Jon Woodson, October 2014

Esoteric Prosody: A Close Reading of Gwendolyn Bennett’s “Lines Written at the

Grave of Alexandre Dumas”— Tarot, Alchemy, and Kabbalah in the Harlem

Renaissance Lyric Poem

Oragean Modernism is my name for a literary movement that at this writing in

October of 2014 remains invisible to scholars of American literature. The Oragean

Modernist school was quite large and over the span of 1924-1968 was able to publish

hundreds of novels as well as many volumes of short stories and poems, and to have

many plays performed. The movement produced many significant and in some cases

canonical literary texts, though the esoteric nature of these texts has not been

acknowledged. My research has so far been directed to studies of the novels of the

Oragean Modernists, since novels provide sufficient substance to reveal patterns over the

writings of the many writers of this school. The most salient characteristic of these novels

is their difficulty. At this writing, many of these texts that I am calling Oragean

Modernist are chiefly discussed by other scholars and critics in terms of their

impenetrability or eccentricity; this includes the works of John dos Passos, Thornton

Wilder, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, James Agee, Nathaniel West, and John O’Hara. Even

though these writers are at times subsumed under the heading of the Lost Generation,

there exist no comparative treatments of these writers, so their commonalities have not

been recognized by their critics. I believe that my chief contribution in addressing the

writings of this esoteric literary school is that I have been able to present the format that

serves as the plan of these texts.

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 (1) Oragean Modernist texts are always written using a cipher called cabala. This

cabala code is the traditional code of the European alchemists. It was used in alchemical

texts as far back as the thirteenth century. This phonetic code sounds out the coded words

and is not confined to the conventions of spelling or to the breaks between words, so that

an intended word can be strewn across several of the words in a text. Interest in the

cabala was renewed at the same time as Oragean Modernism began when the alchemist

known as Fulcanelli published a discussion of cabala in his widely influential book, The

Mystery of the Cathedrals (1926).

(2) Oragean Modernists texts always include intentional mistakes. These mistakes

exist as signposts that are used to inform the reader that the text is written in a cipher and

to read phonetically. The mistakes can occur at any level of the text through misspellings,

narrative paradoxes or impossibilities, and misinformation. In the Western novel Guns

for Powder Ridge, written by Laura Z. Hobson under the name of Peter Field, there are

no beef cattle; while the characters eat venison, chicken, and pork, there is never a

mention of a cow in the entire novel, despite its being set on Western ranches in cattle

country.

(3) The whole point of these esoteric texts is to preserve esoteric teachings. The

Oragean Modernist believed that civilization would be destroyed at any moment. The

Oragean Modernist teachings are drawn from the principles conveyed by G.I. Gurdjieff,

but Orage’s teaching differed from Gurdjieff’s in matters of emphasis and method; for

instance, Gurdjieff did not favor creative writing, while Orage used it as a teaching

technique in his groups. Gurdjieff drew his ideas from many sources, so the literary

works can refer to the teachings of Theosophy, Kabbalah, alchemy, Tarot, Hermeticism,

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Gnosticism, and Egyptian magic. This represents a vast amount of material. Given that

literary scholars in America are completely unfamiliar with even the rudiments of the

occult, there is little chance that they are able to deal with texts based on such wide and

obscure learning.

After many years of studying the Oragean Modernist esoteric novels, I have

reached the point where I have been able to recognize that many of the lyric poems

written during the Harlem Renaissance are also esoteric texts. Gradually, I have learned

to read phonetically; this was a difficulty that I had not taken the proper measure of. The

cabala of the Oragean Modernists lyric poets in the Harlem Renaissance is even more

demanding than the code used in the novels. The length and density of a novel provides

more cover, so the coded lines of the poems needed to more difficult to read than

Oragean Modernist esoteric prose. What makes it possible to read the Harlem

Renaissance esoteric lyric poems is that the poems follow the same rules as the novels.

There is, however, one attribute that the lyric poems emphasize above its use in the

novels—numerology. While some of the novels follow numerological plans in the

number of chapters that they contain, numerology is not very important. In the poems

numerology becomes another aspect of prosody. We may say that a poem is already

attuned to numerology in the sense that, e.g., a sonnet has fourteen lines. While the

conventional poet does not attach an esoteric meaning to the numbers that construct

formal poetry, all that an esoteric poet has to do is to re-pattern the poem to the

requirements of esoteric numbers. In every esoteric system certain specific numbers are

important building blocks of a system. For instance, the Gurdjieff Work take special

interest in a nine-sided figure called the Enneagram. It also emphasizes the Law of Three

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and the Law of Seven. Many of the Oragean Modernist texts can be identified by their

insistence on using the numbers three and seven for the street addresses of houses and the

ages of characters. Kabbalah emphasizes a different set of numbers from the ones used in

the Gurdjieff Work, and the same is true of the other esoteric systems. But if the reader is

unfamiliar with these esoteric systems, the texts will never reveal a meaning beyond what

is available on the surface of the poem.

Gwendolyn Bennett’s poem has received very little critical attention. Michel

Fabre comments on the poem in his book From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers

in France, 1840-1980. He says “She [Bennett] did write poetry, though. In contrast to her

generally subdued, reflective, melancholy verse, her tribute to the author of The Three

Musketeers, ‘Lines Written at the Grave of Alexandre Dumas,’ sounds unexpectedly

solemn and grandiloquent” (125). Fabre’s observation is not of much use in evaluating

the poem, and it certainly says nothing about how the poem was written. What Fabre

says, though, is useful in underlining the poem’s esotericism. The Dumas interred in Paris

is not, as Fabre states, the author of The Three Musketeers; the Parisian grave belongs to

his illegitimate son, Alexandre Dumas, fils—an important dramatist. An examination of

the poem demonstrates that its vocabulary and theme is perhaps in part suggested by a

passage from The Man in the Iron Mask by Dumas, pere:

The young man smiled, whether in resignation or contempt, it was difficult to tell.
"Look," said he, "I have in that Japanese vase two roses gathered yesterday
evening in the bud from the governor's garden; this morning they have blown and
spread their vermilion chalice beneath my gaze; with every opening petal they
unfold the treasures of their perfumes, filling my chamber with a fragrance that
embalms it. Look now on these two roses; even among roses these are beautiful,
and the rose is the most beautiful of flowers. Why, then, do you bid me desire
other flowers when I possess the loveliest of all?" (emphases added)

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In the poem these elements have been transformed to “Bowed before the crystal chalice

of thy soul, / I find the multi-colored fragrance of thy mind” (lines 12-13). We do not

know how Fabre came to assume that Bennett’s poem is addressed to the father, though if

he depended only upon the surface of the poem’s text, he would have been guided to that

conclusion. In other words, the poem was constructed in such a way as to cause the

reader to be in error about whose grave it describes. Thus, Bennett has written her poem

about the grave of Alexandre Dumas, fils as an indication of her own interest in

occultism, though the identity of the Dumas in the Paris grave must be discovered in

order to make the connection. The fact that the poem is situated in this “lawful

inexactitude” or intentional mistake is an indication that it is an esoteric text. Now the job

of the reader is to locate the esoteric material to which the mistake in poem points.

While Dumas, the father, is better known for his novels about court intrigues, he

also wrote a drama called The Alchemist, with literary occultist Gerard de Nerval. Dumas,

pere was also an associate of the occultist Eliphas Levi and a member of the Hashish

Club. Bennett points to alchemy through the intentional mistake of confusing the figure

in the Parisian grave with alchemy; Dumas, fils —the figure who was buried in Paris—

had no interest in the occult. Alchemy comes into “Lines” in line 12, which contains a

clear reference to Grail Alchemy, “Bowed before the crystal chalice of thy soul.” The

crystal chalice is an object derived from Grail Alchemy. Speaking of the Grail in The

Tower of Alchemy, David Goddard comments that “in Da’ath it is carved of crystal.”

Da’ath is one of the locations on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life (Sephirot), and, as we will

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see below, the placement of the crystal chalice in the context of the Sephirot is an

important aspect of Bennett’s poem. Before moving to the abstruse levels of the poem, I

will discuss the esoteric character of some of the more fundamental arrangements in the

poem. Here is the text of Bennett’s poem:

Lines Written at the Grave of Alexandre Dumas

1) Cemeteries are places for departed souls

2) And bones interred,
3) Or hearts with shattered loves.
4) A woman with lips made warm for laughter
5) Would find grey stones and roving spirits
6) Too chill for living, moving pulses . . .
7) And thou, great spirit, wouldst shiver in thy granite shroud
8) Should idle mirth or empty talk
) Disturb thy tranquil sleeping.

10) A cemetery is a place for shattered loves

11) And broken hearts . . .
12) Bowed before the crystal chalice of thy soul,
13) I find the multi-colored fragrance of thy mind
14) Has lost itself in Death's transparency.
15) Oh, stir the lucid waters of thy sleep
16) And coin for me a tale
17) Of happy loves and gems and joyous limbs
18) And hearts where love is sweet!

19) A cemetery is a place for broken hearts

20) And silent thought . . .
21) And silence never moves,
22) Nor speaks nor sings.

The poem consists of twenty-two lines divided into three stanzas of nine, nine,

and four. Everything about the prosody speaks to some type of irregularity. In the first

stanza the lines are of various syllabic length—12, 4, 6, 9, 9, 9, 13, 8, 7. The numbers are

suggestive, but numerology is a distraction that I will ignore so as not to derail the

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discussion by a weak and speculative argument. There is some suggestion of end rhyme

in the first stanza—interred / laughter—, and the effect of rhyme is sustained throughout

the remainder of the poem by the rhyme of some of the end words—hearts, souls, love.

There is also an intricate use of alliteration, internal rhyme, and assonance. The effect of

these inclusions is that they endow the poem with enough music, and sufficient form to

convince the reader that the text is a lyric poem. If the poem is read closely, it seems to

be about a heartsick lover who has gone to a graveyard to mourn for a love affair that has

ended. Confusingly, this echoes the most famous novel by Dumas, fils, Camille, the story

of a prostitute who rejects marriage to an upstanding man and returns to her sordid life in

order to save his reputation. It is a matter of conjecture as to how these associations might

influence a reader to think about the author who is buried in the grave that is the setting

of the poem.

To any reader versed in the occult, the twenty-two lines of the poem are highly

suggestive. Twenty-two is an inescapably important number in the lore of both the

Kabbalah and of the Tarot. The derivation of the number twenty-two from two nines and

a four is also highly suggestive. So, immediately upon taking notice of these

arrangements, it seems that the reader must examine the poem from an esoteric

perspective. The Kabbalah is based on a figure called the Sefirot or the Tree of Life.

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 Figure 1, the Sefirot or Tree of Life showing the 22 paths.

The Sefirot are the ten archetypal attributes of the Godhead. The ten Sefirot are

connected by twenty-two pathways. There are twenty-two trumps in the Tarot pack of

cards. So, the twenty-two lines of Bennett’s poem strongly suggest both the Tarot and the

Kabbalah. Gwendolyn Bennett was a follower of A.R. Orage, who taught the Gurdjieff

Work in New York. In the teachings disseminated by G.I. Gurdjieff and Orage, the

number nine was important, because it was attached to the figure called the Enneagram, a

circle containing nine lines:

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 Figure 2. Enneagram drawn by G.I. Gurdjieff.

This Enneagram was a depiction of the Laws of Three and Seven, and was

essentially a variant diagram of the Tree of Life: “The three realms of Kether, Binah and

Chokma, and the seven realms of Geburah, Hesed, Tipareth, Hod, Netzach, Yesod and

Malkuth of the Tree of Life, are also related to Laws of Three and Seven” (Wellbeloved

68). In Kabbalah the number four is associated with a vast lore connected to the

Tetragrammaton (YHVH, the name of God) and the Four Worlds, the emanation of

creative life force. Thus, the stanzaic structure of the poem, “Lines,” was designed to

demonstrate some of the most important numerical concepts in the occultism that was in

the hands of the Oragean Modernist writers in New York in 1926, when Bennett

published her poem.

Like all of the texts written by Orage’s followers, “Lines” tells the reader how the

poem is to be decoded. It is interesting to note that Bennett’s poem departs from some of

the more common means used to alert the reader to the encoded nature of a text. Often

the word “cabala” will appear in the text, either in its correct spelling or through the guise

of a different but recognizable word— e.g., Calabrese. (See my book Oragean

Modernism for a full discussion of this device.) In novels and epic poems writers have

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found it easier to gradually build up the idea that the text is coded over the length of the

text, and often this is done while at the same time the authenticity of the surface text is

undermined through the introduction of absurdities and paradoxes. A short lyric poem

allows few opportunities for these techniques. Bennett has substituted the word “spell”

for cabala as a way to indicate that the reader must look beyond the spelling of words to

read the hidden levels: the word “spell” is presented as crude anagrams of “spell” in the

following lines: “A woman with lips made warm for laughter / Would find grey stones

and roving spirits / Too chill for living, moving pulses . . .” (lines 4-6; emphases added).

The proximity of the words to one another is an attempt to heighten the recognition of the

intended word. Of course,” lips” and “pulses” are occasions of the use of cabala. Since

the phonetic aspect of cabala is hearing what is seen as a way of reading, the synesthesia

described in line 13 may be another indication that cabala is in use: “I find the multi-

colored fragrance of thy mind.” “Lines” is commenced with the line “Cemeteries are

places for departed souls.” “Departed souls” is a cliché and a euphemism. The statement

made by the first line is obvious and banal. How then can we take seriously Fabre’s

evaluation of the poem as being “solemn and grandiloquent”? Bennett’s line was written

in concert with an agenda other than poetic excellence, and when we examine its esoteric

content, we see why it lapses as poetry. Bennett combines the reiteration of the phoneme

tar in “cemeteries” and “departed” with the long O phoneme in “souls” to form the word

“Tarot.” This line may be poor poetry, but it is excellent cabala. One of the problems that

remains to be solved in future studies is the question as to whether Bennett deflated her

poetry in order to achieve a purposeful mediocrity or whether the exigencies of writing in

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the cabala while writing poetry was too difficult for her, so in the end the poetry suffered

from the requirements of the encoding.

The cabala technique for encoding texts was originally used to encode alchemical

texts, while Kabbalah employed a method of reading sacred texts as though they were

divinely encoded. Gematria, notarikon, and temurah, the techniques for reading

mystically in Kabbalah, are more invasive and complicated than cabala, involving the

substitutions of numbers and letters for the original letters in order to form new words or

to equate the original words to new words. Compared to the methods of Kabbalah, cabala

is conservative. However, since a lyric poem has modest aims, much of these Kabbalistic

techniques do not prove useful. One invention of the Oragean Modernists was to use the

Kabbalistic techniques for writing instead of for reading. There is also some Kabbalistic

content in “Lines” even if the poem does not do much of its encoding through the

Kabbalistic methods; the poem does, though, refer to those techniques as a means of

further indicating to the reader that the poem is esoteric. The word “gems” in line 17

combines with letters from lines 16 and 15 to form gematria, one of the Kabbalistic

reading techniques. While on one hand it seems unlikely that this is a reasonable way to

write in the expectation of a meaningful interpretation by readers, we should note that

“gems” makes little sense in the list of the elements that make up a love affair in which it

appears. If we are thinking of happy lovers, do we necessarily then think of “gems” and

“limbs.” The word “gems” does not appear in the entirety of Dumas, fils’s love story

Camille. While gematria is useless in making a lyric poem into an esoteric poem,

notarikon is very useful. Notarikon makes words out of the initial or final letters of

words. Bennett has inserted the word notarikon into her poem in the last four lines on the

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poem: the word may be read by beginning at the twenty-second line and reading in the

upward direction: “Nor…cemetery…is…broken.” Again, we have the problem of the

last four lines being extremely difficult to account for as poetry, since they add little to

the advancement of the effect that the poem is creating. However, as another move along

the task of the encoding of the poem, the final four lines fill out the numerology and the

Kabbalistic plan. Not only do the final lines provide the word notarikon, lines twenty and

twenty-one give the third Kabbalistic reading technique, temurah. In the hands of the

Oragean Modernists, notarikon was given a loose interpretation, so it is very difficult to

read texts that employ notarikon unless the reader is willing to take imaginative leaps.

Thankfully, there is some logic and consistency involved, so once a subject has been

introduced, it is possible to make headway by pursuing the initial direction. What this

means is that Bennett uses notarikon to give the names of the ten Sefirot. Since it is well

known what the Sefirot are (see Figure 1 above), once one Sefira has been discovered,

the reader knows to look for the rest. The most obvious appearance of the Sefirot in

“Lines” is “bones” in line 2. “Bones” is an instance of cabala, and it is not difficult to

work Binah out of “bones,” since it requires nothing to be added from another word in

the poem. The other nine Sefira follow from the fact of the existence of Binah, though

their extraction is not as direct. We must return to the top of the poem for the first Sefira,

Keter, the crown, which “Lines” gives as “Cemeteries.” Chokmah is nearly invisible but

may be assembled from phonetic elements in lines 6, 5, and 4—“chill,” “laughter,”

“woman.” This is not very convincing, but it is often the case that the renderings of

notarikon by other Oragean Modernists are vague and approximate. Chesed comes out of

line 12—“chalice,” “soul,” “Bowed.” Gevurah is found in line 5—“grey,” “roving,”

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“spirits.” Tifaret is presented in line 6 and 7—“Too,” “for,” “spirit.” Netzach is very

rough—line 7 “granite” and line 10 “shattered.” Hod is extracted from line 14—“Has

lost.” Yesod is found in line 17 “joyous” and line 15 “lucid.” Malkut is a rather diffuse

combination of the elements of line 8 taken from “should idle mirth or empty talk.”

Lest the demonstration of the Sefirot so far seem to be an over-reaching, the final

component of the Sefirot has sufficient support to sustain the argument that Bennett

indeed alludes to the tree of Life in her poem. The capitalized word “Death” in line 14 is

the mysterious Sefira, Da’ ath. Da’ ath is the Hebrew word for knowledge and is by far

the most commented on aspect of the Tree of Life. In depictions of the Tree of Life, Da’

ath is not always shown. When it is shown, it is often indicated by dotted lines (see

Figure 2 above, where Da’ ath is shaded). Jeff Harrison states that “Daath is also known

as The Invisible Sephira, the Sphere without a number. Some Qabalists say Daath is not

one of the Ten Holy Emanations as the other Sephira are called, but a passageway, a

gateway if you will. Others regard it as the 11th Sephira but in a special way - the

Invisible Sephira. Crowley said that Daath was of a different dimension than the rest of

the Spheres.” In “Lines” Bennett uses “Death” as a pun to insert Da’ ath, the eleventh

Sefira, into her poem. Bennett makes sure that the reader understands the equation of

Death with Da’ ath by associating Death with the most important characteristic of Da’

ath, its provisional nature. The fourteenth line Bennett speaks of both loss and

transparency. “Transparency” is not a sensible way to describe death, but is an exact

description of Da’ ath; thus, it is clear that Bennett not only has used various codes to

name the ten spheres of the Tree of Life, she has cemented her meaning with a technical

comment that has a specific meaning. As a further move to identify Death as Da’ ath

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there is the connotation of the refraction of light into rays by a prism in lines 12 and 13.

The refractive power of Da’ ath is suggested by Eliphas Levi who called Da’ ath the

mirror where the rays of everything concentrate (217 Levi Reconcilliation of science and

religion).

Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) is often remarked to be the first modern

poem in English. Eliot identified his poem with the Tarot, though this association is

poorly understood and has long remained controversial. Nevertheless, because of Eliot,

the Tarot was not obscure when Bennett published her poem in 1926. Above, I have

identified “Death” as the invisible Sefira Da’ ath. The figure of “Death” of whom Bennett

speaks may also be identified as the Death trump in the Tarot pack of cards. Having

established this association, it is not a stretch to identify other Tarot cards to which the

poem alludes. The “crystal chalice” of line twelve is the Ace of Cups. “Limbs” in line

seventeen suggests the Ace of Wands. There are several references to a love affairs in the

poem, so it is not a stretch to associate the poem generally with the sixth trump, The

Lovers. “The “broken hearts” in line eleven may refer to the Three of Swords, a card

depicting a heart pierced by three swords and commonly interpreted a meaning a broken

heart. Thus there are five Tarot cards rather clearly delineated in the poem. It is likely that

Bennett may also have attempted to introduce into the poem suggestions of the four suits

of the Tarot—Swords, Wands, Pentacles, and Cups, but this level is indistinct. Having

shown some evidence of Bennett’s manifestations of the Tarot in “Lines,” there is no

need to force the whole apparatus of the Tarot into her twenty-two lines of poetry.

I am often asked about the point of these esoteric texts, for the highly unusual

procedures that I describe seem nothing more than hallucinations to many who are

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confronted with my arguments. In the first place they do not see that everything

associated with civilization was esoteric for thousands of years. Until recently the

majority of the human race was not allowed the possession of knowledge beyond what

was required for survival. “Objective” art is the oldest human tradition. It is difficult to

answer questions about esoteric poetry due to the fact that there is no understanding of

“objective” art on which to frame an answer. What I mean by this is that Gwendolyn

Bennett is writing from an aesthetic point of view so alien that everything she assumes to

be true seems absurd to those not aware of the assumptions of the school of writers to

which Bennett belonged: they were initiates and the inheritors of the “objective”

tradition. Their perspective was highly critical of what is though of as normal life, and

along with their rejection of bourgeois reality they threw out conventional art. P.B.

Taylor’s comment on “objective” art is useful here:

For Gurdjieff the purpose of art in general and his own books in particular is to
preserve and transmit knowledge that has been forgotten, obscured or ignored. To
his pupils he announced that the stories he tells are invaluable, but pupils must
learn to read and understand them. Understanding of his enigmatic and deceptive
writings can come only from careful guidance, from ‘alarm clocks’, as he was
wont to call teachers dedicated to waking others to their personal essence, their
real ‘I’. Gurdjieff's works define and exemplify ‘objective’ art that conveys
meaning in proportion to the capacity of his audience to understand, rather than
transmitting the subjective views of its author. (Taylor Foreword to Wellbeloved
Key Concepts)

What this means in specific terms is that Bennett’s poem “Lines” is not directed to the

entertainment of the reader, and that the poet is not providing a text that the reader is

invited to interpret in any way that the reader desires. In a real “objective” work of art the

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object in a sense hypnotizes the onlooker and installs the viewer or reader in the

“objective” experience. Accounts of encounters with real works of “objective” art are

rare, so it is particularly interesting to take note of such an encounter mentioned in

Christopher Isherwood’s memoir: “And yet he also tells how he and George went with

one of the Belur Math swamis to meditate in the shrine of the Divine Mother at

Dakshineswar and how they all three became aware that the image was alive!” (My

Guru). I have included this description to underline the assertion that the works of art

created by Gwendolyn Bennett and her associates in the Harlem Renaissance were not

real works of “objective” art. The writers in the Oragean circle lacked the power to create

works of art that were endowed with “life” and that appealed universally. What the

Oragean Modernists did do was to encode the rudiments of the Gurdjieff Work into their

poems, novels, and murals. The art that they created were exercises in will and self-

mastery, for they wrote in the state of “super-efforts.” The sheer volume of writings

published by the followers of Orage is staggering. Their belief that the world was ending

forced them to prolific levels of artistic production. In truth, their adherence to the

esthetic dictates pseudo-“objective” art often caused them to create flawed works of art,

and many of the writings of the Oragean Modernists have not become canonical. The

amazing thing is that the procedures of the Oragean Modernists in many cases did bring

about creations that have been judged to be successful as art is conventionally evaluated.

“Lines Written at the Grave of Alexandre Dumas” was first published in the

journal Opportunity in 1926. Subsequently, the poem has not attracted much critical

comment, nor has it been anthologized along with her other poems. Inclusion in

anthologies is not really a measure of its achievement as a poem; it is more an indication

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of its value as a text that addresses the themes valorized by the anthologists. It is difficult

to take the measure of Bennett’s poetry because her work has been given lip service due

to her race and gender, while receiving little serious analysis. There is little serious

criticism directed to African American poetry in the first place.

The criticism of “subjective” poetry is practiced through two main theoretical

constructs, Formalism which “jettison[s] all earnest explication of the text – meaning,

paraphrasable content, social and historical situation – and concentrate entirely on sound,

cadence, metre, rhyme, form” (Paulin) and on the other hand through the examination of

the lyric subject. A.R. Orage was a dominant figure in his capacity as the leader of the

Gurdjieff school in New York between 1925 and 1931 chiefly because he was a brilliant

literary editor, a peerless creative writer teacher, and an excellent psychologist. All of

these attributes came together in his role as the director of the affairs of the Oragean

Modernist literary movement. Thus we should not be surprised to see that in her poem,

“Lines,” Bennett has presented coded versions of Orage’s name in lines three-four (“or…

laughter”) and thirteen (“colored fragrance”). The core of Oragean Modernist writing was

taught through a type of esoteric practical criticism in which students were taught to

evaluate literary texts according to their ranking on a universal scale:

 The heaviest/last level - "The Absolute"

 Earth's satellite - "The Moon"
 Our planet - "Earth"
 All of the planets in the solar system to which Earth belongs to - "All Planets"
 The planets belong to the "Sun" or the solar system
 The Sun belongs to the Milky Way galaxy or the "All Suns" combined
 All galaxies put together belong to "All Worlds"
 All Worlds form a final whole called "The Absolute"

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This way of looking at literature bypassed “subjective” criticism by virtue of the fact that

“objective” texts by definition contain a paraphrasable esoteric content; “objective”

criticism also bypassed a concern with the lyric subject due to the fact that normal

humans were said to be “asleep” and so by definition lyric subjectivism is a form of

psychopathology. If we look at “Lines” as an “objective” text, we see that the poem itself

takes the form of the universal scale, for the Sefirot or Tree of Life is the same thing as

Gurdjieff’s universal scale.

A number of questions come to mind at this point, none of which can be

addressed in this brief paper. First, there is the matter of the presentation of the Sefira in

“Lines,” for they are out of order. Rather than coming between Keter in line one and

Binah in line two, a very indistinct Chokmah does not appear until it is presented running

upward through lines six and four (chill laughter-woman). If the Sefira are placed where

they are purely due to the difficulty of writing a poem in which they might appear where

they would be in an accurate depiction of the Sefirot, then that determines a very different

poem than one in which the placement is intentional. And if the Sefira are intentionally

out of place, there is the further problem of determining what that means. Similarly, there

is the problem of the Tarot cards: either the cards that the poem presents are presented

fortuitously, or they have a definitive esoteric meaning. It has taken literary scholars sixty

years to work out the correct attribution of the Tarot cards in Eliot’s The Waste Land, so

we might not expect to come immediately upon the solution to the problems raised by

Bennett’s poem. (I am thinking of “The Tarot Fortune in The Waste Land” by Betsey B.

Creekmore, which did not come along until 1982. The understanding of what Eliot’s

poem means as an esoteric text still has not been approached.) If indeed there were a

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complex design to ”Lines,” we must realize that the meaning of the design would actually

be esoteric and beyond the interpretive powers of the critic who is not an initiate. In 1926

Orage’s followers were not very advanced in occultism; additionally, the texts that they

wrote were not really esoteric, and their contents were in most cases confined to

assertions that pointed out that mankind was asleep and that the world would soon end. It

therefore does not seem that it is profitable to spend the time it would take to lay out the

Tarot cards alluded to in “Lines” over Bennett’s altered version of the Tree of Life and

then try to speculate about the meaning of that arrangement. It is enough to realize that

Bennett has written a poem that outwardly functions as a passable modern lyric, while

inwardly it includes a considerable amount of esoteric lore. Finally, there is the question

of how the esoteric elements might intersect with the racial component of the text:

Bennett was an African American poet, and Dumas, pere was the descendant of a Black

slave from Haiti. An assumption easily made is that Bennett wrote the poem on Dumas,

pere because she identified with him on the grounds of racial commonality. As I have

suggested above, if viewed from the esoteric perspective, the subject of the poem, the

grave, was chosen for the manner in which it made it possible for Bennett to effectively

introduce an intentional mistake into the poem. The racial subtext then may have served

as an additional convenient disguise. Further, it may be argued that the racial component

of the poem is also an element that cynically adds to the sentimentality of the poem. The

grave depicts a corpse which the poem refers to as “sleep” (line 15). Gurdjieff taught that

humanity is asleep, and that one of the reasons for this sleep was the belief in race.

Gurdjieff sent Jean Toomer to Harlem to organize a group in the hope that he could

awaken Black Americans from the sleep of race identification; it was Orage who taught

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Bennett to write and who taught the liberating technique of observation of the self

without identification. Thus when Bennett says in line 15, “Oh stir the lucid waters of thy

sleep,” she is addressing not Dumas, fils but the sleeping reader who thinks herself

awake. In these circumstances, the surface text mocks the reader and certainly ridicules

the sentimental notion that the poet identifies with either Dumas father or son out of

racial sympathy.

Bibliography

Bennett, Gwendolyn. "Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas." Opportunity

(July 1926): 225. http://www.amazon.com/Oragean-Modernism-literary-

movement-1924-1953-ebook/dp/B00DOL63OE

Creekmore, Betsey B. “The Tarot Fortune in The Waste Land..” ELH. Vol. 49, No. 4

(Winter, 1982), pp. 908-928.

Dumas, Alexandre. The Man in the Iron Mask.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2759/2759-h/2759-h.htm

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980.

http://www.amazon.com/From-Harlem-Paris-American-1840-1980/dp/025206364

Goddard, David. The Tower of Alchemy. http://www.amazon.com/The-Tower-Alchemy-

Advanced-Guide/dp/1578631130#reader_1578631130

Harrison, Jeff. “Da’at: Knowledge and Union.” http://www.isisbooks.com/daath.asp

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 Isherwood, Christopher. My Guru and His Discipl.e Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle

Edition.

Levi, Eliphas. The Reconciliation Of Science And Religion: Eliphas Levi's Discourse On

Gnostic Kabalah - The Human Verb, The Divine Verb And The Divine Humanity.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Reconciliation-Science-And-Religion/dp/

1257715860

Paulin, Tom. “Review— The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler and

Shakespeare's Sonnets edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/tom-paulin/in-the-workshop

Taylor, Paul Beekman. Foreword. Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts by Sophia Wellbeloved.

Routledge Key Guides. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Wellbeloved, Sophia Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts. Routledge Key Guides. Taylor and

Francis. Kindle Edition.

Woodson, Jon. Oragean Modernism: a lost literary movement, 1924-1953.

http://www.amazon.com/Oragean-Modernism-literary-movement-1924-1953-ebook/

dp/B00DOL63OE

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