REALITY CHECK

Eucken once asked, Will it be Existence

Or Substance?

The Sense-World or the Transcendent?

In 1908, the Nobel Prize for Literature

Was His.

A little more than Fifty years Later

Dylan replied

The answer my friend, is blowing’ in the wind

In 2021, the Nobel Prize for Literature

Was His.

Evelyn Underhill introduced me to 

Rudolf Eucken 

In the prodigious 

Footnotes that underpin 

Her magisterial work, Mysticism.

 In this, my short-stack exercise

In Compare and Contrast

Eucken does not represent only Substance

Nor Dylan only Existence.

As E.U. might put it, each sought Reality. 

Philosophers and Mystics both,

One wrote in academic High German,

The other in demotic American. 

Both express a commitment

To the experience of Transcendence. 

Each flourished in the sense-world, 

But, as artists

They wrote their higher calling: 

The exposition of Substance

Within the evanescence of Existence.