A Dream Within a Dream (Edgar Allan Poe)

"Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone? 

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand —

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep — while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?"

The desperation of trying to grasp just one grain of golden sand, one meaningful moment of life, to save it from the pitiless waves of a surf-tormented shore, the overwhleming and illimitable passage of time, is an incredibly powerful and relatable image.

Walt Whitman, What is the Grass?

"I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer 

grass....

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any
more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may
see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves"

Walt Whitman's meditation on grass, in his poem Song of Myself, shows the various perspectives one can adopt when viewing something. This kind of perspectivism and open mindedness, this recognition of the multi-dimensional nature of things, is prescient of many developments in society and culture that came after it, such as Quantum Mechanics and Cubism. I also find his use of the word "heiroglyphic" interesting, implying that reality is information or code; this is particularly prescient. Whitman was clearly a deep mystic, who experienced reailty in a raw way.

Full Fathom Five (Sylvia Plath)

Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's coming
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of orgins
Unimaginable. You float near
As kneeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;

You defy godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom's border
Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.

Hope (Emily Dickinson)

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me

If I can stop.. (Emily Dickinson)

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Goethe's Faust

Faust "How uselessly I've laboured to collect
The treasures of the human intellect,
And now I sit and wonder what I've done.
I feel no new strength surging in my soul
I'm not a hairsbreadth taller, I'm not one
Step nearer to the infinite goal"

A significant theme emerging from the first volume of Goethe's Faust is the contrast between a life of study, deep introversion, observation and a life of direct action, involvment, raw emotion. Herman Hesse took this one theme, one contrast, and wrote a brilliant novel centred almost entirely on it, Narcissus and Goldmund.

I feel this theme addresses a fundamental element of human experience. As humans we have constructed complex, complicated cultures; epigenetic worlds. We are able to involve ourselves in these worlds and in some way detach ourselves from the physical, genetic world.

I think some people can involve themselves in an epigenetic world too much and lose connection with raw reality and direct experience. Thus it is understandable that Faust would, after years involvment in this world, want to break away from it. He undertsands that full, deep knowledge doesn't derive entirely from book learning.

Goethe's Faust and the Religious/Atheist Debate

Margareta "Then you don't believe?"

Faust "My sweet beloved child, don't misconceive
My meaning! Who dare say God's name?
Who dares to claim that he believes in God?
And whose heart is so dead
That he has ever boldly said:
No, I do not believe?
Embracing all things,
Holding all things in being,
Does He not hold and keep
You, me, even Himself?
Is not the heavens' great vault up there on high,
And here below, does not the earth stand fast?
Do everlasting stars, gleaming with love,
Not rise above us through the sky?
Are we not here and gazing eye to eye?
Does all this not beseige your mind and heart,
And weave in unseen visibility
All round you its eternal mystery?
Oh, fill your heart right up with all of this,
And when your brimming over with bliss
Of such a feeling, call it what you like!
Call it joy, or your heart, or love, or God!
I have no name for it. The feeling's all there is:
The name's mere noise and smoke - what does it do
But cloud the heavenly radiance?"

This passage sheds interesting light on the religious/atheist debate and to me provides one of the best takes on it.

Goethe was receptive to the awe-inspiring complexity of existence and interpreted his experiences in a subtle way, without succumbing to simplicity and dogmatism. With the purity and clarity of a child he realised and understood the sheer brilliance that things exist "Are we not here and gazing eye to eye?"

Significantly Goethe addresses the limitations of language, in describing the complexity of nature and reality, "the name's mere noise and smoke"

In order to address the multifarious nature of reality and the religious question Goethe writes in paradoxes. "Who dares to claim that he believes... whose heart is so dead that he has ever boldly said: no, I do not believe". The answer to the religious question lies in between two clearly defined, one-dimensional poles. The structure of his poetic language is also paradoxical, "weave in unseen visibility"

More points should, undoubtedly, be added to the religious/atheist debate. Such as the oppression of institutional religion and the point that religious stories or concepts, such as God, represent aspects of the human psyche and can therefore be illuminating.