- 1 Extract from the preface to Farewell Happy Fields [1973: 8].
What is all the art and poetry of the world but the record of remembered Paradise and the lament of our exile? We tell one another, we remind one another, we seek ever to recreate, here on earth, what we saw and knew once, elsewhere and for ever1.
- 2 See preface to Autobiographies [1991: ix].
1Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) was a twentieth-century British poet, autobiographer, and essayist, particularly famous for her work on William Blake. She authored eleven books of poetry and an autobiography in four volumes – or rather, three volumes, as the fourth is more of an account of her travels in India2. She also contributed a large body of essays aiming to restore the Neoplatonic philosophical sources of the English Romantic poets, or of the Irish Nobel Prize winner W.B. Yeats, and to uphold the works of some of her contemporaries (Vernon Watkins, Edwin Muir, David Jones, David Gascoyne). In France, Raine’s poetic and autobiographical work gained recognition in the eighties and nineties with the publication of acclaimed translations by François-Xavier Jaujard, then director of Granit publishing house. Many French readers have since been captivated by Raine’s style of writing, which unfolds in multiple planes of reality: the sensory world of nature where form and meaning are one and indivisible; the epiphanic visions giving access to a wider level of consciousness; the intellectual approach, based on a wealth of philosophical and artistic scholarship.
2Raine’s three-dimensional body of work – poetic, autobiographical and philosophical – invites us to compile a lexicon of her most significant words, charged with intellect and affect, memory and imagination, and produce a sort of kaleidoscopic portrait of the author. It should be noted that this contribution does not pertain to academic research but rather to a freer style of writing, yet precisely informed by Raine’s work. In connection with the topic of this special issue, the reader is invited to pay particular attention to Raine’s conception of time and memory, especially in relation to Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy, as it evolves across the various entries.
3Finally, this dictionary may be read alphabetically, which, by coincidence, happens to align quite well with the chronology of Raine’s life, or in any order, entirely at random. Different aspects of Raine’s life and work that briefly appear in one section are expanded upon elsewhere, with cross-references scattered throughout. Regardless of whether one follows the alphabetical order, the reading experience remains non-linear as the reader is placed at the center of a web of meanings that expands, growing both broader and more nuanced. This effect is amplified by the repetitive structure of the entries, each conforming to the following model: i) a brief definition of the word, in italics, and in the first-person pronoun, as if Raine were speaking to us in a confidential tone; ii) a quote by Raine herself borrowed from one of her works; iii) a comment made by the author of this Lover’s dictionary to the works of Kathleen Raine.
My Platonic compass
I remember, in the beginning, a place of perfect happiness, filled with the bright sun of Easter, pure living light and warmth. My place was my state and therefore in it I knew myself where it was mine to be. That was the beginning of a dream which recurred again and again in early childhood; the dream, as I now suppose, of my birth into this world.
[…] But little by little I would find myself drawn irresistibly into the flux; and as I realized that it was no longer in my power to return or to stop, I began to be afraid […] The dream was always the same; and I knew that from bliss I would plunge into terror, from the freedom of being into the power of an irresistible mechanical destruction. I also knew that the dream was my life, the pattern it would follow of necessity; the substance I might have thought of all generated life. But in dreams we do not generalize, we experience. (Raine [1973: 11-12])
- 3 Plotinus, Ennead II, Tractate IV, Matter in its two kinds.
4Raine begins her autobiography with this primordial dream, the remembrance of the soul’s uprooting from paradise to enter the process of incarnation and birth into the world. The fall is not due to a sin as in Christianity, for it is rather the consequence of a natural drift of the soul into the Sea of Hyle3, or the Ocean of Prima Materia. Indeed, in reference to Plato’s myth of Er the Pamphylian in Book X of Republic, the soul, in order to become incarnate, must separate itself from the great universal soul and take on a lot (a “pattern”), which in Raine’s case is that of poet. This conception echoes Oriental philosophy, which also considers the cycle of metempsychosis. Although Raine never converted to Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other spiritual tradition – her true devotion remained poetry and the “great imagination,” as defined by William Blake – she demonstrated an intellectual interest in Eastern philosophy and was even given a personal mantra. In fact, during her first visit to India, she was invited to spend some time in Maharaj Charan Singh’s ashram and she compares his teaching to “the teachings of masters of all times”, including Jesus and Pythagoras (Raine [1990: 89]). Once immersed in the world of sensory illusion – the veil of Maya – how can one recover the memory of paradise? If, for the Buddhists, enlightenment is what can give access to the marvellous unity of the microcosm and the macrocosm, for Plato and the Neoplatonists, anamnesis (from the Greek ἀνάμνησις, literally the recall of memory), – a form of enlightenment – plays this dynamic role towards awakening to the true reality. “Platonic recollection is not remembering the past, writes Raine, but remembering the timeless” (Raine [1976: 21]). Plunged into the oblivion of its happy condition, the soul remains blind and apathetic, subject to the inertia of sensory illusion and to what Blake calls “Eternal Death”. Awakened and clear-sighted, it frees itself from its chains and soars towards the intellectual firmament. The memory of primordial bliss is crucial: it acts as a stimulus for the soul numbed in the material order. At various times in the course of her life, Raine will be given the gift of anamnesis: first of all, as a very young child in her pram, looking at a flowering currant bush “with the delight of rapt knowledge”(Raine [1973: 12]), then during her childhood at Bavington on the wild hills of Northumberland, then again in Martindale, in the Lake district, looking at a hyacinth growing in an amethyst glass on her writing-table, when she saw “the living form”, “the essence or soul of the plant” in a wonderful epiphany (Raine [1975: 119]). Or later, with the vision of the blackbird in the rowan tree – the tree of life – first in a dream, then materialized in a poem similar to a poem written by her great love, Gavin Maxwell, a Scottish naturalist and author, and finally in real life near Maxwell’s cottage on Sandaig island. There, again, she was allowed to sense the bird-soul in the tree, “intimate and inviolate sanctuary of the spiritus mundi” (Raine [1977: 41]). For Raine, such epiphanies of the original vital force that irrigates and connects all forms of life constitute precious moments of anamnesis. (See also Memory; Religion)
The place where I was not born; where I was most happy; the closest place to Paradise
I have written of my years in Northumberland as if they had preceded in time all that belonged to other phases of my life; but that is not so. Northumberland was anterior only in a symbolic sense: not only because from beyond the Border came my ancestors, but also because there I found, in the few short years I lived at the manse with my Aunty Peggy Black, my own image of a Paradise already lost long before my birth. For I was not even born in Northumberland but in an East London suburb. (Raine [1975: 78])
- 4 In actual fact, an orphan cousin of her mother raised by Raine’s grandmother (Raine [1973: 29-30]).
5In actual fact, during the first world war, at the age of seven, Raine was sent to live in Bavington with her mother’s sister Peggy Black4 who was the village schoolmistress. Bavington is situated a few miles away from Hadrian’s wall, the former physical border between England and Scotland. For Raine, Scotland, homeland to her parents and particularly to her mother, already an exile, embodied the original matriarchal paradise, the land of poetry: “The place of poetry seemed to me, then, a place in this world, of this world, and only a few miles away” (Raine [1973: 22]). Thus, during childhood, lost paradise is still within easy reach and can be regained anytime. (See also Jessie Wilkie)
The prophetic bird, my winged version of the poet
But on the hillside I have heard
The voice of the prophetic bird
That feeds upon the bitter fruit,
I have heard the blackbird sing
The wild music of the wind,
Utter the note the sun would cry,
Sing for the burn that flows away.
(Raine, “Northumbrian Sequence”, The Year One [1952], Collected Poems [2019: 66])
6Birds are omnipresent in Raine’s poetry – all sorts of birds from garden birds such as sparrows, peacocks, herons, pigeons, swallow doves, swifts, rooks, nightingales, green linnets, robins, ravens, and larks, to seabirds as she is allowed to share Maxwell’s cottage on Sandaig island: eider ducks, gulls, shelducks, black cormorants, grey geese and curlews flying in a V-shape. Her fetish bird, the blackbird, belongs to the two realms, that of the land and that of the sea. It appears in a dream at the top of a rowan tree, then in her poem “Northumbrian Sequence”, and finally in real life on Gavin’s Island, in the Inner Hebrides. The final lines of the poem “I have heard the blackbird […] Sing for the burn that flows away” also evokes the Heraclitan flux, incorporating the Northern dialect word “burn,” and suggests that time and place are intertwined in the bird’s song. For Raine, the blackbird symbolizes freedom and the unceasing flow of poetry. (See also Sandaig)
The place I have come to call “Fool’s Paradise”
Intellectual ‘honesty’ for the time overcame intuitive distaste and I swam with the other fish in that medium of Bloomsbury humanism, Freudianism, Wittgenstein and Russell’s positivism, behaviourism, Marxism, Imagism, to which presently was added Le Corbusier’s functionalism. (Raine [1975: 38])
7In the second volume of her autobiography, The Land Unkown, the chapter on her studies at Girton College, Cambridge, where she started studying natural sciences in 1926 with an exhibition and a County major scholarship is entitled “A fool’s paradise”. Indeed, at first glance, Cambridge looked like paradise, home to the English aristocracy that she called “the swans”, which soon turned into hell, the hell so well described by Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano [1947] or in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that their generation inhabited “as they inhabited no other poem” (Raine [1975: 39]). Because of the ideologies of the time, she had to abandon all her childhood intuitions and her love of English Romantic poetry. She obtained her degree after just two years and went on to pursue another degree in psychology, but with much less success that time, barely achieving an average. The poet Charles Madge, co-founder of the Mass Observation movement, eventually rescued her from a first marriage with Hugh Sykes Davies and her subsequent depression, and literally drove her away from Cambridge. She returned to London with him, married for a second time and had two children, Anna and James, born in 1934 and 1936. These years soon ended with a break-up, a passionate affair with a Scottish man called Alastair, and her taking refuge with her children at Martindale’s vicarage, in the Lake District, near Ullswater, far away from Cambridge. There she awakened from a long period of somnambulism, recovered the memory of paradise, and inspired by her daimon, rediscovered her poetic voice (Raine [1975:123]). (See also Martindale)
My way of being reborn into life
Often in dreams to this day I find myself back at 6 Grotes Buildings, the beautiful house we then lived in so precariously, between Charles’s imaginative poetic exaltation and my tears and guilt and despair. There was a big almost empty drawing-room where, alone, I used to dance, possessed perhaps by the same daemon that had once possessed Zelda Fitzgerald; for like her I was desperately neurotic and unhappy even while the dream possessed me; and only while I danced did I seem free; “dying into a dance” from my distraught self. (Raine [1975: 83])
8Raine had just been rescued from Cambridge by Charles Madge, the poet of the mass observation, soon to become her second husband and father of her two children. They had settled in Blackheath, to the south-east of London. She compares her life then to that of a somnambulist living in someone else’s dream. Dance, the call of the body and the movement of the arms and legs, has the power to restore her life, spirit and self-awareness. Dance will remain important to Kathleen, as will her passion for a Scotsman called Alastair, a few years later, who will awaken her from this state of absence. Resurrection through the body, through the land of the ancestors, a renewal of oneself and the world altogether. Eventually, her visits to India will lead her to the figure of Shiva, the Indian god of destruction and creation, whose dance gives rhythm to the metamorphoses of the cosmos. (See also Love)
My experience as a child
I remember, in the beginning, a place of perfect happiness, filled with the bright sun of Easter, pure living light and warmth. My place was my state and therefore in it I knew myself where it was mine to be. That was the beginning of a dream which recurred again and again in early childhood; the dream, as I now suppose, of my birth into this world. (Raine [1973: 11])
9The Hebrew word “Eden” means “delights”. It refers to a country or province in the East where the earthly paradise was located. The Old Testament mentions it three times: in “Genesis”, “the Book of Ecclesiastes”, and the “Song of Songs”. In “Ecclesiastes”, Eden refers to the king’s orchard, and is thus related to the Chaldean “pardes”, synonymous with “orchard”, a place planted with fruit trees. In Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the Golden Age of the Earth as a period of spontaneous fertility during which, under the reign of Saturn, every flowering, every harvest, is the result of an overflow of perpetual energy, produced without effort and gathered without labour. In the beginning, therefore, life is a wonderful game and the earth a garden enjoying an unalterable spring.
10For Raine, Eden is both a place and a state: the state of childhood when subject and object, seer and seen have not yet been set apart, and historical time has not yet begun. In this context, Raine’s depiction of Eden echoes traditional visions of the Golden Age, a time when humanity and the divine are united, and the paradisiacal Illud Tempus prevails. Mircea Eliade [1957] suggests that all myths, from ancient to modern, yearn for a return to this state. The cyclical “Great Time” contrasts with the linear progression of “passing time”. Thus, the small village of Bavington where the poet spent part of her childhood is associated with Eden as an off-spring of Paradise, her mother’s native land, the Great Matriarchal Scotland, still within easy reach. There, time and place coalesce into an eternal present. (See also Bavington; Exile)
Ilford, the London suburb where my parents settled, far from the happy fields of early childhood, my first place of exile
As cancer cells proliferate without the informing pattern of the life of a human body, so this new way of life proliferated, cell by cell, rapidly killing the life of villages and old farms and parishes and manor houses. I knew that something was taking place all round me which I wanted to stop, for all seemed wrong about it, as if it were some vast mistake, beyond control. […] It was as if the earth were being killed; and humanity becoming something quite other than that for which man was created, upon that earth now stricken. Or rather, not becoming anything, only unbecoming, ceasing to be something and becoming an unreality so immense that my young soul’s “No, No” was as powerless against it as the lark’s song or the petals of a wild rose opening in a doomed hedgerow. (Raine [1973: 100])
11This description of Ilford, where Raine lived part of her childhood and her teenage years illustrates the very concept of exile: being banned from the native land of the immortal soul. Indeed, the Roman poet Ovid explains that the end of the Golden Age is marked, under the new domination of Jupiter, by a reduction in the duration of spring and by the establishment of the four seasons. Adam and Eve driven out of Eden, Persephone lured out of the Garden of Demeter by the sight of a golden narcissus, Psyche condemned to exile from her lover’s palace, or Aphrodite’s trials, all these stories clearly suggest that it is not the garden that ceases to be, but its inhabitants who are banished. To be more precise, the garden is reduced and enclosed behind a fence, in a sort of miniature version. The theme of enclosure is thus correlated with that of exile, while the garden, however small, remains in its perpetual spring. In the course of her life, Raine will experience various periods and places of exile (Ilford, Cambridge, London) as well as periods and places of return to Eden (Bavington, Martindale, Sandaig) before she reaches a certain peace of mind in the last part of her life through her discovery of India and her involvement in the Temenos Academy. (See also Cambridge; Eden)
The minute made perfect, the door to the essence of life, my delight
I looked up at those flowers with their minute perfect forms, their secret centres, with the delight of rapt knowledge. They were themselves that knowledge. Not discovery but recognition; recollection; not as memory brings the past to the present but as something forever present coming to itself. In the manifold, the innumerable I AM, each flower was its own I am. A bush burning green and rose in the light of day. (Raine [1973: 12])
12Euphrasias, tormentils, lilies, primroses, anemones, snowdrops, violets, daisies, tulips, crocuses, columbines, pansies, geraniums, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, peonies, Chelidonium, jasmine, campanulas make up Raine’s poetic floristry. Even in exile, the eye can glide over the pages of the illuminated Book of Nature and enjoy at every moment this pure manifestation of Life. Indeed, the flower is a favourite symbol of Raine’s poetry. More than just an image assuming a variety of shapes and colours, it is a word of action, a dynamic “verb” prone to rejoice and “proclaim / We are, we are manifold, in multitude / We come, we are near and far, Past and future innumerable, we are yours / We are you (Raine [2019: 107]). Indeed, for Raine, flowers keep telling the oneness of all living beings. It is to be noted that she studied botany at university and discovered through the lens of the microscope the infinite beauty and mystery of the minute (Raine [1975: 11]). For Raine, every flower is a transcendent image that reveals, beyond its very existence, the ineffable origin of the flower of the world. The idea of the flower as a mandala capable of arousing a movement towards knowledge is suggested by Raine herself, evoking the memory of the first roses that filled her childhood vision “with the breadth of a cathedral rose window” (Raine [1973: 12]). She also recalls her first rose; an Alba rose that her father put into her hand on the very day she was born and whose scent will forever be associated with that of her mother; or the flowering currant bush hung over her pram which she contemplated with rapture – a mystical experience that is to be relived later in life with the vision of a hyacinth. (See also Hyacinth)
The golden country of the Imagination
Ladies and Gentlemen, and friends who have honoured me by coming to welcome me this evening, I feel that I have made the short journey (as it is now), not from the earth of England to that of France, but from the so-called ‘real world’ to the France of the Imagination, the ‘realm of gold’ (to use the word of the poet Keats) that I have most loved. (Raine, excerpt from her speech at Maison de la Poésie, Paris, Septembre 21, 1999)
13From 1924 to 1926, while still a teenager in Ilford, a ‘place of exile’, Raine spent her summer holidays with her parents in France, more precisely in Le Pouldu, a picturesque seaside resort on the coast of Brittany. The family was invited there by Germain d’Hangest, a brilliant French teacher of English whom her father had become acquainted with. In her autobiography, Raine refers to him as “Mr. d’H.” He was the author of several books on English literature and later became Inspecteur Général de l’Instruction Publique. He made a great impression on the young woman and acted as a mentor—until he fell in love with her and eventually attempted to seduce her. In the meantime, under his literary guidance, she felt liberated from Ilford, her life taking on the lightness of a ‘winged flight’, akin to Michelet’s birds: “Rêves ailés, ravissements de nuit, si vous étiez, pourtant. Si vraiment vous viviez!” (Raine [1973: 171]). To her, France represented a world of possibilities, solace, and freedom. She even speculated whether the unknown Englishman who carved the words “Here I was happy” into a little cave on one of the sandy beaches of Le Pouldu was the poet, Ernest Dowson (Raine [1973: 161]). Indeed, what a beautiful sentence, capturing in just four words both the fullness of happiness and the depth of nostalgia!
14During World War II, Raine earned a living working in various government departments, including the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, where she wrote propaganda leaflets in French that were dropped over France to encourage resistance. Her connection to France also extended to her work as a translator: Talk of the Devil by Denis de Rougemont [1945], Cousine Bette by Honoré de Balzac [1948], Existentialism by Paul Foulquié [1948], Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac [1951], and Land of Evening by Jean Mambrino [2004].
15In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Raine developed numerous friendships in French literary circles, particularly with François-Xavier Jaujard and Diane de Margerie, who translated the first volume of her autobiography, Farewell Happy Fields, which won the prize for “best foreign book in France” in 1979. Among all her translators – Pierre Leyris, Claire Malroux, Marie-Béatrice Mesnet, Philippe Giraudon, Jean Mambrino, and Diane de Margerie – François-Xavier Jaujard was undoubtedly the most remarkable. The son of two wartime resistance fighters – Jeanne Boitel, an actress at the Comédie-Française, and Jacques Jaujard, who, as director of the Louvre, worked with René Huyghe to save the Mona Lisa and other masterpieces from Nazi plunder – he founded the publishing house Granit and played a key role in making Kathleen Raine well known in France during the 1980s and 1990s through several major publications, including Isis errante [1978], Sur un rivage désert [1978], and Le premier jour [1980]. The journalist and literary critic at Le Monde des Livres, Christine Jordis, also dedicated two outstanding chapters to her, one in Le Paysage et l’amour dans le roman anglais [1994], the other in Le Fil d’or [2024].
16Raine made several trips to France for the publication of her books, reading her poetry at the British Council in 1989 and delivering a speech at the Maison de la Poésie before a packed amphitheater in 1999. Whenever she visited Paris, she would stay in a small hotel on Place de l’Odéon, where she felt “at home.”
17If Raine loved France, France loved her too. On June 5, 1987, she was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) by Professor Jacqueline Genet, a specialist in W.B. Yeats, at the University of Caen. Then, in 1994, she was named Officier des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2000, Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
18Nearly a quarter of a century after her passing, will her beloved France still remember Kathleen Raine?
The angel man, my alter ego, my love
Suddenly the trees looked strangely beautiful:
“It has taken the form of trees,” I said,
“And I of a woman standing by a burn.”
So near I stood to your new state
I saw for a moment as you might
These sheltering boughs of spirit in its flight.
Shall you and I, in all the journeyings of the soul,
Remember the rowan tree, the waterfall?
(Raine, On a Deserted Shore, Collected Poems [2019: 215])
19This final extract from On a Deserted Shore, a collection written after Gavin Maxwell’s death in the form of very short poems evoking the quest of an Isis wandering along a Western Islands shore, raises the following question: Could this unique love, transcending space and time, for somebody known “from all eternity”, be nothing more than a mere illusion? Gavin Maxwell (1914-1969) was a British naturalist and writer who travelled to Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and raised Iraqi otters on the island of Sandaig, off the west coast of Scotland, his native land. His relationship with Raine was tormented, as she recounts in the third volume of her autobiography. According to her, their encounter did not only take place in the ordinary plane of reality but also in the world of the Imagination, the spiritual world where she recognised her alter ego, the “man of light” (Raine [1977: 48]). She claimed that Gavin’s homosexuality did not bother her. She rather had the impression that they had been brother and sister in another life, never lovers, let alone husband and wife (Raine [1977: 22]). However, such a love, which she believed in all her life, came up against the trivial dimension of reality. Indeed, the frustration of not meaning enough to him, led her to utter a curse – ‘Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering now’ – at the foot of the rowan tree, the tree of her vision, of her long poem “Northumbrian Sequence”, the tree of Sandaig’s house, which the poet held to be the archetypal tree of life. Gavin subsequently blamed her for all his misfortunes, including the loss of Mijbil, his beloved otter, and the fire at his cottage, until he called on her shortly before his premature death and eventually reconciled with her. Hence the final question of On a Deserted Shore, which can also be understood as a powerful conclusive claim: “Shall you and I, in all the journeyings of the soul, / Remember the rowan tree, the waterfall?” (Raine [2019: 215]) (See also Sandaig; Love)
The flower of anamnesis
The hyacinth springs on a dark star
I see eternity give place to love,
It is the world unfolding into flower
The rose of life, the lily and the dove.
(Raine, “The Hyacinth”, Stone and Flower, The Collected Poems [2019: 9])
20Raine’s life will be marked by a cycle of exiles and returns to paradise, particularly through visions that give her access to the eternal present at the heart of life. The Land Unknown includes such an episode which took place in the summer of 1940, in Martindale, not far from the land of her childhood, where Raine, aged 32, took refuge with her two children. She had just left her second husband, Charles Madge, a poet and fellow member of the Mass-Observation Movement, for a man she only ever referred to as Alastair; soon summoned for military service. Raine relates a special moment in the contemplation of a hyacinth, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s experience of “the true flower” in her childhood garden at St Ives. Raine is sitting at her desk, writing a poem. In front of her is an amethyst vase. In the vase, a hyacinth suddenly catches her eye and her whole being. In a kind of anamnesis or awakening, she feels, for an indefinable length of time, a clear and irrefutable intuition about the inexhaustible flow of life to which she and the plant fully belong (see Raine [1975: 119]).
- 5 The active virtue, being made a soul
As of a plant, (in so far different,
This on the way is, that ar (...)
21This visionary experience, which Brian Keeble [2003: 169] describes as the “theophanic immediacy of truth and beauty present in the immediacy of pure perception”, is beautifully evoked in the poem “To the Sun”: ‘It is I’, I knew, ‘I am that flower, that light is I, / Both seer and sight’ (Raine [2019: 335]). The assonance in /aɪ/ emphasises the first-person pronoun and equates it with light and sight. The knowledge of being both seer and seen relies on a level of consciousness in which the true essence of life is recovered. Raine calls this core of energy the “essence or soul of the plant”, or the “living form”. Dante calls it “active virtue”, the energy of life which only needs the “primal Motor” (i.e., God) to “inspire / A spirit new with virtue all replete” so that it becomes “one soul / That lives, and feels, and on itself revolves” (Dante, Purgatory 25: 70, 74-75).5
22According to Raine, it is imagination, otherwise named imaginativa or fantasia by Dante (Purgatory 17: 13, 25.) or Jesus the Imagination by William Blake, that allows us to perceive this reality. She also refers to the writings of Henry Corbin, a specialist in the Ismaili tradition, who was co-founder in the 1930s of the Eranos Circle, with Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and Carl Gustav Jung and who coined the term “imaginal” to designate the mundus imaginalis as “the place of all spiritual events” (Raine [1991: 15]). According to Corbin, Imagination is conceived as an organ, a sense in its own right, – for Raine, an “Edenic sense”. Indeed, the experience of the hyacinth was not restricted to the world of the mind. It also took place in her body or, rather, in her entire being. Furthermore, the episode fired a period of intense poetic creativity, which materialised in 1943 with the publication of her first book of poems: Stone and Flower in which the poem “The Hyacinth” is to be found. (See also Flowers; Anamnesis; Memory)
The goal and term of my soul’s human journey
When did I set out on my “passage to India”? Since I arrived there I must have set out, but when? Or did I arrive? Perhaps I have not arrived – am as far from India as before I set out. But I know at least that it is India from which I am still far away; and that is something to have discovered. The India of the Imagination, the Orient – for I am not speaking of any geographical country or political nation, nor indeed of India’s treasuries of art, sculptures and temples and dance and marvellous cloths and jewels and paper birds and garlands of stephanotis and marigolds offered to gods without number – no, that India is marvellous indeed, and who am I to write of it, who set foot on Indian soil only after I was seventy? – but the India of the Imagination is another country; everywhere and nowhere it exists. It is universal, for is it not, finally, the place of every arrival, the term of every spiritual quest? And that being so, the frontier between this and other worlds. But that frontier too is everywhere, is in ourselves. (Raine [1990: 3])
23Raine travelled to India a total of three times, the first at the start of 1983 to give the inaugural lecture of the Yeats Society, newly created by Santosh Pall, the author of a doctorate thesis on Yeats and the Sacred Dance. Her 15-year-old granddaughter Sonia, James’s daughter, accompanied her. She returned in 1987 for an international conference on Yeats. She made a third and final visit in 1989, staying at the International Centre in Delhi.
24At the beginning of India Seen Afar, Raine wonders why she has wasted so many years before finding her way to India. And she recalls everything that could have put her on the path. Childhood reading, in particular Kipling and The Book of the Jungle, or the story of Puran Das, the civil servant who leaves his office one day to become a forest-dweller. But, quite surprisingly, she mentions the influence of her mother, Jessie Wilkie. One day a cousin of hers entrusts her with a broken brooch bearing the name of Jessie, found at the bottom of a drawer. Who is behind this name? What does Raine know about her mother – had she too made her passage to India? Indeed, says she, Jessie envied her elder sister, who spent all her adult life in Ceylon and met Buddhist monks. Also, while she was studying at Armstrong College in Newcastle, she had befriended a Singhalese girl, Miss da Cunha, whose beauty and wisdom had struck her, and who spoke to her about Buddhism. Raine’s mother was in fact very close to theosophy, a religious movement that combines Hinduism, Buddhism and other spiritual traditions and advocates fraternity regardless of origin, gender or religion. It was founded in 1875 in New York by a certain Ms Blavatsky and developed in India from 1900 onwards. So Raine [1990: 3] ponders: “Or was my own pilgrimage already forecast in my mother’s most secret life?”.
25In India, Raine found the same unity between life and work as in the Northumberland of her childhood. For instance, she notes, Indians do not give the impression of always going somewhere, but rather of simply being in the exact place where they are. On the Ganges, she uses the same ferries that took her across the Western Isles, from Canna and Sandaig, to Rousay and other isles of the Orkneys. India was also home to Tambimuttu, a Tamil from Ceylon, the editor of Poetry London, who published her first poems and constantly reaffirmed to her: “Kathleen, you are a great poet!” (Raine [1990: 12]). Finally, it was through Tambimuttu that she met Gavin Maxwell (Raine [1977: 12]). However, India remains a profound mystery, as if seen from a distance, holding the memory on the threshold of anamnesis, in a semi-conscious state where we know that we see without grasping what we see, and which keeps on fleeing.
26At the beginning of The Lion’s Mouth, Raine [1977: 7] writes that “Eden is rather a state than a place”. The same is true regarding India. For her, as for Raja Rao, the novelist and philosopher, India is indeed a state of being (Raine [1990: 4]), representing “the Mundus Imaginalis”, the “savage and beautiful country” of our dreams, where all has meaning” (Raine [1990: 146]). And she concludes: “India’s immemorial wisdom which I have ‘seen afar’, what is it but love?” (Raine [1990: 294]). (See also Jessie Wilkie; Religion)
My mother, who passed down to me the legacy of Eden and exile
I came, yes, dear, dear
Mother for you I came, so I remember,
To lie in your warm
Bed, to watch the wonder flame:
Burning, golden gentle and bright the light of the living.
[…]
World you wove me to please a child,
Yet its texture was thinner than light, fleeter
Than flame that burned while it seemed
Leaves and flowers and garden world without end.
Bright those faces closed and were over.
Here and now is over, the garden
Lost from time, its sun its moon
Mother, daughter, daughter, mother, never
Is now: there is nothing, nothing for ever.
(Raine, “Kore in Hades”, The Hollow Hill [1965], Collected Poems [2019: 107-108]).
27The close correlation between Eden and exile is particularly obvious in the poem “Kore in Hades”, which is linked to the character of her mother Jessie Wilkie, and echoes the myth of Demeter and Persephone, omnipresent in Raine’s work. In the last stanza of the poem, the maternal transmission of the dialectic of Eden and exile is reinforced by some particularly striking writing devices: the assonance in /ər/, the trochaic beat of the line “Mother, daughter, daughter, mother, never”, the expansion of “never” into “nothing for ever”, the repetitions, and the chiasmic construction which seems to imprison the word “daughter” in the middle of the line. In The Lost Country [1971], numerous poems evoke this inner border between the world of Demeter and that of Persephone, the poet’s own mother being herself an exile, sharing the same original vision: “The living skein / of which the world is woven” (“Heirloom”, The Lost Country, Collected Poems [2019: 160]). In a poem titled “Seen from the window of a railway carriage”, Raine writes: “My mother a life far other than Scotland’s songs and stories tell / Lived in an alien place among trivial things / Disdaining to behold what was not of the dream / of tenderness and pride her ancestors lived by” (Raine [2019: 161]). No doubt, marriage and the birth of an only daughter at the age of twenty-four constituted a renunciation of the great life of the Imagination. This is, in any case, what Raine tells us, identifying with a maternal figure into whom she projects her own frustrations and aspirations, somewhat reversing the myth of Demeter and Persephone (see The Land Unknown [1975: 53]).
28However, in The Oval Portrait (1977), a collection dedicated to Jessie Wilkie, Raine depicts her mother’s ability to withdraw from her urban surroundings and remain in Eden on the right side of the wall. Several poems in the collection among which the eponymous poem ([2019: 222-223]), or “With a wave of her old hand” [2019: 226], testify to Raine’s mother’s ability to discard her displacement. This ability is considered as a gift by Raine, sole heiress to Jessie’s exile.
29Throughout her autobiography, Raine [1973: 19] emphasizes how fortunate she was to have a poetic mother to whom she owes all the happiness of her childhood, thanks to whom she was able to keep “one foot in Eden” [1973: 21]. This mother, who recorded Kathleen’s first poems before she could even hold a pencil ([1973: 130]; [1975: 75-76]), was born in 1884 on the Scottish border to a mother from Edinburgh and a father from Forfar, a former royal burgh in Angus County (Central Lowlands of Scotland). Thus, she belonged to the great and noble matriarchal Scotland, a reservoir of myths and legends that would accompany the poet throughout her childhood and stand for her native Paradise. Jessie Wilkie met George Raine at Armstrong College in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she studied English literature. Many years later, her granddaughter Anna would keep a book by Shelley in which Jessie had written in pencil, among numerous annotations on Prometheus Unbound: “Death is the door to life.” This reveals that the young woman, who recited Milton’s verses to the moorland wind, had a high level of education and that her knowledge of poetry was not only intuitive but also scholarly. And at the age of eighty she borrowed the Upanishads and the works of A.E. and G.R.S. Mead from her daughter’s bookshelves, Raine [1973: 73] adding that she had never seen her “read any work of Christian devotion”.
30Despite all the vicissitudes, it appears that mother and daughter shared the same “vistas of wonder, the green green ways to fairyland” (Raine [1973: 131]), with the mother taking a glimpse at them and the daughter travelling them with all her poetic might. (See also Eden; Exile; India)
The person I used to be, as I digged my tin dipper into the perpetual welling up of the water from the spring in the farmyard, or sitting on a rock like a hare upon a crag, with a feeling of awe and religious ecstasy
Next day, in Wark, we supped with my old playfellow herself [Sally Walton], now a farmer’s wife, living in country abundance. She had remembered me: her daughter was called Kathleen. But when we left after that happy visit I felt ashamed that they had so welcomed me back. Their lives, I felt, had kept faith; and I was not even a prodigal, for I could never return. I felt myself an impostor, guilty of a deception, in pretending to be the Kathie they had known; as if I had been acting a part. Yet who was I? In imagination times and places and people abide for ever as they were; but the reality of this world is also inexorable. (Raine [1977: 12])
31What Raine is seeking by returning with her two children to the places of her own childhood in Northumberland (in August 1949) is not so much the memories of a bygone past and their inevitable correlate, nostalgia, but rather an inalienable present, the very centre of her life, the omphalos of her soul, that deep, timeless nature of which childhood is the most faithful mirror and from which each act, each step towards adulthood, takes us a little further away. What she can no longer find in Bavington, she will find when she returns to London and meets Gavin Maxwell. (See also Bavington; Exile; Gavin Maxwell)
Amo Ergo Sum
He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river.
He has married me with the sun’s circle
Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.
He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud
That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,
Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,
Bound me to the whirlwind’s centre.
He has married me with the orbit of the moon
And with the boundless circle of the stars,
With the orbits that measure years, months, days and nights,
Set the tides flowing,
Commands the winds to travel or be at rest.
At the ring’s centre,
Spirit, or angel troubling the still pool,
Causality not in nature,
Finger’s touch that summons at a point, a moment
Stars and planets, life and light
Or gathers cloud about an apex of cold,
Transcendent touch of love summons my world to being.
(Raine, “The Marriage of Psyche”, The Year One [1952], Collected Poems [2019: 93])
32For Raine, love is the cosmic life force that animates everything – the sun, the moon, and the stars – and brings forth beings and inhabited worlds. It is both transcendent and immanent, a concept that aligns with Plotinus’s theory of the unfolding of the One into the many. This experience of love restores an original, universal state of total happiness, perfect adherence to all that is, and regained unity. It is this memory of primordial unity that Raine recovers during her encounter with Gavin Maxwell, the author of the best seller Ring of Bright Water (1963) – a title he borrowed from Raine’s poem. In the Lion’s Mouth, she reports how she discovered that Gavin was native of her paradise – his grandfather being the Duke of Northumberland – and that himself was of the country beyond the border: Scotland (Raine [1977: 14-15]). She draws a parallel between the long look they exchanged a few days after their first meeting and that of Dante and Beatrice – a gaze that reveals what she calls the “divine humanity,” the very essence of the soul [1977: 17]. And she declares that she has finally found the reason for which she was born; even though Gavin is homosexual and this love will never be consummated.
33Indeed, her love for Gavin takes the form of agape: for her, it means helping him to develop his talent by all possible means so that he receives the recognition that will establish him as a writer. But the downside is her frustration and the curse she will utter in due time. Nevertheless, this love leads her to write her most beautiful collection, The Year One, whose title signifies a turning point in her life and work. In this collection, Raine reinvents the spells of the ancient oral tradition and develops the sequence – a series of poems forming a whole, like Northumbrian Sequence, which includes the poem of her vision of the tree of life, the rowan tree, similar to the poem written simultaneously by Gavin.
34Another form of love – erotic love – plays a crucial role in Raine’s life. It emerges when the young woman has left her second husband, Charles Madge, and finds herself alone one weekend, invited by friends to a cottage in Cumbria. There, she meets Alastair, a Scotsman, with whom she falls passionately in love. Once again, she describes this feeling as a sudden awakening after a long sleep and discovers in this physical passion the highest divine dimension (Raine [1975: 97]). Such a love will torment her for a long time, to the point that she briefly converts to Catholicism to literally save herself. She adds that those who have never experienced this type of passion may be inclined to consider it as mere lust, but those who have, like her, know it is a matter of life and death [1975: 182].
35Raine also writes extensively about non-love, her inability to truly love – her parents, whom she rejected for part of her life (before taking care of them in their old age), not knowing the healthy and simple relationships of happy families; the men she married; and even her great love, Gavin Maxwell. She describes herself as “loveless” (Raine [1975: 182]) or “heartless” [1975: 53] when she denies her mother the gift of a mimosa branch. The very beautiful poem “The Unloved,” by contrast, brings the reader back to love, the source of all life, the initial spark of the cosmos, without which one ceases to exist, with its dreadful final lines: “I am a diminishing star / Speeding away / Out of the universe” [2019: 76]. (See also Gavin Maxwell; Martindale)
The place where I took refuge in the lake district and awakened at last from a long sleep
On that first sight of it, multitudes of snowdrops were emerging from the melting snow, and the scented buds of the flowering currant bushes were already swelling. A tall window with a semicircular top, of a kind fairly common in Cumberland rose to the whole height of the staircase, looking up the fell-side behind the house where a small rivulet tumbled over its stones and mosses. Often, later, I saw red deer up there, form the Boardale herd, the last in Cumberland. (Raine [1975: 115])
36After a holiday at her mother’s cottage in Devonshire, on Seaton Bay, Raine arrived one September evening, with two exhausted children, at the blacked-out Penrith station. A few days earlier, she had heard Chamberlain’s declaration of war on the radio. Thus, from autumn 1939 until the end of the first winter in 1940, she would share the small house of Janet and Michael Roberts, her generous benefactors, at 49a Wordsworth Street, Penrith. But the house is to be sold, and the time has come to look for a home for her and her children. The first winter of the war is coming to an end. She takes the bus from Howtown and stops at Martindale. Why Martindale? The vicarage was “the most beautiful little white house imaginable” (Raine [1975: 114]) – no doubt an example of the harmonious combination of nature and human endeavour, kind and merciful to anyone who took refuge there. Indeed, this house reminds her of the Manse in Bavington where she spent part of her childhood with her aunt Peggy Black, with its two rooms on either side of the front door and its four tiny bedrooms upstairs; all the more so since by a curious coincidence, Martindale is also the place where Peggy Black began her career as a teacher – Westmorland being not far from Northumberland. And then there are the promises of gooseberries, as in the original vision of paradise. Thus, for the first time since her childhood, she feels that she has reconnected with the thread of her life. (See also Bavington; Flowers)
Memory or how to seize one’s destiny
To write my story, to retrace my life, was an attempt to discover some meaning in it. Above all I wanted to discover when, and why, I had lost the thread, and what the pattern was that I broke and, even, some possibility of finding the lost clue again. And in trying to discover what my own life has been, I have wished to discover what a life, as such, is, or can be. (Raine [1975: 8])
37For Raine, memory serves two purposes: it involves recalling the Illud tempus, the time before history began, as well as remembering significant moments from one’s own life to grasp the essence of one’s personal narrative. The first type of memory corresponds to anamnesis, a kind of awakening from illusion, where one recalls Paradise and individual lives merge with the universal life or soul, as described in Plato’s Republic (Book X). The second concept addresses a specific destiny – an individual’s allotted task, – in this case, the destiny of a poet. Raine’s autobiography seeks to recapture the essential truth of one’s life, the core pattern that remains once all its vicissitudes have been recounted. She is fully aware that an autobiography is inherently biased, shaped by the moment of writing and the perspective one adopts. However, this does not make it any less true. She illustrates her point by comparing two perspectives of the same mountain: one from the arduous climb and the other from a distant view. Both ‘the long ascent’ and the toil ‘among the rocks,’ as well as the image of ‘the range of blue summits against the sky,’ are equally true. (Raine [1973: 6]) In other words, memory is always true – true to the moment, regardless of its complexity. In this regard, she would disagree with Doubrovsky [1977], often considered the father of ‘autofiction,’ as well as with Gasparini [2011], who questioned the ‘pact of sincerity’ in the autobiographical literary genre. She also adds that “Times and places, mountains and seas and houses and cities, all these are only the lived experience of those who inhabit them; the world is continuously woven of our thoughts: there is no other” [1973: 8]. Indeed, Raine’s writing vividly captures this entanglement of episodes and memories, grafted onto meaningful places, as if creative imagination were taking the lead. For instance, the poem Northumbrian Sequence was written in 1949 at Cockley Moor, in Helen Sutherland’s cottage, shortly after Raine met Gavin Maxwell and dreamt of the Tree of Life. Years later, in 1962, she also wrote the manuscript of The Lion’s Mouth there – the third volume of her autobiography – in which she reflects on the similarity between her poem and Gavin’s. Still more years later, in 1966, she returned to Cockley Moor and added what she believed to be the concluding section. However, in 1977, six years after Gavin Maxwell’s passing, she made the journey again and wrote the end of The Lion’s Mouth in the same room. “It seems that not only the events themselves but also their very narratives are grafted onto the same place, like layers of a millefeuille – not merely of memory or recollection of the past, but of creative imagination, always present and active in the moment of writing” (Garnier-Tardieu [2025: 81]). In other words, memory and imagination, usually distinct, coalesce in Raine’s work. (See also Anamnesis)
My second mother – or my first?
To the vicarage I came home to the world I had thought lost to me for ever. It was as if the same multitude of snowdrops had awaited my return, and the sound of the beck that flowed through the field the sound of the same burn flowing all night that I had heard as I lay in my bed in the blue bedroom at the Manse. Again the evenings were lit with Aladdin lamps, again my field and garden were divided from the wild world only by a stone dyke. The formation of the fells is very unlike the great rising sweep of the Northumbrian moors; in every dale there is a boundary, like the mark of a tide, to which has risen the human world of little fields; above the sinuous line of the last stone dyke rises the world beyond the human, stone and sedge and parsley-fern and fell-sheep, curlew and buzzard; but the wilderness, in a different idiom, tells everywhere of the same nature, still virgin as before the Fall of man. (Raine [1975: 115])
38If Raine’s earliest memories are of the redcurrant blossom hanging over her pram, or of the beauty of the garden at West View where the family settled when she was three years old, what forges her poetry is the untamed nature of the Northumberland of her childhood, the same wilderness she rediscovers as an adult in Martindale, then in Sandaig, on the shores of Scotland. The ever-regenerating nature is an idiom, a language in itself. The sense of belonging to this dimension of life is echoed in Emanuel Swedenborg’s concept of correspondences (1983-1999 [1749-1756]), according to which nature is a book that reveals the supranatural essence of the world. (See also Bavington; Cambridge; Flowers)
The portrait of my dear mother
“I was interested”, you said; as the goshawk,
Its hood lifted then drawn down again
Over the golden eyes, is restless to go free
On unencumbered wings home to its wilderness.
(Raine, from “The oval portrait”, The Oval Portrait [1977], Collected Poems [2019: 223])
39In this poem, Raine depicts a faded photograph of her mother at eighteen and underlines “her proud air of freedom and happy heart” that remained so vivid in her eyes at the age of ninety, as if in spite of a life in exile her true nature had never been altered. Once again, the contrast between linear time, which carries away our fading memories, and the timeless, ever-present essence that is never forgotten, lies at the heart of Raine’s poetic struggle. (See also Jessie Wilkie)
My honey-dew, even though so little I have to offer
After tea in my push-car I was again happy: we were setting off, at last, for those beautiful hills; but the push-car was turned round towards home, myself crying and struggling. They promised that I should go there “someday” – that beautiful horizon of time, where as upon mountains distant in space, resides that same imagined beauty. They thought I would forget, as soon as they themselves, my purpose to go to that place; but I was, on that day, not the baby in push-car but the self I was later to become, or already was. At last poetry came to my aid, and I fell into a chant, repeating the magic phrase over and over until the words became a sort of mantra. “I want to go to the Wild Hills O’Wannie”. By incantation I tried to bring near the far bright beauty of the hills. In need of magic for so specific an end I discovered the use of poetry. (Raine [1973: 24])
40The vision of the cliffs and rocky crags of Northumberland played a direct role in Raine’s invention of poetry, as she recounts this episode of early childhood: her mother and aunt went for a walk to Sweethope’s farm for tea, promising to take her to her favourite spot, a series of hills with anthropomorphic profiles called the Wild Hills O’Wannie, whose very name had already acted on her “as a spell”. After tea, however, the two women turned back to go home and the child, or rather the poet in the child, discovered the power of poetry as she started repeating the magic phrase over and over until the words became a sort of mantra. “I want to go to the wild hills O’Wannie” (Raine [1973: 24]). Indeed, poetry has the power to reveal the beautiful behind the trivial, the numinous behind the phenomenal; the power to transmute reality into its original essence; the power to go beyond appearances, and to tap into the force of pure life. In this respect, the archetype of the rock plays a key role.
41The description of the archetype of the rock made by Gaston Bachelard in La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté [2004: 181] seems particularly relevant here. When the wind blows, says Bachelard, “the rock screams” [2004: 190], and “The function of the rock is to put terror in the landscape” [2004:182]. All of Raine’s poetry is impregnated with this feeling of mixed awe and wonder at the grandeur and savagery of nature. In her poetry, the rock, or the mountain, will later evolve towards the figure of the ethereal, almost weightless island, transmuted into a crystal, a bird’s wing (see Raine, The Hollow Hill; The Hollow Hill [1965], Collected Poems, [2019: 115]). (See also Nature; Sandaig)
My question is my answer
What is all the art and poetry of the world but the record of remembered Paradise and the lament of our exile? (Raine [1973: 8])
42This question raised by Raine in her introduction to Farewell Happy Fields [1973: 8] sounds rhetorical. However, far from being artificial, it actually expresses the author’s entire mind and encapsulates the very essence of her poetic works, her autobiographical writings, and her philosophical commitment. Still, we are entitled to wonder how Raine manages to combine her love of nature and her poetic sensibility with the austere philosophy of Plato. Several answers can be given. Firstly, it is worth reading Robert Muller’s article [2020] on the frequent misinterpretation of Plato’s position on the place of poetry in the ideal city. According to him, Plato only rejected imitative, fallacious poetry (Republic, Book X, 595a) and, on the other hand, maintained its seminal role in educating the guardians of the city (end of Book II, Book III). Raine also read with great interest the Neoplatonists such as Plotinus and Philo, who developed a much more poetic vision of Platonic philosophy. Furthermore, her thorough study of William Blake enabled her to reconcile both her philosophical spirit and her love of life as in this verse from Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (Blake [1979 [1790-1793]: 149]). Finally, it is her poetic writing that concretely achieves the non-duality between her philosophical stance and her love of life.
- 6 What Raine refers to as “a kinship of Eden” [1973: 26].
43Bachelard writes: “Such, then, will be the objects for us: centres of poems. Such, then, will be matter for us: the intimacy of the worker’s energy” [2004: 14]. Indeed, along with the artists of the Eden tradition6 including Edwin Muir, Vernon Watkins, and David Gascoyne, Raine can be viewed as “a worker of memory and imagination”, an architect of paradise. She is both the heir to Platonic philosophy, basing her work on the memory of the garden, and the heir to the alchemical tradition, the tradition of the Great Work, striving, through creative imagination, to transmute the leaden material world into gold. (See also Poetry; Religion)
Poetry is my religion
On the night before I was to be received into the Church – upon the Feast of the Epiphany – my daimon visited me. I was, so he told me, doing wrong, going against everything he and those greater ones who had at times visited me, had wished for me, demanded of me, given me. I was about to separate myself from the inspirers, from those free spirits of imagination, those intellections who shun prison-bars, and all man-made restrictions and conditions imposed upon the reality which they mediate and express. All this and more my daimon said to me, and can you, he asked, can you really form and fashion your imagination by those symbols to which you are about to bind yourself? And will you part from us, the elementals who companioned your childhood, from the celestial hierarchies whose natures are free, as you were free in your childhood, and as you are – yes – as the poet in you is free even now? Do you really love those tame saints, so monotonously good, so wingless? (Raine [1975: 194])
44Here, Raine recounts the moment she was led toward conversion to Catholicism on the advice of friends like Gay Taylor and Cooie Lane, and under the guidance of Father Pius Dolin, the Carmelite prior, to save herself from her passionate love affair with Alastair. She reports a dream in which the daimon, her poetic inspirer, the Puer Aeternus that she feels has accompanied her since childhood (Raine [1973: 56]), admonishes her and urges her to abandon this plan that would forever distance her from the inspirers of poetry. How can she be satisfied with insipid images compared to the powerful symbols and myths of the great Imagination? Raine nevertheless converts briefly, calling this episode a “grandiose evasion” [1975: 207].
45As a child, she was raised in the Methodist religion of John Wesley (1703-1791) and holds precious memories of the service in the small church of Bavington, harmoniously built according to traditional architectural craft. She was in charge of arranging the flowers before the service. She learned to categorize flowers into two groups: “godly flowers”, like daffodils or white narcissus, white phlox, and white mallow, and “ungodly flowers”, like crimson peonies – “too riotously loose-petalled” – or tiger lilies [1973: 48-49], which were banned from the church. However, alongside this “Methodist” education she received, it was the great mysteries that truly moved her: the terror of the church harmonium notes she played alone on Sunday evenings, mingled with her child’s voice in rapture, soon rising like ghosts in the growing dark [1973: 51]; the wild beauty of the bull to be sacrificed – a taurobolium in the village – because it had gored the farmer – the strongest killed by the weakest [1973: 58-60]; the thrill of drawing water from the gushing spring and carrying it home in her bucket, feeling she was renewing an ancestral and sacred act [1973: 42]; or the mixture of terror and religious ecstasy when, perched on her favorite rock, she felt the vertigo of communion with the divine [1973: 43].
- 7 Methodists separated from the Anglican church after Wesley’s death.
46It is thus understandable that Protestantism would be rejected [1973: 152], just as the young girl would reject her father for a time, a Durham University graduate, English literature teacher at the County High School, and Methodist preacher in the small church of Cranbrook Park, Ilford, where she spent her adolescence. This rebellious mind, claiming its freedom, as described in the previously cited excerpt, contrasts in every way with the ideal of George Raine, born in 1882 in Wingate, County Durham, the son of a miner, who seemed to have retained nothing from his legendary past marked by Imagination, incompatible with Methodist religion. This branch of the Anglican Church7, initiated in England in the 18th century by John Wesley, a pastor and Christian theologian influenced by the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, initially developed among poor farmers and peasants, advocating an ideal of human improvement and social justice, including the abolition of slavery and prison reform. George Raine was content with the growth of the city of London, which he saw as a mark of social progress. He lived humbly, declined honors, and aspired to the coming of the Holy Jerusalem – Plato’s Civitas Dei in Raine’s view. In contrast, the poet’s mother, who fainted in church during her husband’s sermons, retained from her ancestors’ austere faith, founded on the harsh teachings of John Knox, only an acute consciousness of evil and a form of animism that made her recognize beauty in everything. It was she, very old, who one day declared to her daughter, “I saw the moor was alive” [1975: 120] – the late confession of an epiphanic experience similar to Raine’s vision of the hyacinth or of the prophetic bird.
47Indeed, Raine would never truly put faith in any particular religion, even though, culturally speaking, she remained steeped in Christianity.
48Eventually, she chose William Blake as her Virgil and her guide: “I took the end of his golden string, and began, with an exhilarating sense of return to duty, to wind it into a ball” [1975: 203]. On entering the British museum every morning to start her day’s work, she followed in the footsteps of W.B. Yeats, who himself studied the works of the brilliant engraver and poet. Blake who rejected organized religion would remain her mentor all her life. Even her travels to India, where she discovered Hinduism and Buddhism and where she was invited to join Sri Araubindo’s ashram, did not deter her from her fidelity to the religion of poetry. (See also Flowers; Jessie Wilkie)
Gavin’s island, in the Inner Hebrides, my second closest place to Paradise
Home is an image written in the soul,
To each its own: the new-born home to a memory,
Birds-souls, sea-souls, and with them bring anew
The isles that formed the souls, and souls the isles
Are ever building, shell by painted shell
And stone by glittering stone
(Raine, “Eileann Chanaidh”, 4. Nameless Islets, The Hollow Hill [1965]. Collected Poems [2019: 126])
- 8 In the The Lion’s Mouth, Raine recounts the death of Mijbil, Gavin’s beloved otter, then in her car (...)
49Sandaig is the place where the rowan-tree that Raine saw in a dream, with the prophetic bird singing in its crown, becomes real. After the loss of her great love for the author of Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell (1914-1969), and her feeling of guilt8, Raine had to fight a great personal and poetic battle to settle symbolically on the mythical shore of Sandaig, so that the antagonism between two traditions was resolved – the Scottish matriarchal tradition inherited from her mother on the one hand, and the Christian patriarchal tradition inherited from her father on the other hand. Her studies on William Blake who became her spiritual master enabled her to discover the Sophia perennis, namely Platonism, Neoplatonism, Hermetica, as well as theosophical, alchemist and later Hindu, Iranian and Buddhist traditions. In the end, it is the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions that remain predominant. This choice – if there was one – may be explained by the fact that the two traditional Western currents come from the same mythical place, Thrace or Trakia, which the Greeks considered to be the land of sacred poetry, according to Edouard Schuré [1921: 292] (inspired by Fabre d’Olivet (1767-1825)). It was in this region that Orpheus, whose attributes were the lyre and the stylus, symbols of the virile consciousness of the sacred, was said to have been torn to pieces by the Thracian Bacchae. But the fact that his head was preserved and drifted in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, chanting the name of Eurydice (Schuré [1921: 340]) suggests that the patriarchal poetic mode was widely disseminated southwards. In a sense, Orpheus emerged victorious from death and gained immortality. On the other hand, the matriarchal oral poetry embodied in the songs of the Bacchae was pushed northwards. This brings to mind the Scandinavian sagas, Icelandic runes and Celtic legends. It would then appear that Sandaig island embodies a new Trakia reconciling the two great currents in Raine’s life. If so, let us imagine the lighthouse on the small Hebridean island as a kind of Omphalos of the North, flashing its light for the poet, a lost traveller in the night. (See also Eden; Gavin Maxwell)
The Review of the arts of the Imagination I co-founded and to which I devoted the last part of my life
I see my life as a series of doors opening, through which I have passed, or through which others have entered. Incredibly rich has been my life’s journey in learning and unlearning alike, as I have wound in that “golden string” that leads us all by different routes to the place Blake called “Heaven’s Gate”, the place of arrival of every pilgrimage, however devious the way we have followed. For the laws of the spiritual worlds are no less immutable than the “laws of nature” (which is in reality the world of change and impermanence) and to these every spiritual tradition has borne witness. In terms of history, the word “tradition” signifies a process in time, by which the memories of the generations are conserved and studied and passed on; but as understood in terms of spiritual knowledge, “tradition” is timeless, an ever-present reality to which generations have borne witness in the world’s sacred scriptures, in all “inspired” works from the cave-paintings of Altamira to those of Ajanta, from Fra Angelico to the Chinese landscape painters of the Sung dynasty, to Samuel Palmer and to my contemporaries Cecil Collins and David Jones. All tell of Imaginative vision, seen in terms of their own here-and-now in the ever-moving present in which we live. (Raine, Editorial. Temenos Academy Review 1, Spring [1998: 7])
50Temenos journal, co-founded by Kathleen Raine, Philip Sherrard and Keith Critchlow, was named after the Greek word temenos (from τέμνειν: to cut) which, in ancient Greece, designated a sacred precinct – a “piece of land cut off as an official or sacred domain” (Merriam Webster dictionary).
51In fact, a few years earlier, Raine had discovered the term The New Age, an expression coined by William Blake in 1809 in the preface to “Milton a Poem”, and previously used by Thomas Taylor the Platonist who had a considerable influence on the English Romantic poets and on Raine herself. Indeed, in founding the magazine Temenos, she seems to have responded to the same call for “the young men of the new age” to rally to “the banner of Plotinus” (Raine [1998: 11]).
52In 1978, she spent a few months in New York at the Lindisfarne Association, a writing and teaching community. As it happens, the very name Lindisfarne was borrowed from that of an island in Northumberland, the country of her childhood, famous for its monastery established by an Irish monk, Aidan, in 635. This could only be taken as a good omen. On her return from the United States, Raine planned to found the journal Temenos with Keith Critchlow, Professor of architecture and Islamic art, Brian Keeble, poet, philosopher and editor of Golgonooza Press, and Philip Sherrard, philosopher and translator of modern Greek literature.
53The first issue of the magazine came out in 1981. The aim was to give a voice to scholars who did not subscribe to the materialism of British academia. Temenos was to be the journal of the arts and the imagination. From issue 1 onwards, it brought together some great names including Gilbert Durand, a disciple of Gaston Bachelard and author of works on the imaginary, Henry Corbin, a philosopher in the Ishmaelian tradition, Cecil Collins, a painter and friend of Kathleen Raine, Vernon Watkins, a Welsh poet, and David Gascoyne, the British poet she particularly cherished, to name but a few.
54Such a commitment to publishing a magazine, synonymous with criticism and various difficulties, especially financial, also corresponds to the culmination of her monumental work on William Blake, begun in 1961, and her discovery of the Sophia perennis: Emanuel Swedenborg, Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus, Plato and Plotinus, the Koran, the Bhaghavad-Gita, Greek, Scandinavian and Hindu mythologies, Zoroastrianism, the Annals of the Calcutta Society, written by Sir William Jones, and Jewish and Christian Kabbalah.
55Understandably, her visits to India reinforced this commitment. The journal Temenos thus opened up to the East, integrating arts and discourses from different cultures and traditional sources, reaffirming the “age-old alliance between the arts and gnosis” as Philip Sherrard wrote in his editorial for the first issue [1981: 6].
56The journal was published for a decade, until issue 13 in 1992. It later became the Temenos Academy Review following the creation of the Temenos Academy, whose vocation is to teach art and works of wisdom through courses and seminars, as well as to organize international conferences. The impetus for this came from the two major symposia held at Darlington Hall in 1987 and 1989, which were attended by the Dagar brothers, Drupad singers from India, as well as Kapila Vatsyayan, a specialist in religious architecture and sculpture, and Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, a world authority on traditional Indian arts. The Temenos Academy Review was supported by Prince Charles of England and continues to this day.
It was there that I found myself fully understood and recognized for my work on William Blake, and where I experienced unwavering friendships, – and not in the British academic world
I was to discover, on the contrary, that my discoveries were most unwelcome, were rejected or swept under the carpet. I had expected thanks for the restoration of this golden string of wisdom, perhaps looked for a little praise. Instead I found myself on a battlefield with bullets whizzing past my head. Academia not only did not want to know of the great universe of spiritual worlds, of Plotinus and Porphyry and the Hermetica and the mystical insights of Boehme and Swedenborg, of the Cabbalistic Tree of God: on the contrary they wanted not to know, not to have their premisses called to question. (Raine, Unlearning the Best Education, unpublished manuscript [1995: 15]; Apprendre à désapprendre, Raine [1998])
57In 1961, Raine was invited to give lectures at the National Gallery in Washington for an entire year, as part of the prestigious Andrew Mellon Lectures. Then, on 25 February 1962, at the worst moment in her relationship with Gavin, when he announced his marriage to Lavinia Renton (soon to be ended), Raine embarked on the Queen Mary for the United States where she was once again invited.
58Significantly, it was the poet Alexis Léger, alias St John Perse, then French ambassador, who welcomed her and guided her on this journey of the spirit, where she won praise and recognition. The contrast with her own country could only help to reveal the harsh reality. In fact, Raine’s public commitment began with the loss of a certain naivety and the realization that a relentless battle would have to be fought to save the spirit. When Blake and Tradition appeared in England in 1968, in the collection The Andrew Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, the reception was negative. She suddenly understood that a catastrophe was looming. Her own life was at stake at the very heart of the struggle between spirit and matter. Having perceived, through her childhood, her dispossessed youth, her awakening and her poetic creation, the ineffable reality that underlies the world and all beings, what she then called “the Presence”, she felt her mission was to stand up and fight. But how? Essentially, with her pen. In 1967, following her brilliant work on William Blake, Raine published a collection of essays with the evocative title Defending Ancient Springs, some of which were translated into French in Le monde vivant de l’Imagination, in 1998. In these essays, entitled On the Beautiful or On the Mythological, she defended the Neoplatonic tradition, as well as English Romantic poetry, in particular Shelley and Keats. In 1969, in collaboration with George Mills Harper, she prefaced and published the texts of Thomas Taylor the Platonist, which include fascinating pages on the Mysteries of Eleusis, among others. In 1979, a new collection of essays, Blake and the New Age, was published by George Allen & Unwin and translated into French a few years later under the title: L’Imagination créatrice de William Blake. In 1986, Yeats the Initiate was published, a compilation of nearly five hundred pages of her essays on the great Irish poet Yeats, himself a disciple of William Blake. Finally, in 1999, she published W. B. Yeats and the Learning of the Imagination, translated into French three years later under the title: W. B. Yeats ou le pouvoir de l’Imagination, edited by Jacqueline Genet. It was a colossal piece of writing, a kind of intellectual bulwark against the waves of ignorance and consumerism.
59Finally, in 1978, she went back to the USA where she spent a few months in New York with the Lindisfarne Association, founded in 1973 by William Irwin Thompson, “a fraternity of scholars living in a community of writing and teaching”, which soon became her American “family”.
With her friend Victoria Sackwille-West, the two most beautiful women I have ever seen
It was during the summer term that Virginia Woolf visited Girton – the first famous person with whom I had ever been in the same room. She came – it is all history now – at the invitation of the Girton Literary Society, to give her paper, A Room of one’s own. […] With Virginia Woolf had come her friend Vita Sackville-West: the two most beautiful women I had ever seen. I saw their beauty and their fame entirely removed from the context of what is usually called “real life”, as if they had descended like goddesses from Olympus, to reascend when at the end of the evening they vanished from our sight. (Raine [1975: 22])
60Kathleen Raine attended the famous first reading of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf herself. She confesses that at the time she had not read any of Woolf’s novels and discovered with surprise that the problems of “a woman writer” were different than those of a man writer. Raine always maintained a position that could be described as anti-feminist, recognising no fundamental difference between men and women, arguing that she had always found the time and freedom to write. She even recalls an episode of sudden Gelstat-like realisation when, one day in Martindale, while scrubbing the floor, she felt that whatever she was doing, she was and remained a poet (Raine [1975: 117]). However, her choice to live independently of a man, and to write poetry while working for a living, at a time when Europe was ablaze and London was undergoing the Blitz, left her with a strong sense of guilt that she would never relinquish towards her two children, Anna and James, whom she eventually entrusted to the care of Helen Sutherland, a patron of the arts who had taken her in for a time at her house of Cockley Moor. Even though her life contradicts her intellectual position, the latter remains understandable if one considers her philosophical stance, which places the primordial unity of Being before the plurality of its manifestations.
61Raine had a second opportunity to meet Woolf in 1928 when after obtaining her degree she had to consider her future. A friend of hers, Julian Bell, took her to see Woolf and ask if she could work at the Hogarth Press. Raine says that at the time she had lost all her illusions about Cambridge, along with her identity and soul. She was courted from all sides, due to her great beauty, and about to marry Hugh Sykes Davies, the year after, from whom she would soon divorce. Then came depression, shipwreck, and a second marriage in 1932 with Charles Madge, which was also to end in divorce. As might be expected, the meeting with Woolf led to nothing. How could the famous writer have seen, in the awkward, poorly dressed girl petrified by shyness, the great poet to come? (See also Martindale)
I will write with it
(And re-reading this manuscript in 1976, I dreamed, last night, the words, repeated again and again, ‘Set the axe to the root of the Tree’) (Raine [1977: 140]).
62This quote – and dream – is a reference to Matthew 3-10: “The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” Writing with an axe is that which cuts through illusion, prunes away the causes of suffering, to lay bare the ultimate truth, the final word. This is how one can understand Raine’s approach in The Lion’s Mouth, the third volume of her autobiography, where she paints an uncompromising self-portrait. Written in three stages – 1962, 1966, and 1971, after Gavin’s death – this text can be seen as a reverse palimpsest: each addition strips away any remnant of self-indulgence, justification, or excuse. This incisive writing ultimately reveals a sense of fulfillment and irreducible certainty: Sandaig remains the unchanging headland, both figuratively and literally – three years after Gavin’s death, Kathleen is invited to take the wheel of the Western Isles and guide the boat towards the mountain overlooking Sandaig: ‘Just hold her towards Sgriol’. (See also Anamnesis; Gavin Maxwell; Sandaig)
My illustrious predecessor at the British Museum in the footsteps of William Blake
It is claimed in these days that knowledge can be stored in machines; but to the poet whatever can be so stored is by that very definition not knowledge. For the poet knowledge is a living experience: the poet’s truth is not fact but the immeasurable mystery of life. The poem lives on the frontier of that mystery; and advance as we may through libraries of books, that frontier lies always before us – it can never be crossed. ‘Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it’, Yeats wrote. (Raine [1986: xvi])
63This excerpt from Raine’s voluminous collection of essays on W.B. Yeats – Yeats the Initiate [1986] – points at a conception of true knowledge that is not shared by the academic or scientific world. True knowledge is an intimate experience preceded by this ‘leap of the heart’ that she felt each morning when entering the British Museum to begin her day’s work on William Blake at the same place where Yeats had done so decades earlier. For Raine, Yeats’s imaginative universe is “an extension of Blake’s own” (Raine [1986: xvii]). Indeed, she recognizes symbols in Yeats’s poetry as in these lines from He and She (Yeats [1982: 331]): ‘All creation shivers/With that sweet cry’, or from Paudeen: […] ‘There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot, / A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry’, which seem to echo Blake’s verse: ‘The fading cry is ever dying, / The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy’ (Blake [1972 [1795-1804]: 289]. And she further advocates that both poets are referring to the same traditional source, The Hermetica, in which the divine principle is heard as ‘the unutterable voice of nature’ (cited by Raine [1986: 103-104]). Acknowledging such intellectual lineages is, in itself, knowledge and elicits joy – the joy of uniting scattered fragments of the world’s wisdom. Yeats was precisely accused of resorting to “unscientific” knowledge, including theosophy, Indian and Far Eastern scriptures, or even magic and obscurantism, contrary to T.S. Eliot who remained faithful to the Christian tradition. Yet, the poet of ‘Byzantium’ and of ‘A Vision’ lived at a time when all the excluded knowledge was still graspable as he recalls in his essay on ‘Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places’. Indeed, after travelling across Ireland with Lady Gregory in search of folk beliefs, Yeats shared this insight: “I was comparing one form of belief with another, and like Paracelsus, who claimed to have collected his knowledge from midwife and hangman, I was discovering a philosophy” (cited by Raine [1986: 7]).
If music be the food of poetry… Play on!
Those Sunday visits became habitual. Roland would take me into the little dining-room at the back of the house, where he would sit down at his upright piano, piled high with music. There I would sit beside him on a dining-room chair, and he played Chopin’s Nocturnes and Mazurkas and his Ballades, whose language of wild longing spoke for Roland’s soul, as Hardy’s less passionate nostalgia for his father’s; Chopin and Ravel and Debussy. He made me sing, to his accompaniment, the Kennedy Fraser’s adaptations of Hebridean songs; the first echo of the Celtic revival to reach me. Afterwards we would walk to the church where I would rejoin my parents in their pew. (Raine [1975: 132])
64Raine vividly recalls her first love at fourteen, forever encapsulated in “the resonance of Chopin’s third ballad.” Roland Haye, a student and admirer of Raine’s father, fell in love with her, sharing his passion for art and music (See Farewell Happy Fields, chapter 2). As a child in Ilford, Raine had already begun studying piano at the Metropolitan Academy of Music. Later, during the First World War, while living with her aunt Peggy Black in Great Bavington, she would play the harmonium at the local Methodist church after Sunday services. During her time at Cambridge, she sang as a second soprano in the Girton College choir, experiencing “heavenly” emotions (Raine [1979]). Indeed, as noted by Eric McElroy [2025: 132] in his seminal chapter on “Music in the Life and Work of Kathleen Raine”, Raine remembers those magic moments in a letter to David Matthews and says: “It was heavenly” [1979]. No doubt that when joining her voice to all the other voices in such performances as J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor, or pieces by Claudio Monteverdi or Antonio Vivaldi she could hear “that music of the spheres Pythagoras heard” (Raine, “The Presence” [2019: 287]), and feel she belonged to that great choir of the stars that Plotinus equated with the universe. Indeed, Raine’s poetry is nothing else but the constant reassertion of this original concord: “I, living, utter as the blackbird / In ignorance of what it tells, the undying voice” [2019: 287]. (See also Blackbird)