Scholarly Essay

The Jailed Roses of Thomas Merton: Revealing Alchemical Elements by Stephanie Pope

For Thomas Merton writing poetry was a stimulus to and result of a contemplative lifestyle. He searched for the sacred present in a culture where it seemed to have vanished. For him modern poetry had lost its traditional, symbolic potency. As he explored Christian apophatic mysticism and the Zen experience, and involved himself thoughtfully in the contemporary social issues of his times through daily, trappist, contemplative monasticism, he sought continually to be a nexus for the lost or ignored spiritual intuition that would, as Alan Altany states, "help restore poetry to its truth-telling, myth-sharing roles" (Altany 1). Along with spiritual intuition and mythic themes a poet, Merton instructed his younger counterparts in the monastery, yields in poetic form, a striving toward the highest unity (Merton, Paradise). Yet, an analysis of the alchemical elements within the context of Merton's poem, There Has To Be A Jail For Ladies reveals that the poem ultimately fails to attain this unity.

The way of the poet, as Joseph Campbell informs us, transforms a literal story into its beautiful fiction. By doing so, it communicates allegorically a truth (Audio 4). The mythic function will strive to integrate the dynamics of an individual conscious life with the dynamics of the unconscious life whose two great tensions today are the challenges relating consciousness to the certainty of death and the uncertainty inherent in the vastness of the cosmos (5). Now, There Has To Be A Jail For Ladies, writes Merton. Whereupon that might mean there has to be a psychic space in which this tension is contained and worked upon.  So now, let there be such a "jail". And, let examining this "jail" for its truth mean seeking to expose the beautiful ground of fiction through which  such truths are rendered.

Importantly, the creation of mythic space, that is, the leap from the literal plane to the poetic or mythic sphere, occurs with line fourteen, But I remember one favorite song. The whole alchemical sequence which follows this line is figuratively contained in the song imagery. It functions like a testament to an alchemical art capable of revealing a hidden identity. This identity can be imagined as the incarnate nature of the one divine presence which suffers in us all. This incarnate soul, by revealing itself, functions to unite in us our humanity. And, just as the Ave Praeclara served Melchior to elucidate alchemical stages of transformation in the form of a mass (Jung 396), this motif serves the reader to initiate the alchemical exposé in the poem .

Joseph Campbell called such an image a sundoor. In such an experience we are psychically torn apart. In other words, for an eternal value to shine through poetic imagery, it must first disengage us "as a separate entity in the form of time in order that we lose commitment to this little instance", our literal reality (206). We are opened, dismembered, as it were, and fluidly afloat upon the transcendent stream--that existent non-existence where eternity breaks into time, and time flows back upon the waves of an ever farther out.

The jail has become a garden now. Song is that portal of our passing by which we have gained our entry. The movement takes us from outside to inside and further; from present time to past, from past to eternity. And from there, even in a farther direction can an image point, though in this experience, the poem makes no further statement.

The first self-radiant form presented is the faded flower, the often-used symbol of the artisan, which represents the nigredo phase of alchemy and a psychological reference to wholeness (Bernoulli 306). The rose (lotus, golden flower, etc) is a common vegetal reference to the Self. If thought of as a "cosmic flower", it may then be roughly equivalent to the rose in Dante's Paradiso according to Jung (172). This means the alchemical opus is rendered out of the potency contained within this image/form/pattern i.e. likeness of this motif of the faded flower. In other words, the aurum non vulgi, the uncommon gold of spiritual illumination, is contained within the devalued forms represented by the faded flower. Because alchemy "draws its nourishment from Greek culture, Neoplatonism, and Gnosis and constitutes in some degree a continuation of the mystery religions" (Bernoulli 309), the devalued forms would be, at least in part, inherited from the Greek tradition and would involve four aspects of reexamination and integration.

The first of these four aspects is the Homeric inheritance of the warrior spirit and its Victory Gods. In its putdown of the even earlier inheritance of the Goddess, it sublimates the image of the author of creation as the Goddess Mother and re-turns in an image of emergence as the Great Mother of Gods, which eventually re- turns through the Christian mythic pattern in the likeness of Mary, the Great Mother of God.

Second, the Hesiodic inheritance of social justice establishes the not beautiful as aberrant and therefore outside the protections of the social order or the law. One can be thought of as ugly simply because one is not doing what is expected. Consequently, one is wrong. It is right for the wrong to be unheard of for a long time, the poem states in line twelve.

Third, the Dionysian themes of guilt and atonement or stain and purification, of Trying, without wanting, to kill your sin, (line 29 of the poem) introduces the problem of the need/want/deep desire in the becoming nature of being. As one fully aware of the monstrous and terrific, horrific effects of conscious strivings as well as that recognition of one's own willing participation, there is also that subtle moment where one at once paradoxically recognizes one's "desire" to return to that state of innocence nestled in being resting within an imagined core of being-supported-by-non-being or the void of non-identity.

The fourth inheritance from Greek culture involves the Orphic theme invoking the use of sacred song to establish access to the Other World, a world-beyond-this-world accent (think again not of the common gold of a marketplace, but of this Other World), which ennobles the devalued, put-down existences of expression or the non-identities of existences (as in the ugly, the poor, the old, the wrong) and which, by such re-cognition, unites again the beholder and the beheld through a "wonder return" , a culminating image already precognate.

Already "known" to our own heart, it is by way of this re-making of likenesses that our humanity eventually shines through. This shining is the real singer. And then, it is this singer whose song of remembrance overpowers even the laws of hell. When (this) God becomes your heart's prisoner (line 40), an idea Merton borrows from Blake, you are free (Merton, Revelation).

Finally, there are two other points I wish to make involving the last six lines of the poem and regarding the imagery of the pocket, the skylark, and the white rose. Keep this voice--this song in your pocket i.e. the pocket out of which the mythological object comes, and in transformation you will stay in your inherited tradition. The possibility yielded offers opportunities toward the perfection of spheres of Self within that tradition. One can think in terms of perfecting a self through transformation and in stages that imitate the stages of transformation perfectly.

However, keep this voice where you keep your richness, in your "heart pocket" or your pocket of lumen naturae, and you will place yourself on a kind of trackless track that will open you to a mysterious experience as of one's own idea; awakening to the presence of the one one is in the Core of Psyche. That one is and needs no transforming. It merely ask you to live, and then that one teaches you how to live in the presence of a song open to the many in-dwelling and often disparate voices singing, all of which are you in your deepest identity.

The poem re-imagines  identity as a window. This is the window where the inner and outer worlds meet. It allows the reappearance finally of duality fashioned as a bird and a flower, connotative in value as of spirit and nature, male and female, eternity and time---of any pair of opposites really. For in consciousness you and I have been returned in dreaming from the transcendent inflection back across the timeless threshold into a time-factored statement. The skylark has released an elixir vitae, a soothing balm "in flight" as it were. Each year is plucked like a white rose. These final two lines are reflections of the poem's last light.

The mystical rose of Christ--the white rose--resonates to my mind as the Communion of Saints. Where are these saints? In heaven. So it is here (in heaven) that the myth finally dissolves for me. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, Merton ends up in heaven before the highest alchemical union has been attained. The white of the alchemical transformation has been distilled and claimed and reflects the albedo phase. But, the union of the red and the white, "the white of the spiritual flowering as contained within the red", is missing (Campbell 254). This statement of the resolution of mythic forms "on earth" and "in the flesh" represents a higher story and the greater mystery (Campbell 243), leaving (for me) The Jailed Roses of Thomas Merton contained within the garden of an unknown fate.
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Wholeness is Jung's way of regarding the human psyche in its strivings toward belonging together. However, there are now dramatic changes in our system of thinking since Jung's time. Transiting from Modernity to Post-modernity, the human psyche can be viewed from the in-scapes of its disparate identities through an attitude whose seeking is toward an experience of completeness rather than wholeness. For more on this idea of psychic organization see the writings of James Hillman.


Author's note about the alchemical rose photo:

This is emblem 21 from Iacobi â Bruck Angermundt Cogn. Si. Emblemata Moralia & Bellica, Argentorati Per Iacobum ab Heyden Iconographum Anno MDCXV. M. Merian Incidebat.
                                                                                                   


                                                                                                          Works Cited

Altany, Alan. Thomas Merton's Poetry: Emblems of a Sacred Season. Research on
Contemplative Life: An Electronic Quarterly 2.1 (1995): 38p
http://140.190.128/merton/altany2.html. March 2, 1999.

Bernoulli, Rudolph. "Spiritual Development in Alchemy". Spiritual Disciplines: Papers
from the Eranos Yearbooks. Ed. Joseph Campbell. New Jersey: Princeton, 1985.

Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Image. New Jersey: Princeton, 1974.

---Mythology and the Individual. Vol. 1. Audiocassette Tape 4 and 5.
New Horizons, 1996.

---Transformations of Myth Through Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

Jung, C.G.. Psychology and Alchemy. New Jersey: Princeton, 1968.

Merton, Thomas. Poetry of Paradise: Lectures at Gethsemani. Audio. Missouri:
The National Catholic Reporter. P.O. Box 419491 Kansas City, MO 64141.

---Poetry of Revelation. Audio. Missouri: The National Catholic Reporter. P.O.
419491 Kansas City, MO 64141.