MYSTICISM AND POETRY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 70, 23 March 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

MYSTICISM AND POETRY.

STUDY AND EXPERIENCE. It is impossible in an ordinary review to do justice to the depths of learning and spirituality in the Rev. Dr. Allen Brockington's " Mysticism and Poetry " (Chapman and Hall). One can only indicate its contents, and recommend it to those who care for such studies and experiences. Dr. Brockington writes in the light of experience from the day when his father read to him, as a small boy, Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner," to the time when, forty years later, he stood by the- bed of a dying woman, and saw her ravaged face take on an infinite beauty. He thought: "This is what shewas meant to be. This is what she really isi" The book is a study of the mystical element in poetry, but it is n. good -deal else. It reaches back to Plato and Plotinus, and discusses St. Joan; it is a "book that Dean Inge would thoroughly appreciate. And the author bad profound experiences after the death of his son in the war. He saw visions, heard guiding voices, and was moved to write without labour find in a condition of intense vitality. With the.se went a sensibility sometimes "extremely painful" and sometimes "strangely glorious." Human distress α-ppalled him, but changes in the appearances of trees, a child playing with a doll, a woman talking to her infant, a man greeting his wife —a thousand commonplace, minute things of this kind set his heart dancing.

" These things seemed to have a value of eternal gladness. It was more than 'seemed'; I knew they had."

To this deeply impressive combination of study and experience .Sir Arthur Eddington, F.TC.S., contributes a preface which shows that science can bo warmly sympathetic to mysticism. He recalls the days when Dr. Brockington's teaching of English " meant the transformation of those wearisome School hours devoted to English into a time of joy and revelation." Fortunate indeed ie the man who can write thus of his school-days. " Physical science," says Sir Arthur, who is a Quaker, and therefore educated in mysticism, " is by its own implications led to recognise a

domain of experience beyond its frontiers, but not (o .annex it. All varieties of mysticism represent an escape from the closed world of physics into the open world beyond it and to which it points." ,