Yeats

Yeats (1865-1939)

Key terms: mythology, mysticism, gyre, near rhyme, Irish literature, apocalypticism, antithesis and contradiction

Along with Swift, one of the great heroes not just of Irish literature but of Ireland; his grave in Sligo is a major tourist site today.

History: Easter Rising (1916), Sinn Fein. "Easter 1916" is his record and also captures some of his guilt: did his work promoting Irish nationalism lead to people being killed? To the abortive rebellion or the idea that the downtrodden Irish people would follow the lead of the revolutionaries and overthrow the occupying British? "All changed, changed utterly; / A terrible beauty is born.") Cp. concept of sublime—how it is changed. "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart."—notion that Ireland has suffered for so long it may not be save-able. Even in his last poems he worried about what Irish poets should sing about—what kinds of inspiration they should provide:

From "Under Ben Bulben" (Sept. 1938)

Irish poets, earn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made,

Scorn the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds.

Sing the peasantry, and then

Hard-riding country gentlemen,

The holiness of monks, and after

Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;

Sing the lords and ladies gay

That were beaten into the clay

Through seven heroic centuries;

Cast your mind on other days

That we in coming days may be

Still the indomitable Irishry.

Economy of style: in Yeats, every word counts and has to be considered carefully. He uses both formal and free verse--both near rhyme and exact rhymes. He is always experimenting with something.

Mythologies of old Ireland (esp. swan transformation myths and the Children of Lir). "Wild Swans at Coole"—everything is changed but them—"Their hearts have not grown old" but the persona’s heart has. "Leda and the Swan"—what have people lost (or gained) from power? From the rape of people or of countries?

"No Second Troy"—lament for Maude Gonne. No chance of love or being loved—how far we have come just from Dover Beach. This is how it is—no chance of change, of love, of transformation—no blame, just despondency. They stayed friends—later poem about their conversations as ex-lovers is so poignant:

"After Long Silence" (1929)

Speech after long silence; it is right,

All other lovers being estranged or dead,

Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,

The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,

That we descant and yet again descant

Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young

We loved each other and were ignorant.

Byzantium (c. 6^th, 7^th c. C.E.)—his "Camelot"—"That is no country for old men." Introduces Yeats' notions of mysticism. Notion that the only chance for immortality is if "Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing." Begs the "sages" to "perne in a gyre, / and be the singing-masters of my soul."

"Second Coming": apocalyptic vision, contraries, lots of antithesis and contradiction ("mere anarchy"), Yeats’ notion that every 2000 years history renews itself in violent cataclysm: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world", feeling that such a time is coming again, "And what rough beast…slouches towards Bethlehem…." One of the great statements of modernism.

"Among School Children"—sees himself as aged and corrupted—wonders about Maud as a child, about the uncorrupted images of children, about what nuns and mothers worship—about the sources of belief and hope, the things Tennyson could believe in but that he cannot: "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

From "The Circus Animals’ Desertion" (1938)

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. (Dr. K's emphasis)

W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats is a wonderful poem that imitates the style of three of Yeats’ poems. Its statement that "poetry makes nothing happen" is one of the key reflections of modernism:

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
W. H. Auden

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.

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 (Dr. K's emphasis)

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.

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honours at their feet. (Dr. K's emphasis)

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

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; (Dr. K's emphasis)

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. (Dr. K's emphasis)