The archetypal mandala: Visions of the self in the poetry of Coleridge, Eliot and Breytenbach

This paper surveys how three poets—a Romantic, a Modernist, and a Postmodernist—depict transformations of consciousness in cyclical poems. Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is an allegory of the poet's temporal subjective consciousness metamorphosing into an eternal subject position. Eliot's "Four Quartets" exemplifies a Modernist ironic vision of unity achieved through a religio-aesthetic meta-narrative. Breytenbach's "The Undanced Dance" prison poetry volumes adopt an Einsteinian time-space form of relations, luring readers into postmodern quantum consciousness.

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Abstract

This paper is a preliminary survey of the visions of the s e lf in poetry. It is concerned with the transformation of consciousness as depicted by each of the three poets a Romantic, a Modernist and a Postmodernist poet respectively and expressed in specific poems with a cyclical nature. The romantic poet Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is taken as the first example. It is found to be an allegory of the metamorphosis of the poet’s temporal subjective consciousness into an ‘eternal ’ subject position in the narrated text. Eliot’s "Four Quartets" exemplifies the Modernist mode of consciousness as an 'anironic vision of unity' achieved by adhering to a religio-aesthetic meta-narrative. Breytenbach (1988:115) calls his volumes of prison poetry "The Undanced Dance". Taken as a whole "The Undanced Dance" has a structure which concurs with what Brodey (1971:4) calls "an Einsteinian time-space form of relations” and lures its readers into the trap of falling into postmodern quantum consciousness.