W.B. Yeats — Poet of Two Phases
Throughout his life W.B. Yeats followed a star above contemporary standards of poetic brilliance. But he was a writer of two phases and in the one which came later his wagon often pulled the star to which it had been hitched into the roadways of day-to-day speech, and showed how a high purpose could illumine tones and methods which in other hands prove an aesthetic failure. In the initial phase, however, he was at his richest from the viewpoint of poetry proper, for there the inspiration seems to be the most continual.
Secret Worlds and Human Heart-tones
This inspiration is a distinct type of Symbolism: it is surcharged with an unusual second sight opening on vistas of Celtic mythology, and it moves on a sound-stream which is exquisite incantation. The atmosphere it creates is due in part to a sensuous monotony, but there are subtle senses as well as the gross, and Yeats's concrete experience is of a world that shimmers behind the physical consciousness, a world of "odorous twilight" where "dream-dimmed eyes" under "cloud-pale eyelids" watch "flame on flame" guarding some "incorruptible Rose". Such and other key-words he interblends with a changing vividness of phrase to embody the master-passion of his life — love.
Yeats has remained at every stage of his career a poet of love, but here it is a mood aglow with occult images. It is a poignancy which the spirits behind the veil portion out to man as his greatest blessing; it is a net of fire cast about mortal limbs making them prisoner to an immortal beauty; through its spells and its tyrannies the clay-born hours partake of an Everlivingness hidden in the deeps of the heart. Though the occult perception thrills through Yeats's poems even apart from the cry of love, their finest moments are often when the hues from secret worlds have mated the
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heart-tones of this. The pure expression of the former is never so haunting as in those eight lines:
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still;
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold
And bid them wander obeying your will,
Flame under flame, till Time be no more;
Have you not heard that our hearts are old,
That you call in birds, in wind on the hill,
In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still.
From the love-poems it is difficult to choose, presenting as they do unbroken flawlessness everywhere, but in two or three places delicacy and grandeur go hand in hand. Such seems to me the close of that series of couplets in which the memory of a loveliness the poet feels he has known in previous births mingles with his living passion — lights and shadows from a more enchanted past which ultimately carry his mind beyond themselves to yet profounder intuitions:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.
The Art of Indefinite Suggestion
In both these quotations what is common is an indefinite suggestiveness which is the very soul of Yeats's art during his early phase. That phase culminates in Shadowy Waters
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where the story of Forgael and Dectora is told in a language mirroring, as it were, strange symbolic silences, for words are packed with image-colour only to suggest the mysterious and the ineffable. But Yeats's most marked triumph is precisely this pervading vagueness — a triumph since it arises not from the sense being diluted or because he errs in verbal craft. His phrases are none save the right necessary ones, to change them would be to spoil his work, and the general impression he makes through them is of something actually visioned and accurately described. So perfect is the stimulus of his poetry that we get the sight and sound and even the subtle touch of some real world: only, it is a domain of mist, an unknown country which lies in a glimmering haze. The vagueness is not a shortcoming, as there is no mental inanity, no lack of sincere emotion, no mere decadent virtuosity, but an appropriate technique interpreting a very genuinely perceived "inscape" and making vagueness itself a positive quality of vision.
Only one contemporary poet can challenge comparison with Yeats in the art of indefinite suggestion by word and rhythm: Walter de la Mare. Their techniques overlap in several respects, mainly in a use of spondees to produce mournful and remote reverberations; but Yeats is a greater musician and his management of broad vowels and harmonious consonants adds a crystalline richness to the slow chant made by his spondees:
Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,
Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
Or take his blank verse:
For life moves out of a red flare of dreams
Into a common light of common hours
Until old age bring the red flare again.
A glide-anapaest is frequent in his blank verse as an aid to his
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most artistic effects:
A sweet, miraculous, terrifying sound,
or,
No, not angelical but of the old gods,
Who wander about the world to waken the heart.
Walter de la Mare is not only noted for spondaic rhythms and for assonances, like
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose;
but he practises too a queer magic by syncopation, dropping a syllable and lengthening out its companion in a foot:
Speak not — whisper not —
Here bloweth thyme and bergamot...
Beauty vanishes, beauty passes,
However rare — rare it be...
Or again,
See the house, how dark it is,
Beneath its vast-boughed trees.
Here also is a haunted language, but mostly de la Mare is the singer of a romantic strangeness and of the superstitious instinct. It is a domain different from Yeats's: even in the faery element their treatments are unlike, for de la Mare is a poet of the imaginative child, while Yeats goes beyond to a
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supernatural innocence, a childhood wise with unknown voices. The former evokes a ghost-atmosphere in which the colour is subdued and a delicate solemnity reigns over all: the latter spreads out vistas like melting jewels, his shadows too bear each a quivering aureole, and it is not ghosts that hover round him but Elemental Powers and Masters of Destiny, the old gods —
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
Joy and sorrow in Yeats's poetry are alike a keen ecstasy, in fact they are almost one and the same, and whatever delicacy he puts into his art is not solemn but intense: all his flush of triumph is yet passionately wistful and he drinks anguish like a nectar. De la Mare stands on the threshold between the waking life and the subconscious: Yeats belongs to some complete inner realm and a full light from there comes through. Unlike the other who sees a spot of light and concentrates on it, trying to discover how it touches and changes the outer vision, he is a secure seer with an eye that ranges over the entire "inscape" of mystery until his outer consciousness is altogether drenched in that translucence.
Change in Style and Psychology
That a poet should discard so thorough a power to voice occult insight seems a grave tragedy. But life does not follow expected curves of development and the pure critic has no right to complain provided the new curves trace artistic forms as flawless as those that have vanished, different though they be in gesture and expression. Yeats of the second phase is very little of an occultist at the beginning, because the old joy in the fire-mists of an unearthly realm yields to a desire for the clear contours of direct human experience. When he does turn to occult issues, it is mostly with an intellectual semi-Kabbalistic penchant: he deals with
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them in a discursive temper and an abstruse language which to a large measure rob them of poetic vitality. His direct human experience, too, finds as he grows older an accent which, while often powerful or majestic, verges oftener on prose in quality as well as in turn of phrase. In more simple moods he is capable of a lyrical poignancy or a sévère douceur, but not seldom the utmost he displays is a colloquial vivacity and at the worst there is a lapse into the dull and the insipid. These defects do not condemn his second phase; for it has superlative moments, especially at the outset when to a considerable extent it co-exists with the first, though the gradual drift from the latter is characterised beyond mistake by a certain change in style and psychology.
The change was prepared by Yeats's contribution to the Irish theatre. He began "colloquialising" poetry in order to fit blank verse to an idiom and rhythm which would approximate to naturalness in the mouths of men and women. Not that he wanted a language commonplace or abstract: he wished for a spoken vividness, a stir of the wide-awake mind in the tone to mingle increasingly with chanted dream-splendour. It is, however, doubtful whether in his plays he frequently succeeds when he attempts the new style; the best portions are those where the blank verse is filled with mystic intonations, for, at other times, he is prone to keep away magic and wingedness from the lines without quite making them stride with simple strength. Still, there are instances when he does strike out a movement which anticipates the change to come: the early plays on the whole belong to the first phase since the occult imagination is at work in them and by means of Celtic symbols, but lines like
Do you not know
How great a wrong it is to let one's thought
Wander a moment when one is in love?
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And while we bore her hither cloudy gusts
Blackened the world, and shook us on our feet;
Draw the great bolt, for no man has beheld
So black, bitter, blinding and sudden a storm, —
lines like these connect up with the second phase in its finer aspects. The other qualities of that later development grew more from Yeats's dramatic theory than his dramatic practice — a theory which led to a modification in his outlook on the function of all poetry, for he now appeared to believe that a word-music not in consonance with the vehement whimsical gusto and variety of actual outer life could not claim the highest class. Indeed, it must not image the cramped superficial gesticulation of men and women enslaved by fear and habit and routine; it must be a less muddied force, expressing passion, personality, action — a force never forgetting that it has behind it an imperishable spirit in touch with unseen magnitudes and powers, not disdaining to let its imagination be kindled with heroic or romantic colours — but the test is life, more abundant life, and never should the emotions cease responding to flesh as human and the mind fail to move among tangibilities. Yeats could never escape idealism: only, he would not look from beyond the walls of the world, but rather beat against them with a proud courage and use idealism and its light to subserve the actual instead of allowing the actual to dissolve in ideal visions.
The Art of Clear Intensity
The first complete freedom from the old atmosphere is in poems like Adam's Curse. A faint intellectual accent also makes itself heard and, though not the intense emotion of the direct kind which is another feature of the second Yeats, a graceful feeling-tone is not absent:
We sat together at one summer's end,
The beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
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And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught'....
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, 'To be born woman is to know —
Although they do not talk of it at school —
That we must labour to be beautiful'....
For the full perfection of the new style and psychology, two pieces provide excellent examples: they fuse the growing intellectual tone with a direct throb of passion to achieve a clear intensity as contrasted with the indefinite suggestive power of the old lyricism. The Folly of Being Comforted leaves an unforgettable vibration in the memory because of its original idea-turn which sharpens the impact on our feeling to a sort of delightful stab in the dark:
One that is ever kind said yesterday:
'Your well-beloved's hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seem impossible, and so
Patience is all that you have need of.'
No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs within her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turned her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.
I do not see in what way Yeats is here less a poet and an
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artist than during his pure Celtic period. The whole music is dissimilar, and the artistry performs its secret office by a method other than the slow sorcery in a poem like Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven —
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams —
yet it is a method equally authentic and supports an inspiration as inevitable. For, though there is no spell of a perceptible nature in The Folly of Being Comforted, the creative skill by which the effect as of "a moment's thought" is carried to perfection by an alert "stitching and unstitching" is proved by the careful phraseology, the pregnant transitions of syntax, the rhythm modulating itself with most delicate decisive strokes, the repetitive device in the seventh as well as the penultimate line to enforce the emotion. Every detail counts: mark, for instance, that terminal "No", breaking up as it does for the sake of significance the line of which it is metrically a part, giving thereby the argument of that line and its immediate predecessors a kind of check and rebuttal which seems final; nor would it be so definite a stimulus to the reader's zest for the latter half of the poem, if it did not stand thus solitary and suspended.1 The words "wild summer" have also an inspired raison d'être: "summer" is a foot
1. I have followed the original version of the poem. Yeats subsequently revised the line:
All that you need is patience.
Heart cries, 'No,
and he made the heart's speech end with the last word of line 12. The new version is more smooth and poised, but the deliberateness in its dramatic quality makes it somewhat artificial. Yeats's rewriting is not always happy.
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with an inverted stress in the line, and the ordinary justification would be emphasis for the sake of contrast with the peculiar fascination exerted by the well-beloved when the poet is speaking about her; what confers a supreme appo-siteness on the changed accent is the epithet "wild", for immediately we perceive the impulse behind the summer-charm as one which would most naturally tend to run against rules — here the rule of the iambic metre!
The poem entitled No Second Troy differs from The Folly in that its emotional element is more implicit than the latter's and the intellectual rises to the front. The emotion is not lost, it constantly supplies fuel to the intellectual glow in the language, or, to take another metaphor, provides the living edge to the tempered swordlike strength and dignity of each line:
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
This, too, can stand on aesthetic grounds a safe comparison with anything in the old genre, even the deepest music possible there:
Who dreamed that Beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.
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We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any heart to beat,
Weary and kind, one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
Both poems show the master-hand, both are as gifts from the gods; but the gods send their gifts through various channels in man's being, and it is only in face of this fact that criticism can permit itself a regret on viewing Yeats's total achievement. For Yeats of the Celtic phase was a rara avis, while the gradual change he underwent produced poems which, though original in detail, were of a type not absolutely novel; much fine work has been done in the latter kind by others, but the rich mysticism and intonation brought by his early verse, the enchanted "mouthful of sweet air" laden with symbolism of "Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days" were such as no one before had breathed on the world's ear.
Was the Early Yeats Decadent?
It is most superficial to see, as Yeats himself did in his old age and some apostles of modernism do, an anaemic decadence in that verse. No doubt the languid aestheticism of the 1890s creeps into it here and there; a weakening and blurring influence is at times caught from writers who divorced art from life and set it within a moated grange or worshipped it in an archaic temple for the mere melodic and bejewelled charm words were capable of. But the art of Yeats in its charmed moments was not barren word-culture, and if there
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was any remoteness about it, the remoteness was of a new reality demanding a special approach through unusual states of consciousness and not a phantom languishing in some vacuum between matter-of-fact and magic. The work of the Decadents was generally in that vacuum — it had not the clear contour of earth nor the subtle shape of the occult, it was just ambiguous and world-weary, drained of healthy Nature without being filled with Supernature's sight and sound and touch. Hanging midway in an uncertain fever, it was an imitation of the true wizardry which withdraws from the light of common life into a strangeness that is as living but with forms and forces washed in an unknown air. All poetry in fact is such a withdrawal — but there is a difference between the imaginative profound and the imaginative occult. Most great poetry is of the profound order, the wakeful mind of thought super-sensitising itself and catching hidden worlds in its mirror; occult poetry keeps only a nominal hold on the wakeful mind and receives its inspiration of the hidden worlds by a faculty which is itself half-hidden. This poetry can be of two sorts: it can either bring forth extraordinary symbols with a dynamic full-figured concreteness or set flowing an iridescent wave with unearthly limbs emerging from it. Yeats practises both sorts, the second much more frequently and with larger success. The decadent aesthetes thought they could reach and reveal Art's secret places by getting as isolated as possible from normal things and wrapping in rich cloths the thin bodies of far-fetched desires. They had considerable skill but not creative clairvoyant power. their inspiration was at its best a decorative inventor. Yeats wrote several poems in early youth which are indistinct and sentimental rather than artistically vague with occult emblems and the emotion of the Unknown. These deserve to be weeded out, but just because a poem lacks what he later called "manful energy" and "athletic joy" moulding "clear outlines", it does not become a painted miasma which settles nowhere and misleads the wakeful will and intellect. Perhaps his stern judgment upon
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his early creation was due to an incomplete liaison between his waking mind and the occult: he could not live like a practising mystic, an all-time seer. That, however, was the shortcoming of the man and did not vitiate the poetry, whose particular species of seerhood was absolutely authentic. Yeats's Celtic verse was both true and new.
The Marvellous Might-have-been
Blake had walked with spirits, Coleridge had known an eerie darkness, Shelley had been touched by "nurselings of immortality", but none had opened the door of which Yeats discovered the key; they had won no access to the heart whose pulse followed the footfall of wizard presences. A hitherto unexplored dimension of conscious activity lay before him; he was granted an instinctive knowledge of all its delicate labyrinths and each dusk-lit reverie through which he glided could be echoed by him in a word-rhythm unique for spell-binding overtones of imagination. If he could have continued his delight in that strange paradise we might have had with the growth of his mind some comprehensive disclosure of it, not magic glimpses as at present but a glimmering cosmology. Even if a result so opulent had been denied us since Yeats has not shown anywhere the architectural sweep of the greatest creators, there would have been a sufficient mass of work in an entirely original field to render his voice and his vision an assured extension of the human consciousness. By one-pointed and organic consistency of aim Wordsworth stamped, on his own time and the generations after, a new perception of Nature, Shelley's amazing productiveness blended inextricably by the same means a new idealistic glow with the emotions to which the human race had been accustomed. Yeats, however, bifurcated his never too prolific inspiration, dropped the wonder that had fallen into his hands and took up moods and methods no less valuable from the aesthetic standpoint yet not surprisingly individual enough in what may be termed
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"revelation" to keep enthralled the eye of aspiring ages. Individual these moods and methods are in the sense of thrusting forward a penetrating original mind of virile aristocracy, an imagination zestful, profoundly moved, admirably eclectic in its range. Their defect, in the revelatory sense, is that they do not draw out in a pure form a plane of reality beyond the mental. They have depth of thought and suggestion, at times a fierce flaming, depth as in Sailing to Byzantium; but how far is this from the swinging wide of secret gates into a land where myth and faery and deific dream have a poignant superlife!
Not that Yeats in old age stopped being occult and mystical. He aimed at an expression of the whole man — realist and romantic, flesh and spirit, intellect and intuition. His splendid aim got splendidly accomplished — but what was lost was the accent of some inner world. Now each esoteric plunge was taken in a grand or energetic manner self-consciously moulded; in his youth his voice had been like a wind blowing from an unearthly kingdom, and whatever energy or grandeur was in it came atmosphered with a consciousness other than the proud intellect. The difference between the sources of the two styles can be felt immediately. Take these lines about the "Holy Tree" in the heart:
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the sky.
A similar substance is charged by the later Yeats with a more philosophical and less spiritual passion, though the poetic upshot is no whit inferior:
Whatever flares upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.
The artistry of the aged Yeats made the thinking mind grip and undrape mysteries; that of the young Yeats cunningly
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surrendered to mysteries and made them grip it and undrape themselves with its aid. The larger reality behind the veil used the human self; the smaller came in course of time to lay hands on the larger and fit it to the various sides of the personality. If the early inspiration could have absorbed the whole man instead of a few parts as it was wont to do, there would have resulted an all-roundness not like a compromise as at present under the dominating influence of the athletic will co-ordinating the personality's diverse motions. It would have been a large harmony keyed to a centre of awareness more inward. Yeats did not achieve that rarer wholeness. So what possessed a most surprising individuality of "revelation" came to lack the cumulative power a consistent life-work can bestow, to enlarge beyond doubt the racial soul. As a poet of genius, the finest in the England of the present day, he will last; criticism can enjoy and praise the deviation which occurred in his art, but that deviation is bound to weaken his influence, for it lost him the full blazing torch of a poetic vita nuova which he might have lifted for the future.
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