Not that I mean to say, that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived; but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my description of such objects excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. If in this opinion I am mistaken, I can have little right to the name of a poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this is true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other we discover what is really important to men, so by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections ameliorated.
Essentially, Wordsworth declares that what counts is the quality, intensity and breadth of the poet’s concerns between the moments of writing, the gravity and purity of the mind’s appetites and applications between moments of inspiration. This is what determines the ultimate human value of the act of poetry. That act remains free, self-governing, self-seeking, but the worth of the booty it brings back from its raid upon the inarticulate will depend upon the emotional capacity, intellectual resource and general civilization which the articulate poet maintains between the raids.
T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures (iv), University of Kent, 1986
from The Place of Writing
1 W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee
The usual assumption, when we speak of writers and place, is that the writer stands in some directly expressive or interpretative relationship to the milieu. He or she becomes a voice of the spirit of the region. The writing is infused with the atmosphere, physical and emotional, of a certain landscape or seascape, and while the writer’s immediate purpose may not have any direct bearing upon the regional or national background, the background is sensed as a distinctive element in the work.
This filial relationship with region did indeed work for the young Yeats and the Sligo countryside should arguably be called the Young Yeats Country. But in this lecture I am concerned with the poet from the age of fifty onward, establishing an outpost of poetic reality in the shape of a physical landmark, a poet with a domineering rather than a grateful relation to place, one whose poems have created a country of the mind rather than the other way round (and the more usual way), where the country has created the mind which in turn creates the poems.
Consider, for example, Thomas Hardy’s home in Dorset, in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton. Set among the trees, deep at the centre of a web of paths and by-roads, in the matured stillness of an old garden, small-windowed, dark-ceilinged, stone-floored, hip-thatched, the Hardy birthplace embodies the feel of a way of life native to the place. It suggests a common heritage, an adherence to the hearth world of Wessex. If it is a secret, it is not singular. We recognize a consonance between the inside and outside of that house and the center and circumference of Hardy’s vision. Hardy country, in other words, predated Hardy. It awaited its expression. Its ballad memory, its Romano-Celtic twilights and nineteenth-century dawns, all of which are part of the phantasmagoria of Hardy’s work, were already immanent in the place from which Hardy sprang. He did not impose Hardiness upon his landscape the way Yeats imposed Yeatsiness upon his. He was patient rather than peremptory, bearing the given life rather than overbearing it. Hardy’s eye was as watchful and withdrawn as the little window at the back of his birthplace through which his mason father doled out wages to the workmen. But it was nevertheless an eye which functioned within its community as unremarkably as the hatch functioned in the wall.
Or take Max Gate, the house Hardy designed and had built for himself on the outskirts of Dorchester, the house that proclaimed him the distinguished writer rather than the son of a Bockhampton builder: here the emblematic meaning is greatly different from the meaning of the tower which Yeats restored for himself and his wife at a corresponding moment of his career. Even if we recognize a significance in its alignment with the birthplace across the fields, Max Gate does not seek the status of monument. It is a red-brick dwelling place, which belongs to the fashion of its period and maintains the decorum of its suburb. It both embraces and embodies ordinariness, if only as a camouflage or a retreat; it certainly does not proclaim itself or its inhabitant as an original, a founder, a keeper, a sentry or a besieged one.
Yeats admittedly spent most of his life in houses which were equally machines for living in. The house where he was born in Sandymount Avenue in Dublin remains the usual semi-detached, mid-Victorian, bay-windowed, steps and basement type of residence which would be hard to mythologize beyond its solid bourgeois respectability. The same is true of his apartments in Bloomsbury and the town house in Dublin’s Merrion Square which was his main base during the very time when the later tower poems were being written. These addresses were not significant and would not be made to signify in terms of Yeats’s imagining. They remained structures which would never become symbols. They were places where Yeats would remain his unwritten self.
But a Norman keep in the Barony of Kiltartan, dating from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, descending from the great line of the de Burgos, and registered in The Booke of Connaught at the end of the sixteenth century, this was a very different matter. Even though Yeats bought it for £35 from a government body called with an unromantic grimness The Congested Districts Board, it retained for him the aura of its historically resonant past and became a verifying force within his mind. It sponsored an attitude and a style, attained in his books a fabulous second dimension that would eventually transform its original status as a picturesque antiquity in the fields of Ballylee.
*
Three years were to pass between Yeats’s purchase of the tower in 1916 (as a wedding present to himself and his new bride, George Hyde-Lees) and the summer of 1919 when he and George would move in; but even then, the residence was never permanent. Thoor Ballylee remained a kind of summer home, occupied occasionally by the family between 1919 and 1928, after which date their visits ceased altogether. By then, Yeats’s health was beginning to fail. Moreover, in 1928 the volume of poems entitled The Tower appeared, and its sequel, The Winding Stair (1933), had been conceived. The tower had now entered so deeply into the prophetic strains of his voice that it could be invoked without being inhabited. He no longer needed to live in it since he had attained a state in which he lived by it.
To call it a summer home, then, is really slightly off the mark, since it is obvious that the tower’s first function was not domestic. Here he was in the place of writing. It was one of his singing schools, one of the soul’s monuments of its own magnificence. His other addresses were necessary shelters but Ballylee was a sacramental site, an outward sign of an inner grace. The posture of the building corresponded to the posture he would attain. The stone in all its obstinacy and stillness, the plumb bulk and resistant profile of the keep, the dream form and the brute fact simultaneously impressed on mind and senses, all this transmission of sensation and symbolic aura made the actual building stones into touchstones for the work he would aspire to. And that work would have to be a holding action in the face of old age, death and the disintegrating civilization which he, ‘Heart smitten with emotion’, perceived in its decline.
One of the first functions of a poem, after all, is to satisfy a need in the poet. The achievement of a sufficient form and
a fulfilling music has a justifying effect within his life. And if the horizons inside which the poet lives are menacing, the need for the steadying gift of finished art becomes all the more urgent. So it is in the light of just such a constantly flickering horizon of violence and breakdown that we must read the tower poems and much else of Yeats’s work at this period.
The Easter Rising had occurred in Dublin a few months before his negotiations with the Congested Districts Board in 1916. The Battle of the Somme was fought that summer also. The Russian Revolution broke in 1917. From 1919 onwards, the War of Independence was in full swing in Ireland, and between 1922 and 1923, the Civil War got close enough to Ballylee for the builder, Thomas Rafferty, to get shot, for the bridge outside the tower to get blown up, and for the mind of this most public-spirited of poets to be darkened by a sense of personal danger and civic collapse …
*
In the title poem of The Tower volume, Thoor Ballylee is a podium from which the spirit’s voice is resolutely projected. In the third section, the tower’s stoniness is repeated in the lean, clean-chiselled, high-built verse-form; its head-clearing airiness is present in the rise and enjambement of the three-stressed line. Indeed, the tower is now not just an embodied attitude or symbol of loyalties but also a locus of energy. Inevitably, it continues to affiliate Yeats with his (Anglo-Irish) caste and casts him as its self-appointed panegyrist. But it also marks an original space where utterance and being are synonymous. This section of ‘The Tower’ so strives to transcend its personal and historical occasion that it reminds us of the exultation and absolutism of another tower-dwelling visionary, Rainer Maria Rilke. It was Rilke who declared in his third sonnet to Orpheus, written in 1922, only a few years before Yeats’s poem, that Gesang ist Dasein, singing is being, or song is reality, phrases that could easily stand as epigraph to Yeats’s superb peroration:
Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come –
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath –
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.
One brilliant eye which had made a catch in the breath in nineteenth-century Ballylee was the beauty Mary Hynes, celebrated in song by the blind poet Anthony Raftery. Both of them are invoked in an earlier part of ‘The Tower’, but all through this period of his writing, Yeats was in the situation dramatized by Raftery in the last stanza of his most famous poem:
Féach anois mé,
Mo chul le balla,
Ag seinm ceoil
Le póchaí folaimh.
Look at me now,
My back to a wall,
Playing the music
To empty pockets.
When he quartered himself and his poetry in Thoor Ballylee, Yeats too had been backed into an extreme position. He was being compelled by his years and his times into a new awareness of himself as his own solitary protagonist out on the mortal arena, and then suddenly, in that needy space, a tower ascended. Not a tree, as in Rilke’s first sonnet to Orpheus, not a natural given miracle but a built-up, lived-with, deliberately adhered-to tower. Yet by now that tower is as deep inside our hearing as the temple which Rilke imagines the god Orpheus building inside the consciousness of the listening creatures. Before the visitation of the god’s song, their ear was full of humble, un-self-trusting creaturely life, shabby huts full of common speech and unpoetic desultoriness. But his song brought about a marvel:
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.
Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests:
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,
but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,
a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind –
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.
(translation by Stephen Mitchell)
That sense of a temple inside the hearing, of an undeniable acoustic architecture, of a written vaulting, of the firmness and in-placeness and undislodgeableness of poetic form, that is one of Yeats’s great gifts to our century; and his ability to achieve it was due in no small measure to the ‘beckoning’, the ‘new beginning’, the ‘pure transcendence’ of an old Norman castle in Ballylee, a place that was nowhere until it was a written place.
Yet we must go further, since Yeats himself went further. Another of his gifts was his own boldness to question the final value and trustworthiness of this powerfully composed tower in the ear – for it is a mark of fully achieved poetry that it shirks none of the challenges that the fully awakened intelligence can offer it. The last stanza of ‘All Souls Night’, for example, represents all the positive force that Yeats’s tower-schooled mind could command: his prayer for concentration is itself focused and shining with an inward, self-illuminating ardour:
Such thought – such thought have I that hold it tight
Till meditation master all its parts,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world’s despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance;
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in mind’s wandering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.
I have talked about this kind of centred, purposeful writing because it is what we rejoice in most immediately in Yeats’s poems. Here conviction arises out of the very words in which it is sought, and stamina has been conjured by the strong expression of the poet’s need for it. But, as Richard Ellmann has insisted, the credibility of this art is ultimately guaranteed by Yeats’s readiness to doubt its efficaciousness. The very power of his desire for foundedness should alert us to the fear of unfoundedness which lurks beneath it. It is Yeats’s greatest triumph that he could acknowledge this possibility and yet maintain a resolute faith in the worth of artistic creation. In a late poem like ‘The Man and the Echo’, the much-vaunted insulation of the tower dweller is helpless against the unaccommodated cry of suffering nature. The man’s composure is certainly assailed by the mocking echo of his own doubting mind, but it is finally most vulnerable to the yelp of pain in a hurt creature:
But hush, for I have lost the theme
Its joy or night seem but a dream;
Up there some hawk or owl has struck
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out
And its cry distracts my thought.
It is the triumph of this art to confront a despair at the very notion of art as triumph. Yet it also manages to wrest from the confrontation with such despair a margin of trust that makes the renewal of artistic effort contemplatable. Behind the large firm gestures of Yeats’s last poems, where the humanist effort is racked upon a wheel that is a paradigm of hollowness, we can already make out the shuffling, unappeasable decrepitude of Beckett’s heroes going on refusing to go on …
‘The Black Tower’ is the last poem which Yeats composed. It dramatizes, with deliberate offhandedness, a dialectic between the spirit’s indomitable, affirmative impulses and the mind’s capacity to ironize and mock those impulses as s
elf-serving fictions. Indomitable spirit is reflected in an ancient image of warriors buried in a standing position, signifying their eternal vigilance and oath-bound fidelity to the cause that unified them during their lives. The ironist and questioner is their old cook, who represents a kind of unheroic life force, a scuttling principle of survival and self-preservation. He embodies all that Cuchulain had come to terms with in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, the poem where Yeats sends his hero into the underworld and makes him consort with ‘Convicted cowards … by kindred slain / Or driven from home and left to die in fear.’ Yet the cook’s scepticism is resisted by the comitatus; they persist at their post even as they are pestered by his rumours and heckling. They are like T. S. Eliot’s magi journeying towards an ambiguous epiphany with voices singing in their ears that this may be all folly:
Say that the men of the old black tower
Though they may but feed as the goatherd feeds,
Their money spent, their wine gone sour,
Lack nothing that a soldier needs,
That all are oath-bound men;
Those banners come not in.
There in the tomb stand the dead upright,
But winds come up from the shore;
Finders Keepers Page 27