Professor Langdon
Hammer: In our first Yeats
lecture, I was talking about
Yeats's early development and
stylistic transformation over
the course of,
roughly, a twenty-,
twenty-five year period.
Yeats has a long career,
really beginning in the late
nineteenth century.
 
The poems that matter the most
to us today are those that he
starts publishing around 1915,
or 1914, and later.
But he's really in the middle
of his literary career at that
point.
I suggested in looking at that
early development that Yeats is
seen as a kind of representative
figure who somehow moves out of
symbolism,
out of a kind of ornate
aestheticism,
towards a kind of heroic
realism.
But I insisted instead that,
in fact, the way to understand
that development is really a
transition from one set of
symbols to another,
as exemplified by the movement
between "Aengus" and "The
Fisherman" in Yeats's early
work.
 
 
 
The little poem,
"A Coat," that poem about that
stylistic transformation about
the enterprise of walking naked,
well, it's a poem that reminds
us that Yeats's development was,
as he understood it,
conditioned by his relationship
to his audience.
Yeats, I said,
wanted to speak for and to the
Irish people,
as well as to explain Ireland
and Irishness to an
English-speaking world abroad.
 
At the same time,
even as he has a kind of
intense identification with the
Irish people,
he also, in that little poem
and in other poems,
fears being betrayed by the
crowd;
fears being sold cheap;
complains of his reception.
Last time, I alluded to Yeats's
involvement in the Abbey
Theater, beginning in 1904.
 
This is an important phase of
his career, when with the help
of Lady Augusta Gregory and John
Synge, Yeats tries to establish
an Irish national drama.
 
Synge's play,
The Playboy of the Western
World--which you may know
-- it was set in the Aran
Islands, in Western Ireland.
 
This was a kind of turning
point in the movement.
Misunderstood as a satire on
the Irish peasantry,
Yeats's production of the play
led to riots in 1909.
This is one of the events,
I think, that Yeats is thinking
about in "The Fisherman" when he
speaks of "great Art beaten
down."
The audience that Yeats
distains and turns away from in
the teens is,
importantly,
a middle class,
urban audience,
and that attitude of
Yeats's--it's a motif we find in
other poets that we'll read,
and I'd like you to note it;
an attitude that we'll see in
Pound, in Eliot,
in different ways.
The displacement of
aristocratic and peasant
cultures by an urban
bourgeoisie,
by the Dublin theater-going
audience, the people at the
center of a new mongrel,
modern culture -- well,
these are the people that Joyce
depicts so memorably in the
daily life of Leopold Bloom.
 
Yeats is a very different
writer and has a different
relation to the world of Joyce's
Ulysses,
for example.
Yeats has a kind of hostility
towards this ascendant
middle-class world,
and a hostility that you can
view as a kind of anti-modernism
or anti-modernness,
that is again an important
component in Yeats.
 
Or maybe the right way to say
it would be that Yeats's sense
of his own modernity,
of what it means for him to be
modern, emerges in defiance of
certain new social formations
and also through a fantasy,
I say, identification with the
aristocracy and with the
peasantry, with these cultures
rooted in rural Irish society of
the past.
Like Pound, like Eliot,
from a political and social
point of view,
you could say that Yeats is a
reactionary modernist,
turning away from the ascendant
social forms of the present
towards an idealized past.
Or, rather, you could say Yeats
seems to want to do this,
seems to want to turn away from
the present -- expresses the
desire to.
In fact, however,
Yeats's eyes remain really
fixed in a kind of horror and
fascination on the cataclysmic
events of his time and the
political life of his time in
which he is himself very much
involved.
Yeats is, in fact,
a far less nostalgic thinker
than either Eliot or Pound,
at least as I understand them.
 
The stance that I'm trying to
describe, which is a kind of
ambivalent and complicated one,
emerges powerfully in the poem
"Easter, 1916," on page 105 in
this book.
And I'd like to spend some time
with that, with you.
 
 
"Easter, 1916."
The subject of this poem is the
Easter Uprising,
the Irish Republican challenge
to English domination that
briefly established an Irish
state led by Padraig Pearse,
who, along with,
in fact, all but one of the
leaders of the insurrection,
was executed.
These events have a--still have
a kind of central and powerful
place in modern Irish
consciousness.
If you go to Dublin and you
enter the post office,
one of the important scenes of
the rebellion,
you find great wall paintings
of scenes from the rising,
almost like Stations of the
Cross.
Well, Dublin is an interesting
place to be with this poem in
mind, partly because you realize
when you are there that
it's--the city center is a small
one,
and that, well,
Yeats's house is--was not far
from the post office;
and the world that he's writing
about is something very intimate
and familiar,
of which he is a part.
And that is,
in fact, one of the important
points of departure for this
poem.
He says:
I have met them at close
of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
[Dublin, "them" being the
revolutionaries.]
I have passed with a nod of the
head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
 
["Motley" signifying their
Irishness, as if Yeats and these
men
and women he speaks of shared
only their Irishness.]
In the second strophe of this
poem he proceeds to talk about,
to isolate individuals,
particular figures of the
revolt, which your editor
identifies at the bottom of the
page.
That woman's days were
spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
 
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
 
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the
end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
[Maude Gonne]
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in
his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
 
 
Yeats is describing his
interaction with and his
distance from Pearse and the
others in that first stanza,
and then in the second.
 
He's saying something like,
"I used to see these people all
the time.
I was proud, however.
I kept myself apart from them.
 
I felt we had nothing in common
but "motley," our Irishness.
But all that is changed by
events.
They have become political
martyrs to the future Irish
state, and I am obliged to
remember and honor them in my
poetry, even those I disdained.
 
My poetry, which"--well,
the dedication to which had
defined Yeats's difference from
them up till now.
The poem's extraordinary
refrain, "a terrible beauty is
born," returns in the poem like
a chorus,
like the voice of some kind of
abstract and impersonal chorus,
and it suggests almost a
strangely impersonal event,
something that happens without
agents making it happen.
"A terrible beauty is born" --
a passive construction.
Take the first part of the
refrain first:
"All changed,
changed utterly."
"All changed, changed utterly."
 
I think there are really three
strong metrical accents in a row
there.
 
 
 
By "all," that three letter
word, a highly Yeatsian word,
a word Yeats loves to use --
you'll see him use it often --
Yeats means "all of them,"
"all of those people," "all the
people I've been describing."
 
He also means "my relation to
them," "the way I kept myself
apart from them."
 
He also means "all:
everything, plain and simple,"
"all" in the sense of "everyone
and everything";
"all" conveying a kind of
apocalyptic, epochal event.
That wonderful pileup of stress
in that line,
"all changed,
changed utterly:
/ a terrible beauty is born";
another two,
two strong three-beat lines in
a row;
they become a kind of,
well what?
A bell ringing in the poem,
pealing and announcing the
coming of the birth of a new and
terrible age.
How can something be changed
utterly?
How can something be changed
utterly?
Doesn't that mean "destroyed,"
to be entirely changed?
Yeats is talking about an event
that has brought forth
destruction, destruction of the
world before the Easter
Uprising.
And Easter is an important
resonance here,
obviously.
Easter, another moment of death
and transfiguration,
transformation.
Here, this destruction brings
forth a new order,
a new form of life that Yeats
calls "terrible beauty."
 
This may be the most memorable
sentence in modern poetry:
"a terrible beauty is born".
 
I said that Yeats looks on the
modern with a sense of both
horror and a fascination,
a compulsion almost.
Well, it's a "terrible beauty"
he sees that draws him in this
way.
He sees, specifically,
the passion of the
revolutionary's act and he finds
it beautiful.
Yeats aestheticizes their
political action.
 
He finds beauty in it,
it seems even or especially
because it is terror-filled,
when the change that it enacts
is utter, which is to say,
a change that means blood.
 
 
To find bloody events
beautiful, what do you think
about that?
How do you describe the
politics, if you like,
of such a position?
Well, how does Yeats stand in
relation to the events he's
describing?
"Easter, 1916" equivocates.
Like that phrase,
"a terrible beauty," the poem
is full of contradictions,
of contradictory feelings.
It takes the side of the
nationalists.
It also makes the
anti-nationalist,
the English or pro-English or
unionist, case.
It sees the dead as heroic
martyrs.
It also sees them as
ideologues, as stony-hearted
political activists.
 
It sees the dead as lovers, too.
 
It sees them as dreamers.
 
Yeats looks at them with pity,
with admiration,
with scorn.
He speaks of them as a mother
would of her children.
 
All of these attitudes and
others, too, are held in
suspension in the poem.
 
And you can hear them together,
Yeats moving from one to
another with,
oh, incredible speed and
agility in that final strophe of
the poem,
on the next page.
 
 
 
Listen to how quickly Yeats
modulates from one feeling,
one image, to another in these
really very short,
quick, three-beat lines.
 
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
 
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
 
What is it but nightfall?
 
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream;
enough
To know they dreamed and are
dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
 
 
 
This is really moving poetry,
remarkably so.
And that may be the most
important fact about it.
When Yeats aestheticizes the
political, he makes it moving,
moving in the literal sense of,
I think, emotionally engaging
and cathartic.
He specifically converts the
political into tragic action;
tragic action with which as
spectators, the poet and the
reader -- ourselves,
are meant to be passionately
and imaginatively engaged,
which is also to say
implicated.
Through Yeats's poem,
Easter, 1916 goes on happening,
happening in a sense in and
even to us.
The poem makes us see the
political as a space of passion
and of contradictions,
like art.
And it requires us to
understand history not in moral
terms, such as "good" and
"evil," but rather in aesthetic
terms.
"Pity" and "terror," these
become crucial terms,
the terms that Aristotle,
in his Poetics,
used to define tragedy.
When the bombs went off in
London last year,
I thought about Yeats and what
he might have thought or written
about this.
As I said last time when I
showed you that letter to Pound,
Yeats's London apartment is
essentially across the street
from where the number 30 bus
blew up.
And interestingly,
strangely, make of it what you
will, the man who detonated that
bomb, as I understand it,
had studied Yeats at school in
Leeds.
There's a way in which Yeats's
poetry of this period goes on
resonating in the world we're
living in.
Yeats's sense of his own
implication in history,
well, it's something that we
see in the intensive,
stylistic transformations that
his writing undergoes.
 
Part of the resonance and power
of that famous refrain,
"a terrible beauty is born,"
is that this beauty is being
born not only in the world but
in Yeats's poetry.
Something remarkable is
happening to the poet and to his
language at the same time.
 
Yeats is saying even simply on
one level, "I will write
differently henceforth,
I must."
Yeats's stylistic changes in
this way are coordinated with,
respond to the historical
changes he witnesses and
participates in;
in particular,
coordinated with the violent
emergence of,
through civil war,
of the Irish State,
for which Yeats would serve as
a senator in the 1920s.
Yeats in this period makes and
remakes his work out of passion,
a sort of, as he images it,
tumult in the breast,
a tumult from which new modes
of poetry, new modes of
self-knowledge emerge for Yeats.
 
Yeats's poetry is full of
images of birth,
and he tends to represent birth
as an explosion,
a bursting forth,
a bursting forth of energy or
presence in some sense that
can't be contained or
constrained in existing forms.
 
I'll say more about this next
time with reference to Yeats's
late poetry.
What I want to stress now is
that Yeats sees passion at work
in the same way in history.
Powerful super human forces
emerge from, or invade,
human actors and change them.
 
One consequence of this view is
that for Yeats history starts to
look like a poem,
or it starts to conform to laws
of poetic imagination or of
tragedy, if you like,
of myth.
In the Easter Rising,
Pearse and the others for Yeats
invoke -- as they,
the revolutionaries themselves,
deliberately and rhetorically
did -- invoke ancient Irish
heroes.
Pearse is seen as,
in Yeats's poetry and in
popular lore,
as Cuchulain,
as a kind of avatar of the
mythic Irish hero.
At the same time,
as the superhuman enters these
historical characters in this
way,
there is also,
well, an energy that you would
have to call sub-human,
bestial,
that does as well.
 
In his late poem,
"The Statues," which you don't
have, Yeats says,
"When Pearse summoned Cuchulain
to his side,
/ what stalked through the post
office," as if the
revolutionaries' action brought
forth at once the presence of a
legendary hero and a beast that
might be stalking through his
embodiment and his presence.
Yeats saw history in symbolic
and mystical terms.
This is a poet who,
with his wife,
practiced automatic writing,
who believed that the dead
spoke through the living.
 
This occult Yeats is a
genuinely and wonderfully
strange thinker.
He elaborated a systematic
account of mind and history.
 
As I said last time,
talking about "The Song of the
Wandering Aengus",
and Yeats's interest in
alchemy,
which was developed,
it isn't, in fact,
necessary for you to grasp
Yeats's system,
which you'd have to go to his
book called A Vision to
begin to do.
It isn't necessary for you to
grasp his occultism in order to
read his poetry well.
 
Yeats said that the voices that
he communicated with on the
other side gave him "metaphors
for poetry."
This is what they deliver him.
 
They also gave him,
as he put it,
"stylistic arrangements of
experience."
The occult gives Yeats
aesthetic forms for
understanding individual
psychology and historical event.
This is, I think,
how we need to understand the
various occult symbols in
another great poem from this
phase in his career,
a little bit further on,
"The Second Coming," on page
111.
 
 
Turning and turning in
the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;
Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world,
The blood-dimmed tide is
loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is
drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate
intensity.
 
 
Surely some revelation is at
hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at
hand.
The Second Coming!
 
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:
somewhere in sands of the
desert
A shape with lion body and the
head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as
the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs,
while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant
desert birds.
The darkness drops again;
but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony
sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a
rocking cradle,
And what rough beast,
its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to
be born?
Another poem of birth.
 
Notice how very casual Yeats is
in that second strophe,
how self-consciously fantastic
and speculative he is.
He doesn't insist that the
Apocalypse is at hand,
only that some revelation is.
 
In fact, this poem's power
lies, I think,
in its--not only its inability
but its unwillingness to specify
the content of that revelation.
 
Yeasts suggests that we think
of this historical moment as the
Second Coming.
But this is not the return of
Jesus that Christianity
prophesizes.
Yeats sees the Second Coming as
an image, as a myth,
an idea, a metaphor,
a certain stylistic arrangement
of experience.
It comes out of what he calls
Spiritus Mundi,
a semi-technical term;
Yeats's name for something like
the collective unconscious of
all peoples, a kind of
repertoire of archetypes from
which the symbols that we use to
understand the world derive.
 
 
This is really,
I think, a radical if not
heretical idea for the national
poet of a Christian people.
Yeats is saying that
Christianity is only one
symbolic order among others.
 
It has a history.
 
It is now passing away as it
once came into being.
He is also saying that the
birth of Christ in Bethlehem was
a nightmare for the world it
altered,
the world that it changed
utterly -- a change that Yeats
sees as the end now of the
Christian Era and not its
fulfillment.
There is in there,
too, the disturbing suggestion
that Christ himself was a rough
beast.
Yeats develops this idea or
develops another version of it
in a somewhat earlier poem
that's interesting in relation
to this one.
And let's turn back and look at
it, on page 103.
That's "The Magi";
 
 
 
again, a visionary poem where
Yeats is saying,
"I see, I see in my mind's
eye."
The action of the poem takes
place in Yeats's imagination.
Now as at all times I can
see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff,
painted clothes,
the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the
blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces
like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver
hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed,
hoping to find once more
Being by Calvary's turbulence
unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on
the bestial floor.
The Magi here are,
again, an image,
a kind of visionary symbol,
an image available "in the
mind's eye" at all times.
They are unsatisfied by
"Calvary's turbulence" --
"Calvary's turbulence," a
remarkable phrase --
unsatisfied by the scene of
Christian martyrdom because they
recognize that history is
cyclical and that the cycle that
they saw come into being can
only be completed by another
such birth,
not by Christ's death and
resurrection.
Notice here how Yeats images
what is at the core of Christ's
birth.
It is an uncontrollable mystery
"on the bestial floor":
on the floor,
on the bottom,
on the ground,
where the animals dwell.
The Second Coming,
it seems, is as Yeats imagines
it a kind of similarly
uncontrollable mystery,
and the energy,
the new presence that it
releases into the world,
is bestial,
is that of a beast.
 
The divine enters the human in
these poems of Yeats's through
the bestial.
It's a powerful and disturbing
idea.
There's another very powerful
and disturbing poem that
literalizes this idea,
and that is "Leda and the
Swan," on page 118:
a poem that is a sonnet,
though it doesn't quite look
like it at first,
a mythological poem that seeks
to give a mythological image to
or for the kinds of epochal and
apocalyptic historical change
that Yeats is living through in
the 1920s in Ireland.
 
In certain ways,
it's a beautiful poem and a
grotesque one at the same time.
 
A sudden blow:
the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl,
her thighs caressed
By the dark webs,
her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast
upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague
fingers push
The feathered glory from her
loosening thighs?
And how can body,
laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart
beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins
engenders there
The broken wall,
the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
 
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood
of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge
with his power
Before the indifferent beak
could let her drop?
 
 
 
History, what makes history
happen, is imaged here in the
form of the rape of the human by
the divine in the form of a
beast, the form of a swan.
 
The myth that Yeats takes up is
of Zeus's rape of the maiden,
Leda, whom he attacks as a
swan.
The offspring that the rape
engenders includes Helen,
the "terrible beauty" for whom
the Trojan War was fought;
also Clytemnestra,
the wife of the Greek lord
Agamemnon whom Clytemnestra
murders on his return from Troy.
Those future events are
glimpsed in the sestet of this
poem, in the final six lines.
 
They are, in a sense,
compressed and imaged and
contained in the rape itself.
 
There's a kind of radical
foreshortening of temporal
experience at what Yeats images
as the orgasmic union of the
divine and human -- "a shudder
in the loins" -- bringing about
the sack of Troy,
the murder of the king,
all that future contained in
this generative,
ambiguous violence in the
present that the poem describes.
In effect, in that middle part
of the poem, Yeats collapses
creation and destruction,
suggesting that the same
bestial energy flows through
both of these acts.
Here, divine force reduces to
brute power in somewhat the same
way as it does in "The Magi" and
"The Second Coming."
One result of this is Yeats's
-- and this is interesting --
his lack of interest in the god.
 
This isn't a poem about Zeus;
it's not a poem about the swan.
He doesn't name the swan,
just as he doesn't name the
"rough beast" in "The Second
Coming."
What the swan thinks or feels
or intends doesn't matter.
The swan is really only a
force, and Yeats's concern is
rather with the human experience
of that force,
which is, again,
another manifestation of
"terrible beauty."
 
Yeats explores that experience,
which is an experience of
suffering here and of violation,
through a series of rhetorical
questions, which are a crucial
poetic device for Yeats.
Yeats is a poet who asks
questions.
Questions, well,
they're different,
even rhetorical questions are
different, aren't they,
from statements of fact.
 
They're more like propositions,
like speculations,
that we're asked to test
through empathic identification
with,
in this case,
the poem's subject,
Leda.
This is what the form of the
question invites,
I think.
In "Easter, 1916" I talked
about Yeats's partial,
complicated identification with
the suffering martyrs of that
poem.
Well, that identification here
is re-imagined and we're invited
into it, too,
troublingly,
I think.
The frightening experience that
Yeats evokes here is the
imposition of the divine on the
human.
"Helpless breast upon...
breast": that's a wonderful
phrase.
The repetition of "breast"
links them, makes us see them
together, side by side,
one on top of the other.
It even, I think,
identifies the divine and the
human, makes them hard to tell
apart;
binds them, even while we are
being confronted with their
difference.
Leda feels the beating of the
swan's heart,
and that heart is "strange" to
her, that simple,
powerful word.
The poem's great final question
concerns that perception:
"Did she put on his knowledge
with his power"?
Did she know the heart she felt
or could she only feel it?
What difference would it make
between those two things,
between knowing that heart and
merely feeling it?
It's the difference between
knowing history --
understanding its patterns and
motivating forces,
causes, intentions -- and
merely feeling it,
merely suffering it,
serving as its instrument or
vessel,
an object to be dropped when
it's no longer useful.
 
To know history,
to be able to put on the god's
knowledge with his power,
would be to have access to
history's meaning,
and therefore to be more than
merely subject to it,
subject to its capricious and
violating forces.
 
But Yeats doesn't answer the
question, does he?
Well, why not?
Probably because there isn't an
answer.
The further implication is,
I think, that whether or not we
can have access to historical
knowledge,
the only path to such knowledge
is through submission to its
bestial or brute power,
which is a kind of shattering
experience in this poem.
Well, on Monday we'll look at
some of the figures in Yeats's
late poems, who represent a kind
of knowledge to be had through
an experience of violation or of
shattering power,
characters such as the mad old
men or Crazy Jane in Yeats's
late poems.
