Professor Langdon
Hammer: Let's see.
On your handout I have Yeats on
the subject of magic.
This goes back in time from the
text we were discussing last
time in the teens and twenties
to 1901.
And I wanted to introduce it to
you as some of Yeats's
reflections on the general
question of the occult and of
the symbolic in his poetry;
a kind of preparation in his
thinking for some of the poems
we discussed last time,
such as "The Second Coming."
 
He says, "I believe in the
practice and philosophy of what
we have agreed to call magic,
in what I must call the
evocation of spirits,
though I do not know what they
are."
That's important, I think.
And you remember Yeats in "The
Second Coming," there's a beast
that's kind of--He doesn't know
what it is, and here he's saying
something similar.
 
He also speaks of his belief
"in the power of creating
magical illusions,
in the visions of truth in the
depths of the mind when the eyes
are closed;
and I believe in three
doctrines," which he will
conveniently put forward for us:
(1) That the borders of
our mind [and he has that in the
singular there]
are ever shifting,
and that many minds can flow
into one another,
as it were, [that's probably an
important qualification]
and create or reveal a single
mind, a single energy.
 
[In effect, at work in our
common imaginations.]
(2) That the borders of our
minds are shifting,
and that our memories are part
of one great memory,
[what he calls]
the memory of Nature herself.
(3) [And this is the most
important thing.]
That this great mind and great
memory [this kind of unitary
repertoire of spirits and
memories]
can be evoked by symbols.
 
[From Magic]
This is something poetry can
activate and draw upon.
 
That "Spiritus Mundi" that
Yeats refers to in "The Second
Coming," well,
this is Yeats talking about
that idea here.
It is something,
as he stresses,
that can be evoked by symbols,
by poetic symbols,
and this he intends to do in
his poetry.
In fact, Yeats sees his poems
as a kind of summoning of
spirits or evocation of spirits,
as he refers to it.
 
Last time I talked just briefly
about Yeats's interest in
automatic writing,
a practice that he engaged in
with his wife.
Well, his poems themselves have
an occult dimension of evoking
this "great mind" and the
spirits contained therein
through symbols.
He also stresses that the
borders of our minds,
and of individual identity,
are ever shifting and unstable,
and that, well,
behind all these ideas,
I think, is a sense of the poet
as a figure who channels in his
life,
as well as in his writing,
channels spirits and presences,
and voices, importantly.
And this is related to Yeats's
idea that the poet – and this
is something he wrote about in
the prose I asked you to read
for today – that the poet is
more type than man.
On page 884,
late in his life,
writing a kind of summary
comment on his work for the
collected edition being produced
by the publisher,
Scribner's, he writes certain
important summary propositions
about his work but about poetry
in general.
And he says on page 884:
A poet writes always of
his personal life,
in his finest work out of its
tragedies, whatever it be,
remorse, lost love or mere
loneliness;
he never speaks directly as to
someone at the breakfast table,
there is always a
phantasmagoria.
Dante and Milton had
mythologies, Shakespeare the
characters of English history,
of traditional romance… [and
so on.
He says, the writer]
…is more type than man,
more passion than type.
 
He is Lear, Romeo,
Oedipus, Tiresias;
he has stepped out of a play
and even the woman he loves is
Rosalind, Cleopatra,
never The Dark Lady.
[Well.]
He is part of his own
phantasmagoria and we adore him
because nature has grown
intelligible,
and by doing so [we apprehend]
a part of our creative power.
 
[From A General Introduction
for My Work]
In the poet and in his work
nature grows intelligible.
This is an important idea for
Yeats and it suggests that
though work is rooted in life
for Yeats,
it's always a life transformed,
fed through this
"phantasmagoria" that he's
discussing,
which is important because at
once Yeats is insisting on the
personal nature of his poetry
and of the experience it offers,
and yet he's also,
interestingly,
a curiously impersonal figure,
impersonal poet.
On page 887 he says,
towards the top of the page:
 
 
Talk to me of originality
and I will turn on you with
rage.
I am a crowd,
I am a lonely man,
I am nothing.
Ancient salt is best packing.
 
The heroes of Shakespeare
convey to us through their
looks, or through the
metaphorical patterns of their
speech,
the sudden enlargement of their
vision, their ecstasy of the
approach of death… [And so
on.]
[From A General Introduction
for My Work]
And this is the kind of
impersonal channeling of emotion
that Yeats, himself a kind of
actor in his poetry,
wishes to convey.
On your handout there's another
quotation from late in Yeats's
life that I wanted to emphasize.
 
He says--and here's that
Yeatsian word "all" again--he
says:
When I try to put all
into a phrase I say,
"Man can embody truth but he
cannot know it."
[Man can embody truth but he
cannot know it.]
"I must embody it in the
completion of my life.
 
The abstract is not life and
everywhere draws out its
contradictions.
You can refute Hegel but not
the Saint or the Song of
Experience.
[From a letter to Lady
Elizabeth Pelham]
That's a wonderful claim.
 
"You can refute Hegel but not
the Saint or the Song of
Experience."
"Man can embody truth but
cannot know it."
This is an important
formulation.
I think of it as a kind of
reply to that famous question in
"Leda and the Swan";
that is, "did she put on his
knowledge with his power /
before the indifferent beak
could let her drop?"
The answer that Yeats is giving
here is different from saying
either "yes" or "no" to that
question.
It's more like saying "yes and
no," I think.
Truth is something to be
embodied in Yeats,
embodied rather than known;
embodied in the sense of lived,
not merely understood but
experienced.
But also, I think,
embodied because it is
specifically a thing of the body
and involves an experience of
the body, as much as,
or more than,
the mind.
What kind of knowledge,
if any, can be had from the
shattering experiences of
revolution or rape,
those models of history that I
proposed last time?
 
Remember how Yeats represents
history as rape in "Leda and the
Swan."
He sees it there as an
experience of violence,
of sexual violence,
involving the intercourse of
opposites: of god and man,
eternity and time,
male and female,
the will and patterning force
of the one thing against the
other,
imposed on it by brute force.
What kind of knowledge can be
had from that experience?
"Leda and the Swan" seems to
say a knowledge of the body,
of the necessity of embodiment.
 
In the late Yeats,
in the poems that I'll be
discussing today,
there's no knowledge apart from
the body.
And this is something to
contrast with the early Yeats
and its high idealism,
and its drive to exist in an
abstract and ideal world.
Late Yeats: this is a poetry
written in age and written about
age and aging;
age seen and experienced as the
failure and corruption of the
body, to which the soul is
bound.
In "Sailing to Byzantium," a
transitional poem to later
Yeats, on page 123 in your book,
Yeats says:
An aged man is but a
paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
unless
Soul clap its hands and sing,
and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal
dress…
The poet speaks of his soul
there as "sick with desire / and
fastened to a dying animal";
that is, the body.
 
And yet, for all of the
complaints about the body here
in this poem and in other late
Yeats, the poet doesn't reject
it;
doesn't reject that dying
animal, doesn't scorn it.
 
Instead, Yeats affirms it,
affirms the body,
in its corrupt state.
 
He, in fact,
sings and sings louder for it
in this late poetry;
sings louder,
as he puts it,
"for every tatter in its mortal
dress."
This is the extraordinary
energy of Yeats's late poetry,
what he calls--The word he has
for the energy of this poetry,
of this attitude towards life
is "joy" or "gaiety," words that
recur throughout these poems:
"joy,"
"gaiety," or sometimes
"madness."
Joy and gaiety are both states
of mind associated with madness
in these poems – the body's
truth,
felt as an experience of joy or
of gaiety as arrived at through
a kind of shattering of the body
and of the rational mind and its
working.
Gaiety for Yeats seems to
represent some reconstitution of
mind and body,
some experience of their unity
out beyond an experience of
tragedy and grief.
This is a point of view
specifically associated in
Yeats's late poetry with old men
and with women – particularly,
but not only,
old women, as he says on page
886, back in that General
Introduction for My Work.
 
 
This is interesting.
 
He's talking here about the
kind of style he wishes to
create in poetry which involves,
for him, making the language of
poetry coincide with that of
passionate normal speech.
He says: I wanted to
write [a version of Frost's
ambition, though conducted
differently]
in whatever language comes most
naturally when we soliloquise,
as I do all day long,
upon the events of our own
lives or of any life where we
can see ourselves for the
moment.
I sometimes compare myself with
the mad old slum women I hear
denouncing and remembering;
"how dare you?"
I heard one of them say to an
imaginary suitor,
"and you without health or a
home."
If I spoke my thoughts aloud
they might be as angry and as
wild.
So this is a kind of model for
the late Yeats in poetry,
the voice of the angry and wild
slum woman.
Well, in order to get at this
style in action in Yeats's late
poems, I want to look back a
little bit at a poem that looks
back on "Easter,
1916," the poem I discussed
last time, as well as Yeats's
own earlier poetry,
and that is the poem called "In
Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con
Markievicz," on page 126.
 
It's a kind of postscript to
"Easter, 1916," written in 1929.
Con Markievicz was the only
surviving leader of the Easter
Rising, condemned to death,
but then her sentence was
transmuted.
What is it?
Yes, thank you:
commuted, not transmuted.
Well, Con Markievicz is,
in a sense, a figure like Leda.
She is someone who has suffered
the traumatic violence that
engenders history.
 
Yeats's elegy here recalls her
youth and that of her sister,
both friends of the younger
Yeats: Eva Gore-Booth;
a youth spent in the Sligo
mansion, Lissadell,
where Yeats visited in 1894.
 
At that point Yeats was--1894,
Yeats is twenty-nine,
and the two women were slightly
younger.
Let me read the beginning of it.
 
The light of evening,
Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
 
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's
wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger
dreams--
Some vague Utopia--and she
seems,
When withered old and
skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
 
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion,
mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of
youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Here, female beauty,
nineteenth-century manners,
and aristocratic culture are
all held together as if
expressing each other and
associated with each other.
 
Yeats's nostalgic vision of
them is charmed and static,
interestingly static.
 
See how the verb is withheld in
the first sentence of the poem,
and then in the closing lines
of that first strophe?
Well, in order to give us that
image, "two girls in silk
kimonos, both / beautiful,
one a gazelle," which he
returns to, it's as if the
action itself were being
withheld from this charmed world
and time slowed down or even
stopped,
making a picture,
an image, a haiku.
 
But all of this is overthrown,
"changed utterly," by the
radical politics that altered
Ireland during Yeats's lifetime,
that announced the coming of
modernity and that these two
women themselves participated in
centrally.
Politics makes them ugly to
Yeats.
It's as if they might have
maintained their beauty had they
only refrained from it.
 
You could look at a similar
attitude in "A Prayer for My
Daughter," another important big
Yeats poem from slightly
earlier,
where Yeats says,
"An intellectual hatred is the
worst, so let her think" – his
daughter – "that opinions are
accursed."
Women shouldn't have them.
 
This is not an attractive side
of Yeats, at least for people of
our moment and sensibility.
 
There's a kind of,
well, masculinism in Yeats,
and it's part of what I meant
last time when I spoke of
Yeats's anti-modernism or his
reactionary modernism.
And it's here,
too, in this poem.
But the attitude here,
as in "Easter,
1916" and Yeats's other great
poems, is complicated.
For all of Yeats's reactionary
moods, even for his indulgence
in nostalgia here,
he's not a nostalgic poet.
And this poem I think shows us
what I mean by that.
Look at how the poem changes as
it develops, as it moves to this
second strophe,
and Yeats turns from the frozen
image of the past to address
those two sisters directly,
saying:
Dear shadows,
now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
 
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time
catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
 
We the great gazebo built.
 
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and
blow.
The poet and the women together
become "we" in the poem's last
sentence.
"They," the "they who convicted
us of guilt," well,
that's hard to identify.
 
Who is that?
I think it's possible to see
that "they" as the sort of
general forces of modernity,
of everything at odds with the
aristocratic culture Yeats and
these women shared,
inhabited.
"We the great gazebo built."
 
I stumbled and put "built" in
the wrong place when I read it.
It's a strange line.
 
I am told that it plays on a
slang phrase then current,
"to make a gazebo of yourself,"
meaning "to make a spectacle of
yourself and a fool of yourself,
publicly."
The footnote to your
Norton here suggests that
the gazebo is a summerhouse and
by extension – it's quite an
extension – the nationalist
movement,
and then, "even the whole
temporal world."
Those are some real extensions,
aren't they?
It's a little hard to know what
to do with this gazebo.
Does it, in fact,
represent the nationalist
movement that culminated,
or one form of which
culminated, in the Easter
Rebellion?
Does it represent Yeats's own
early cultural nationalism and
the work represented in The
Wind Among the Reeds and
other early poems?
 
Well, it's a little hard to say.
 
I tend to see that gazebo or
summerhouse as a version of
Lissadell itself,
this home that the poem evokes
and that is representative of a
nineteenth-century world of art,
of pleasure,
of rarified and delicate and
ideal beauty – a world very
important to Yeats.
As Yeats--as his thought
develops in the course of this
poem, he turns from nostalgia to
affirmation and seems to join
the sisters in the actions that
they chose through some kind of
sympathetic identification;
Yeats who had seemed to stand
apart from it,
against them,
in the first part of the poem.
 
The women represent for Yeats a
kind of self-destructive energy,
and it's something he too,
I think, is willing to share
and enter into.
He speaks of the destruction of
the world that they shared,
of a house that they had built,
one that he mocks as this
"great gazebo," as something
noble and beautiful,
perhaps, but also fragile and a
spectacle and unable to stand up
to history.
Time is the enemy in the poem,
and Yeats joins forces with the
women at the end,
and in doing so joins forces
with time and sets a match to
it, as if time itself were
tinder.
 
 
 
Yeats imagines a kind of active
arson in this poem.
Fire is symbolically important
throughout his poetry.
In "The Song of the Wandering
Aengus," I talked about the kind
of flickering passion and the
fire in the head that sends
Angus out on his quest.
 
Fire reappears with increasing
frequency in the late poetry.
In your RIS packet,
I gave you the short poem "Two
Songs from a Play."
 
The first stanza of that
interesting poem repeats themes
from "The Magi" and "The Second
Coming."
You can look at it with those
poems in mind where Yeats
imagines a new world coming into
being, ushered in through the
blood of the old.
 
This idea leads him to the
meditation that's in the second
stanza there.
Everything that man
esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love
away,
The painter's brush consumes
his dreams;
The herald's cry,
the soldier's tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has
fed.
"Man's heart" in Yeats is
"resinous";
it's a sticky filth that flames.
 
The longing heart accumulates
desires that become in time a
kind of volatile waste,
which can't be contained.
The heart is combustible,
like the energy that insists on
birth in "The Magi" or "The
Second Coming."
And this is our glory,
Yeats says.
Again, notice how bodily,
how material and physical
Yeats's images of human energy
are.
Let's turn back to The
Norton Anthology and look at
the poem "Vacillation," on page
131.
This is a meditation that comes
in several parts.
As Yeats's work develops,
he creates a kind of poem that
comes in parts;
that is, you might think of it
as a kind of sequence poem in
which, with increasing daring,
Yeats explores contending
viewpoints seeking some kind of
synthesis.
That's what's going on here.
There's a similar kind of
structure in other late Yeats's
poems.
Yeats at first thought to call
this poem "What Is Joy?"
 
It takes up his lifelong quest
to reconcile extremities,
opposites – in his thought,
in his experience – and to
achieve some kind of unity of
being.
What is the goal of "Wandering
Aengus"?
Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?
Here, in the first part of the
poem, Yeats talks about death
and remorse as the end of all
debate, the last word.
We're all going to die and
we're all going to regret what
we did.
But this understanding of the
end of things is only the
cancellation of all those
antinomies in a kind of failure
to reconcile them;
and it doesn't satisfy Yeats.
 
He's asking,
in effect, "how can we be
joyful in the face of death and
in the face of certain remorse?"
Or, "how is it that somehow we
are?"
He wants to explain this.
 
He wants to find a way to not
so much redeem as affirm time
and age and understand them not
simply as a cause of despair or
as a cause of defeat.
 
The poem then tries out
different answers,
answers that alternately
explore transcendental and
secular solutions.
 
And the poem vacillates,
as it were, between them.
In Section III below,
Yeats says, "Get all the gold
and silver that you
can"--"Provide,
provide!"
But just as in Frost,
this strategy isn't going to
work.
So, therefore,
we must take up,
he suggests,
an ascetic path,
engaging only,
as he says, in "those works"
that are fit "for such men as
come / proud,
open-eyed and laughing to the
tomb."
In Section IV then,
the next, on the next page,
blessing is not,
on the other hand,
something to work for.
 
Rather, it's a potential fire
that flashes up momentarily
within us.
My fiftieth year had come
and gone [when I first read this
poem that
seemed a really long way in my
future, as perhaps it does to
you],
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
 
While on the shop and street I
gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my
happiness,
That I was blessèd and could
bless."
It's a serendipitous and
moving, momentary experience
Yeats describes.
And notice that it's the body
that blazes: soul and body or
soul and heart.
These are antinomies that the
poem is exploring.
Yeats insists that the heart is
an organ of the body,
and located in it.
 
This is important.
 
In the sixth section,
down below, he speaks of "man's
blood-sodden heart."
 
This is another turn on that
image of man's "resinous heart."
In Section VII,
"Soul" and "Heart" argue.
The vacillation and debate
become quickest here as one
point of view gets one line and
the other the rhyming next line.
 
 
The Soul.
 
Seek out reality,
leave things that seem.
[That's what the Soul instructs
us.
The Heart responds.]
The Heart.
What, be a singer born and lack
a theme?
The Soul.
Isaiah's coal,
what more can man desire?
 
The Heart.
 
Struck dumb in the simplicity
of fire!
The Soul.
Look on that fire,
salvation walks within.
 
The Heart.
 
What theme had Homer but
original sin?"
It's a wonderfully compressed
argument in which the Soul and
the Heart make competing claims
for Christianity and classical
and literary wisdom.
 
Yeats counterposes Isaiah's
prophetic coal to the blazing
body of Section IV,
where fire is spontaneous,
imminent, something that arises
from the body.
There then follows in that last
section a kind of comic
conclusion where the poet
chooses to side with Homer,
and implicitly with poetry,
against the theologian Von
Hügel who's a kind of comic
figure at the end there.
"Vacillation."
The poem was written following
a series of poems called the
"Crazy Jane" poems,
written as a kind of summary of
them, a kind of resolution of
the debates that go on in them.
 
You have just one of them in
your Anthology,
but it is one of the greatest.
 
It is back on page 130.
 
In the "Crazy Jane" poems,
the Bishop, who is Crazy Jane's
antagonist, has the part of Von
Hügel,
the position of the Church
authority, and Jane speaks for
Yeats and for poetry;
for Homer, too, I suppose.
Crazy Jane is one of Yeats's
masks or roles.
She is a mad peasant woman.
 
She speaks from the point of
view of a cracked or shattered
mind, in the tradition of a
Shakespearian fool.
She speaks what Yeats calls in
his general title for this group
of poems Words for Music
Perhaps.
The poem's connection to music
signifies the difference in
point of view in these poems
from reasoned speech.
It also seems to relate these
poems to folk forms and to the
wisdom of the folk.
 
Jane speaks in praise of love,
in praise of satisfaction.
She speaks of the necessary
unity of body and soul,
which for her entails a defense
of the body,
defending, as she does,
its knowledge and its goodness.
As a character she is sour.
 
She's rank, ill-tempered,
pungent in all senses.
Well, let's look at this debate.
 
I met the Bishop on the
road
And much said he and I.
 
"Those breasts are flat and
fallen now
Those veins must soon be dry
[this is the Bishop,
speaking to her of her body];
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty."
 
[To which Jane replies.]
"Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul," I cried.
 
"My friends are gone,
but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
 
[And she continues.]
"A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his
mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent."
["Crazy Jane Talks with the
Bishop"]
The points of view,
again, are those of the sacred
and profane, the soul and the
body,
the promise of a heavenly
mansion, and the reality of a
life lived in a foul sty.
 
The Bishop claims one side of
debate, Jane claims the other.
But unlike the Bishop,
she doesn't want to reject the
other and this is important.
 
Speaking for the body,
she speaks for the potential
unity of body and soul.
 
In answer to the promise of the
Bishop's heavenly mansion in
another life,
she claims another sort of
house,
what she calls love's
"mansion," which is noble itself
and which is to be lived here on
earth.
"Love has pitched his mansion
in / the place of excrement."
 
This is an outrageous claim.
 
What does it mean?
 
Look at the claim it's paired
with.
"For nothing can be sole or
whole / that has not been rent."
Why is it necessary to rend
something, to make it soul or
whole?
Is it necessary?
Only that which is broken,
Jane claims,
is unified.
That which appears whole is not.
Yeats seems to be insisting
through Jane on the necessity of
shattering experience to achieve
unity of being,
which Yeats imagines,
again, as the union of
opposites.
Again, think of the rape of
Leda.
This is the type of the violent
union that Yeats imagines in
which the divine enters the
human,
and the human finds access to
the divine through the bestial.
 
And the bestial is identified
in Yeats with the heart and with
the irrational and with the
uncontrollable.
 
 
Yeats's late poems speak from
the point of view of Jane,
more often than not,
and yet powerfully,
we do see him vacillating from
different--between different
points of view.
We have really no time left to
explore them,
but I want to just point you to
two important late poems that
seem to represent different
attitudes in late Yeats,
that contrast the kinds of
claim that can be made for art.
 
One of them is the moving
valedictory to his work that is
called "The Circus Animals'
Desertion,"
where the poet imagines his
imagination as having arisen on
ladders, if you will,
out of what he calls "the foul
rag and bone shop of the heart."
 
And in conclusion he imagines
giving up that terrific drive
towards imagination and
idealization and a return to the
"rag and bone shop of the
heart."
That's an image of art
ultimately leading out of art to
a kind of state of
de-sublimation.
Contrast this poem to "Lapis
Lazuli," a beautiful and moving
late poem on page 135 that is
full of echoes from that general
introduction to his work that I
quoted from earlier.
Here, Yeats presents us with an
image of art in the form of a
lapis lazuli Chinese carving,
and he describes the figures on
that carving,
who are in some sense
representatives of an attitude,
again, beyond tragedy,
beyond the kinds of social and
political apocalypse that Yeats
faced in his career and that he
describes also in this poem.
And Yeats concludes,
well, with an image of the
artwork that I'll read for you,
that is fascinating in itself
but is also, as I suggest,
an image of Yeats's late ideal
for what art should be like.
 
He says:
Every discolouration of
the stone [this is on page 136],
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an
avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still
snows
Though doubtless plumb or
cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way
house
Those Chinamen climb towards,
and I
Delight to imagine them seated
there [at their altitude,
looking at the world from
within the perspective of art];
There, on the mountain and the
sky,
On all the tragic scene they
stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to
play.
Their eyes, amid many wrinkles,
their eyes,
Their ancient,
glittering eyes,
are gay.
And there is finally,
again, an affirmation of this
joy and gaiety,
here seen as a property of the
artwork itself.
 
