The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems From Many Cultures [Hardcover]

Robert Bly (Editor, Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 1995

With this new anthology of poetry, Bly touches upon the current controversy surrounding religion, spirituality, and how we can evoke the two meaningfully into our modern lives. Divided into 10 sections, each one exploring a different aspect of spiritual questioning, mythical symbolism, amd mystical faith which has resonated across cultures and throughout time.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Prayer To The Mother by Lucius Apuleius
The Newborn by Farid-uddin Attar
A Hole In The Basket by Bhartrihari
Introduction by William Blake
The New [or, Building Of] Jerusalem [or, To The Christians] by William Blake
The Dweller by Robert Bly
To The Tree-brother With A Few Days Left by Rene Char
The Stricken Deer by William Cowper
Voyages: 2 by Harold Hart Crane
Amor And The Courteous Heart by Dante Alighieri
The Woman I Adore by Dante Alighieri
The Hemlock by Emily Dickinson
I'm Ceded - I've Stopped Being Theirs by Emily Dickinson
Immortality by Emily Dickinson
The Journey by Emily Dickinson
We Thirst At First by Emily Dickinson
Wild Nights! Wild Nights! by Emily Dickinson
Coming Or Going by Dogen
This Cloud by Dogen
From Divine Meditations: Sonnet I by John Donne
The Mysteries Remain by Hilda Doolittle
The Holy Longing by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The Second Poem The Night-walker Wrote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
To Juan At The Winter Solstice by Robert Ranke Graves
A Flower No More Than Itself by Linda Gregg
Raise Me Up, Lord by Miguel De Guevara
In The Great Sweetness Of The Spring by Guillaume De Poitiers
Knowing Love In Herself by Hadewijch
Love's Maturity by Hadewijch
The Garden by Hafiz Of Shiraz
The Grace Of The Teacher by Hafiz Of Shiraz
Joseph The Lost Will Return by Hafiz Of Shiraz
The Lost Daughter by Hafiz Of Shiraz
The Pearl On The Ocean Floor by Hafiz Of Shiraz
When The One I Love by Hafiz Of Shiraz
Praise For Death by Donald Hall
Ghazal 96 by Bibi Hayati
A Dialogue Between God And The Soul by George Herbert
The Pulley by George Herbert
All The Fruit by Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin
Bread And Wine: Part 7 by Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin
God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Habit Of Perfection by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Heaven-haven; A Nun Takes The Veil by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Immanent by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Starlight Night by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Chastity by Ibn Faraj
Separation By Death by Ibn Hazm
The Visit Of The Beloved by Ibn Hazm
Sssh by Rolf Jacobsen
The Animal Soul by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Bread by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Breaking The Dragon by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
A Chickpea Leaps by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Come To The Orchard In Spring by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Drunkards by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Eating Poetry by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Edge Of The Roof by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Force Of Friendship by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Hawk by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
I Have Such A Teacher by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Idle Questions by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Instruments by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Jar With The Dry Rim by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Jesus On The Lean Donkey by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Longing For The Birds Of Solomon by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Love Dogs by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Mill, The Stone, And The Water by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Names by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Night And Sleep by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
On Resurrection Day by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Praising Manners by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Say Yes Quickly by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
A Small Green Island by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
The Snake-catcher And The Frozen Snake by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Someone Digging In The Ground by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Sometimes I Forget Completely by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
That Journeys Are Good by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
These Spiritual Windowshoppers by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Two Poems By Rumi by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Who Makes These Changes by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Who Says Words With My Mouth by Jalal Ad-din (jalaluddin) Ar-rumi
Dawn Outside The City Walls by Juan Ramon Jimenez
I Am Not I by Juan Ramon Jimenez
Oceans by Juan Ramon Jimenez
A Remembrance Is Moving by Juan Ramon Jimenez
Remorse by Juan Ramon Jimenez
The Boat by Kabir
Breath by Kabir
The Caller by Kabir
The Clay Jug by Kabir
The Cloth by Kabir
The Failure by Kabir
The Flute by Kabir
Friend, Please Tell Me What I Can Do About This World by Kabir
The Hearse by Kabir
Music by Kabir
The Pitcher by Kabir
A Place To Sit by Kabir
Rice by Kabir
The Sound by Kabir
Sound Of Seashells by Kabir
The Spinning Wheel by Kabir
The Swan by Kabir
The Swing by Kabir
The Time Before Death by Kabir
The Unknown Flute by Kabir
What I Said To The Wanting-creature by Kabir
Why Should We Part by Kabir
Evening Hymn [or Prayer] by Thomas Ken
Briefly It Enters, And Briefly Speaks by Jane Kenyon
The Footprint by Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan
Daybreak by Galway Kinnell
Four Questions by Lalla
Men And Women Now, Even The Best by Lalla
The Soul, Like The Moon by Lalla
There Is A Lake by Lalla
You Were Once A Swan by Lalla
Your Way Of Knowing by Lalla
The Shulamite by Else Lasker-schuler
Conversation In The Mountains by Li Po
Written On A Monastery Wall by Li Shang-yin
Is My Soul Asleep by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Last Night by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Proverbs And Tiny Songs: 11 by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Proverbs And Tiny Songs: 12 by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Proverbs And Tiny Songs: 2 by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Proverbs And Tiny Songs: 6 by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Proverbs And Tiny Songs: 7 by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Rainbow At Night by Antonio Machado Ruiz
Sorrow, It Is Not True That I Know You by Antonio Machado Ruiz
The Wind, One Brilliant Day by Antonio Machado Ruiz
When Do I Join You by Mahadevi
How Shall I Begin My Song by Juana Manwell
A Dialogue Between The Soul And Body by Andrew Marvell
What Wondrous Life Is This I Lead! by Andrew Marvell
Sonnet 12 by Edna St. Vincent Millay
All I Was Doing Was Breathing by Mirabai
Ankle Bells by Mirabai
The Clouds by Mirabai
The Coffer With The Poisonous Snake by Mirabai
Don't Go, Don't Go by Mirabai
Faithfulness by Mirabai
The Heat Of Midnight Tears by Mirabai
His Hair by Mirabai
I Was Going To The River For Water by Mirabai
It's True I Went To The Market by Mirabai
The Music by Mirabai
O My Friends by Mirabai
Why Mira Can't Go Back To Her Old House by Mirabai
White Buffalo Woman by John Gneisenau Neihardt
Maybe by Mary Oliver
From Like To The Arctic Needle by Francis Quarles
Loss Of Memory by Kathleen Jessie Raine
And Where Is He? by Rainer Maria Rilke
I Find You In All These Things Of The World by Rainer Maria Rilke
I Have Many Brothers In The South by Rainer Maria Rilke
In This Town by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes A Man by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sunset by Rainer Maria Rilke
Whoever Grasps by Rainer Maria Rilke
You Are The Future by Rainer Maria Rilke
When The Days Grow Long In May by Jaufre Rudel
To Aphrodite Of The Flowers, At Knossos by Sappho
Leave Me, O Love by Philip Sidney
For The Flowers Are Great Blessings by Christopher Smart
There Is No One by Edith Sodergran
Roll Call by William Edgar Stafford
The Old Lutheran Bells At Home by Wallace Stevens
Dusk by Rabindranath Tagore
For The Goddess Of Love by Rabindranath Tagore
The Meeting Missed by Rabindranath Tagore
The Message by Rabindranath Tagore
Merlin's Riddle by Alfred Tennyson
The Name by Tomas Transtromer
The Scattered Congregation by Tomas Transtromer
I Sing Of A Maiden by Anonymous
In Praise Of Sophia (from Proverbs 3: 11-20) by Anonymous
Lord Help Me (french Medieval Prayer) by Anonymous
Lord, You Called by Anonymous
The Red Goddess (laksmi) From Hymn To Tirumal by Anonymous
To Nature. Orphic Hymn by Anonymous
Man Frail And God Eternal by Isaac Watts
A Voice by William Butler Yeats
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author

Robert Bly's books of poetry include The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. His awards include the National Book Award for poetry and two Guggenheims. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 268 pages
• Publisher: The Ecco Press/W. W. Norton & Co.; 1st edition (October 21, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880013559
• ISBN-13: 978-0880013550
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,036,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delight! Wonderful, readable spiritual poetry., June 12, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems From Many Cultures (Hardcover)

Robert Bly has a wonderful knack for finding the best of the most approachable, readable poetry available. If you've never followed his work, I invite you to pick up any of his anthologies for starters: News of the Universe is a good one, also try The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (it's subtitled "Poems for Men" but it's not really for men only, he features probably more women poets in there than many other anthologies). He continues his winning streak with this book.

I've read or heard Bly recite poems by many of the authors featured in this book. If you are a Bly fan, it's standard fare: Rilke, Kabir, Rumi, Dickinson, Stevens, Machado. It's nice to have it combined in one book- a compact, travel edition, if you will. Plus there are poems from Mirabai that have not been included in any of his books (although there's a small pocket book of her poems that's sadly out of print). There is a whole section entitled God in the Feminine, welcome and refreshing for men and I think very valuable for women seeking her spiritual path, surrounded as we are by masculine images of God.

The book is divided into 10 sections, by theme. Some of the titles are Starting on the Path, Dying to this World, and The Spirit- Who is a Guest of the Soul- Will Never be at Home on this Earth. Preceding each section Bly gives a little introduction that sets the theme for each. I love his interpretation and gentle guiding. He opened my eyes years ago to reading poetry and looking at the images in a broader way. Bly has received some criticism for his translations, as actually some of his work involves taking the English of other translators and giving it more vernacular language. While I understand and appreciate precision, I would also rather read a Bly translation of, say, Rilke's The Panther. I've seen the original and understand a little German, and to me Bly's ideas about keeping the emotional tenor alive make the poems so much more delightful to read, and his translations lose nothing.

So the poems are arranged in sections by topic and with a sense toward their emotional tenor. This is Bly's greatest strength, I think, and combined with his intelligence and broad interests he has used his senses to put together a wonderful, inspirational book.

For another excellent book in a similar vein, check out The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. Includes a couple of recipies (I have yet to try them out). Also The Kabir Book, by Robert Bly. The spiritual poems of Kabir, Rumi, and Mirabai are still new to this culture, and very beautiful and delightful. It's nice to see them in the anthology alongside Western poems- especially alongside Western poems. Who knows? Maybe they will change your life. -Mike

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't read this review, August 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems From Many Cultures (Hardcover)

Don't waste your time reading reviews. Read this book. It is absolutely amazing. Powerful. Deeply spiritual. Touching. Loving.

What more can I say?...

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bly returns us here to the emotional stew., June 6, 2001

By 

tepi "tepi" - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (Paperback)

I first read Robert Bly's earlier anthology, 'News of the Universe : Poems of Twofold Consciousness' (1980), many years ago and often find myself returning to it, not only to re-read my favorites from its 150 poems, but also to re-read Bly's full, informative, and extremely interesting introductions to the six Parts into which the book is divided.

'News of the Universe' is a tightly knit and beautifully assembled whole, and is built on a powerful thesis. Basically what the essays and poems set out to do, and they do it very effectively indeed, is to demonstrate that what Bly calls the "Old Position," the "pride in human reason" and "the conviction that nature is defective because it lacks reason" has had the effect of "deforming all poetry and culture" (page 3). What we must learn to realize and to fully embrace is the notion that human consciousness is only one of the many kinds of consciousness operating in the universe.

Since 'News of the Universe' had such a profound influence on me, and has remained one of my favorite books, I had very high hopes for the present book. After all, its title - 'The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy' - is very promising. Although the statement is perfectly true, there aren't many today who are telling us we are here for our own joy. More often than not what we are being told is that we are here to be good citizens, or good workers, or good party members, or good whatever - but not that we are here to actually enjoy life, though anyone who has observed animals at play ought to suspect as much. So if Bly had succeeded in assembling a whole collection of poems dealing with this vitally important message, it was something I was definitely interested in reading.

You may imagine my disappointment when, on receiving the book and turning to its mere 2-page 'Introduction' (which isn't really an Introduction at all), I found Bly confessing that he had originally intended to name the anthology 'Baskets that Hold God' (page xviii). So why didn't he?

But even worse was to follow, for not only are the Introductions to each of its parts skimpy, and altogether lacking the solid intellectual content of those of his earlier anthology, but I noted that Part X is named : 'THE SPIRIT - WHO IS A GUEST OF THE SOUL - WILL NEVER BE AT HOME ON THIS EARTH.' Gulp! Readers will at once see the glaring contradiction. If the soul is here for its own joy, how can it possibly joy if it will never be at home on this earth? Bly, so far as I can see, seems to want to have his cake and eat it.

The present book, I'm sorry to say, doesn't seem to me to be a particularly well-conceived project at all, and its title is certainly misleading. It contains a number of fine poems. It also contains a lot of flowery God-intoxicated Sufi writing - Kabir, Rumi, etc., - which will appeal to those who find that sort of thing appealing. Frankly I found the book rather monotonous. Perhaps it requires a more 'spiritual' type of reader. It certainly lacks the thrust and excitement of Bly's earlier anthology.

Readers who may be simply looking for an international anthology of 'spiritual' poems, poems about humans and their involvement with what they take to be 'God,' will probably like it. I see Bly as having reneged and fallen into the very anthropocentrism that his earlier anthology provided such an eloquent testimony against. Bly, in short, returns us here to the emotional stew, and seems to have completely forgotten the wonderful news of the universe that his earlier anthology brought.