Homeward by Æ

First published: 1894

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

George William Russell’s pen name was Æ. His first volume of poems appeared during a turbulent moment of Irish history when political turmoil was bound together with religious and cultural strife. In Homeward, Æ attempted, through awakening his readers’ spiritual insights, to bring balm to his strife-torn country.

Throughout the nineteenth century, many in Ireland were trying to change the political status of their country from colony of England to independent nation. Irish representatives argued in the British parliament, and there were mass protests and armed revolts. By the 1890’s, neither political nor military struggles had borne much fruit but they had helped stimulate a strong national cultural current. Writers touched by this current contended that the authentic Celtic roots of Irish life were being buried under superficial British traditions.

At the same time, some proposed religious innovations. In Ireland, religion could not be separated from politics. The British colonists were Protestant and earlier disestablished and, for a period, banned the practice of Catholicism, the religion of the Irish masses. Religious hatreds compounded nationalist fervor to cause occasional fanatical outbreaks of unproductive violence. Writers such as William Butler Yeats and Æ were so put off by this sectarianism that they turned away from Christianity altogether and became attracted to esoteric, orientally influenced faiths.

Æ embraced the new “religion” of Theosophy and, in 1891, moved into a communal household with other converts. He was living in this house when he wrote the poems for his first collection of verse, in which he strove to put his spiritual beliefs into poetic form.

Guided by Indian philosophy, Theosophy involved a belief in the reincarnation of souls. It was thought that in sleep or meditation, each person’s soul could remember former lives or, diving deeper, link up with the grand soul of the universe. Æ is a shortened version of Aeon, the gnostic name for the first men on earth, whose pristine experience, according to Theosophical belief, could be recaptured through proper spiritual exercise and attentiveness. In writing poems about these subjects, Æ was not trying simply to explain the basic doctrines of Theosophy, but, as an Irish nationalist, to show that the primary ideas of the philosophy were contained in ancient Celtic lore. Whereas in prose works such as The Candle of Vision (1918), he worked out connections in a scholarly way, in Homeward he suggests them by showing how mystical epiphanies arise naturally from contact with the Irish countryside.

Far from presenting metaphysics in meter, however, Æ tries in each poem to re-create a moment of vision in which the speaker, through his communing with nature, rises to glimpse a higher realm. The seventy-five-page book contains sixty-seven short lyrics, few more than a page in length. Employing the ballad form, usually with four-line stanzas and rhyme schemes of aabb, abab, or abac, Æ lightly and naturally expounds on a Theosophical concept. The single-mindedness of his endeavor is, in fact, the chief complaint made against his poetry, which, for all its graceful music, is often said to lack variety and contrast. If form and thought throughout the book tend to be monotonous, there is nevertheless a traceable progress in the collection, which charts the history of a speaker who begins mired in Earth’s miseries, moves to a fuller appreciation of the mysteries of nature, and finally finds a metaphysical guide in his own soul.

The first movement places the speaker’s spiritual development within the poverty and unhappy history of Ireland. This situating of Æ’s thought provides a valuable ballast for his higher flights, making it clear that his writing is an attempt to face, not escape from, his condition. In the volume’s second poem, “Recognition,” he imagines a farmer who, “Over fields a slave at morning/ bowed him to the sod.” This man, who, because of his intimacy with nature, should have been most in tune with deeper, spiritual levels, is blind to them most of the time because of the weight of his toil. Æ reveals that it is his own overburdened heart that is driving him to search for a meaning to life. In “The Place of Rest,” for example, he writes that only the sea knows of the wounds that have lacerated his feelings.

The second grouping of poems is especially concerned with elucidating Theosophical doctrines. The sequence of poems: “Dusk,” “Night,” “Dawn,” and “Day,” is an interesting and ironic example of his expositions. The irony resides in the way the contents of the poems reverse what would be expected from a casual perusal of the titles. Common sense would indicate that the sequence represents an upward movement, climaxing with “Day,” when a man or woman’s full powers would be on display.

According to Theosophical premises, however, which hold that the hidden soul speaks with clearest accents in dreams, it is “Night” that forms the apex of the twenty-four-hour round. Then an individual is in contact with other souls and the universe. As Æ puts it, in dreams: “The olden Beauty shines: each thought of me/ Is veined through with its fire.” It is heartbreaking to wake up from such heavenly communion. In “Dawn,” Æ explains, one is “thrown downward” from the happy unconscious watches of the night. In “Day,” the poet evokes images of prisons and darkness to indicate the sense of entrapment that comes when an individual is no longer synchronized with true being. In the sequence’s closing irony, though, Æ mentions the one remaining joy that makes the day livable, that is, the chance that when awake one will remember a fragment of the previous night’s dream.

These four poems are not representative of other poems in this section, which more typically begin with a picture of the Irish countryside. This reflects Æ’s belief that, second to dreams, concourse with nature offers the surest way to rise to Theosophical understanding. In “The Singing Silences,” the poet begins by picturing a still night, with barely visible flowers, more visible constellations, and a thick, soporific mix of perfumes and natural sounds. Relaxed and drowsy, the speaker feels his life running in harmony with nature, but then his thought branches out and he speculates that, perhaps, analogously, the earth and the material universe are harmonized with another, less distinct realm of souls.

In the final set of poems, a spiritual guide often appears, either from without or within the speaker. This guide does not so much offer counsel as become an accompanying presence. In “Three Counsellors,” for example, after the speaker receives instruction from people telling him to retire from life or, alternately, become an activist, he hears from one with a superior recommendation. This “all-seeing” adviser tells him: “Only be thou thyself.” Such an admonition fits the tenor of Theosophical thought, which holds that every person’s soul contains all knowledge. Therefore, it would be more productive for individuals to plumb their own inner depths than to listen to teachers.

Whereas “Three Counsellors” states this message in an uncharacteristically didactic manner, it is presented in a more dramatic form in “The Hermit.” Here, the speaker retires from city life and forms a relation with a mysterious old enchanter, who “Smiles and waves and beckons me.” Although depicted as another person, this enchanter may best be viewed as the spokesman for the speaker’s inner soul. “Alter Ego,” the poem that immediately follows, makes this connection explicit. The piece begins by describing how the narrator is chasing a fairy lover through the forest. Unsuccessful by day, he is able to approach this being in his dreams, thus indicating that the entity is an integral part of himself. It is the anthropomorphic embodiment of the Theosophical self. For the spiritual seeker, being allowed to catch a glimpse of the soul so personified is a step beyond the bare apprehension of principles into the ability to conduct an internal dialogue that will lead to new stages of enlightenment.

The danger with poetry that seeks to teach abstract theories is that it may become stilted and removed from the warmth of communication about more concrete human concerns. Æ largely avoids these dangers. Each of his poems is set up as a single moment of apprehension, and the moment is usually one triggered by an experience of nature or other everyday incident. In “Pity,” for example, the speaker is sitting with a friend looking down at a town, and from this situation is generated his reflections. Grounding spiritual meditations in average occurrences gives them a homely concreteness. Moreover, by restricting himself to writing short poems, he is not tempted to treat the intricacies of Theosophical dogma but to use each poem to lay open a single thought. Concerned above all to lead readers to see the naturalness of his convictions, Æ chooses simple words and a verse form that avoids intrusive rhymes. However, this verse form, although it flows with a soft rhythm, often reads as if it were transcriptions of a man talking to himself.

Æ cannot be placed in the front rank of poets because his writing is restricted to one subject, which is itself limited. His Irish contemporary and friend William Butler Yeats, a poet of the first rank, wrote poems that, like Æ’s, were brief explications of his esoteric philosophy. Yeats, however, also wrote poems on Irish current events and encounters with people from different backgrounds, poems that retold old fables, and ambitious longer works such as “The Tower” (1928), which integrated aesthetic and political discourse. Æ lacked Yeats’s range, and the specialized field he did explore, that of a rarefied philosophy, is of small scope. It is the poets who are concerned with the tragedies and comedies of normal women and men that usually have the broadest array of topics at their command. Within his limits, however, Æ produced a body of work of high quality. With consummate skill, he conveyed a feeling for the beauty and the power of nature and for the underlying depths of being that seem to exist behind life’s veil.

Bibliography

Allen, Nicholas. George Russell (Æ) and the New Ireland, 1905-30. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. Allen examines the four periodicals on which Æ worked to determine the writer’s political, personal, social, and spiritual values.

Davis, Robert Bernard. George William Russell (“Æ”). Boston: Twayne, 1977. Brings out the predominant themes of Æ’s verse, while pointing to such effects as the use of color words and occasional archaic diction.

Figis, Darrell. Æ (George W. Russell): A Study of a Man and a Nation. Dublin: Maunsel, 1916. Explains how important Æ was as a leader of a philosophical coterie that read his poetry as revelation more than as art. Figis argues that the writing suffered because this reverence made Æ unwilling to probe his doctrines sufficiently.

Kain, Richard M., and James H. O’Brien. George Russell (Æ). Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1976. Provides background to link Æ’s study of Indian thought to his writings. The authors examine “Three Counsellors,” for example, as understandable in relation to his reading of the Indian religious epic The Bhagavad Gītā (c. 400 b.c.e.).

McAteer, Michael. Standish O’Grady, Æ, and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002. Focuses on the work of writer and historian Standish O’Grady, discussing his influence on the Irish literary revival, including the writings of Æ and William Butler Yeats.

Russell, George W. Letters from Æ. Edited by Alan Denson. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1961. Includes a reply from Æ to a reviewer of Homeward, in which he takes the critic to task for dismissing the book’s Indian influence. He argues that the spiritual wealth of the East should not be overlooked.

Summerfield, Henry. The Myriad-Minded Man: A Biography of George William Russell, “Æ,” 1867-1935. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975. Useful to supplement the poems insofar as it provides a detailed summary of the Theosophical beliefs that influenced Æ. Also notes where he differed from the traditional interpretations of this thought.