I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each;
Until imagination brought
A finer welcome; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.12
The very difficulty of enunciating that final line is part of its meaning, for now the poet too endures "lack of breath", with his heart literally in his mouth, blocking utterance. Acknowledging its own redundancy, after a patently ludicrous attempt to tabulate and catalogue elements of a very casual build-up, the poem's baffled silence is in fact the greater tribute, rather like that offered at the end of "The Fisherman", which concludes that the audience for (as well as the content of) a national art has yet to be inferred.
In Yeats's middle period, the Dancer becomes an emblem of pure form, sheer contour, devoid of intellectual content ("opinion"), which is now subsumed by style. What Michael Robartes wishes to see is the supernatural element incarnated in bodily form; but the yearning for "thought" is not so easily denied:
. . . it's plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant could grow wise.13
This represents a phase of womanhood with which the poet fully identifies himself by now, that moment when every rational control is lost and a supernatural visitation becomes possible. It is the moment of second coming and, indeed, the moment of Leda.
The famous question which closes "Leda and the Swan" assumes that the price of full knowledge is indifference; and this is entirely in keeping with Yeats's long-standing conviction that to poets the half-said thing is most attractive. The point was, indeed, repeated at the end of "Meditations in Time of Civil War" where "the half-read wisdom of daimonic images" was to "suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy"14 (though, of course, there is an element of resignation about the word "suffice"). While feminists have denounced the lyric as a glamorization of rape, it is possible to see that mythical rape as Yeats's metaphor for artistic creation and the poet as identifying with the put-upon woman.
As a mere medium for the awesome, impersonal power of supernatural forces, Yeats knew that he possessed massive gifts of technique (poetic "power") but that his intellectual control over such language (analytic "knowledge") lagged sadly behind. It is undeniable that his skill with words far outstripped his abilities as a thinker. His father had often joked: "You want to be a philosopher, Willie, and are only a poet", but the son was consistently aware of the dilemma. He refers to it in "Vacillation" ("What, be a singer born, and lack a theme?") and again in "The Circus Animals' Desertion" ("I sought a theme and sought for it in vain"). He was being no more than honest when he wrote:
Those poets that in their writings are most wise
Own nothing but their own blind stupefied hearts.15
The result is that many of Yeats's most memorable lines are striking without being lucid (like the end of "The Second Coming", where the rough beast may be a divine agent of inspiration, heralding not only a new era but also new subjects for poetry). This need not necessarily be a bad thing, for great poetry often has the capacity to communicate before it is fully understood; but that surrender of intellectual control did trouble Yeats, who sometimes felt more violated than illuminated by image and symbol.
A pervasive theme through The Tower is the cost of worshipping images. The bird in "Sailing to Byzantium" achieves a highly qualified triumph, permanence being won only at the cost of mobility and growth. The image of Hanrahan, recalled by the poet in "The Tower", threatens to unhinge his mind to such a degree that the poet must abort the sentence, crying out "enough": he fears that, instead of mastering the image, it will master him, in much the same way that the images of Mary Hynes in Raftery's poetry so inflamed Clare countrymen that they strayed into the bog of Cloone.
Often, when Yeats evokes an image, he feels threatened. This is especially true of the potent image of the swan, which in "Among School Children" causes him yet again to abandon a sentence with the cry "enough!". At these moments, he may feel unhinged and even tempted to abort not just the sentence but art itself – as in the third section of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen":
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page . . .16
The swan promises an experience bestial as well as divine, and threatens the abolition of art as well as portending inspiration. The poet who has been seeking an impersonal style must, like Leda, surrender to the "indifferent" poetic beak,17 being merely a passive agent of universal history.
Until recently, critics debated why the fingers in the poem were "vague" as they pushed the feathered glory from "loosening" thighs. Was Yeats describing the blurred effect in a painting of the scene? Or webbed feet? Or was he implying some sort of consent with the word "loosening"? The violence of "blow", so the argument ran, was mitigated by "caressed", though words like "caught", "staggering" and "helpless" suggested no acceptance whatever. Most readers, noting the ambiguity in lines 7 and 8 (ambiguous as to whether it is Leda or the swan feeling the strange heart beating) decided that consent, whether resigned or exacted, had been given at about that point. Perhaps the question asked simply whether the bird could put on her feeling with his knowledge; or perhaps it referred to Leda's experience of the strange, pulsating swan – it didn't seem to matter much in the end. There were even some highly traditionalist males who saw the poem's subject not as rape but as seduction.
All of this, however, misses the point that consent was assumed even before the start, by the swan with regard to Leda, and also by Yeats vis-à-vis the reader. The poet's technique of assumed intimacy – a polite phrase for a rape of readerly sensibility – is manifest in the emphatic opening "A sudden blow". A Yeatsian poem seldom follows nineteenth-century protocol in the sense of earning its terms or extending the traditional courtesies of literature to the reader; rather, it tends to assume absolute consent and in-feeling with its given world. ("Pythagoras planned it" – but what? "I have met them at close of day" – but whom?) So Leda becomes an emblem of the. poet's violation by the Muse, and also of the poem's assault upon the sensibilities of the reader.
The trajectory of this lyric is in keeping with the strategies adopted in "The Magi", "The Second Coming" or the stanzas of "Among School Children": a rising tide of rhetorical expectation over a slow accretion of clauses, leading to a final line that is somehow disappointing or downbeat, expressive of frustration and puzzled into question. This is a technique not only for bathos – all of life again being a preparation for something that may never happen – but for post-coital indifference. If "consent", or at least "resignation" has been the mood after the opening resistance by Leda, then this makes the final indifference of the swan almost tragic.
The question in line 8 asked, apparently, whether the swan could combine the "feeling" of Leda with its own "knowledge"; the question at the end asks whether she put on his "knowledge": in other words, had she foreknowledge of her story, of how she would bear Ciytemnestra who would kill Agamemnon after his return from the siege of Troy? If stanza one was centred on the swan, and stanza two queried Leda's response, then the rest of the poem centres on the puzzled poet with his final, rather voyeuristic, query. As always, there seem to be three people involved in this affair. Though the bird is at all times brutish and threatening, there is something finally concessive about that closing "let her drop", as if he were
not in full control, perhaps even frightened by all this strangeness.
At the most obvious level, the poem identifies the swan with the supernatural authority and power of the creative imagination; and so the broken wall and burning roof are less significant as historic facts than as immortal elements of a poet's epic narrative. Art and image are "engendered" there. At a deeper level, however, these references to one war remind us that Yeats was writing in the year of another. 1923, italicized at the foot of the sonnet. This leads to the possibility of interpreting the swan as the invading English occupier and the girl as a ravished Ireland. The girl is more expert in "feeling", the swan in "knowledge". She is a mere mortal, whereas he comes from an imperial eternity. The debate about her alleged consent recalls vividly those common clichés to the effect that the Irish were colonizable because they secretly wished others to take command of their lives. The poem might then be read as a study of the calamitous effects of the original rape of Ireland and of the equally precipitate British withdrawal. The final question would then be asking: when the Irish took over power from the departing occupier, did they also assume the centuries-honed skills of self-government and control (or "knowledge")? The "indifferent beak" might then be Yeats's judgement on the callous and irresponsible suddenness of an unplanned and ill-prepared British withdrawal. The "Anglo" side of Yeats, a man now in mortal peril himself during the civil war, must have felt the precipitate nature of the withdrawal a hard betrayal, and a betrayal of possibly tragic dimensions, given that the two peoples had seemed in recent years to have come to a forced but real understanding, rather like the uneasy concord between woman and swan in the poem. The "Irish" side of Yeats was just plain angry, an anger palpable in the bitter, bleak monosyllables of the close.
The poem was to have been about one kind of politics, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, but Yeats explained in a commentary that the lyric which he eventually wrote was different: bird and lady took possession of the scene, and he claimed that all politics went out of the poem. If politics went out, it returned again in the cited date and in the civil war imagery. The poem which Yeats delivers in his moments of greatness is invariably not the one which he sets out to write, nor even the one which he often thinks he is writing in the early lines. "Leda and the Swan" may indeed be another account of the artistic or even the readerly process: but in teasing out those themes, it has much besides to say on the crisis of a newly independent people.
Eighteen
The Last Aisling – A Vision
For Yeats, the rough beast slouching to Bethlehem recalled that incongruous couple of two thousand years earlier, who brought into the world a child destined to announce a new dispensation:
The Roman Empire stood appalled,
It dropped the reins of peace and war
When that fierce virgin and her Star
Out of the fabulous darkness called1
Now, in the years following Irish independence, Yeats struggled to define an alternative vision of society. A Vision, for all its arcane lore, was intended by him to provide a spiritual foundation for the new nation-state. The indefinite article of the tide is unusually tentative for such an ambitious document. This would suggest that Yeats remained somewhat sceptical about the project. He had always encouraged his youthful friend, George Russell, to question his visions: and his relation with his own instructors was appropriately dialogic:
Except at the start of a new topic when they would speak or write a dozen sentences unquestioned, I had always to question, and every question to rise out of the previous answer, and to deal with their chosen topic.2
That interrogative case of mind had led, years earlier, to his expulsion from the esoteric section of the Theosophists for seeking, in a quasi-scientific fashion, to conjure up the spirits of dead flowers. Such a person was well capable of imagining the possible reservations which might assail readers of A Vision:
Some will ask whether I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon ... To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination, I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.3
That is a recipe for perpetual scepticism: for Yeats would always seek to balance things as they are against things as they should be. He was keen to include those very "facts" in a system of binaries, which would ultimately be transcended by a third term, the unnameable "thought" which combines both reality and justice.
The son of a sardonic artist, Yeats was bound to be a sceptic. He despised the literature of the single point of view, the "single vision" of a mechanistic psychology which he equated with "Newton's sleep".4 He would have endorsed Scott Fitzgerald's declaration that the mark of a first-rate mind is its ability to hold opposed ideas while yet retaining the capacity to function.5 Such a liberal imagination, recognizing the best features of the opposing viewpoint, was a legacy of the Fenian John O'Leary, who taught that there was no cause so bad that it had not been defended by good men. The son's tolerant sense of the doubleness of all deep experience may also be attributable to the spiritual hyphenation of the Anglo-Irish, forever seen as English in Ireland, and always Irish in England.
This meant that Yeats could never sponsor one term of an antithesis for long without moving to embrace its opposite; and, even as he sidled away from the original term, he would cast longing glances back in its direction. Despite a reputation for dreaminess, he was as "Anglo" (cautious, analytic, even cunning) as he was "Irish' (passionate, careless, emotional). Ultimately, his guile led him to expose the limitations of either term by fusing both, and to do this in the conviction that while it takes talent to discern differences, only genius can establish the underlying unity. So, according to his developing system, the members of his pantheon of English literature, Shakespeare, Blake, Shelley, were honorary Celts by nature and temper; and Yeats himself could confess, near the close of his career, that he owed his Irish soul to England. By such devious routes, an Irish national poet emerged from English tradition, much as a rough beast transpired out of the stony sleep of Christendom.
One cone in the system of A Vision is, therefore, interpenetrated by its opposing cone, and one gyre by its antagonist. Those contrary gyres may well be a version, in world-historical terms, of the Anglo-Irish antithesis out of which Yeats and the Irish revival came, but, if so, they are also part of his attempt to transcend it:
ANGLO GYRE – PRIMARY: democratic scientific, factual, objective, Christian, realistic God over one soul.
CELTIC GYRE – ANTITHETICAL: hierarchical, aesthetic visionary, subjective, pagan, idealistic multiple self.6
Belonging to Phase 17, Yeats has elements of the Primary about him, and hints of the anglophone, but he is predominantly Antithetical or Celtic. The interpenetration of cones perfectly captures his dual inheritance.
The word visionary is included in the Antithetical Celtic gyre, and with justice. A Vision, however tentative a tide, deliberately refers the Irish reader back to the aisling or vision-poem, practised by the fallen bards like Ó Rathaille to whom Yeats was increasingly attracted. The outlines of the aisling were rigidly formulaic:7 it began with a poet, frustrated and weak, falling into a doze by river, lake or mountain-side; and thereafter, he was visited by a spéirbhean or sky-woman, who was in effect a medium for a supernatural power. The misfortunes of modern Ireland were next described, its weakness and diminished grandeur lamented: then, with occult symbolism and complex metaphor, the spéirbhean would foretell the return of Gaelic rulers and values, and the extirpation of the Saxon occupier and of his levelling administrative methods. It was from this convention that Yeats appears to have drawn his framework for A Vision. That the spéirbhean should in this
particular instance have been his own English wife must have tickled his sceptical imagination: but Mrs. Yeats proved a wonderful medium.
In his essay on Matthew Arnold and the Celtic element in literature, Yeats had endorsed the basic outlines of the Celticist analysis, but for the word "Celtic" had repeatedly substituted the word "ancient". As early as 1897, he was expanding the meanings of "Celtic" to global dimensions, sensing that the ancient was due for a return. For that reason, as well as for its roots in aisling tradition, it makes some sense to read A Vision as a kind of Celtic constitution, first published in 1925, at a juncture when the new Irish state, of which Yeats was by then a senator, was seeking to codify its own laws and customs.
The reference in the introduction to a dispensation combining reality and justice is a throwback to the ancient Brehon system under which the functions of file and breitheamh, poet and judge, were one. "Thought is nothing without action" was Yeats's motto.8
Even at the level of elementary psychology, A Vision has much to teach Irish people concerning, for example, the need to internalize demons which were once external. The book therefore offers "a distinction between the perfection that is from a man's combat with himself and that which is from a combat with circumstance".9 Now that the English have gone, the Irish may draw back from the prosaic quarrel with others to the more poetic quarrel with the self. Perhaps hoping for a softening of the physical-force elements in Irish nationalism, Yeats had asked: "Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself".10
A Vision's are mostly internal quarrels, struggles with the Daimon inside the person: but these are shadowed at a political level by the Irish Civil War which, in Yeatsian terms, was a regrettable but almost predictable phase in nation-building. A perpetual shying-away from the tensions of the old Civil War in England had led to effete manners and a drab caution in public debate. The Irish Civil War rehearsed within A Vision, on the other hand, was one conducted between Anglicized habits of compromise and the unappeasable Celtic hosts.
Inventing Ireland Page 39