II
The poetry of mysticism might be defined on the one hand as a
temperamental reaction to the vision of Reality: on the other, as
a form of prophecy. As it is the special vocation of the
mystical consciousness to mediate between two orders, going out
in loving adoration towards God and coming home to tell the
secrets of Eternity to other men; so the artistic self-expression
of this consciousness has also a double character. It is love-
poetry, but love-poetry which is often written with a missionary
intention.
Kab?r's songs are of this kind: out-births at once of rapture and
of charity. Written in the popular Hindi, not in the literary
tongue, they were deliberately addressed--like the vernacular
poetry of Jacopone da Tod? and Richard Rolle--to the people rather
than to the professionally religious class; and all must be struck
by the constant employment in them of imagery drawn from the
common life, the universal experience. It is by the simplest
metaphors, by constant appeals to needs, passions, relations which
all men understand--the bridegroom and bride, the guru and
disciple, the pilgrim, the farmer, the migrant bird-- that he
drives home his intense conviction of the reality of the soul's
intercourse with the Transcendent.
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