t of his interlocutor sufficiently to shy away from any mystical or spiritual declaration. But as the poem sinks deeper into nihilism, he offers an epiphany from his childhood which parallels an experience that Tennyson elsewhere describes in plain prose:
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had quite up from boyhood when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this is not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest. Utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Read The Ancient Sage, by Alfred Lord Tennyson,
or listen to a reading of the poem,
or listen while reading.
Sri Yukteswar (1855-1936)
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