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The Elementals

Dreamed between 1953 & '65 by Kathleen Raine


Say I was where in dream I seemed to be
(Since seeming is a mode of being)
And by analogy say a curtain, veil or door,
A mist, a shadow, an image or a world was gone,
And other semblances behind appeared.
Perhaps a seeming behind the real those giant presences,
But seemed reality behind a seeming,
For they were fraught with power, beauty and awe:
The images before those meanings pale.
What seemed, then, was the world behind the world,
But just behind, and through the thinnest surface,
Not uncreated light nor deepest darkness,
But those abiding essences the rocks and hills and mountains
Are to themselves, and not to human sense.
Persons they appeared, but not personified;
Rather rock, hill and crag are aspects worn:
Shape-shifters they are, appear and disappear,
Protean assume their guises and transformations
Each in as many forms as eyes behold.

They received me neither as kindred nor as stranger,
Neither welcome nor unwelcome was I in their world;
But I, an exile from their state and station
Made from the place of meeting and parting where I stood, the sign
Signature and emblem of the human
Condition of conflict, anguish, love and pain and death and joy,

And they in harmony obeyed the Cross
Inscribed in the foundation of their world and mine.
From height to depth, circumference to centre
The primal ray, axis of world's darkness
Through all the planes of being descends into the prison of the rocks
Where elements in tumultuous voices wordless utter their wild credo.

SOURCE: Collected Poems by Kathleen Raine, 2001, p.130-1


LISTS AND LINKS: place-spirits - mountains - Christianity? - mandalas? - shamanic dreams - dream poems - more Kathleen Raine - I hear echoes of Robinson Jeffers as a Shaman & of E.M. Martin's dream of the Four Winds

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