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William Butler Yeats:
‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’
The reference in the article on Auden to his elegy on the death of WB
Yeats (1865-1939) was a reminder that we had still to deal with the
latter, an omission that it is now time to make good.
Yeats was an Irishman, but he began his poetic career in the
essentially British Pre-Rapahaelite and Aesthetic tradition represented
by Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris. His early poetry is typical of what
Eliot calls “the vague enchanted beauty” of that tradition. However, by
drawing on Celtic mythology and folklore as well as on the Irish
landscape for inspiration Yeats does achieve a distinctively individual
note, a good example of which is “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “I will
arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of
clay and wattles made...And I shall have some peace there, for peace
comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the
cricket sings....I will arise and go now, for always night and day I
hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore...”
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W B Yeats |
What Yeats’ Irishness does for his poetry at this stage is to “give
to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Still, we do not feel
that the poetic imagination is working to its potential. It is seemingly
the “fancy” that is taking up the slack and fancy, as suggested by
Shakespeare’s Ariel and confirmed by Coleridge, is bred in the head
rather than in the heart. “Mad” Ireland has not as yet, in the words of
Auden’s elegy, “hurt Yeats into poetry” of the heart, bred out of the
plenitude of emotional experience.
That only happens after Yeats gets involved in the real Ireland of
the present rather than the idealised Ireland of the past. It is then
that the anguish of an unrequited love for a beautiful Irish woman, the
disappointment with Irish politics and the horrors of the Irish civil
war, the frustrations of trying to spearhead an Irish literary revival,
along with the consciousness of growing helplessly old in this maddening
Irish context, all contribute to Yeats’ progressive development into a
major poet. The process starts with “Adam’s Curse”-1904, Maud Gonne
having rejected Yeats and married another:
“I had a thought for no one’s but your ears: That you were beautiful,
and that I strove To love you in the high old way of love: That it had
all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown As weary-hearted as that hollow
moon” Yeats makes us feel his private agony at the failure of love and
beauty as the general fate of accursed humanity. “The Fascination of
What’s Difficult”-1910 reflects the frustrations of theatre management
even in the noble cause of the promotion of Irish drama: “The
fascination of what’s difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and
rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart....My curse on
plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day’s war with every
knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men....”
How different this verse is from the dreamy style of “Innisfree.” The
phrasing is tough and sinewy, the idiom and rhythm are those of modern
speech, and the tone is bitter and disillusioned. Yeats never departed
from traditional verse form, notably rhymed iambic pentameter. What he
did was to intensify from within and develop a uniquely individual
poetic that outstandingly proved the axiom: “Le style-c’est l’homme meme
(Style- it is the man himself).” His Irishness became a matter of
expression as well as of subject matter.
The bitterness deepens to despair in the title poem of
“Responsibilities_-1914: as he contemplates the childlessness that
infatuation has cost him and addresses his forefathers: “Pardon that for
a barren passion’s sake, Although I have come close on forty-nine I have
no child, I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your
blood and mine.” In “Men Improve with the Years”-1916, the bitterness is
tinged with scorn not only for himself but for humanity: “I am worn out
with dreams; A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams; And all
day long I look Upon this lady’s beauty As though I had found in a book
A pictured beauty....For men improve with the years; And yet, and yet,
Is this my dream, or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my
burning youth! But I grow old among dreams, A weather-worn, marble
triton Among the streams.”
In “Nineteen-Hundred and Nineteen” of the same date, Yeats’ verse
assumes a Shakespearean density and a cynical intensity as he describes
the brutality on both sides occasioned by British reprisals for the
abortive Irish revolt of 1916: “Now days are dragon-ridden, the
nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother,
murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; The
night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into
philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but
weasels fighting in a hole.”
What we find in these examples is, in Eliot’s words, “that sense of a
unique personality which makes one sit up in excitement and eagerness to
learn more about the author’s mind and feelings.” In consequence, Yeats
achieves the “impersonality of the poet who, out of intense and personal
experience is able to express a general truth; retaining all the
particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol.” As in
the case of Blake, there is a terrifying honesty about Yeats’ mature
poetry, and this comes through because of a commensurate technical
accomplishment.
It is the poems that reflect such honest self-expression – and not
some of the more famous poems that rather spuriously draw their
inspiration from magic and occultism (eg. the two “Byzantiums” and “Leda
and the Swan”) - that create genuine value for the reader. “A Prayer for
my Daughter” draws on Yeats’ experience of disappointed love: “May she
be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger’s eye
distraught, Or hers before a looking glass, for such, Being made
beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural
kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and
never find a friend.” What parent would not realise the wisdom of that
prayer from the felicity of its expression?
The context of “Among School Children” is Yeats’ visit to a school as
“a sixty-year-old smiling public man. He imagines his beloved Maud Gonne
as a child and is shaken by the thought of “her present image” as an old
woman “hollow of cheek” and feeding on “shadows.” This gives rise to
meditations on the way old age seems to mock the labours of mothers to
bring forth life and of philosophers to claim that a spiritual
permanence underlies its physical transitoriness. The final stanza is a
supreme example of the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that,
according to Wordsworth, should follow “emotion recollected in
tranquility”:
“Labour is blossoming or dancing where the body is not bruised to
pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed
wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are
you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O
brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
The emotional logic of this glorious verse defies paraphrase. Perhaps
Frost’s lines best convey the sense of it: “The fact is the sweetest
dream that labour knows.” The fact, that is, of life in all its
blossoming, chestnut-tree-like, fullness, without any self-defeating
efforts to analyse its complexity and rationalise its ephemeral nature.
“Anything more that (this) truth would have been too much.” This poem is
surely the acme of the poetic achievement that mad Ireland hurt Yeats
into.
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