A Relative Examination of the Enchantment of William Blake and Rabindranath Tagore

Exploring Mysticism in the Works of William Blake and Rabindranath Tagore

by Neeraj Vishwakarma*,

- Published in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education, E-ISSN: 2230-7540

Volume 18, Issue No. 2, Mar 2021, Pages 136 - 141 (6)

Published by: Ignited Minds Journals


ABSTRACT

The strands of mysticism can be seen in practically all the romantic artists of the world regardless of the language they write in or the age they live in. In some romantic writers the spiritualist components stay torpid as they care more about different wonders which is of quick worry to them. This paper talks about the idea and impression of mysticism in progress of the occidental writer William Blake and the oriental artist Rabindranath Tagore. Brought into the world in various grounds they appeared to share an otherworldly proclivity. William Blake's works, however to a great extent Biblical in its symbolism, is whole-world destroying in style and degree. In Indian magical idea, Tagore offers a framework wherein the belief in a higher power of the Bhagavad Gita, the transcendentalism of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the mysticism of the Bauls and the philosophical standards of Vaishnavism and Sufism exist in amalgamation.

KEYWORD

Enchantment, William Blake, Rabindranath Tagore, mysticism, romantic artists, spiritualist components, occidental writer, oriental artist, Bhagavad Gita, Vedas

1. INTRODUCTION

Rabindranath Tagore was brought into the world in Calcutta in 1861, child of the Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, who offered gloss to a name previously respected all through India. Concerning the surname, changed recognizably here into Tagore, it is in the first ―Thakur," which implies in a real sense a divine being or a master. He lost his mom when he was as yet a kid, and this misfortune implied an extraordinary arrangement to him. It gave him a particular lament for the mother's adoration, so forcefully severed as far as he can tell ; and further, it tossed him back upon the encouragements to be had in that innocent fellowship with Nature which assisted with filling the single days of his youth. Hear his own record of these years, as given to a companion: " I was forlorn that was the main component of my youth. My dad I saw very sometimes; he was away an extraordinary arrangement, yet his essence swarmed the entire house and was perhaps the most profound impact on my life. Kept accountable for the workers after my mom kicked the bucket, I used to sit, for a long time, before the window and picture to myself what was happening in the external world. From the absolute first time I can recall that I was energetically partial to Nature. Ok, it used to make me distraught with delight when I saw the mists come up in the sky individually. I felt, even in those extremely silly days, that I was encircled with a companion, a friendship, exceptionally extraordinary and extremely close; however I didn't have a clue how to name it. I had quite a surpassing adoration for Nature, I can't advise how to portray it to you ; however Nature was a sort of cherishing buddy consistently j with me, and continually uncovering to me a few/new magnificence." The subsequent period was spent away from urban communities, and started with his marriage at the age of 23. At that point came the subject of confronting reality. His dad, the Maharshi, had planned he should go to the nation to deal with the family home at Shilaida on the banks of the Ganges. Much against his first tendency, he went to his assignment there; however it demonstrated of direct assistance to him in the method of human experience. For there he came into contact with the genuine of the individuals, and recorded, hot from the life, stories and illustrations managing their ordinary issues. There, as well, he thought of a portion of his more prominent plays, among them ―Chitvargada," " Visayan," and ―Raja-o-Rani." His natural environmental factors, and the sort of presence they assisted with shading right now, might be discovered reflected in pages of The Gardener, and in a portion of the accounts laid out or retold in a succeeding section, ―The Tale Teller.‖ This Shilaida period endured in all exactly seventeen years. At that point came a break what he figured out how to view as his Varsha Shesha, or "fall of the year." It was surely the finish of his mid-summer. Passing came and glanced him in the face: he lost first his cherished spouse; at that point, inside a not many months, from utilization, the little girl who had her spot; and afterward his most youthful child. He was almost there, of his 40th year when a man needs to accumulate his own people about him. A difficult situation had come to him very few months

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English artist, painter, and printmaker. Generally unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is currently viewed as an original figure throughout the entire existence of the verse and visual specialties of the Romantic Age. His prophetic verse has been said to shape "what is with respect to its merits the least perused assemblage of verse in the English language". His visual imaginativeness drove one contemporary workmanship pundit to announce him "by a long shot the best craftsman Britain has ever produced". In 2002, Blake was set at number 38 in the BBC's survey of the 100 Greatest Britons. Although he lived in London his whole life aside from three years spent in Felpham he delivered a different and emblematically rich corpus, which held onto the creative mind as "the collection of God", or "Human life itself". Considered frantic by peers for his particular perspectives, Blake is held in high respect by later pundits for his expressiveness and imagination, and for the philosophical and magical inclinations inside his work. His compositions and verse have been portrayed as a feature of the Romantic development and "Pre-Romantic", for its enormous appearance in the eighteenth century. Respectful of the Bible yet unfriendly to the Church of England – in reality, to all types of coordinated religion – Blake was affected by the goals and aspirations of the French and American insurgencies, however later he dismissed a significant number of these convictions he kept an agreeable relationship with Thomas Paine, he was likewise impacted by scholars, for example, Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known impacts, the peculiarity of Blake's work makes him hard to characterize. The nineteenth century researcher William Rossetti described him as a "heavenly luminary," and "a man not hindered by archetypes, or to be classed with peers, or to be supplanted by known or promptly surmisable replacements". Blake was a protester who related with a portion of the main extremist scholars of his day, for example, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In resistance of eighteenth century neoclassical shows, he advantaged creative mind over explanation in the production of the two his verse and pictures, declaring that ideal structures should be developed not from perceptions of nature but rather from internal dreams. He announced in one sonnet, ―I should make a framework or be oppressed by another man's.‖ Works, for example, ―The French Revolution‖ (1791), ―America, a Prophecy‖ (1793), ―Visions of the Daughters of Albion‖ (1793), and ―Europe, a Prophecy‖ (1794) express his resistance to the English government, and to eighteenth century political and social oppression as a rule. Religious oppression is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the composition work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), he ridiculed abusive expert in chapel and state, just as crafted by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish rationalist whose thoughts the many, barely for work'y-day men by any means, rather for youngsters and blessed messengers; himself 'an awesome kid,' whose toys were sun, moon, and stars, the sky and the earth." Yet Blake himself accepted that his compositions were of public significance and that they could be perceived by a larger part of men. A long way from being a confined spiritualist, Blake lived and worked in the overflowing city of London during a period of incredible social and political change that significantly impacted his composition. After the harmony set up in 1762, the British Empire appeared to be secure, yet the tempest wave started with the American Revolution in 1775 and the French Revolution in 1789 changed always the manner men took a gander at their relationship to the state and to the set up chapel. Writer, painter, and etcher, Blake attempted to achieve a change both in the social request and in the psyches of men. The basic sonnets to every arrangement show Blake's double picture of the artist as both a "piper" and a "Minstrel." As man experiences different phases of guiltlessness and involvement with the sonnets, the artist additionally is in various phases of blamelessness and experience. The lovely expressive part of verse is appeared in the job of the "piper" while the more serious prophetic nature of verse is shown by the harsh Bard. In the "Presentation" to Songs of Innocence, Blake presents the writer as a basic shepherd: "Quieting down the valleys wild/Piping songs of lovely joy." The frontispiece shows a youthful shepherd basically dressed and holding a line and it is clear Blake is building up a peaceful world. The "channeling songs" are sonnets of unadulterated delight.

2. TAGORE AS A MYSTIC

Mysticism depends on the idea that God is intrinsic – staying inside all creation. God must be acknowledged; brief looks at God can be had in any sort of otherworldly experience: tasteful, good or strict. The Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) wanted to set up accord or solidarity among people and the creation. Gurudev was sustained on the Upanishads which express insight on the topic of the natural Brahman – the Supreme Reality blessed with all pervading force and energy, rising above appreciation and any sort of depiction. In Indian spiritualist cerebration, Tagore proffers "a framework wherein the belief in a higher power of the Bhagavad Gita, the transcendentalism of the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the mysticism of the Bauls and the philosophical standards of Sufism exist in amalgamation". Moreover, Tagore was persuaded by the enthusiasm of the Bauls – the holy people who praise the Almighty. The Vaishnava writing likewise deeply affected him, where Radha's passionate warmth for Lord Krishna is the insignia of man's interminable yearning for God. He has kept up that a definitive the truth is Brahman and that the limited. Tagore the writer, painter and author's later verse was an otherworldly shocker toward the West in Gitanjali that made him the Nobel Laureate in 1913 a lot of which encodes the certainty of natural harmony for a stylishly supportable life. Tagore encountered the living bit of God's affection in the marvels of Nature. Nature, with its greenery is ontologically one with the person as both man and nature are the appearances of the Absolute soul. Nature's capacity, as per Tagore, is "to confer the tranquility of the interminable to human feelings". Radhakrishnan's declaration (in The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore) that, "Earth is packed with paradise; all presence is suffused with God", clarifies his tendency sonnets. At the core of supernatural awareness is love. Rabindranath believes love to be a recognizing experience – like Donne, he finds in adoration a method of self transcendence from body to soul. He considers love to be an elective name of the delight from which all creatures are conceived, by which they are continued. He needs that all men ought to build up the religion of adoration and kinship for the entire of mankind: ―In love all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only In love are unity and duality not at variance... In love, loss and gain are Harmonized... Love is what brings together and inseparably connects both the Act of abandoning and that of receiving‖ (Tagore, Sadhana 2006:90)

3. WILLIAM BLAKE‟S MYSTIC POETRY

"William Blake is one of the incredible mystics of the world; and he is by a wide margin the best and most significant who has spoken in English. Like Henry More and Wordsworth, he lived in a universe of magnificence, of soul and of vision, which, as far as he might be concerned, was the solitary genuine world. At four years old he saw God glancing in at the window, and from that time until he invited the methodology of death by singing tunes of euphoria which made the rafters ring, he lived in an environment of heavenly illumination." Blake's life and work are an appearance of the truth of a solid association between extraordinary insight accomplished through a condition of extended awareness, and the endowment of creative mind. For the duration of his life Blake analyzed this relationship and appears to have lived to make an interpretation of this mindfulness into words. Blake appeared to have accepted that there was little distinction between his own activity and God's will. Blake was sure about proclaiming himself the instrument of the heavenly. F. E. Spurgeon says:"… he had furthermore a way of thinking, a framework, and a significant plan of the universe uncovered to him predominant effect he has with us that is of his striking, private cognizance of the Divine presence and his mentality of dedication. Blake's mysticism was a mind-boggling individual experience, offering ascend to an extraordinary profound longing to which all the other things should be relinquished. His mystical encounters resembled wings with which he clove through his own haziness. In these encounters, he pointed toward rising above the restrictions of the universe of existence by methods for originations which ought to pass on unceasing realities. He didn't really accept that that God uncovered himself to principled blockheads, nor that He could be drawn nearer through contemplated contention by methods for philosophical suggestions. Interminable realities could grasp simply by "Creative mind increased to vision." Blake was without a doubt a visionary mystic. He saw dreams from his very youth and replicated them in different structures through his creation. He used to have dreams and the embodiment of Blake's mystic encounters can't be analyzed in confinement from his detailed dreams. Blake's dreams unquestionably affected and roused his craft and verse for the duration of his life; however the artist seems to have encountered an inward disclosure, which not just brought about a prompt reclamation of his certainty, yet by implication prompted the making of a portion of his significant work. Blake's creative mind and dreams were an aftereffect of his extrasensory discernments for he accepted the surface five faculties are just probably the most minimal method of correspondence and comprehension of God. The extra-tactile discernment is to see by moving past the faculties and acquiring the solutions for one's questions through some higher medium. For Blake, this medium was Imagination; unadulterated creative mind that to a much degree might have been the reason for his dreams. Furthermore, to have the staff of Imagination created and see dreams, one necessities not a tactile eye but rather an internal eye - the eye that could mirror the truth in genuine viewpoint and could move to the minds the crude material that when assessed by the cerebrum waves gives one the mind that inturn could assist man with understanding the God and Nature around as well as himself as well. Blake's refrains from his prophetic work, Jerusalem are a declaration of the above expressed adaptation of insight. Blake says; ―Trembling I sit day and night, My friends are astonish‘d at me, Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task! To open the eternal worlds,

Into Eternity Ever expanding In the Bosom of God, The Human Imagination As needs be, Blake is of the assessment that constantly, he stays zeroed in on his objective, the objective of accomplishing an illuminated eye, the eye of creative mind and dreams that could see to him beyond what his tactile eye could accumulate of. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon in her book, "Mysticism in English Literature" states:"By "Creative mind" Blake would appear to mean all that we incorporate under compassion, understanding, vision, vision, rather than narcissism, sensible contention, realism and concrete, logical actuality. As far as he might be concerned, Imagination is the one incredible reality; in only it he sees a human staff that contacts both nature and soul, in this way joining them in one. The language of Imagination is Art, for it talks through images so men shut up in their selfhoods are hence ever reminded that nature herself is an image. At the point when this is once completely acknowledged, we are liberated from the daydream forced upon us from without by the apparently fixed truth of outside things. In the event that we think about all material things as images, their interestingness, and thusly their existence, is ceaselessly extending. "I rest not from my incredible undertaking," he cries… …." So, we can say, that it was Blake's internal eye enlightened by the personnel of "Creative mind," that in all actuality made his dreams wide wherein he could see all the material things of nature and even his own-self as images remaining in solidarity. For Blake, typical things had their own an incentive as they went about as signs alluding to the higher facts. As per Maurice Bowra; "Blake was a visionary who accepted that normal things are unsubstantial in them but rich as representative of more prominent real factors." The string of this very Unity basic all the God's creation is something definitive that a mystic comes to see and see accordingly implying towards God's everlasting presence and loftiness. Blake was a mystic of this sort who saw Unity basic all that existed.

4. BLAKE AND TAGORE: MYSTICS WITH A DIFFERENCE

It is clear that the mystical shares something for all intents and purpose with sentimentalism. Their feeling of intrinsic just as a feeling of past brings them near one another. The mystic's dreams pass like glimmers of lightning. The mystics and visionaries are worried about self exploration and their internal quality was not exactly helpful for the projection of reality outside of their own selves. At the end of the day, it is a typical of analysis that the Romantic artists don't show adequate this present reality occasions and can't neglect to extend the self into various selves. We locate the English Romantic artist William Blake and the Bengali Romantic writer Rabindranath Tagore, show proof of this depersonalization and of the ability to accommodate and relate the two universes – the inward universe of thought and the outside universe of activity. The Romantic writers imagined that their errand was to investigate the idea of reality that lies behind the universe of appearances. This they attempted to do through creative mind, understanding, powerful dreams and some other beautiful sensibilities. Verse was to them simply one more intends to show up at an end – a human predetermination where one will find some supernatural request or extreme reality, which holds the universe. That is the reason they believed not in explanation the same number of current writers do, but rather in love and heavenliness of heart, not in the indifferent objectivity, but rather in close to home self projection. This must be anticipated, they thought, either through some focal figures or with images and moral stories or fantasies which will be their representative. Images a lot are viewed as the results of an artist's mystic cycle. Blake just as Tagore accepted that craftsmanship should plan to catch more supreme certainties that must be gotten to by aberrant strategies. Both the artists were extraordinary symbolists. Blake has followed four of his own speculations while concocting his images. The standard of contrastive investigation (in light of the hypothesis: "without contraries there is no movement"); the way toward affecting mystic completeness (Restoration of Unity through Diversity from Unity); the hypothesize that characterizes Imagination as "the Divine body in Everyman" ("God is man and exists in us and we in him"); and the rule and practice of the otherworldly "enlightened printing" have empowered him to make his own framework. Utilizing his own fantasy, his symbology and his framework, he has represented Creator, Imagination, Eden, Hell, Reason, discipline, rule, request, forbearance, parsimony, self, detachment from the Unity. So in the prophetically calamitous works of Blake, we find different curious figures, for example, Urizen, Orc, Los, Enitharmon, Lavah, Theotormon, Oothoon, Elohim, Clytia, Beulah, Zoa and Albion. Thus in the mythic universe of Blake, the artist is the God, who, with the assistance of Spiritual Freedom (Orc), Poetry (Los), Love (Enitharmon), Passion (Luvah) and England (Albion), wins over Evil (Urizen) and his abettors. The triumph of the writer with Urizen spells triumph of adoration (and subsequently likewise of Imagination, Poetry and Art) over the prideful selfhood. So in Blake's image sprangled idyllic world: "Wonderful love casteth out dread". That is the reason, the spirit that loves and incorporates itself with humankind, Nature, society and God mounts the stepping stool of Heaven and rises to the sky of sky. Tagore's language of mystic to a lady is a representative articulation of the rise of life out of issue. Science discloses to us that in the crude phase of earth, there was no life on it. The liquid shakes and stones, expected hundreds of years to chill off. Consequently, the earth needed to hang tight for an extremely lengthy time span before its climate got harmonious for the development of life. Rabindranath, in any case, doesn't acknowledge any principal distinction among life and matter. He feels the entire universe to be supplied with life and awareness. Tagore thought about creative mind as the preeminent and innovative personnel of the psyche. For Blake, the creative mind was the base innovative intensity of the human mind, and when it was working at its most elevated force he called it 'the Divine Vision'. Through it he accepted that man approaches limitlessness and forever, a reality past the appearances of the material world. Blake is a prophet of unitive love and thinks about adoration as the integrative power. It is one of the Blakean dicta that is least controvertible That Man subsists by Brotherhood & Universal Love Not for ourselves but for the Eternal family we live Man liveth not be Self alone, but in his brother‘s face Man shall behold the Eternal Father, and love and joy abound (Jerusalem V.21). Inside the edge of Romantic love, the Blakean love envelops all methods of human fascination. Beulah advances love. Blake's Beulah sonnets, specifically Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, The Crystal Cabinet and Visions of the Daughters of Albion illuminate his hypothesis of unitive love. Love, for Tagore is a method for greatness from body to soul. He accepts love to be the way in to the entryway of the profound and good emotions and is another name of the delight from which all animals are conceived, by which they are supported. Tagore feels love alone is the gathering purpose of the limited and the Infinite: God kisses the finite in His love And man the Infinite. (Stray Birds, No.302, p.50) Both Blake and Tagore were votaries of humanism and painters of rural scenes. William Blake, while monitoring Nature's excellence and concordance, considered Nature to be a piece of the natural world. As per him it is through Nature that people could arrive at the consciousness of their position known to man. He utilizes Nature as a system for his refrains. The scenes and pictures Nature brings out make a symbology which permits the writer to impart his musings and thoughts. "Green wood", snickering "with the voice of satisfaction" and "Mount of Olives" on which one can discover "The strides of the Lamb of the trees and Tagore finds the Love of Lord in the lap of Nature. Individuals, Tagore accepts, are subject to Nature, for their organic requirements, however for the full acknowledgment of their own otherworldliness. The sensation of self-destruction and of complete personality with Nature is the unmistakable trait of Rabindranath as a writer of Nature.

5. CONCLUSION

The connection between the Absolute, endless, self-existent and permanent and the limited human person who is enmeshed in the transient request is incomprehensibly private however hard to characterize and clarify. A top to bottom investigation of crafted by William Blake and Rabindranath Tagore uncovers that their wonderful vision combine despite the vivid uniqueness by contemplating their beautiful workmanship, art and oeuvre, while pushing off the social strains and nationalistic assumptions aside. The most conspicuous subject in their wonderful works is that of mysticism and introspective philosophy. Blake's works, however to a great extent scriptural in its symbolism, is prophetically catastrophic in style and degree. Since Blake's actual home is in vision, through noticeable things he has indicated the imperceptible, nebulous and changeless. Tagore's mysticism is with regards to the aged custom of the incredible holy people and soothsayers of India. Despite the fact that brought into the world in various terrains, they appeared to share an otherworldly partiality. Consequently, it tends to be said that the two of them are extraordinary mystical artists who share the substance yet they vary extraordinarily in the utilization of the mediums and its appearance. Blake super-ordinates Christian qualities to Churchianity and escapes the snare of tight fundamentalism much like the Indian writer Tagore who disposes of the multitude of 'limited homegrown dividers' and petitions God for humanity to be offered with a climate "where the psyche is without dread and the head is held high". The two extraordinary sentimental artists longed for an instinct of the Divinity, of an immediate thought of the Supernatural. They thought about the world and the human spirit as a radiation of the Divinity. Indeed, their verse can be called a spell which conjures the spirit of quiet manifest in human language – the quietness of indisputably the significance past the general possibility of verbal occasions

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Corresponding Author Neeraj Vishwakarma*

Research Scholar, Mansarovar Global University, Sehore (MP)