by Rick Gekoski
Yeats is never this prolix, and begins from a different starting point. Amongst his earliest works he edited collections like Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1891), and steeped himself in Celtic lore. He wrote a considerable number of plays based on these subjects, which are (thankfully) rarely performed, even at the Abbey Theatre. This obsession with the world of druids and mythological Celtic figures can cause a softening of the brain, and has been known to lead to the compulsive singing of songs, and even (in extreme cases) to vegetarianism.
When I took my course on Yeats at the University of Pennsylvania, I can remember mugging up this material, being furiously engaged with it, in the way that characterizes ambitious undergraduates, anxious to master and to stand out. But none of it stuck. The mere thought of such folkloric subjects now fills me with a kind of agitated vacancy, as if I were listening to a prolonged weather report in Esperanto.
Yeats’s later, and even more boring, reading in eastern religion and philosophy, as well as Christian mysticism, was driven by the desire not so much to master these traditions, as to root about within them for new metaphors and sources of poetic inspiration. The process through which the material was filtered did not ask ‘is this true?’ but ‘how might it be useful?’
The effect of this rage for abstract thought, which Yeats allied to a ‘longing . . . to be full of images’, has curious effects on the poetry. So intense is his desire to see the world whole, that he rarely sees it clearly, or, to put this more carefully, he rarely registers it in its particularities. I can remember few characters, moments, or voices from individual poems by Yeats (as one does from, say, The Waste Land). He strains for, and reaches, a kind of pitched intensity that has archetypal – he occasionally uses the term ‘ceremonial’ – radiance, but he frequently lacks a way to locate that visionary quality in the ordinariness of everyday life.
And hence, I think, why I reach for my Yeats when something large is at stake, as one might reach for the Bible. Since that time in Oxford, perhaps semi-consciously prompted by memory of Yeats’s role in my life when I was twenty-two, I have increasingly turned to his poetry, not for solace, exactly, but for that assured magisterial understanding that characterizes his later poems.
I now feel uneasy with most of early Yeats, even ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’, which strikes me as suffering from a number of the same flaws that characterize ‘Brown Penny’. I have had enough of those poems. (I hate the much anthologized ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.) Perhaps it would be a sign of retardation if I hadn’t, at my age.
Of course, most great romantic poetry has been written either by those who died young (Byron, Keats, Shelley) or those who, having written poetry while young, later wrote less (and less well) and turned instead to criticism (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Arnold) – as if, no longer able to produce great poems, one could at least reflect upon the nature of what one had done. Yeats is a great exception here. He not only maintains the intensity of his early thinking and feeling, but enriches, deepens and widens it in his later work: instead of turning to prose to reflect upon his early sources of inspiration, he allows such reflection to become part of the poetic process.
He is no less, though differently, moved and inspired by the fact of growing old than of having been young. Yeats provides, of course, many of our most haunting images of physical decay. My favourite of all his poems, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, puts this squarely. It begins with a most wonderful evocation of the urgent flow of universal life:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
–Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
But this flood of procreative activity, this swell of comings and goings, hardly takes account of, or makes a place for, the consciousness of those who – having experienced the tides of youth – have time enough, also, to reflect upon their withdrawal. And thus the second stanza immediately, almost necessarily, begins:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick
You get a stick when you detach a piece of wood from a branch, when it dies and the sap dries up, when the organic connection to its tree of life is severed. So too, and yet more poignantly, can a man apprehend his own slow detachment from his vital sources:
. . . sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It is a harrowing, unforgettable image: one of those phrases that attaches itself to one’s consciousness, defines and refines it. For desire is never shed, neither is it overcome. It is remembered, and unless transformed by the spirit, or the imagination – by the power of poetry – it torments us with what we have lost without putting anything in its place. Yeats’s answer to this, in the fourth stanza of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, is not entirely satisfactory – the poet imagines himself immortalized as a Byzantine golden bird, singing ‘of what is past, or passing, or to come’. This final artistic incarnation feels impotent and trivial, hardly enough ‘to keep a drowsy Emperor awake’.
But the poet does not insist upon the need for transcendence. There is an inalienable conflict between flesh and spirit, youth and age, the transient and the immortal, the world of sensual experience and the world of art. You can’t wish away this tension, nor can you solve it: all that you can hope is that the transforming powers of the imagination can use such conflicts as sources of art – however inadequate the process may sometimes seem – and hence be of some consolation. T.S. Eliot, who regarded Yeats as the greatest poet of the century, makes this point perfectly:
one feels that the most lively and desirable emotions of youth have been preserved to receive their full and due expression in retrospect. For the interesting feelings of age are not just different feelings; they are feelings into which the feelings of youth are integrated.
It’s not an easy process, not as I experience it, this mixing (as Eliot put it) of memory and desire.
Much of what I remember of Rachel is so intense and so vivid that it seems as if it were played by some inward video, recalling the delights of first love. All of forty-odd years later this – might one call it emotion recollected in senility? – is so fresh, and very occasionally so stimulating, that it rather embarrasses me to admit it, though it is testimony to the unfolding of time, to its radiant refulgence, its pathos and inevitability.
First love is only infrequently revisited, when the right catalyst occurs. It might be hearing that significant song, or talking to an old friend, or looking through those old photos. Or reading W.B.Yeats. Perhaps I’ve had it wrong: it is not Rachel that makes me think of Yeats but the other way round. Yeats makes us all think about first love, the flushes of youth: what we never cease to regret the loss of. This is, he came to feel, the essential task of the poet: to become that golden bird which sings forever of ‘what is past, or passing, or to come’. There is no consolation in art, only formulation: the pain of our inevitable loss of vitality is not slowed by the intercessions of the artist, but in listening attentively we may smile, and remember for a moment what it was to be vibrantly alive, to have been young and in love.
First love is better remembered than continued, and Rachel was right to leave it when she did. The irony – I was too young to expect it – is that pain releases energy, just as pleasure often retards it. I indulged myself with a few months of operatic grief, in which I wrote a two hundred-page account of my travails, and then threw it away. Soon enough I was seeing other women, had a romantic idyll in Ischia with an attractive classmate of Rachel ’s who’d decided I was just the right sort to serve as her first lover, and returned to Oxford happy and refreshed. In my overstuffed pigeonhole at Merton, amongst the usual
college notices and invitations to join various societies, was a letter from Rachel. I carried it back to my flat in my breast pocket, and put it on my desk, where it sat for a few minutes before I was ready to open it. What might it say? What did I want it to say?
She had ended her relationship with her teacher, which had been a mistake, but a necessary one. We’d had a ‘very young’ relationship, she acknowledged, but the pause might be good for us. Could we not try to get to know one another again, in a better way? It was the letter I had yearned for, the letter that Wandering Aengus was designed to prompt, it had a tentative delicacy that hurt my heart, but it was too late. I thought for a few days, and composed a letter of thanks, and of regret, to say good-bye. It was florid and self-regarding – April was our cruellest month, but I was breeding lilacs out of the dead land – which rather confirmed her sense of how immature the relationship had been.
I still was. At the time I got her letter we would have been married for three months. I presume it wouldn’t have lasted. Better the lifetime pleasure of first love, remembered. Better, too, that sadness, that loss.
7
SWEET AND SOUR
Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize on truth: – the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
If it had to be Wordsworth or Arnold, then it would have to be Arnold. The Oxford BPhil in English made you choose one or the other as a special subject, and I’d had enough of Wordsworth in my undergraduate Romantic Poetry course. I did not share his reverence for ‘nature’, and had no desire to be improved by its beggars, leech gatherers, and other drooling rustics. To my sort of Jewish American, nature is dangerous, where you are more likely to be eaten by a bear than improved by neo-Platonic contemplation. I’m rather fond of scenery, though, as long as you don’t step in it. You need to be protected from it by a pane of glass.
Not that I knew much about Matthew Arnold. I think I’d read ‘Dover Beach’, and was aware that Lionel Trilling’s PhD thesis and first book had been on Arnold, which was some recommendation. Having made my choice, I threw on my rather dashing magenta-and-cream striped Merton College scarf, and headed to Blackwell’s Book Shop, on the Broad, where I had opened an account: ‘R.A. Gekoski, Merton’ was enough – you didn’t even need to prove it – to allow you a full term’s credit. Take a book, take armfuls of books, sign: ‘R.A. Gekoski, Merton’. It was a good game. My shelves filled right up. Arnold’s Collected Poems and Culture and Anarchy on the top shelf.
My tutor for the term, Hugo Dyson, had suggested I do an essay on Arnold as a critic. I was anxious to impress him: he’d been a member of the Inklings, was a noted (if not exactly prolific) scholar and bon viveur, and had recently had a walk-on role as a professor in the movie Darling, with that super Julie Christie. I worked hard on the paper, and sent it to him a few days in advance of the tutorial. On the day, I popped on the scrappy, distinctly humiliating black rags called a Commoner’s Gown – the Scholar’s Gowns were capacious enough to flap about like Gandalf – hoisted my umbrella, and made my way down the slippery cobbles of Merton Street for my tutorial.
The essay attempted a demolition of one of Arnold’s central critical ideals, concerning the use of touchstones, or memorized lines of poetry of such quality that mere comparison with them would indicate the merit of any other bit of verse. I’d read his two essential essays, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ and ‘The Study of Poetry’, and been mystified by the combination of extreme self-confidence and methodological laxness that they seemed to display. The following was typical, and typically irritating:
Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality . . .
What lines did he have in mind? There are eleven examples: three each from Homer, Dante and Milton, and two from Shakespeare. They are ‘lines and expressions of the great masters’, of the utmost gravitas, and include Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio, and Milton’s lament on the death of Persephone, as well as his injunction:
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome . . .
which is perfectly designed to appeal to high-Victorian sensibility, as well as to scout troops, Sumo wrestlers and American Marines.
Tuck these lines away, add a few dashes of Dante, and ‘if you have tact’ they will be adequate ‘even of themselves’ to guide us to a proper understanding and evaluation of poetry. Clearly a lot is being built into the term ‘tact’, which pretty obviously means ‘sensibility’. But if you have such sensibility, surely, you don’t need a carrier bag of touchstones to help you on your way? You will have your own standards of quality, your own comparators, your own understanding of the nature of the poetic.
‘Poetry,’ Arnold informed me, consisted of ‘a criticism of life’, a remarkably airy notion, accompanied by no definition, as if delivered to an audience that would know what he meant. I didn’t. When I went back to Arnold’s formulation, seeking further guidance, things only got worse: ‘a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty’. It was enough to make you squeal, and I did, for twelve closely argued polemical pages. I sent them to Dyson, expecting approbation.
His rooms were messy and apparently unloved – I’d not yet encountered the concept of the shabby genteel – but there was a comfy chair and the inevitable glass of dry sherry, an astringent drink about which no one had warned me, and of which I’d drunk too much during my college induction meetings. It made me feel sophisticated: Amontillado, or better yet Fino. Not Bristol Cream.
My essay was sitting amongst a pile of papers on the table next to the bottle of sherry. I craned my neck, but couldn’t see a mark or any comments on the front page.
‘Now, dear boy, shall we look at the Marguerite poems?’
I opened my Collected Poems.
‘Which one?’
‘Why don’t you read ‘To Marguerite’?
YES! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown.
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour;
O then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent!
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
O might our marges meet again!
Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance rul’d;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
I read the poem, then reread it, and looked up.
‘There is only one line of genuine poetry in the entire poem,’ he said. He paused while I looked back through the poem anxiously. ‘Which is it?’
I peered at the text. Surely it couldn’t be the opening line – ‘
enisled’ was awful! I could feel my mind closing down.
What kind of a tutorial was this anyway? I’d never been asked such a question before, and had no idea where to start. Presumably I was supposed to classify the lines – both Arnold and Oxford were obsessed by class – give them a First, or an Alpha – both new categories to me, and distinctly foreign. Was this how you read poetry in Oxford?
Dyson looked at me steadily, as if willing me to find the answer – or, perhaps, to fail? My attack on Arnold had been intemperate and show-offy, and Arnold was revered in Oxford, ‘that city of dreaming spires’ as he had christened it: ‘home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties’. I drank some sherry – I needed some sherry – and looked at the text again. I fidgeted, I sipped, I stalled. I was fast becoming another of Oxford’s ‘lost causes’.
‘Surely,’ he said, crisply: ‘“The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.” Pure poetry, lovely.’
We spent the rest of the hour – it was intimidatingly intimate, this one-to-one tutorial format, its apparent gentility really just a stage for jousting, testing, competing, probing – in similarly amateurish pursuit. It was a ‘tact’ test, and I was failing it. I was furious. By the time Dyson had walked me through the other poems seeking lines worthy of touchstone status (though I didn’t see what he was up to), I couldn’t wait to collect my essay and get the hell out of there. I rose as the college bells tolled the hour, and Hugo handed me my essay.