現代英詩と宗教 : 特に象徴としての「水」について

The recent study of the history of language postulates the primitive use of the words possessing single meaning. For instance, the Greek word \u27pneuma\u27 is now considered as originally having meant some one undivided thing, including breath, wind, the principle of life, spirit and soul altogether. Even from this hypothesis we can see that the ancient people lived as if they had been half man and half spirit, and they could perceive spiritual phenomena and the otherworldly things as sensuously and vividly as they perceived the physical wind. The antennae of their primitive instinct were extraordinarily sensitive to divine voices and promptings; and as their responses to them, all the ancient life-governing rituals and sacrifices were performed. What is worth noticing in these ancient rituals is that they contained prototypes of the essentials of the Christian doctrine, as J. L. Weston affirms in her recent study of the Holy Grail Romance. Further, characteristically of such primitive men, they regarded all natural phenomena as being personalities which possess senses, feelings and passions quite similar to those of human beings. The myths thus created by their collective consciousness were the only means of their own education, and it is by these myths that they were made capable of religious awe and perception of immortality. Indeed these ancient myths are now dead, but modern poetry has succeeded to the myth-making mind of our ancestors and poets are now creating the myths of the individual. Besides, modern poet are imitating the ancients also in using symbolical words, such as the sun, water, wind, tree, bird etc., and making each of these poetical symbols revive its primordial single meaning. Now, I find that the symbol \u27water\u27 plays the dominant part in Dylan Thomas\u27 This bread I break, J. M. Hopkins\u27 The Wreck of the Deutschland and T. S. Eliot\u27s The Waste Land. This article tries to see how the water images are mythologically used in these representative modern English poems. Emphasis is placed upon the interpretation and appreciation of these images with reference to old myths, whiles I prefer to keep away from dwelling upon the question how finely these poems can awaken our ancestor\u27s naive consciousness sleeping in our psyche, and restore our now sophisticated mind to the primitive half-way state between man and spirit. Perhaps that question might as well be left to each reader\u27s judgement