Edward Carpenter

(1844 - 1929)

Carpenter has a power of substance, thought-vision,
image, expression which is very rare.

SRI AUROBINDO

So Thin a Veil

So thin a veil divides
Us from such joy, past words,
Walking in daily life — the business of the hour, each detail seen to;
Yet carried, rapt away, on what sweet floods of other Being:
Swift streams of music flowing, light far back through all Creation shining,
Loved faces looking —
Ah! from the true, the mortal self
So thin a veil divides!

Sri Aurobindo’s remarks:

«Carpenter with a poetic faculty of a high order, a prophet of democracy and of the Self, like Whitman, but of a higher more spiritual truth of the Self, has like him found it impossible to restrain the largeness of his vision and personality in the bonds of metrical poetry. In both we see that the prophet and thinker predominate over the poet and artist. Less rough and great than the epic voice from the other side of the ocean, his poetry has a more harmonious, limpid and meditative fullness. But the lesser abundance of force and drive makes us feel more the limitations of his form. The thought is not only great, but poetically great and satisfying, the expression as form of thought is noble and admirable, but we miss the subtler rhythmic uplift of the poetic enthusiasm which is given to minds of much less power by the inspiring cadence and the ordered measures of the poetic spirit, chandas.
His flow is ordinarily of the middle kind with occasional choric turns and movements, but the latter do not carry with them the full force of the intenser poetic cadence.
To cite one passage, —

There - in the region of Equality, in the world of Freedom no
longer limited,
standing as a lofty peak in heaven above the clouds,
From below hidden, yet to all who pass into that region most
clearly visible —
He the Eternal appeared.»

«The total effect is the sense of what might almost call a noble and chanting super-prose rhythm.
This appears more clearly in another passage where Carpenter’s movement is more at its normal level. He begins with a strain which is only just distinguishable from the prose strain, but suddenly rises from it to the beginning of a choric elevation,

As one shuts a door after a long confinement in the house — so out of your own plans and purposes escaping, —

then comes the full choric rise,

Out of the mirror-lined chambers of self (grand though they be, how O how dreary!) in which you have hitherto spent your life, —

where, if the line had only ended with the parenthesis, it would have been a strain of perfect choric poetry, magnificently thought, imaged and cadenced, but the closing words spoil the effect, for they are a sharp descent towards the prose level. There are too elevations rising up from a rhythmical prose cadence but lifted high by the scriptural nobility of phrase and spiritual turn which we get so often in Carpenter.»

Love’s Vision

At night in each other’s arms,
Content, overjoyed, resting deep deep down in the darkness,
Lo! the heavens opened and He appeared —
Whom no mortal eye may see,
Whom no eye clouded with Care,
Whom none who seeks after this or that, whom none who has not escaped from self.

There — in the region of Equality, in the world of Freedom no longer limited,
Standing as a lofty peak in heaven above the clouds,
From below hidden, yet to all who pass into that region most clearly visible —
He the Eternal appeared.