Raine learn

Pure was I before the world began

Northumbrian Sequence I — expresses Platonic pre-existence of the soul and anamnesis; the self precedes material creation.

Dark into dark, spirit into spirit flies

Northumbrian Sequence VI — depicts death as return and reintegration into a spiritual continuum rather than annihilation.

Bring my lover

Love Spell — imperative incantation; language as performative act turning desire into ritual invocation.

Spell away sorrow

Spell Against Sorrow — poetry as healing ritual; repetition functions as verbal exorcism of grief.

Home, home. All birds home

Spell to Bring Lost Creatures Home — image of return and restoration; compassion extended to all living beings within a cosmic order.

In the word there speaks a world

Spell of Creation — logos-based poetics; language is generative and ontological, not representational.

Because I love / the sun pours out its rays of living gold

Amo Ergo Sum — love replaces cogito; being grounded in affective and cosmic relation rather than reason.

Let him be upheld in sleep as a cloud at rest on the air

Spell of Sleep — surrender and trust; sleep as liminal state between worlds.

Shelter and hide from mouths of night

Spell of Safekeeping — poetic speech as protective charm against threatening forces.

And I repent / of flesh and bone

Two Invocations of Death — renunciation of corporeality; tension between incarnation and transcendence.

All that you were, are, and shall be forever

Message — affirmation of eternal identity beyond time; continuity of the soul.

Hidden is the heart

Lament — inwardness and secrecy of the self; the heart as inaccessible centre.

A word that the dead hear and obey in darkness

A Word Known to the Dead — sacred speech bridges life and death; language transcends temporal limits.

Hill, tree, sky, distance, only seemed to be

Three Poems on Illusion I — phenomenal world as appearance; Platonic critique of sensory illusion.

Fades, and will not become more clear than shadow

The Holy Shroud — epistemological humility; truth remains partially veiled.

Riding the waves of song / riding the waves of pain

Three Poems of Incarnation I — incarnation as simultaneous joy and suffering; embodied existence as paradox.

Unblemished, the white kid, the calf

The Victims — sacrificial innocence; violence inscribed in ritual and myth.

An eye only, one of the eyes of earth

Seventh Day — vision detached from ego; seeing as cosmic rather than personal faculty.

The world that you inhabit has not yet been created

Shells — critique of material reality; the true world exists beyond temporal perception.

Presence, ever-present presence

The Presence — immanence of the sacred; presence as constant rather than episodic revelation.

Pre-existence

Platonic belief that the soul exists before birth and survives death; a core metaphysical premise in Raine.

Anamnesis

Platonic remembering of eternal truths; poetry recalls rather than invents meaning.

Imagination (Raine)

Faculty of knowledge granting access to a higher reality; opposed to fantasy or subjective self-expression.

Symbol (strong sense)

Not mere metaphor: a real correspondence between image and invisible order; symbol reveals by participation.

Archetype

Ever-existing pattern behind appearances; what the imagination recognises across nature, myth, and personal experience.

Continuum

Existence as unbroken flow (life/death, presence/absence); endings return to beginnings.

Incantation

Ritualised repetition and address that aims to act upon reality (heal, protect, summon), not just represent it.

Performative language

Speech as action; in Raine’s spells, the poem “does” (binds, shields, carries away) as much as it “says.”

Exile

Loss/displacement as existential condition; often the engine of vision and spiritual longing.

Presence (concept)

The sacred “here-and-now” immanence shining through the physical world; not rare, but “ever-present.”

Absence

Not pure void: absence becomes a mode of relation, often converting into presence through memory and symbol.

Illusion

The phenomenal world as “seeming”; perception must be re-educated by imagination to see deeper reality.

Incarnation

Spirit in matter: paradox of beauty and pain, joy and suffering, within embodied life.

Renunciation

Turning away from ego/flesh toward the enduring; often voiced as repentance or shedding images.

Visionary poetry

Poetry as revelation of a higher order (mythic/symbolic) rather than confessional self-display.

Anti-materialism

Resistance to positivist reduction of reality; affirmation of invisible meaning within visible forms.

Lyric impersonality

The voice aims at universal and archetypal, not private diary; the “I” becomes a vessel.

Form as meaning

Form is spiritual practice: sequence enacts cycles, spell enacts ritual, fragment preserves vision in miniature.

Spell form

A poem built on anaphora/refrain/imperative; the cadence is designed to work like a charm or rite.

Fragment

Compressed elegiac unit that crystallises a whole life/vision in few lines; intensity through brevity.

Sequence

Long form in sections staging descent/return; a structural model for cycles of being.

Love (Raine)

More than emotion: generative principle of creation (love makes worlds, not just relationships).

Light motif

Divine radiance entering human darkness; illumination as redemption and knowledge.

Bird symbolism

Soul’s flight, passage between worlds; endurance beyond individual life.

Fourfold symbolism

Elemental framework (air, earth, fire, water) used to organise reality into meaningful correspondences.

Ontology

Concern with being itself (what is real); in Raine, poetry is an ontological inquiry through symbol.

Poetry and religion (Raine/Yeats line)

Poetry understood as revelatory (not institutional religion): a way of accessing the eternal through form and symbol.

Mythic imagination

A mode of knowing that apprehends through story, symbol, and image rather than abstract concept.

Hazard Adams (1958)

Raine as “enchantress and medium”: her poems cast spells and channel forces larger than the self.

Adams 1958 "

Objects assert themselves as extensions of a communal mind" Adams argues Raine’s objects are not private inventions: symbols feel communal/archetypal, as if nature “asserts itself.”

Adams — Bede sparrow frame

Adams reads Northumbrian Sequence through the Bede parable (life as brief passage between darknesses), supporting Raine’s cycle/return logic.

Andrew Johnston 2019 Kathleen Raine collective poems (agrégation intro)

Presents Raine as reconnecting with Western tradition and nature while resisting modern materialism; urges reading her “on her own terms.”

Joseph Milne 2008 (Temenos, cited by Johnston)

Distinguishes philosophical discourse from poetry: philosophy may define beauty, but poetry “manifests” it through symbol and presence.

William blake quote

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

Oldmeadow Sacred Web, 2025

Raine’s early life in Northumberland was her “wellspring of poetry… where poetry was the essence of life”

Sherrard, Temenos Academy Review 11, 2008

Raine saw poetry as expressing the Platonic myth of the soul’s descent and return

Pursglove Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 2020

“Raine is antagonistic toward what she sees as the positivist and materialist thought of the modern world”

Pursglove 2020 Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

Raine’s poetry privileges myth and symbol over naturalistic observation”

Keeble. B 1982 the inner journey of the poet and other papers

Her visionary mode "set her apart from the modernist agenda"

Keeble 2011 tenemos academic review 14

[fragments] They are elegiac talismans holding within a few words the reality of an entire life and love.”

Claire Garnier Tardieu

exile is both biographical loss and spiritual experience

Exam sentence

Raine’s poetry consistently inscribes individual experience within mythic and Platonic structures, allowing the lyric to gesture beyond the self toward universal being.

Raine is not…

Raine is not confessional, ironic, or psychologically introspective; her “I” is archetypal rather than autobiographical.

Raine in a sentence

Kathleen Raine is a poet of the symbolic imagination who uses poetry as a mode of knowledge to reveal an eternal reality obscured by modern materialism.

Raines poetic progress

Kathleen Raine is a poet of the symbolic imagination who uses poetry as a mode of knowledge to reveal an eternal reality obscured by modern materialism.