Today’s Poem: Brahma
“They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again.”
Brahma
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
It was Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) who introduced Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) to Hindu theology, the ancient Sanskrit writings in the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads — in Charles Wilkins’s 1785 English translation, reissued in New York in 1867.
Those dates are important, for there did not exist at the time a large library of secondary sources that might have helped explain Eastern religion, and the truth is that Emerson never really understood what he was reading. He had been drawn to New England Unitarianism as a way to transcend what he thought of as the theological rigidity of orthodox triune Christianity, but he grew in midlife increasingly unhappy with the result. What had felt like a climb up into profundity turned, intellectually, into a tumble down into meaningless goo. The ethics of the Unitarians would not support anything more than a vague feeling of mysticism, and Emerson wanted more.
And for a while in the 1850s, he thought he had found it in the paradoxes of the Vedas. The transcendental must actually transcend, beyond all the apparent dualities we think we perceive: life and death, near and far, light and dark, doubt and faith, heaven and hell. They are not a unity; in the world they are actually divided. But the ultimate transcendent principle must be beyond them.
If this sounds like would-be profundity thinning itself into meaninglessness, that’s probably accurate. But the toe Emerson had dipped into Hinduism gave him a vocabulary and a set of symbols — enough, anyway, for this single endeavor — to give some apparent specification to the sense of something profound. To make a poem, in other words
We must ask ourselves, at some point, why the 19th-century Transcendentalists produced such generally minor poetry. This was, after all, a major literary coterie in a very literary time. But within its own eccentric terms, Emerson’s “Brahma” succeeds as poetry. In four tetrameter quatrains, the poem poses opposites, with the declaration — in the transcendental’s own voice — that the truth lies beyond all such distinctions. (“Brahma,” as the supreme principle, is more usually rendered as “Brahman” in English these days, to avoid confusion with the Hindu god Brahmā, the Creator within the the trinity of gods, alongside Vishnu and Shiva.)
Written in 1856 and published in The Atlantic in 1857, the poem is the best-known fruit of Emerson’s attempt to find a coherent Transcendentalist mysticism: “They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again.”
“to give some apparent specification to the sense of something profound. To make a poem, in other words”
Nifty definition!
"Turn thy back on heaven" is rather tendentious.
Yvor Winters has an answer to the question why the Transcendentalists, and especially Emerson, produced minor poetry: the inheritance of Calvinism.