Since I've received several responses to the article in private, as a public service announcement, I would invite everyone who's read the article and had some thoughts to share remarks in the comments.
Given the times, an open debate and conversation is very much in the interest of everyone. There's no need for self-censoring or fear of reprisal. Art and culture thrive in a culture of open debate and dialogue.
I love Yeats, and I have no doubt that he and Eliot are the true standard bearers for poetry written in English in any era.
There are many different aspects to Yeats - the occult being just one - and it's always a grave error to be bound up in some theory or other and totally miss the sheer magnificence of a major poet's best work.
A more balanced view of Yeats - the man and his poetical achievements - is offered by R. F. Foster in W. B. Yeats : A Life, and I would totally recommend this all-encompassing biographical study.
One just has to read 'The Second Coming', then look at what is happening politically in America right now, in order to see how timeless and relevant Yeats is, and will remain, because he chose 'perfection of the work' rather than 'perfection of the life' - which was, nevertheless, profoundly interesting.
For such an 'obscure' poet Yeats seems to have a very wide appeal. If that's what New Criticism says then it's obvious nonsense. No poem is a self-contained entity. Just as no poet is. For a start we need to be able to understand the language. Everything but everything takes place in a context. And that context is always relevant. The fact of the matter is that Yeats is a universal poet because he uses universal images. He has studied occult science in much the same way as Jung has and for much the same reasons: precisely to put him more closely in touch with the universal archetypal symbols. Compare this with Hart Crane whose symbolism is purely private and in any case rather pretentious. He is merely playing the part of a poet. And producing a more or less clever simulacrum of poetry. In any case I rather like the mysteriousness of Yeats's later verse. It makes them a mystery. Because they celebrate a mystery. The inherently paradoxical nature of reality. In Yeats there is manifest a quarrel which is inherent in all of us between the sheer brutality of power and the meek authority of truth. But in the case of a good poet the authority of truth always wins out. All occult knowledge is true. And one finds it everywhere. The laity do not attend theological college. The mobile phone itself makes use of a knowledge with which I am only partly familiar. Mysteriousness is a part of power as it is also a part of authority. Except that in the latter case it is as inherent as it is innocent.
I like your point about Yeats's universality. I have heard his words being quoted all over the world. So, if Yeats is obscure, it doesn't seem to be a problem for most of his readers.
I also like you point about Yeats's symbols being common Jungian archetypes that can be identified easily enough in this age. So, like you, I have no great difficulty with them.
In fact, what I like most about Yeats is the rather obvious beauty and musicality of his words and their timeless appeal to the human heart.
I would have liked to edit this comment. But found out only after I'd posted it that I couldn't. The general case would have remained the same but I would have finessed it, and introduced a few paragraph breaks, etc
Auden, with considerable perspicacity, wrote about the Irish vessel emptied of its poetry:
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all...
I think of these lines when I reconsider Yeats and his journey, his excursions into the occult, his political journeys, some ambivalence regarding 1916, and his adolescent fascination with Maud Gonne, and his mean, unworthy remembrance of her husband, Major John MacBride.
*******************
A Taste of the Irish
In the Spring time Young Ireland was his bride.
That morning, when it came his turn to die,
He took a breath and stared death in the eye--
Come, have a taste for Foxy John MacBride!
---------------------------
...stared death in the eye: he refused the offer of a blindfold.
...Foxy John MacBride: MacBride had red hair and a long, straight nose. While still in school these attributes earned him the nickname "Foxy" MacBride.
A recent comment about Irish poetry and poems about Ireland got me to thinking about Yeats's poem Easter 1916 and Major John MacBride, who figures prominently in it.
MacBride was educated by Irish Christian Brothers. They also quite possibly radicalized him. As a man he served in Africa fighting for the Boers against the British, who opposed his Irish troops with crack Irish regiments under service to the British. MacBride's troops, Irish and Irish American volunteers, served with distinction, and built their reputation around several hard fought engagements.
MacBride married Maud Gonne, who had rejected Yeats on four occasions. They had a son, Sean, and an adopted daughter, Iseult. The marriage was short lived and there was a messy divorce trial in France, during which MacBride was acquitted of all charges against him, except for being drunk on one occasion.
Yeats spread stories, first to Lady Gregory, then generally, that MacBride had abused Gonne and sexually molested her eleven year old daughter. After MacBride's death his brother Anthony brought suit in France to clear his brother's name of the allegations of physical and sexual abuse. The suit was successful.
After the break-up with Maud Gonne MacBride returned to Ireland, where he signed up with the IRB. However, because he was well known to the British due to his involvement with the Boers, MacBride found himself excluded from the inner planning of the IRB. Thus on Easter Monday, on his way to a wedding, MacBride stumbled across the insurrection already underway. He offered his services and was posted in a command position. He held that post until Pearse gave the order to surrender. Shortly thereafter he was court martialed by a British tribunal, and on the mornning of May 5, 1916, John MacBride was executed by firing squad. We have his last words, spoken after being offered a blindfold, which he refused:
"I have looked down the muzzles of too many guns in the South African war to fear death and now please carry out your sentence." He is buried in the cemetery at Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin. (Wikipedia Article, "John MacBride).
By late September Yeats had completed "Easter 1916." In the poem he talks about the rebellion, its motives, and about his ambivalence concerning it. All fine so far -- but when he comes to MacBride's role in what became Ireland's break from British rule, Yeats allowed personal animus to cloud his judgment and to vitiate his poetic commemoration:
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-----------
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-----
It may have been a casual comedy, a dream for Yeats, but for MacDonagh, Connolly, Pearse and MacBride, it was sentence carried out under the strictures of Article .303.
As for the personal accusations against MacBride, despite successful defenses in court, some still argue them. A popular claim is that Gonne, a supposedly abused woman, withheld her charges. There seems to be a new found sympathy for the claim that Yeats, driven by jealousy, fabricated the charges and was behind the rumor mill which dispersed them. (Op. cit.)
As for Maud Gonne, she never corroborated the charges, and she disliked "Easter 1916:"
Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats, "No I dont like your poem, it isn't worthy of you & above all it isn't worthy of its subject... As for my husband he has entered eternity by the great door of sacrifice… so that praying for him I can also ask for his prayers".
No. It isn't perspicacity. It's a piece of goddam cheek. Who was he to compare himself with Yeats?
Auden may have been silly, but Yeats never was. In fact Auden was silly all his life. His ending as silly as his beginning. All those uppers and downers, and that bottle of wine a day, and then those rent boys. Give me Yeats's meditation, and yoga, and exercises, and magic, and astrology, and his marriage to a medium, and all the rest, anyday.
I will not try to weigh Auden's achievements against those of Yeats. The quotation from Auden is from an elegiac sequence, an emotionally complex and ambiguous appreciation of Yeats and his poetic achievement. Auden was not denigrating the Irish poet, and he wrote his tribute by the same license and generosity which poets have traditionally used to remember their dead fellows:
So we who now profess our love of you,
Should honor you by honoring what is true.
To return for a moment to our previous exchanges: you said that Yeats was not a politician. That is not quite accurate, for in his sixties he saw government service. In fact he acknowledges as much in verse:
...the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
At the time of these lines from "Among School Children" Yeats was a senator in the Irish government, a type of work for which I will venture he was unsuited. Posterity has benefited from his achievements as a poet. His record as a senator was honest but lacking in distinction.
I think I will close out this thread on my end by simple restating that like Maud Gonne I am not a great admirer of Easter 1916. Horace, in his Ars Poetica, tells us that even Homer nods. Such is my view of Easter 1916.
But I would be remiss if I did not remember and mention three short poems which follow Easter 1916 in the collected poems:
Sixteen Dead Men:
O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?
The Rose Tree:
'But where can we draw water,'
Said Pearse to Connolly,
'When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.'
On a Political Prisoner
When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulben to the meet,
The beauty of her country side
With all youths lonely wildness stirred,
She seemed to have grown clean and sweet
Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird..
These poems share much of the conflicting doubt and sad resignation of Easter 1916, but without the bitterness of personal animus.
*************
Here is Auden's elegy for Yeats, which pays tribute to him with all the praise and ambiguity which Auden felt toward him.
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
I do know Auden's poem and admire it. But that remark about Yeats's silliness was plain silly. And merely an example of lèse majesté. In no way was Auden Yeats's equal.
I think there's a slight but important difference between a politician and a Statesman. I put it to you that Yeats was more like the latter. He didn't fight for that position, as a mere politician might have, but was awarded it in recognition for his services to the newly formed Nation as its greatest living poet. And in my opinion quite rightly so.
One cannot help one's feelings, however ignoble they may be . And I can think of no better way of working them out and coming to terms with them than in the body of a poem. Yeats himself said he made poetry out of his quarrel with himself, but rhetoric out his quarrel with others.
Rhetoric is more akin to politics.
Yeats never pretended to be a perfect man. A perfect man presumably doesn't need to write poetry. But he admired perfection on all levels, as much in the human as in the aesthetic. And sometimes achieved it himself in the latter. Isn't that enough? How many of us can say they've achieved either?
We may not be able to help our feelings, but I think we may choose how we act on them. Unhappy as Yeats was because of his rejection, first by Maude Gonne, then by her daughter Iseult, he repeatedly violated the good name of a true hero and patriot, and in so doing besmirched his own reputation. Perhaps worst of all e used his art to memorialize the calumny. Perhaps his training as a sage was directed more to th grand notions than the little generosities and virtues soothe the burdens and disappointments of being human.
Isn't it better to record our imperfections in our art, and use our art as a mirror, so to speak, than to pretend to a perfection that very few of us in fact have? Remember, no less a person than Christ said, 'Why do you call me good? I am not good. Only God is good.' I can think of worse ways of coping with our imperfections than recording them in our art.
Surely it's like confession but better. Because it's helpful to us all. And we see that a man can achieve great things spiritually without being a Saint.
He was a human being. So what? He fell in love with women. So what? And got jealous. So what? What is important is that out of that unpromising material he made great art that still speaks to us.
And at least he wasn't a serial philanderer. He idealised one woman and then later on idealised her daughter. Like a latter-day Dante perhaps.
John, you ask whether I would prefer that Yeats had pretended to a virtue he didn't have. I don't think your question hits the mark. If he could not help struggling with jealousy, I think he could have made a better aestetic choice than to have vilified in death a rival in love. Instead an appeal to his baser instincts vitiates the unity of the poem. He tarnishes what was truly a moment of grandeur by the intrusion and inclusion of what, in context, seems a lower order of sentiment. The poet's elevation of a personal vice only scars that "terrible beauty [which] is born."
Although there are many poetic themes and appeals which might incite us ro squirm in our seats (e.g., the antisemitism of Pound and Southwell, Dowson's not clearly differentiated love for a child, Plath's laying bare her conflicts with her father) those poems, like all artistic endeavors, must stand or fall on aesthetic grounds, on thematic and rhetorical decorum. On those grounds I find myself concurring with the critical judgment of his Muse, Maud Gonne. I think that an unfortunate interjection of the particular, an unreflective personal judgment, into an exposition of nobility and universality, does not gel with the great theme of Easter 1916. The breach of high decorum deflates the poem's aspiration to graze the stars and leaves us instead with the awkwardness of an unfortunate parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.
You may be right. It's certainly a long time since I last read the poem, but I do know that a small amount of imperfection can actually improve an artwork's beauty. As well as providing some indication of the nearly always lowly origins of any work of art. And I'm sure Yeats was aware of this. In fact isn't that often the very thing that Yeats is trying to get across? 'For love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement.'
You see for Yeats the making of a work of art was akin to the alchemical process: the conversion of dross into gold. And if some traces of the dross remained that was all to the good, since it served to remind us of the great work's authenticity. And that it wasn't merely the result of some act of prestidigitation.
To write a poem is to walk a very difficult tightrope. And it's only too easy to fall off. The occasional stumble can serve to make us more aware of the poet's skill. And arouse in us those feelings of awe and wonder so indicative of the presence of the sublime, which is an essential component of beauty. And always serves to distinguish it from the merely picturesque.
I certainly agree with your animadversions against Ezra Pound and Sylvia Plath. But they are hardly on Yeats's level.
To me the mountain still remains a mountain. And that mouse, so soon forgotten, merely leaves us aware of how vast that mountain still remains.
Adam, I think that somewhere on this plane Nietzsche quipped that if there were a god he would have written better Greek.
Now, thanks to the famous wrestling match between Crowley and a thousand foot demon, I am insulated from demonic attacks originating in other dimensions and worlds.
Nonetheless something still troubles me: why, with their mastery of all that esoteric science, do demonologists or thaumaturges such as Mather, Crowley, Waite and their ilk write such abysmal Latin? Why is the Way to Wisdom littered with such malodorous fire and brimstone of excremental Latin and faux-Hebrew from the bowels of Satan and his cohorts? Surely Thrice Great Satan cannot be pleased with such abomination from his minions!
Aspirants to the rank of adeptus might profit more from a prophylactic dose of imodium and some reading in Martianus Capellus, who has told us about children clutching their lesson books and clinging to the knees of Dame Grammar, who stands over them wielding rods to correct their lapses in grammar.
They might also do well to absorb the lessons of Apuleius' hero Lucius, transformed into an ass by a spell gone awry. No less an authority than St. Augustine informs us that Apuleius himself was a skilled sorcerer.
Since I've received several responses to the article in private, as a public service announcement, I would invite everyone who's read the article and had some thoughts to share remarks in the comments.
Given the times, an open debate and conversation is very much in the interest of everyone. There's no need for self-censoring or fear of reprisal. Art and culture thrive in a culture of open debate and dialogue.
And we're all fort it!
I love Yeats, and I have no doubt that he and Eliot are the true standard bearers for poetry written in English in any era.
There are many different aspects to Yeats - the occult being just one - and it's always a grave error to be bound up in some theory or other and totally miss the sheer magnificence of a major poet's best work.
A more balanced view of Yeats - the man and his poetical achievements - is offered by R. F. Foster in W. B. Yeats : A Life, and I would totally recommend this all-encompassing biographical study.
One just has to read 'The Second Coming', then look at what is happening politically in America right now, in order to see how timeless and relevant Yeats is, and will remain, because he chose 'perfection of the work' rather than 'perfection of the life' - which was, nevertheless, profoundly interesting.
For such an 'obscure' poet Yeats seems to have a very wide appeal. If that's what New Criticism says then it's obvious nonsense. No poem is a self-contained entity. Just as no poet is. For a start we need to be able to understand the language. Everything but everything takes place in a context. And that context is always relevant. The fact of the matter is that Yeats is a universal poet because he uses universal images. He has studied occult science in much the same way as Jung has and for much the same reasons: precisely to put him more closely in touch with the universal archetypal symbols. Compare this with Hart Crane whose symbolism is purely private and in any case rather pretentious. He is merely playing the part of a poet. And producing a more or less clever simulacrum of poetry. In any case I rather like the mysteriousness of Yeats's later verse. It makes them a mystery. Because they celebrate a mystery. The inherently paradoxical nature of reality. In Yeats there is manifest a quarrel which is inherent in all of us between the sheer brutality of power and the meek authority of truth. But in the case of a good poet the authority of truth always wins out. All occult knowledge is true. And one finds it everywhere. The laity do not attend theological college. The mobile phone itself makes use of a knowledge with which I am only partly familiar. Mysteriousness is a part of power as it is also a part of authority. Except that in the latter case it is as inherent as it is innocent.
I like your point about Yeats's universality. I have heard his words being quoted all over the world. So, if Yeats is obscure, it doesn't seem to be a problem for most of his readers.
I also like you point about Yeats's symbols being common Jungian archetypes that can be identified easily enough in this age. So, like you, I have no great difficulty with them.
In fact, what I like most about Yeats is the rather obvious beauty and musicality of his words and their timeless appeal to the human heart.
I would have liked to edit this comment. But found out only after I'd posted it that I couldn't. The general case would have remained the same but I would have finessed it, and introduced a few paragraph breaks, etc
Auden, with considerable perspicacity, wrote about the Irish vessel emptied of its poetry:
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all...
I think of these lines when I reconsider Yeats and his journey, his excursions into the occult, his political journeys, some ambivalence regarding 1916, and his adolescent fascination with Maud Gonne, and his mean, unworthy remembrance of her husband, Major John MacBride.
*******************
A Taste of the Irish
In the Spring time Young Ireland was his bride.
That morning, when it came his turn to die,
He took a breath and stared death in the eye--
Come, have a taste for Foxy John MacBride!
---------------------------
...stared death in the eye: he refused the offer of a blindfold.
...Foxy John MacBride: MacBride had red hair and a long, straight nose. While still in school these attributes earned him the nickname "Foxy" MacBride.
A recent comment about Irish poetry and poems about Ireland got me to thinking about Yeats's poem Easter 1916 and Major John MacBride, who figures prominently in it.
MacBride was educated by Irish Christian Brothers. They also quite possibly radicalized him. As a man he served in Africa fighting for the Boers against the British, who opposed his Irish troops with crack Irish regiments under service to the British. MacBride's troops, Irish and Irish American volunteers, served with distinction, and built their reputation around several hard fought engagements.
MacBride married Maud Gonne, who had rejected Yeats on four occasions. They had a son, Sean, and an adopted daughter, Iseult. The marriage was short lived and there was a messy divorce trial in France, during which MacBride was acquitted of all charges against him, except for being drunk on one occasion.
Yeats spread stories, first to Lady Gregory, then generally, that MacBride had abused Gonne and sexually molested her eleven year old daughter. After MacBride's death his brother Anthony brought suit in France to clear his brother's name of the allegations of physical and sexual abuse. The suit was successful.
After the break-up with Maud Gonne MacBride returned to Ireland, where he signed up with the IRB. However, because he was well known to the British due to his involvement with the Boers, MacBride found himself excluded from the inner planning of the IRB. Thus on Easter Monday, on his way to a wedding, MacBride stumbled across the insurrection already underway. He offered his services and was posted in a command position. He held that post until Pearse gave the order to surrender. Shortly thereafter he was court martialed by a British tribunal, and on the mornning of May 5, 1916, John MacBride was executed by firing squad. We have his last words, spoken after being offered a blindfold, which he refused:
"I have looked down the muzzles of too many guns in the South African war to fear death and now please carry out your sentence." He is buried in the cemetery at Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin. (Wikipedia Article, "John MacBride).
By late September Yeats had completed "Easter 1916." In the poem he talks about the rebellion, its motives, and about his ambivalence concerning it. All fine so far -- but when he comes to MacBride's role in what became Ireland's break from British rule, Yeats allowed personal animus to cloud his judgment and to vitiate his poetic commemoration:
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-----------
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-----
It may have been a casual comedy, a dream for Yeats, but for MacDonagh, Connolly, Pearse and MacBride, it was sentence carried out under the strictures of Article .303.
As for the personal accusations against MacBride, despite successful defenses in court, some still argue them. A popular claim is that Gonne, a supposedly abused woman, withheld her charges. There seems to be a new found sympathy for the claim that Yeats, driven by jealousy, fabricated the charges and was behind the rumor mill which dispersed them. (Op. cit.)
As for Maud Gonne, she never corroborated the charges, and she disliked "Easter 1916:"
Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats, "No I dont like your poem, it isn't worthy of you & above all it isn't worthy of its subject... As for my husband he has entered eternity by the great door of sacrifice… so that praying for him I can also ask for his prayers".
No. It isn't perspicacity. It's a piece of goddam cheek. Who was he to compare himself with Yeats?
Auden may have been silly, but Yeats never was. In fact Auden was silly all his life. His ending as silly as his beginning. All those uppers and downers, and that bottle of wine a day, and then those rent boys. Give me Yeats's meditation, and yoga, and exercises, and magic, and astrology, and his marriage to a medium, and all the rest, anyday.
Hello again;
I will not try to weigh Auden's achievements against those of Yeats. The quotation from Auden is from an elegiac sequence, an emotionally complex and ambiguous appreciation of Yeats and his poetic achievement. Auden was not denigrating the Irish poet, and he wrote his tribute by the same license and generosity which poets have traditionally used to remember their dead fellows:
So we who now profess our love of you,
Should honor you by honoring what is true.
To return for a moment to our previous exchanges: you said that Yeats was not a politician. That is not quite accurate, for in his sixties he saw government service. In fact he acknowledges as much in verse:
...the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
At the time of these lines from "Among School Children" Yeats was a senator in the Irish government, a type of work for which I will venture he was unsuited. Posterity has benefited from his achievements as a poet. His record as a senator was honest but lacking in distinction.
I think I will close out this thread on my end by simple restating that like Maud Gonne I am not a great admirer of Easter 1916. Horace, in his Ars Poetica, tells us that even Homer nods. Such is my view of Easter 1916.
But I would be remiss if I did not remember and mention three short poems which follow Easter 1916 in the collected poems:
Sixteen Dead Men:
O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?
The Rose Tree:
'But where can we draw water,'
Said Pearse to Connolly,
'When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.'
On a Political Prisoner
When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulben to the meet,
The beauty of her country side
With all youths lonely wildness stirred,
She seemed to have grown clean and sweet
Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird..
These poems share much of the conflicting doubt and sad resignation of Easter 1916, but without the bitterness of personal animus.
*************
Here is Auden's elegy for Yeats, which pays tribute to him with all the praise and ambiguity which Auden felt toward him.
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
I do know Auden's poem and admire it. But that remark about Yeats's silliness was plain silly. And merely an example of lèse majesté. In no way was Auden Yeats's equal.
I think there's a slight but important difference between a politician and a Statesman. I put it to you that Yeats was more like the latter. He didn't fight for that position, as a mere politician might have, but was awarded it in recognition for his services to the newly formed Nation as its greatest living poet. And in my opinion quite rightly so.
One cannot help one's feelings, however ignoble they may be . And I can think of no better way of working them out and coming to terms with them than in the body of a poem. Yeats himself said he made poetry out of his quarrel with himself, but rhetoric out his quarrel with others.
Rhetoric is more akin to politics.
Yeats never pretended to be a perfect man. A perfect man presumably doesn't need to write poetry. But he admired perfection on all levels, as much in the human as in the aesthetic. And sometimes achieved it himself in the latter. Isn't that enough? How many of us can say they've achieved either?
We may not be able to help our feelings, but I think we may choose how we act on them. Unhappy as Yeats was because of his rejection, first by Maude Gonne, then by her daughter Iseult, he repeatedly violated the good name of a true hero and patriot, and in so doing besmirched his own reputation. Perhaps worst of all e used his art to memorialize the calumny. Perhaps his training as a sage was directed more to th grand notions than the little generosities and virtues soothe the burdens and disappointments of being human.
Isn't it better to record our imperfections in our art, and use our art as a mirror, so to speak, than to pretend to a perfection that very few of us in fact have? Remember, no less a person than Christ said, 'Why do you call me good? I am not good. Only God is good.' I can think of worse ways of coping with our imperfections than recording them in our art.
Surely it's like confession but better. Because it's helpful to us all. And we see that a man can achieve great things spiritually without being a Saint.
He was a human being. So what? He fell in love with women. So what? And got jealous. So what? What is important is that out of that unpromising material he made great art that still speaks to us.
And at least he wasn't a serial philanderer. He idealised one woman and then later on idealised her daughter. Like a latter-day Dante perhaps.
John, you ask whether I would prefer that Yeats had pretended to a virtue he didn't have. I don't think your question hits the mark. If he could not help struggling with jealousy, I think he could have made a better aestetic choice than to have vilified in death a rival in love. Instead an appeal to his baser instincts vitiates the unity of the poem. He tarnishes what was truly a moment of grandeur by the intrusion and inclusion of what, in context, seems a lower order of sentiment. The poet's elevation of a personal vice only scars that "terrible beauty [which] is born."
Although there are many poetic themes and appeals which might incite us ro squirm in our seats (e.g., the antisemitism of Pound and Southwell, Dowson's not clearly differentiated love for a child, Plath's laying bare her conflicts with her father) those poems, like all artistic endeavors, must stand or fall on aesthetic grounds, on thematic and rhetorical decorum. On those grounds I find myself concurring with the critical judgment of his Muse, Maud Gonne. I think that an unfortunate interjection of the particular, an unreflective personal judgment, into an exposition of nobility and universality, does not gel with the great theme of Easter 1916. The breach of high decorum deflates the poem's aspiration to graze the stars and leaves us instead with the awkwardness of an unfortunate parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.
You may be right. It's certainly a long time since I last read the poem, but I do know that a small amount of imperfection can actually improve an artwork's beauty. As well as providing some indication of the nearly always lowly origins of any work of art. And I'm sure Yeats was aware of this. In fact isn't that often the very thing that Yeats is trying to get across? 'For love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement.'
You see for Yeats the making of a work of art was akin to the alchemical process: the conversion of dross into gold. And if some traces of the dross remained that was all to the good, since it served to remind us of the great work's authenticity. And that it wasn't merely the result of some act of prestidigitation.
To write a poem is to walk a very difficult tightrope. And it's only too easy to fall off. The occasional stumble can serve to make us more aware of the poet's skill. And arouse in us those feelings of awe and wonder so indicative of the presence of the sublime, which is an essential component of beauty. And always serves to distinguish it from the merely picturesque.
I certainly agree with your animadversions against Ezra Pound and Sylvia Plath. But they are hardly on Yeats's level.
To me the mountain still remains a mountain. And that mouse, so soon forgotten, merely leaves us aware of how vast that mountain still remains.
Adam, I think that somewhere on this plane Nietzsche quipped that if there were a god he would have written better Greek.
Now, thanks to the famous wrestling match between Crowley and a thousand foot demon, I am insulated from demonic attacks originating in other dimensions and worlds.
Nonetheless something still troubles me: why, with their mastery of all that esoteric science, do demonologists or thaumaturges such as Mather, Crowley, Waite and their ilk write such abysmal Latin? Why is the Way to Wisdom littered with such malodorous fire and brimstone of excremental Latin and faux-Hebrew from the bowels of Satan and his cohorts? Surely Thrice Great Satan cannot be pleased with such abomination from his minions!
Aspirants to the rank of adeptus might profit more from a prophylactic dose of imodium and some reading in Martianus Capellus, who has told us about children clutching their lesson books and clinging to the knees of Dame Grammar, who stands over them wielding rods to correct their lapses in grammar.
They might also do well to absorb the lessons of Apuleius' hero Lucius, transformed into an ass by a spell gone awry. No less an authority than St. Augustine informs us that Apuleius himself was a skilled sorcerer.