Longfellow, "The Ladder of St. Augustine"

Ingredients:

This is a poem by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), better known for his "Psalm of Life" and whose birthday was yesterday. I've taken the liberty of changing the last line of the penultimate verse because the original failed to rhyme.

I think every important concept or idea has a powerful image attached to it which encapsulates it. In astronomy for example, the idea that the galaxies of the universe are moving away from each other, yet there is no point within the universe from which they are moving (rather it is the fabric of space-time itself that is expanding and that it even expanded faster than the speed of light in the initial moments after the Big Bang), a mind-boggling concept, but made perfectly clear if we have the image in our mind of galaxies as like points on a balloon, moving apart as the balloon itself is blown up.

In the case of the spiritual journey, and the journey of life, the path is a powerful image that helps us understand how there can be many paths, but the destination is the same, or how we might reach a crossroad and need to make a choice, or how the shortest way may be the most difficult. But another very powerful image for this journey is that of the ladder, of letting go of past attachments, the rungs that we must trample down, climbing up step by step from our subjective view of the world that might involve unskilful desires and lack a deeper wisdom, and looking down from a higher more objective viewpoint. At least, that's my understanding.

I wonder if you have any powerful images that you have found useful which you would like to share?

Directions:

Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!

All common things, each day's events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.

The low desire, the base design,
That makes another's virtues less;
The revel of the ruddy wine,
And all occasions of excess;

The longing for ignoble things;
The strife for triumph more than truth;
The hardening of the heart, that brings
Irreverence for the dreams of youth;

All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds,
That have their root in thoughts of ill;
Whatever hinders or impedes
The action of the nobler will; —

All these must first be trampled down
Beneath our feet, if we would gain
In the bright fields of fair renown
The right of eminent domain.

We have not wings, we cannot soar;
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summits of our time.

The mighty pyramids of stone
That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
When nearer seen, and better known,
Are but gigantic flights of stairs.

The distant mountains, that uprear
Their solid bastions to the skies,
Are crossed by pathways, that appear
As we to higher levels rise.

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

Standing on what too long we bore
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern — unseen before —
A higher path to our surprise,

Nor doom the irrevocable Past
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.