Frithjof Schuon Archive

About the Poems

Poetic Genius of Frithjof Schuon

Frithjof Schuon’s first poems flowed from his pen as a twelve year old boy in Basle.[1] He writes of his introduction to poetry:

Since from childhood I had delighted in drawing and painting—I painted dragons and all sorts of pictures from fairy tales—my father cherished the wish that I should become an artist; nevertheless, in the time before his death, I wanted to be a poet, not a painter, and this was not at all to his liking. What spurred me towards poetry was my discovery in my father’s bookcase of all the German lyricists, and I eagerly read in them; the melancholic folksong style specially appealed to me.

A poem written during his final years incorporates one of his earliest poems:

Late summer has now kissed the land;
With weary rustling in the woods;
The little flowers on the hill
Bow their heads towards autumn.
The rose glows in the evening light,
And fades away—spring is long past;
A man stands there and, quite alone,
Harkens to the Creator’s song.

This poem—not the last two lines—
I wrote as a child almost eighty years ago.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a poet—
God can also reveal Himself in little flowers.

(Songs, 11th, XLV)

Schuon’s poetic gift was manifested at various points throughout his life,[2] and he acknowledged that some of his poems were written “in the ecstasy of an inspiration.” Schuon wrote, “With the poet, his work must be the expression of an inner nobility; the work must express the man himself, and not just an isolated and over-accentuated corner of the man.” In a letter to Martin Lings, Schuon speaks further of the nature of poetry and of the duties of the poet:
Poetry is the ‘language of the gods’; and ‘noblesse oblige’; what I mean by this is that the poet has certain responsibilities. In poetry, the musicality of things, or their cosmic essentiality, erupts onto the plane of language; and this process requires grandeur, hence also authenticity, both of the image and of the sentiment. The poet spontaneously has the intuition of the underlying musicality of phenomena; under the pressure of an image or an emotion—the emotion, moreover, being naturally combined with concordant images—the poet expresses an archetypal beauty; without this pressure, there is no poetry, which implies that true poetry always has an aspect of inward necessity, whence its irreplaceable perfume. Therefore, we must have the subjective and objective grandeur of the point of departure or of the content, then the profound musicality of the soul and of the language; now the grandeur of language must be drawn from its own resources, and this is what the whole formal art of poetry is. Dante had not only grandeur, he also knew how, on the one hand, to infuse this grandeur into language and, on the other, wield language so as to render it adequate to his inward vision. When Shakespeare describes, following the strains of a popular song, some situation or other, he usually succeeds in presenting its quintessence and thereby brings appearances back to their cosmic musicality, whence a liberating feeling that is characteristic of all true poetry…. [3]
Another period of poetic outpouring produced Arabic poems written in the wake of the graces he received from the Holy Virgin. At the age of 86, came a series of poems written in English and published in a collection called Road to the Heart. [4] Then, at age 87 began an unimaginably rich and unforeseen poetic cycle, once again in his native German. During the next three years, Schuon wrote more than three thousand poems, the inspiration coming in such abundance that it was not unusual for him to complete several poems in a day. In his Introduction to a bilingual (German-English) volume of Schuon’s poetry, Adastra and Stella Maris, William Stoddart writes:
A blessing lies not only in the quality of the poems, but also in the quantity—they constitute an all-inclusive totality. On the one hand, Schuon’s German poems recapitulate the teachings contained in his philosophical works in French; on the other, they are an inexhaustible, and ever new, purifying fountain—a crystalline and living expression of the religio perennis. They epitomize truth, beauty, and salvation.
In the same Introduction Stoddart indicates the diverse subject matter of this last cycle of poems:
In his rich profusion of references to the many and varied cultural forms of Europe and beyond—the streets of the Latin Quarter, Andalusian nights, la Virgen del Pilar, la Macarena, sages such as Dante, Shankara, Pythagoras and Plato, the Psalms of David, Arab wisdom, the graces of the Bodhisattvas, Tibetan prayer-wheels, Samurai and Shinto, the songs of love and longing of many peoples—in all of these diverse cultures, Schuon captures the timeless message of truth and beauty which each contains and renders it present in a most joyful way. When these cultural forms happen to be ones that the reader himself has known and loved, the joy that emanates from the poems is overwhelming.
In her Foreword to the same work, Annemarie Schimmel, [5] herself a native German speaker, describes the way in which “the great mystics all over the world used the language of poetry when trying to beckon to a mystery that lies beyond normal human experience…”. “Taking this fact into consideration,” Schimmel continues, “we are not surprised that Frithjof Schuon too felt compelled to write poetry…”. After comparing the ideas, images, and sound of Schuon’s German verses to those of Rilke, Schimmel notes:
This sound [of the German] could not be maintained in the English translations of his poetry. Yet, as he himself explains, what really matters is the content, and here we listen to the thinker who, far from the intricate and complex scholarly sentences of his learned prose works sings the simple prayers of the longing soul: God is the center, the primordial ground which comprehends everything, manifesting Himself through the colorful play of His creations. And it is the human heart which alone can reflect the incomprehensible Being, for man’s central quality is divinely inspired love, which is the axis of our life.
I hope that Schuon’s mystical verse will be read not only by English speaking readers but even more by those who understand German. They will enjoy many of these tender lyrics which show the famous thinker in a very different light and from an unexpected side.
This final poetical opus is in many ways a synthesis of his life’s written work and provides a complement to the sage’s articles. Schuon wrote, for example, a number of articles exploring the subtle question of the posthumous states of being, [6] while a didactic poem pierces through to the essential teaching: 

Earth, Heaven, and hell; purgatory,
And transmigration. Do not rack
Your brain over these.
The good go to Heaven and the wicked go to hell.

You would like to know what no eye can see;
God knows best what will happen with you—
What lies in the destiny of creatures,
In Eternity. And that He knows, suffices.

(World Wheel, 1st, CXXIX)

Frithjof Schuon’s last poem was written on March 12, 1998, less than two months before his death:

I have wished for long to end this book—
I could not do so; I had to go on writing poems.
But this time I lay down my pen,
For there are other preoccupations, other duties;
Be that as it may, whatever we may do:
Let us be obedient to the call of the Most High.

Let us rest in God’s deep peace.

(World Wheel, 7th, LXXX)

During the last two years of the philosopher’s life he had several times predicted that the flow of poems would soon stop, but inspiration constantly returned. When, however, the ninety-year-old poet wrote his last poem few doubted that Heaven had “other preoccupations” in store and that this cycle of his poetic inspiration had come to a close, for Schuon, as always, would remain obedient to the call of the Most High. The last seven weeks of Schuon’s life were a peaceful time spent in the remembrance of God, his vital forces gradually withdrawing.
The above was adapted from an article by Michael Fitzgerald.

NOTES

[1] Schuon wrote: “My parents wanted me to be a painter; / But I read poets and wished to be like them, / And lived until my twelfth summer / In romanticism’s somber melody. / Then came India, early enough; the poet / Still had his say, but never in the foreground; / Then he kept silent for many years. / In old age / The poet awoke again—not in order to dream— / But to sing new songs sprung from the Spirit.” (World Wheel, 1st, CXIV)
[2] In 1947 two books of his German poetry were published under the titles Sulamith and Tage- und Naechtebuch. They have not been translated into English.
[3] Letter dated January 1971, published in part in Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts (World Wisdom, 2007).
[4] World Wisdom, 1995.
[5] Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003) was among the twentieth century’s foremost Rumi scholars and interpreters in the West; she authored more than one hundred books, and was a professor at Harvard for more than thirty years. She also wrote a Foreword for Schuon’s Understanding Islam (World Wisdom, 1998).
[6] See, for example, “Cosmological and Eschatological Viewpoints” in Treasures of Buddhism, “Concerning the Posthumous States” in Eye of the Heart, and “Comments on an Eschatological Problem” in Form and Substance in the Religions.