[Mark Allinson]

Interesting, this lack of response to your thread, Philip.

Is it possible that the ecstatic voice is a little embarrassing for some of us? A little too earnest for our tastes?

The dominant tone today seems to be one of reserved irony. Or as Edna Millay says in Sonnet clxv:

It is fashion now to wave aside
As tedious, obvious, vacuous, trivial, trite,
All things which do not tickle, tease, excite
To some subversion, or in verbiage hide
Intent, or mock, or with hot sauce provide
A dish to prick the thickened appetite;
Straightforwardness is wrong, evasion right;
It is correct, de riguere, to deride.

So when we see a blast of pure ecstatic emotion, we feel embarrassed by such a display.

I don't. I love the ecstatic mode.

Like this passage from Whitman, on his responses to music:

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)
I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music - this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent
waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of
death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

============

The ecstatic mode involves the self beyond itself (ex-stasis) - a transcendence through powerful emotion. The poetry of Mysticism is full of ecstasies, such as in St. John of the Cross.

Does the ecstatic mode embarrass us today?