Swedenborg heavenly dreaming
‘every soul of man is in a spiritual body, after it hath put off it’s material coverings which it carried about with it in the world.’ Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) Divine Love and Wisdom
‘[…] a man without egotism, without drama, without a sense of the picturesque, and who wrote a dry language lacking fire and emotion, and who to William Blake seemed but the arranger […] an author not of a book, but of an index.’ Yeats, Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places
‘Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up.’ Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
I beseech ye Yeats & Blake —
his reputation is hardly at stake?
for describing a pastoral four-star heaven
with chapter & verse extensively given
Elysium vicariously concealed
and personal theology revealed
Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon
their discourse sounds like mere opinion
his public career and talk could haunt
predictions proved him clairvoyant
he made no secret of Gyllenborg
the eternal love of Swedenborg
her spouse a local politician
wishing Swedenborg’s perdition
taunting the mystic with ridicule
Stockholm’s famous heretical fool
the national mining tax collector
a post-Renaissance spook and spectre
likes his garden, sleeps in the shed
sceptics think: he’s off his head
travels by ship, contagiously occult
yet in public is never difficult
sojourns in Amsterdam & London
widely welcomed, seen as fun
denies he’s a mystic or anything mystical
his only claim is scholarly biblical
predicts to the hour, his time of death
and in his eighties has perfect breath
vilifies every established religion
under divine benign dominion
knows many angels in extensia
all writ up in Arcana Coelestia
Swedish Church shuns him heretical
otherwise he can go to hell-ical
of all his works he will none recant
finds some support in Emmanuel Kant
requests communion before he dies
‘Tell me the hour for I’m going to the skies’
he’s hale and hearty at eighty four
he sees Apostles at his bedroom door
the skull went missing for a century
and was safely returned, 1823
in Uppsala, the Swedenborg crypt and gate
has been carefully locked since 1908
Kevin Kiely Irish-American Fulbright Scholar & PhD, “The Patron of Modernism & Postmodernism at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard” University College Dublin (link). Poetry Books include Plainchant for a Sundering; Breakfast with Sylvia Awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry 2006; UCD Belfield Metaphysical: a retrospective; UCD Belfield Metaphysical: New & Selected Poems; Cromwell Milton Collins Carson; Endgames: Good Friday Agreement & Missus Windsor’s Hitmen; Yrland Regained: Central Cantos Vol I; Yrland Regained: Central Cantos Vol II; Criticism: Harvard’s Patron: Jack of all Poets; Seamus Heaney and the Great Poetry Hoax: a critical exposé of Faber & Faber’s verse-man; I Shot the President’s Verse: Selected Literary Journalism; The Principles of Poetry DI + ID = Ψ Psi;
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