Kathleen Raine's Poetry of Longing

The work of Kathleen Raine contains a tension between glimpses of the spiritual world and the experience of being cut off from it. The references to doorways and openings that occur in several poems are often used as metaphors for negotiating a passage between material and spiritual dimensions. Although there are poems that describe profound experiences of the spiritual, the 'doors' are not always open and several poems contain a sense of grief and defiance at the inability to reach the divine. As such, there are many poems that can be read as ‘poems of longing’, where there is a desire to connect with the divine in the human other and in the natural world. Of particular interest is the way in which the expression of longing develops through Raine’s poetic career.