Mystical Symbols of Divine Love in the Poetry of Omar Tarin and William Blake: A Comparative Cognitive Analysis7

Poets Omer Tarin and William Blake, despite coming from different religious and cultural backgrounds (Pakistani and English), use identical symbols—Pipe, Woman, and Bird—to express the soul's ineffable union with the Divine. A comparative cognitive analysis applying Mental Spaces theory from Cognitive Poetics and Perennialism from Comparative Mysticism shows that these symbols function not merely as artistic decoration but as cognitive tools for meaning construction. The analysis demonstrates a shared unitary poetic-mystical consciousness between the two poets, revealing a commonality in how abstract mystical experiences of Divine Love are grounded in concrete symbols. The study calls for further cross-cultural research on mystical language and poetry.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This study is a comparative cognitive analysis of the identical symbols of Divine Love in the poetry of the oriental Pakistani poet Omer Tarin and the occidental English poet William Blake. It adopts the Mental Spaces theory in Cognitive Poetics and the theory of Perennialism in Comparative Mysticism as the main theoretical frameworks. The study aims at demonstrating the mental operation of meaning construction of these symbols and help deliver meaningful mystical perceptions of the human soul’s ineffable experience in its union with the Divine. Exploring mystical symbols via these theories will offer an accurate interpretation of the meaning of the abstract concepts based on the concrete ones and stipulate deeper insight into the commonality of the ambiguous feelings of the soul in Divine Love. Answering the question of the existence of identical symbols with mystical connotations, the study focusses on the symbols of Pipe, Woman, and Bird and reveals that despite the religious and cultural disparities between Omer Tarin and William Blake, there is a keen affinity between them as related to their unitary poetic-mystical consciousness of the soul’s experience in its search for the Divine, for which both poets have ingeniously utilized identical symbolism not only as a tool for artistic ornamentation but as a tool for cognitive orientation. The study endorses further research on mystical language and poetry from comparative and cognitive perspectives to corroborate the tenets of cognitive theories in comparative literary studies through cross-cultural research.