[William A. Baurle]

My first love was twenty years older than I, and she was passionately into reincarnation. I was in my late twenties, and I did nothing but handwave and poo-pooh when she brought the subject up.

I read a lot of poetry during those years, and I think I understood about 10% of it. Maybe not even that much.

T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets looked and sounded great when I read it for the first time. I don't think I understood a single line. When I took up that work again recently, suddenly it began to make perfect sense to me. Has anyone else had such an experience?

Eliot is just one example. I find a consistent and compelling exploration of the theme of reincarnation in many works, by many major poets, from the classics to the present, so much so that it has formed a pattern. I am starting this thread to find out if that pattern is something I am imagining myself, or if someone else has noticed.

Eliot's Burnt Norton is, for me, one of the greatest expressions in poetry of the idea of reincarnation. (Edwin Arlington Robinson has some doozies, also, as do many other major poets.)

**



The first part:


BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxBut to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxOther echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

*

[Ann Drysdale]

How strange - I was just reading this...

Death is the 'recession of life into the
unknown', not the annihilation of any one
particle, but a retreat of hidden natures to
the same state they were in before ...

from

Anthroposophia theomagica, or, A discourse of the nature of man and his state after death ... by Thomas Vaughan, 1621-1666.

[William A. Baurle]

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.


East Coker is choked with it. I didn't hear him at all when I was a kid. Now he's clear as a bell.

[John Riley]

O God, tell me, O merciful One, in pity, tell a pitiful creature whether my infancy followed yet an earlier age which I spent in my mother's womb? For something of that sort has been suggested to me, and I have myself seen pregnant women. But what, O God, my Joy, preceded that period of life. Was I, indeed, anywhere, or anybody?

-- St. Augustine, Confessions

[Douglas G. Brown]

In the early sixties, Roger Miller's song about reincarnation was popular for a while. Perhaps it's not exactly poetry in the deepest sense; but there are not that many pop tunes on this subject.

Miller had a very distinctive singing style, so it sounds better with his voice than it scans in text. Few of Millers lyrics have been sung by other artists since he died.

Reincarnation

By Roger Miller

If l was a bird and you was a fish
What would we do, l guess we'd wish
For re-incarnation, re-incarnation
Wouldn't it be a sensation
To come back two alike in reincarnation

If l was a tree and you was a flower
What would we do, l guess we'd wait for the power
Of re-incarnation, re-incarnation,
Wouldn't it be a sensation
To come back two alike, in reincarnation

I love you, and don't you know l always will
You're a girl, l'm a boy,
But suppose you were a rose
And l was a whip-poor-will
If l was a bird and you was a fish
What would we do, l guess we'd wish
For re-incarnation, re-incarnation
Wouldn't it be a sensation
To come back two alike, in reincarnation

If l was a tree and you was a flower
What would we do, l guess we'd wait for the power
Of re-incarnation, re-incarnation,
Wouldn't it be a sensation
To come back two alike, in reincarnation


I'm wondering if Ogden Nash did anything on reincarnation ... He wrote a little bit about practically everything, it seems.

[john savoie]

Try Wordsworth:

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/...arly-childhood

[Julie Steiner]

Elise Hempel has a really lovely one in her soon-to-be-released book, Second Rain. I'll ask her if she'll let me quote it here.


Edited to say: Her publisher (Alexander Pepple) just gave me permission, so I'm delighted to be able to share it:


Two Cents Toward My Reincarnation

I hope I'm not a hawk,
hunting alone,
still watchman on a wire
above the highway's drone,
a silent single wingspan
adrift on the wind
in the open afternoon.

I'd rather, please,
be one of these
clamoring geese
passing over now, always
heading somewhere,
a member of a band
in five different keys.

[Gail White]

A favorite quotation from Sir Thomas Browne:

Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ, yet is it in a measure true if I say it of myself, for I was before all creation, that is, in the mind of God, and the decree of that synod held from all eternity. And thus was I at an end before I had a beginning, and died before I was born. Though my grave be in England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.

[john savoie]

Great addition to the conversation, Gail. Thomas Browne is John Donne in prose, and loses nothing in the humbler switch.

[William A. Baurle]

Lots and lots has been written about this famous Frost poem. I can't help but wonder if reincarnation is not what he's talking about in the bit I bolded.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Thanks for that Elise Hempel poem, Julie.

Also, YES, the Intimations Ode is a biggy.

I've got several of Browne's books on Kindle which I've been meaning to get to. Love that quote, Gail.