WHITE'S HISTORY

This is a chapter from my first published book entitled: “The Emergence of a Baha’i Consci
The chapter begins with the following quotation from the Australian poet Veronica Brady:
"A poet s life, any life, is a process of unfolding realization… a responsibility for poet
I learned a great deal about many subjects from White and I dedicate this part of my autobi
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J.B. Priestly once wrote that "the true Shakespearian way of life was to combine a sceptici
White s poetry, like the poetry of W.B. Yeats, is so filled with the people and places he c
In the beginning was the story, the Word - and White leads us back to that story and Word,
The Western dreaming opens, for the Greeks and the Hebrews, on the plains of Troy and in
However recent, the Baha i dreaming can slip into history beyond our reach. It is we who
White gives us a neighbourhood to journey in for our dreaming . Sometimes the path is too
The hieroglyphics gouged in air
By an impatient fire-gloved hand
Are given as our library –
We, star-affrighted, gaze to land.
All roads in White s poetic journey converge at one spot: the teachings of Baha u llah and
White helps us to carry our stories within us, into the world and out of it. In the end it
White s poetry is, of course, more than story . It is both praise and criticism of life,
White s poetry is an expression of what for him was "true historical sense", of his exis
Roger White is one of the finest wordsmiths in the Baha i community to have written in Engl
White seems to have some of that "inexhaustible ardour for insight" that the poet William B
We court a miracle and see the candles fail,
The petals rust. What do our tears avail?
No sword of vengeance cleaves us as we stand,
Our supplication brings no answering shout.
An ant crawls by persistent as our doubt
And in the comprehending hush we understand
Our mediocrity and godliness …
White would have agreed with Jane Austen when she wrote: "Real solemn history, I cannot be
History for White also was, as Gibbon put it much later in that grand work, "a record of th
For White the writing of poetry, and his particular take on history, is a dance of life ,
White gains access to meaning by interpreting events, arranging patterns, making descriptio
White attempts to create a narrative, a concept of the Baha i narrative, which Baha is can
Matthew Arnold once wrote that the Greek dramatist Sophocles saw life whole, with its moral
This is partly why White sought to draw his readers away from his personality. Indeed, he
Some things in life must be savoured slowly. White s poetic history is one of these. The
Have patience, Martha,
White is informal but serious as he continues with thirty lines of graphic description whic
the poisoned air
the towers afire
the maimed trees
the human pyre
sent her "hurtling in exquisite arc/across the blackening sky". And so she did hurtle fo
...... a solitary warning cry
against engulfing dark
and ultimate night.
The darkness was so great during these inter-war years when millions perished in Stalin s a
Your eyes were dippers
used against the fire,
Apparently insignificant, her efforts, he goes on:
purchased brief respite
that on the ramparts might arise
the legioned guardians of light.
These "legioned guardians" began to arise in the teaching plans that the Guardian initiated
Be patient:
we may yet ourselves become
God s gadabouts,
meteoric, expire
Martha-like,
in conflagrant holy urgency.
And so in five lines, the last five of White s first poem in his first major book of poetry
There is an authenticity here, something behind and beyond the text, beyond the life of Mar
Even the face of Martha, usually characterized as photographs of faces are by its ability t
There has been a strong belief in the West since the early years following the invention of
Indeed it may be more accurate to say that White clarifies Root s mythic status. For there
In another poem, the next one in Another Song, A Letter to Keith, White continues with his
The poem begins by placing the reader right at the heart of the issue White is exploring:
Why did you do it, Keith,
And you a looker?
Not your usual religious dame
in need of a good dentist
and a fitted bra.
In White s response to a letter criticizing his poem s "stereotypical thinking about religi
At the end of the poem Keith s sacrifice causes this anonymous narrator to re-examine his o
I m bawling,
me a grown man,
three sons and a wife in the grave
and not what you d call sentimental.
White concludes his letter by saying that "we cannot lose hope that even the narrator of A
Perhaps some of White s skill resides in that strange ability, as William Blake expressed i
To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of (his) hand
And eternity in an hour.
Or as another poet, Browning, emphasized –
..... a man s search should exceed his grasp
Or what s a heaven for.
White s poetic pieces of history are based on the view that human phenomena must be interpr
For White, "the poem comes before the form", as Herbert Read described the process, "in the
White recognizes the complexity, the interdependence and the mystery of the reality I refer
There is another kind of clock
its cogwheels fixed
in the unknowable convolutions
of God s mind,
perhaps our galaxiesits smallest jewels,
a clock that marks
some celestial piecing
of eternity,
one that runs silently,
invisibly,
forever,
fluidly forward or back,
cancelling our time,
its tick perpetual,
attuned to the omniscient
and eternal heart.
The cornerstone of the Baha i philosophy of history is a belief in progress through provide
what clock or calendar keeps Him
and Who He is.
This teleological view of history, where "intervention/rises up to melt our mathematics/or
It is White s view that the revealed Word fundamentally affects the development of social a
…. as a young girl into the service of his wife …
he was led through the rabble of the streets. …
A strange sight indeed - like seeing a white rose
in a swarm of gnats. He walked in dream-like majesty
She describes how she was about to throw a small pebble at him but, in shame and fear, she
it was enough to have seen that face.
Perhaps I should have cast it, but my hand was stayed.
I took it as an omen. …
It grows, I think, more white each year.
The silly amulet of an old fool, I suppose,
but when I am ill or sad it comforts me …
So there you have it; it was his eyes, you see.
It was as though they gazed beyond us to another world.
Although this is a somewhat humble way of illustrating the whole notion of the evolution of
How does White express this interpretation of history in his poems? What are the various s
In a poem about Ruhiyyih Khanum, White refers to "history s hunkered spectre/brooding watch
The poem, The Gift, is based on an experience Curtis Kelsey had in 1921 when Abdu l-Baha
With that face given to me had I need
Of other gift? With those eyes holding mine
The shrivelled earth lost power to incline
Me to its shimmering mirage, to heed
Its ashy course, its dimming stars design—
In one long glance the light of sun was mine!
Embossed on all my days this best of gifts,
A compelling image rising in my brain
To challenge me to virtue past my reach.
Thus comforted, upheld, the frail heart lifts
To meet the imprinted living goad again
And pluck sweet victory like the low-hung peach.
His countenance held heaven s very plan.
That message read, what other need I scan?
The "shimmering mirage", the "ashy course" of earth and the "dimming stars design" that Wh
And finally the reader is brought face to face with the core of the meaning of the poem, a
One important part of White s view of history, White s view of some essential perspectives
With every breath to celebrate breath s source:
Was merely this the perspicuous distinction,
To be as choiceless candle hastening extinction,
Burning with single purpose its brief course
Mindful of the wick, the hand that set the flame,
The oxygen it drinks to speed its end,
Casting its light for stranger and for friend
Nor caring were one beautiful, another plain?
Is this the model consciously we d choose?
The faithless mind contrives a thousand ways
To fit distraction to our fleeting days
Yet sorrows for the unnamed thing we lose.
What use were lungs unless in every breath
Life s source be remembered? Were all else death?
The purpose of our history, our life, White says is that "with every breath" we "celebrate
In some ways the centre of history is a spiritual path, a journey. The Journey, White desc
In the end, any poem s success depends on the reader participating in the emotional life of
Notes:

Autobiography of John Cowper Powys, Picador, 1967, p.xvii.

2 William Hatcher, "Science and Religion," World Order, No.3, Spring 1969, p.9.
3 David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Cambridge, Harvard, 1976 - in William Pritchar
of the Modern Poets, Faber and Faber, London, 1980, p.58.
4 ibid., p.62.
5 Wayne Booth in "How We Read: Interpretive Communities and Literary Meaning," Falling Into
Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, editor, David Richter, Bedford, NY, 2000, p.247
6 Mark Turner, The Literary Mind, Oxford University Press, NY, 1996, pp.4-5.
7 Alan Richardson, "A Review of Mark Turner s The Literary Mind ," Internet, 17 June 2002.
8 Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold s Essays in Criticism, Dent, London, 1966 (1906), pp.viii-
9 Robert Pinsky, "Poetry and American Memory," The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 284, No.4, Octobe
10 David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature, 2nd edition, Longman, London, 1981 (19
11 ibid., p.87.
12 Roger White, One Bird, One Cage, One Flight, p.69.
13 George Steiner, A Note on Kafka s Trial, No Passion Spent, Faber and Faber, London, 19
14 Michael Foucault in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Linda Hutcheon
1988, p.162,
15 Francois Lyotard in Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Ron Price, unpublished manuscript: appe
16 Somerset Maugham, Ten Novels and Their Authors, Mercury Books, London, 1963 (1954), pp.1
17 Louis Untermeyer, Lives of the Poets: The Story of One Thousand Years of English and Ame
Simon and Schuster, NY, 1959, p.310.
18 Roger White, "In the Silent Shrine an Ant," Another Song, Another Season, p.113.
19 Jane Austen, "Quotations on History," Internet, 2002.
20 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chatto and Windus, 1960, p.30.
21 ibid., Chapter 16.
22 Charles Beard in "Faith of a Historian," Samuel Eliot Morison, American Historical Revie
pp.261-275.
23 Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin s Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-
24 A.D. Hope in Native Companions: Essays and Comments on Australian Literature: 1936-1966,
and Robertson, Sydney, 1974, p.132.
25 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 1957, p.150.
26 Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History, Holmes and Meier Pub. Inc., NY, 1978, p.9.
hermeneutical approach to human thought and institutions expounds a vision of philosoph
poetic, artistic and historical culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the founders of he
as "the voice of a culture". (The Times, Obituary, 14 March, 2002.)
27 Sociological Theory in Transition, editors M. Wardell, and S. Turner, Allen and Unwin, 1
28 Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, Faber and F
1958, p.100.
29 Charles Baudelair in Baudelair, Claude Pichois, Hamesh Hamilton, 1987, p.xiv.
30 Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tra
Penguin, 1974 (1957), p.132.
31 P.E. Easterling, "Character in Sophocles," Greece and Rome, Vol. 24, 1977, p.121.
32 Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, Harmony Books, NY, 1993, p.18.
33 See his play Antigone. This quotation is from A. Bonnard, Greek Civilization: From the
1959.
34 Arthur Koestler, quoted in The Pheonix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, Oxfo
35 See Tudwig Tuman, Mirror of the Divine: Art in the World Baha i Community, George Ronald
1993, p.116.
36 ibid., p. 117.
37 Roger White, Another Song, p.3.
38 Herbert Read, op.cit., p.137.
39 Allan Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Ph
1973-1983, Halifax, Nova Scotia, p.85.
40 The transposition of the star system from movies to literature was also well established
by 1937. Brenda Silver, Virginia Woolf: Icon, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 19
41 For an interesting discussion of the hero-star phenomenon in our culture see Silver, op.
42 John Hatcher, The Purpose of Physical Reality, Bahá i Pub., Wilmette, 1987, pp.74-117.
43 This term was used by Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, Sheed and Ward, Kansas City, 19
44 Rollo May, The Courage To Create, G.J. McLeod Ltd., Toronto, 1975, pp.106-108.
45 Roger White, letter to Baha i Canada, 15 April 1991, copy to the author.
46 William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence."
47 Robert Browning, Collected Works.
48 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: Vol.10, Oxford UP, NY, 1963, p.38 and Vol. 1, p.46.
out that Lord Acton was the last person who was able to read everything in a field of k
to write his book but, in reading everything, he did not publish. This was in the 1890s
49 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper and Rowe, NY, 1942, p.261
50 Herbert Read, op.cit., p.140.
51 Herbert Read, op.cit. pp. 101-115.
52 Roger White, Another Song, p.30.
53 Geoffrey Nash, The Phoenix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.89.
54 Roger White, op.cit., p.39.
55 ibid,.p.47.
56 ibid., p. 57.
57 ibid., p.58.
58 ibid., p.94.
59 Nader Saiedi, Logos and Civilization: Spirit, History and Order in the Writings of Baha
Press of Maryland, 2000, p.340.
60 Roger White, The Witness of Pebbles, p.4.
61 ibid., p.12.
62 ibid., p.15.
63 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, Secker and Warburg, London, 1951, p.291.
64 Roger White, Pebbles, p.22.
65 ibid., p.23.
66.ibid., p.51
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The following section or chapter returns to the theme of letters found in volume 1 chapter