, so common in twentieth century poets, especially those who left their homeland, of White the outsider. He became accepted, not only by the Bahá'í community in Haifa but by a community of poets in Haifa that he belonged to and academics that he had some association with.^[40] If leaving Canada was a sacrifice, and there is no strong evidence that it was, the experience, it would appear, nourished rather than inhibited his creativity. He gained a great deal, so much that he could not have found in Canada had he stayed there.

Herbert Read, in his analysis of the poetry of Wordsworth, argues that the highest quality of poetry escapes analysis. It is, he goes on, an intangible essence, a synthetic occasion.^[41] This is true of the best of White. But White's best has become for many what Wordsworth became for the young John Stuart Mill as he expressed it in 1828,

"a medicine for my state of mind....not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty...the very culture of feeling.....a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings....poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his did.^[42] White's poetry is also for many what English poetry was to Voltaire, the treatment of moral ideas "with more energy and depth"^[43] than other nations and poets and a powerful and profound application of ideas to life.

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chapter 6

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chapter 8