Live in the past; await no more
The rush of heaven-sent wings;
Earth still has music left in store
While memory sighs and sings.
[Footnote: Invita Minerva.]
But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her title as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries … beholding apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; shining in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, as in an oyster shell. [Footnote: Phaedrus, 250.]
For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is." [Footnote: Ibid., 249.]
If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See Prince Athanase. For Matthew Arnold's views, see Self Deception.] Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the Ode on Immortality. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in verse of other poets. One writer inquires,
Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes,
Indeed the product of my heart and brain?
[Footnote: Henry Timrod, Sonnet.]
and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul. Another maintains of poetry,
Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after.
[Footnote: Edwin Markham, Poetry. Another recent poem on prenatal
inspiration is The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born (1919), by
Dorothea Laurence Mann.]
Perhaps Alice Meynell's A Song of Derivations is the most natural and unforced of these verses. She muses:
… Mixed with memories not my own
The sweet streams throng into my breast.
Before this life began to be
The happy songs that wake in me
Woke long ago, and far apart.
Heavily on this little heart
Presses this immortality.
This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations. She continues,