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WHO BELIEVES IN KARMA AND REBIRTH?
previously born. But “memory appears to be a palimpsest from which nothing is ever obliterated”, declared Professor Dixon, and many a poet has felt convincingly that he or she has lived before.
Perhaps I lived before In some strange world where first my soul And all this passionate love was shaped, and joy, and pain That come, I know not whence, and sway my deeds Are old imperious memories, blind yet strong,
That this world stirs within me.1 Shakespeare made rational enquiry in Sonnet LIX ;
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child ! Tennyson, more mystical, in a littlc-known sonnet begins :
As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood
And ebb into a former life, or seem To lapse far back in a confused dream
To states of mystical similitude ... Browning is more personal, in a poem to Evelyn Hope, who died at the age of sixteen :
Just because I was thrice as old
And our paths in the world diverged so wide, Each was naught to cach, must I be told ?
We were fellow mortals, naught beside ? And he answers his own enquiry :
I claim you still, for my own love's sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few ;
Much is to learn and much to forget Ere the time be come for taking you.
1 George Eliot in The Spanish Gypsy.
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