In Yeats' Long-Legged Fly, there is, I think, strong corroboration for my earlier-posted view of a Yeatsian conflation of Hobbes-Gyres. In each of the 3 stanzas, consequence--That civilisation...; That the topless towers...; That girls at puberty...--precedes cause : Caesar crossing the Rubicon; Helen shuffling off to Troy; Michael Angelo completing The Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. As earlier argued for Yeats, the Fates have so predisposed these 3 personalities that they now find themselves at a climactic pivotal point--more noticeably climactic in the case of Caesar and Helen than of Yeats and Michaelangelo, because for the former pair it entailed a vast, and known, historical significance. In each case, we are viewing the moment of decision to act, which sets off a gyre of untold significance to the decider and for civilisation.
The moment is one of solitary 'cerebral motion', i.e. no one else is intruding their opinions, personality, 'motion', so the responsibility for decision and consequence lies solely with the decider. There are people in attendance, people who will be embroiled in the consequences of the decision, but they purposefully keep their distance, entreat the silence of others, and that the others keep their distance--and indeed that we keep silent as we home in across time. The moment is pointedly 'cerebral'--His mind...Her mind...His mind ; eyes fixed upon nothing ; she thinks--but it is accompanied by the visible emblems of 'animal motion' : Long-legged fly ; A hand under his head ; her feet practise a tinker shuffle ; His hand moves to and fro ( recalling the Yeatsian battered kettle at the heel ). And this stress on 'animal motion' is apt, for it is 'animal motion'--of the same sort as Yeats attributes to his contemporary political activists and military mayhem--that ensues from the decision : civil war in Ancient Rome, the siege of Troy, the extreme physical endeavour necessary to paint the Sistine ceiling.
The Gyres set off by the decision of Caesar and Helen are so obvious as to be self-explanatory, but that set off by Michaelangelo seems oblique and of questionable significance--at least at first. This stanza is like looking down through the middle of a gyre at a succession of concentric circles : Yeats is creating a picture of Michael Angelo who is creating a picture of ' The Creation of Adam', which in turn depicts the creation of mankind through human generation. A fully-formed Adam languorously reclines apart from God, and God's right hand stretches forth to infuse Adam not with life, for that is already plainly there, but with the power of procreation. This is symbolised in that God's left arm curves round the neck of a fully-formed Eve, culminating In God's left index finger resting on the shoulder of a human child, again fully-formed.
Yeats has, I think, chosen this particular painting because therein he identifies a kindred spirit. Michaelangelo, in the same way as did the Byzantime Iconodules, uses the image of divine and human hand converging, as intermediary to a prototype Idea : a purposeful, and divinely preordained--a fully-formed Eve and child precede the God and Adam convergence of divine and human index fingers--infusion into Adam of the power of creation through human generation.
Hands and fingers--the most potent emblems, the most dexterous, manipulative components, of human ;animal motion'--are the central foci of this painting about the creation of mankind. Its title is elliptical but telling : Adam is already depicted as created, fully-formed, but indolent, languorous, so the Creation Michaelangelo depicts is the subsequent creation, the event where he is infused with the power of procreation. It is then that he too comes into his strength, and the primordial Gyre of human history is set off. This Gyre is divinely determined. Out of its widening Gyre successive gyres will spring, at the initiative of the products of this first : human beings.
The reponsibility for the eventualities arising out of the human continuum is here transferred into human hands, and Michaelangelo depicts Eve's awareness of this awesome responsibility as she looks, anxious, apprehensive, wide-eyed, across at the yet-languorous Adam. She is a girl at puberty (who) finds The first Adam in her thought. Every succeeding girl at puberty throughout the human continuum will not have Eve's prescience of her divinely-allotted role and its consequences. So each, when looking at her own 'Adam' and thinking of the human product of their union, will not know that their child will be a Caesar, a Helen, one who will set off a new Gyre.
To counterbalance this nescience on the part of every girl at puberty, a nescience about the possible import in each's individual, future child, Yeats would have it that every girl at puberty be intruded into the Sistine Chapel, indeed shut in, and contemporary children specifically shut out : specifically, not because their chatter would disrupt the silent ambience requisite for the artist's concentration on his subject, though this is still a relevant factor. More pertinent is that if the children were present, the girls at puberty, having absorbed the awesome import of the painting, would be inclined to read it as being possibly specific to any one of the children currently around them. For Yeats, the message of the painting is specific to each girl alone, and to her yet unborn child, so Keep those (living) children out. This done, the girls may find the first Adam in their thought, may individually be in silent, solitary communion with, and attendance on, Michaelangelo's labour pangs as he strains to give birth to his vision of the Created Adam. Having absorbed the message of the painting, each girl will then know that her child may well set off a Gyre, may ensure That civilisation may not sink or That the topless towers be burnt. She would then be as the depicted Eve, looking anxiously, apprehensively, wide-eyed, across--or in this case up--at the languorous, reclining Adam being given the power of creation by a reclining God, and the whole being created by a reclining Michaelangelo. From a nescient girl at puberty, she would then be transformed into a prescient Eve. In this still, yet climactic, ambience, she would, deep in thought, be
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind move upon silence.
Thursday, 14 March 2019
Yeats from Faery arcana to worldly activism
In his old age Yeats is the living embodiment of his Gyres-vision of the historical evolution of civilisations : his material body is on the wane, while his poetic soul and the material on which it thrives--images--are waxing. His Gyres-vision is merged with a Hobbesian mechanistic determinist viewpoint, which latter views all human experience as motion :
(a) animal motion--cf. the political/military activity of Tone, Gonne, Markiewicz, and the Falstaffian Irregular ;
(b) cerebral motion--Yeats himself.
In Ireland, prior to the increasing manifestation that civil war, the Second Coming, the terrible beauty, the Leviathan were at hand, Yeats had tried to fulfil his determined poetic role of cerebral motion founded on images--in Hobbes, memory is equivalent to fancy, imagination--through forging a fictional Faery-land of images. These and later attempts by the 'cerebral' types are--as he acknowledges in Galway Races--a misdirection of the national mood, for the latter is increasingly identified with arms and politics. And so, as in Words, Yeats professes to have come into his strength, and sheds the Faery trappings. Thereafter, his 'cerebral motion'--actualised in poetic images--can be seen to converge with the 'animal motion' taking place on the road outside my door. Yeats is committed, indeed determined, into this active role.
Both Yeats and the political activists are 'in motion', and for Hobbes the greatest evil was to resign the course, to retire to a self-satisfying contemplative existence. This is the ambience of Il Penseroso, Plato, Plotinus, and, because this is a cerebral ambience, Yeats is sorely tempted to be contented with abstract things.
The Fates' dispensation is that Yeats be a poet, but he doesn't simply relay images blandly, as his form of action and commitment to the historical gyring towards a Second Coming which is taking place all around him. He declares his choice, defines his activist's role, in Sailing to Byzantium : it is an identity with the Iconodules' concept of the function of the image (stanza 3 ) as intermediary to the prototype Idea, as set against the singing bird type of image redolent of those manufactured under the last Iconoclastic emperor, Theophilus--where the image's function is simply decorative ( thus, the drowsy emperor ).
In short, Yeats' use of image, within his contemporary sphere of action/motion, will be as intermediary to an Idea. And this Idea is that the Ireland of old--Cuchulain, Cathleen, Coole, etc.--is waning, and a new Ireland is being forged in the heat of civil disorder : a new civilisation is waxing. In this role, the mature Yeats, having come into his strength, sees the poetic road before him, has found the images he will constantly rework. It is a complex imagery, but it is at least used consistently, and for both reasons his image-stock as a sort of battered kettle at the heel. Yeats the poet may well be derided for his choice of imagery, and for his seeming non-participation in the hurly-burly of 'animal motion', but he is playing his part in the great historical events that his poetry portrays. The way of Il Penseroso is tempting, but in his old age and in his responsibility Yeats sticks with the battered kettle.
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(a) animal motion--cf. the political/military activity of Tone, Gonne, Markiewicz, and the Falstaffian Irregular ;
(b) cerebral motion--Yeats himself.
In Ireland, prior to the increasing manifestation that civil war, the Second Coming, the terrible beauty, the Leviathan were at hand, Yeats had tried to fulfil his determined poetic role of cerebral motion founded on images--in Hobbes, memory is equivalent to fancy, imagination--through forging a fictional Faery-land of images. These and later attempts by the 'cerebral' types are--as he acknowledges in Galway Races--a misdirection of the national mood, for the latter is increasingly identified with arms and politics. And so, as in Words, Yeats professes to have come into his strength, and sheds the Faery trappings. Thereafter, his 'cerebral motion'--actualised in poetic images--can be seen to converge with the 'animal motion' taking place on the road outside my door. Yeats is committed, indeed determined, into this active role.
Both Yeats and the political activists are 'in motion', and for Hobbes the greatest evil was to resign the course, to retire to a self-satisfying contemplative existence. This is the ambience of Il Penseroso, Plato, Plotinus, and, because this is a cerebral ambience, Yeats is sorely tempted to be contented with abstract things.
The Fates' dispensation is that Yeats be a poet, but he doesn't simply relay images blandly, as his form of action and commitment to the historical gyring towards a Second Coming which is taking place all around him. He declares his choice, defines his activist's role, in Sailing to Byzantium : it is an identity with the Iconodules' concept of the function of the image (stanza 3 ) as intermediary to the prototype Idea, as set against the singing bird type of image redolent of those manufactured under the last Iconoclastic emperor, Theophilus--where the image's function is simply decorative ( thus, the drowsy emperor ).
In short, Yeats' use of image, within his contemporary sphere of action/motion, will be as intermediary to an Idea. And this Idea is that the Ireland of old--Cuchulain, Cathleen, Coole, etc.--is waning, and a new Ireland is being forged in the heat of civil disorder : a new civilisation is waxing. In this role, the mature Yeats, having come into his strength, sees the poetic road before him, has found the images he will constantly rework. It is a complex imagery, but it is at least used consistently, and for both reasons his image-stock as a sort of battered kettle at the heel. Yeats the poet may well be derided for his choice of imagery, and for his seeming non-participation in the hurly-burly of 'animal motion', but he is playing his part in the great historical events that his poetry portrays. The way of Il Penseroso is tempting, but in his old age and in his responsibility Yeats sticks with the battered kettle.
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Tuesday, 13 November 2012
The Hobbesian perception in Yeats' poems
A bathetic generalisation on W.B.Yeats is that he put Ireland on the European literary map, by pointing up a distinctly Irish identity within the body of Anglophonic literature . An overview of his poetry, however, leaves me with the impression that Yeats used Ireland to put himself on the literary map . He is a lyric poet, and the emotion is consistently one of loss, imminent or recent, or, where the loss--of Gonne, of youth, of 'the aristocratic way'--is most deeply felt, it is recent by way of renewal . Yeats attends the death-bed or the wake, and the Morituri only salute at Yeats' behest, in that their deaths or their passing will serve to highlight a current feature in the poet's individual artistic development . What may objectively be deemed predominant Irish historical and cultural concerns---the nuclear peasant's life on the farm, and the national sense of identity with that life ; St Patrick, and the subsequent pervasive influence of the R.C.Church ; the deleterious effects on Irish society of a centuries-long rule from Britain, and, to perpetuate that in situ, by a foisted Protestant ruling class ; the C19 Potato Famine, the mass deaths and emigrations in consequence---in Yeats figure not at all, or barely, on the fringes of a grossly partial foregrounding of Ireland in the Gyres, an apocalyptic scenario with Yeats straddling the climactic temporal juncture as elegist of things valued and lost, as seer into and anatomiser of things current, as harbinger of doom-laden things to come .
What of abiding merit emerges from Yeats' highly individual, partial rendition of his life and times is where his particular catches the universal . There are the half-cryptic phrases--All changed, changed utterly : a terrible beauty is born ( Easter 1916) ; How can we know the dancer from the dance ? (Among School Children) ; Man has created death (Death)--that are felt to capture the essential rhythms of the language, so as to resolve into novel, seering aphorisms . There are the social and personal symbols--Tower, swan, winding stair, Malachi Stilt-Jack, the tattered coat upon a stick (Sailing to Byzantium)--that are novelly inspired or, where known, are naturalised and worked through to self-sufficiency and place on the wider literary scene . And lastly we have his universal themes---unrequited love, parental concern, physical deficiency in tandem with mental proficiency, loyalty to and affection for one's friends, and, concerning the discipline of poet, the poet's place in his society and his apprisement of his world, in its particulars, as poetical materiel---articulated within the subjectivism of an agonized, agonistic poet before his Morituri .
The agonist in Yeats is concerned with performance in action . As early as The Lake Isle of Innisfree, he sets forth the two forms of action--cerebral and physical--around which all subsequent themes and symbols turn . The poet's form of action is cerebral, and this poem in its entirety, or any other, manifests it . Here, however, cerebral action is further expressed :I will arise and go now--the 'now' undermines the sense of futurity in 'will arise', and thereby reinforces the assertion of subjective control and power . Here in London the poet is capable in the instant of envisaging another world, another field of action . 'I will' superintends a scenario wherein his physical action provides the desired habitat . In the second stanza, the assertiveness of 'will' cedes to 'shall', commensurate with a passive cession to Nature's manifold action upon him . To counter any sense that 'shall have' intimates futurity, his subsequent verbs--comes...sings...midnight's--both corroborate the poet's assertion of power to create in the present, and show Yeats' awareness that even as he stands on the pavements grey, these phenomena, whether at morning...midnight....noon..or evening, are temporally extant now, somewhere in the world . But what, then, of the specific locale pictured forth, Innisfree ? 'Innis' is Erse for 'island', and the poem-title is purposefully tautologous . Here on the Lakists' island of Britain, in the capital that rules Yeats' homeland, the Irishman, and the Irish poet, in him assert his independence from the English Lakists' requirement of physical communion with Nature, by envisaging a Free Island with a pointedly Irish--Innis--identity, the lake ambience of which can be communed with, in the mind . The liquescent peace of Yeats' envisaged Irish littoral proceeds from the tonic cue of 'linn-' from linnets (l.8) . To the Lakists' celebration of the awesome sublimity in waterfalls and precipitous ravines--in 'linns', from A-S,'hlynn', torrent--Yeats proffers the placidity of his Irish 'linn', pool . Yeats' cricket (l.6) and purple (l.7) do not signify, respectively, a distinctly English game and imperial power, but are natural features of his Innisfree .
In England, to Donne's declaration that 'no man is an island', Yeats' assertion that he both is and can summon up a Free Island . His nationalism is intrinsic--I hear it in the deep heart's core--but it is not a war-cry . The Thoreau allusion in the first stanza--small cabin...clay and wattles...bean-rows...hive for the honey-bee...the bee-loud glade--is not some sort of waffling notion of self-sufficiency in Nature . The specific reference is to the chapter The Beanfield in Thoreau's Walden, wherein the anti-militarist Thoreau, busy planting his bean-rows, hears the music of the village militia band, and proceeds first scurrilously to liken these 'expiring' militia to drones in a Middle-sex hive, and, second, to weigh into his weeds with gusto, mockingly imbued with military fervour . Pan out from Thoreau to Yeats, and the replication is intended to impart Yeats' awareness, here in London, that his Innisfree resounds--bee-loud--with militarism . It imparts too Yeats' objection to that militarism, while asserting his nationalism, and it asserts his youthfully self-confident belief in his powers to insulate himself from that swarm of noisy occupants while providing them with a habitat whence Irish political life--and therefore the social setting for his poetical life--will be mellifluous . In sum, this poem asserts Yeats' nationalism, freedom, independence, confidence, self-reliance,imaginative powers, skill in allusion and semantics, control of conversational tone, and an idealism embracing both a realistic awareness of the status quo in Ireland and a belief in his powers of self-detachment and of control over the honey-bee that in situ proves to be unrealistic . Yeats builds a small cabin not in the Thoreau sense, but in the transferred sense of Latin 'insula', a detached house : an 'island' in the mind pointing forward to the Tower, but which here is material solely through the poet's cerebral action--just as on Innisfree the physical action of manifold Nature and of the journeying then labouring Yeats proceed entirely from the immobile (I stand on...on...line11) poet's cerebral action . The bee-loud glade, in that it signifies Irish militarism, is the sole instance in the poem of physical action that is conceded to be beyond the poet's control . Once in Ireland, these horns--cerebral and physical action--of the agonist's dilemma prove to be for Yeats not merely subjects for detached rumination, but, rather, he is subject to them, for they necessarily proceed from the drama of life .
His first poetical Insula is the aorist world of Celtic Twilight, the sum of which is subsequently self-defined as a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies (A Coat) . Having seen Yeats' play on the meaning of words and names in non-Celtic poems, e.g.
(a) Lake Isle of Innisfree, as related ,
(b) from 'salley', meaning 'willow' in Down by the Salley Gardens
to now am full of tears (l.8) ,
(c) from The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner to the Biblical O.T.
Lamentations, specifically I :6 and II :15 on beauty, plus the
Pensioner's 'dependence' asserted syntactically in concessive
clauses ,
I feel sure that , with a grasp of Erse, the strangeness of names--Knocknarea,Scanavin, Clooth-na-bare, Caoilte, Niamh--in the Celtic-topic poems would disappear and so reduce the distance felt with, and amplify the internal significance of, these poems to the point of self-sufficiency and worth on their own terms . The Celtic backdrop of Shakespeare's Macbeth apart, Yeats' Celtic themes--tribal feud, deception and betrayal, bewitchment by supernatural powers--and symbols--the Siddhe, wind, threatening sea--are outwith the European tradition, and Yeats' difficulty is clear from the necessity of adjoining, explicatory and lengthy paraphrase . In At Galway Races, Yeats concedes that he and his fellow proponents of a native Irish literature misread the national mood in pinning their hopes to a Celtic Pegasus . Delight makes all of the one mind (l.2) : Yeats is aware that Delight is something to be conjured up in the poet's readers, with a view to their moral elevation by way of that pleasure--as Spenser, a similar redactor of an anterior literature, had done for English literature . Here Yeats ascribes their failure to the suborning, neo-Genesis bourgeoisie's inspiration of the crowd, but in the matter of Delight, the poet must look for failings within, and in his work . Taking the Celtic poems from an Irish reader's viewpoint, it seems to me that they lack the proportions of, and the continuity in, say, the Norse sagas, and that potential organicism is reduced to the occasional . And, further, it may well be that Yeats' criterion for inclusion in his Celtic mythography is a theme--feud, deception, betrayal-- that sets forth in ancient clothes his feelings on and in present-day Ireland, the like of which surface in the non-Celtic poems : his empathy with the frustrations of old age, the attention given to passion--Is anything better ? (A Faery Song)--and its loss (Ephemera), his fascination with the contumacious, world-transforming girl...that had red mournful lips (The Sorrow of Love) . Yeats' early poems, Celtic and non-Celtic, serve solely to articulate the emotion within, and, to further cloud one's access to Delight, he intrudes a European traditional symbol, the rose, but with specific local significance, attaching it both to Ireland (To the Rose upon the Rood of Time) and to Maud Gonne (The Rose of the World) .
The result is the poet's cerebral action in diaspora : diffused in a staccato rendition of Celtic Twilight and an occasional treatment of the present . This early Yeats eschews the bee-loud glade in the hope that it will go away . It and Maud Gonne are meanwhile growing louder, and Ireland is on the verge of presenting Yeats with a host of present, living Morituri to replace dead passions and dead Celts . Yeats grasps the opportunity, finds his poetical direction, when he makes the physical action in the bee-loud glade the subject of his cerebral action--a process that, in the face of variegated heroism, calls into question the poet's heroism amid the furore of sacrifice and change, thus placing Yeats the poet at the centre of his own poetry : the figurant who let Celtic heroes, a detached He...He, or objective types--Pensioner, The Man Who Dreamed, The Lover [who] Pleads--speak for him now dons The Green Helmet and becomes protagonist whose lyricism is in direct relation with the reader, via an immanent assertive ' I ' who has come into my strength, And words obey my call (Words) .
The foregoing stress on cerebral and physical action was to show predisposition towards a political idea--that of Hobbes in his Leviathan . Now, with the old mythologies sloughed off, this idea from Hobbes is forefronted in disposition--a disposition attuned to an Irish scenario of increasing civil disorder, redolent of Leviathan . Hobbes posits all human performance as Action, manifest either in animal motion or in cerebral motion . Yeats' field of action is cerebral. That of Ireland's past and present political and military activists is animal, and these are Yeats' materiel . His remit is To write for my own race And the reality (The Fisherman ) . The hagiographised wild geese (September 1913 ) are written forth to point up the reality that nationhood is now the Irish godhead . Petty mercenariness gives way to the grand transaction that They weighed so lightly what they gave . The religiosity of shivering prayer palls before the secular pantheon of national saints . The dragon-guarded land (The Realists), once scoured of dragons by St Patrick is now rife with a real, living Leviathan .
Yeats is by leanings if not by blood an aristocrat, and this aristocrat has the problem--which he does not shirk--that his Leviathan is not demotic, but has the affections and active involvement of blood aristocrats--the Markiewiczes, the Gore-Booths--as well as of the crowd . Hobbes's resolution of civil disorder lies in the individually-willed, communal-in-effect transference of political sovereignty to the single figure of king . Yeats has been seen not to identify with British imperial purple . In Ireland, there the king is but as the beggar (Running to Paradise)--the italics setting off the extant 'is' . And the politically inactive, the cultivated, life-enhancing blood aristocracy, with Lady Gregory set forth as their archetype, is in eclipse before the majesty of the clouds, before the lese-majesty wherein The weak lay hand on what the strong had done (These are the Clouds) . These are the realities of the Irish Leviathan, with no framework for a Hobbesian resolution . Yeats assumes his Responsibilities by realistically depicting the demographic parameters of Leviathan, responsibility for which is variously ascribed to bourgeoisie, to loss of culture before pandemic mercenariness (To a Wealthy Man...Wanted Pictures), to the eclipse of cultured aristocracy, and to secular religiosity and hagiology--all of which, though pertinent, subside before The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor (The Magi) . Yeats realises that the dynamism of Leviathan in his country is universally based, surfacing variously in Maud Gonne, 16 Dead Men or the Falstaffian irregular--particular expressions of the manifold . Consequences of untold significance can proceed from the existential physical motion of every mother's son (September 1913) . Here we have the Gyres-vision in embryo, which pans out onto the world stage and the significance of physical action with Leda and the Swan, Helen, and Caesar in the tent...A hand under his head (Long-legged Fly) .
The tone of Responsibilities is conversational and, predominantly, questioning--of the poet's motives in relation to the wider motivation behind Leviathan . The effect, for Yeats, is cathartic . The volume is both a clearing-ground--of old mythologies, of Our Father Rosicross (The Mountain Tomb), of Romantic Ireland (September 1913)--and springboard to a greater thematic florescence . In When Helen Lived, Yeats moots two kinds of beauty superficially akin to Kant's distinction between dependent and free beauty : that of the artist won From bitterest hours , and that of Helen, which a war-obsessed--and thereby culturally bereft--society reduces to A word and a jest . It is at a similar juncture in a strife-torn Ireland that Yeats proceeds to two volumes, The Wild Swans at Coole and Four Plays for Dancers, where the parameters of beauty and the role of the artist are central considerations--this at a time when Easter 1916 and Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen are both poem topic and crucial political development . At first sight, Yeats' immersion in aesthetics seems like a fruitless attempt to escape the political torrent that is subsequently articulated in full flood in Michael Robartes and the Dancer . But that 'and the Dancer' is the justificatory connecting link, for Yeats needs an intervening period to clarify some area of self-sufficiency that stands self-containedly apart from the surrounding furore, and he finds its essence expressed in The Dancer .
Dependent beauty is in the artifice of the artist, and the artist has a Responsibility to fulfil his internal dynamic in cerebral action . For Hobbes, the greatest evil is 'to forsake the course', and Yeats repeatedly forefronts that, rather than forsaking, he discharges his responsibilities in cerebral action to the bitter end--a course marked by the strain of effort--won From the bitterest hours--and by a periodic dearth of creativity--dried the sap out of my veins (The Fascination of What's Difficult) ; I sought a theme and sought for it in vain (The Circus Animals' Desertion)--as well as by the visible emblems of service in his lineaments and physique . As admonitory, distinguishing contrast there is forefronted Major Robert Gregory--Soldier, scholar, horseman, he--and potentially great painter who eschews his artistic responsibility for the momentary delight ['Eden' means 'delight'] and Edenic Fall of knowing that I shall meet my fate...(An Irish Airman foresees his Death) . He is an Air-man, the artist with the ability to transcend the contemporary, who exchanges cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn...stern colour and...delicate line for the cross-barred tartanesque gun-sight figuring a country of numerable dead, of kills at Kiltartan Cross . For good measure, Yeats as medium summons to the narrow stair other Mortui turned Morituri : to salute Johnson and Synge for not forsaking their artistic course ; to cite Pollexfen as precedent for Gregory, as one who eschewed natural bent for an unnatural and deleterious course . For the artist, past or present, whatever his bent, it is a matter of artistic responsibility, and Robert Gregory is Major in Yeats' eyes because of his major eschewal .
In The Living Beauty, Yeats cites two examples of dependent beauty--that...cast out of a mould In bronze, or that in dazzling marble--dependent because the product of artifice . In contrast, there is the living beauty of Woman, whose dynamic quality is remedial and restorative to the artist, a quality carried within, once felt and beheld . This is what Kant calls 'free beauty'--self-sufficient, not dependent on man, his categories, or his artifice--and he ascribes it to flowers and birds-of-paradise . We have already seen Yeats in London infused with the natural dynamic of Innisfree, but Yeats' main concern is people, and the free beauty he found there he finds in Maud Gonne . I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day (His Phoenix)--to each his own beauty . Yeats has the memory of Gonne's beauty, even though now There is grey in your hair (Broken Dreams) . Hobbes's account of cognitive experience is that Imagination, mental imagery, is 'decaying sense', and that Memory is the act of having recourse to these fading images . For Yeats, female beauty is a transcendent saving grace that has restorative function for the artist when all else is 'decaying sense', 'fading images' . It has eternity so long as the beholder has memory . For the woman herself, it renders her self-sufficient, to the extent that, like a Dancer, she best expresses her essence in a type of physical action which is simply being . This self-sufficiency can be a springboard, with the right nature, to a cultivated, aristocratic-by-nature feminine life of which Lady Gregory is the archetype . Lady Gregory, even into old age and physical decay--With the old kindness, the old distinguished grace, She lies (Upon a Dying Lady)--is, simply by being, remedial and restorative to the artist . To this passive form of physical action, that is life-enhancing life-long to the agent, is contrasted Maud Gonne, whose active form of physical action takes her out of self-sufficiency and into the political furore that is life-destroying . In a bitter old age, Maud will never be a Lady Gregory, and her essential beauty is contingent on Vague memories, nothing but...memories (Broken Dreams), just as Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle, who, similarly having become political activists, are for Yeats mere Pictures of the mind...Dear shadows (In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz) .
These two forms of feminine physical action--the one recommended, the other to be eschewed--are relayed in detail in A Prayer for my Daughter . But for Yeats this topic of woman's role in life is not simply a matter for analysis of, or advice to, relatives and close friends . Just as Caesar or every mother's son can set off a Gyre of untold significance, so can an Helen or 'every mother's daughter' . Woman, therefore, as Mother holds the key position of living example and instiller of values to her children . Yeats is distinguishing Woman's Responsibility, for any one of her children can be such as to set off a Gyre--can be a Hitler or Gandhi, a Lucretia Borgia or Mother Teresa--and the responsibility for the tenor of that child-grown-adult's course and for the quality of the Gyre unleashed lies with the Mother and the quality of upbringing she determines . For the girls at puberty (Long-legged Fly), this is the significance to be read from Michelangelo's depiction of the Sistine Chapel Creation of Adam, wherein Eve is given foreknowledge that childbirth--that first setting-off of a Gyre by a human--will proceed from her womb, as will, generatively, the human continuum . The depicted God transfers the responsibility for the eventualities arising out of the human continuum into human hands, and Michelangelo depicts Eve's awareness of this awesome responsibility in her anxious wide-eyed stare . Eve has this prescience . Other girls at puberty do not--thus Yeats' wish that they absorb Michelangelo's lesson . The Long-legged Fly is the climax of Yeats' long consideration of feminine physical action, of Woman's role in life, and Woman's responsibility to the future through herself .
Once Yeats has worked through the parameters of beauty and the role of the artist, he sets to male physical action, which in Ireland in his times is coextensive with political activity, through to military activity, to more deaths and an embellished secular hagiography . As the furore increases, Yeats' tone becomes increasingly apocalyptic, visionary--probably necessarily visionary, because Yeats in situ is too close in time and locale to be able to definitively allocate a Gyre as springing from a specific action out of a welter of potentially significant actions : thus the amorphous beast out of Spiritus Mundi--Leviathan on the march . As for these men seen in particular, the cerebral Yeats shows himself to be a mixture of emotions : he deplores the human waste while admiringly recognising their heroism, and, further, is intrigued by the nature of militarism--ruminating on Sato's sword, talking with affable Irregular and brown Lieutenant on The Road at My Door . Yet perhaps in the next poem Yeats is ranting, doom-laden : Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep : a drunken soldiery... (Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen) . And this frenzy is rendered manic in the crashing plosives of Byzantium . Yeats' confused emotions are a register of the confusion of loyalties and motives all around him .
Perhaps because of the surrounding furore, Yeats is at times tempted to 'forsake the course', and retire to a completely cerebral, contemplative existence after the fashion of Plato, Plotinus and Il Penseroso--to be content with abstract things . Ancestral houses such as Coole would be a fitting location, but My House is a more ancient tower (Meditations in Time of Civil War,II)--a fortification emblematic not of contrived but of genuine action, it renders appositely Yeats' determination to stay 'on course' . A similar determination emerges from a different scenario : Sailing to Byzantium . Here Yeats the poetic activist asserts his strength : that of the Iconodule's Image, where the Image is mere intermediary to the prototype Idea, as opposed to the Iconoclastic Image for decoration and entertainment . The poet may find himself in the leisurely ambience of drowsy emperor...lords and ladies--drowsy because lacking in an inspiring prototype Idea--but he has been purified by sages standing in God's holy fire, and his self-allocated role there is not to plausibly entertain, but to sing Of what is past, passing and to come--to relay the eternity of Godhead to which the supplanted Iconodules' Image formerly mediated . As with Innisfree, so with Byzantium .It is not escapism, but a voyage in the mind serving to articulate, in a hostile environment, the poet's self-control, direction of purpose, and command over his work . Here Yeats affirms that his strength is manifest in cerebral action, it lies with the image relaying the prototype Idea, and that the Iconodule artistic purpose will be his, whatever the prevailing ambience--drowsy or frenetic .
Once the momentum of Apocalypse and political furore subsides, Yeats emerges into old age like the renovated King Lear emerging from the hovel--the past sloughed off, the present a half-lunatic, half-perspicacious vision . This is Yeats' final reality, a depoeticised reality shorn of myth, symbol and reverberating significances, commensurate with common-or-garden Irish people-in-the-life, -in-the-streets, -in-the-pubs, -in-the-minds : minds like Crazy Jane's and Tom the Lunatic's, which would have no truck with literary embellishments, no more than they would with the foregoing grand thematic baggage--nationalism, one's role in life, etc. In my view, this late surge is the closest one gets in Yeats to real people, as opposed to the perennial 'what they signify' . They are, of course, intellectually barren, bur are part of everything outside us--human life, in which participated Yeats' fellow members of the author's Pantheon : the Mad as Mist and Snow, those with the capacity, like snow, to eclipse everything . Even the aristocratic Yeats is self-mocked : keeping his distance by clomping around in the guise of Malachi Stilt-Jack .
Yeats' final poems are a clearing-ground for the grave, until he discovers that his circus animals--Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what (Circus Animals' Desertion)--have deserted him . The circus reference marks the fact that the poet has completed his poetic circle . And, to emphasise this fact intratextually, he goes full circle back to his starting-point on Celtic Twilight--Oisin, The Countess Cathleen, and Cuchulain . That done, he returns to the centre where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart .
What of abiding merit emerges from Yeats' highly individual, partial rendition of his life and times is where his particular catches the universal . There are the half-cryptic phrases--All changed, changed utterly : a terrible beauty is born ( Easter 1916) ; How can we know the dancer from the dance ? (Among School Children) ; Man has created death (Death)--that are felt to capture the essential rhythms of the language, so as to resolve into novel, seering aphorisms . There are the social and personal symbols--Tower, swan, winding stair, Malachi Stilt-Jack, the tattered coat upon a stick (Sailing to Byzantium)--that are novelly inspired or, where known, are naturalised and worked through to self-sufficiency and place on the wider literary scene . And lastly we have his universal themes---unrequited love, parental concern, physical deficiency in tandem with mental proficiency, loyalty to and affection for one's friends, and, concerning the discipline of poet, the poet's place in his society and his apprisement of his world, in its particulars, as poetical materiel---articulated within the subjectivism of an agonized, agonistic poet before his Morituri .
The agonist in Yeats is concerned with performance in action . As early as The Lake Isle of Innisfree, he sets forth the two forms of action--cerebral and physical--around which all subsequent themes and symbols turn . The poet's form of action is cerebral, and this poem in its entirety, or any other, manifests it . Here, however, cerebral action is further expressed :I will arise and go now--the 'now' undermines the sense of futurity in 'will arise', and thereby reinforces the assertion of subjective control and power . Here in London the poet is capable in the instant of envisaging another world, another field of action . 'I will' superintends a scenario wherein his physical action provides the desired habitat . In the second stanza, the assertiveness of 'will' cedes to 'shall', commensurate with a passive cession to Nature's manifold action upon him . To counter any sense that 'shall have' intimates futurity, his subsequent verbs--comes...sings...midnight's--both corroborate the poet's assertion of power to create in the present, and show Yeats' awareness that even as he stands on the pavements grey, these phenomena, whether at morning...midnight....noon..or evening, are temporally extant now, somewhere in the world . But what, then, of the specific locale pictured forth, Innisfree ? 'Innis' is Erse for 'island', and the poem-title is purposefully tautologous . Here on the Lakists' island of Britain, in the capital that rules Yeats' homeland, the Irishman, and the Irish poet, in him assert his independence from the English Lakists' requirement of physical communion with Nature, by envisaging a Free Island with a pointedly Irish--Innis--identity, the lake ambience of which can be communed with, in the mind . The liquescent peace of Yeats' envisaged Irish littoral proceeds from the tonic cue of 'linn-' from linnets (l.8) . To the Lakists' celebration of the awesome sublimity in waterfalls and precipitous ravines--in 'linns', from A-S,'hlynn', torrent--Yeats proffers the placidity of his Irish 'linn', pool . Yeats' cricket (l.6) and purple (l.7) do not signify, respectively, a distinctly English game and imperial power, but are natural features of his Innisfree .
In England, to Donne's declaration that 'no man is an island', Yeats' assertion that he both is and can summon up a Free Island . His nationalism is intrinsic--I hear it in the deep heart's core--but it is not a war-cry . The Thoreau allusion in the first stanza--small cabin...clay and wattles...bean-rows...hive for the honey-bee...the bee-loud glade--is not some sort of waffling notion of self-sufficiency in Nature . The specific reference is to the chapter The Beanfield in Thoreau's Walden, wherein the anti-militarist Thoreau, busy planting his bean-rows, hears the music of the village militia band, and proceeds first scurrilously to liken these 'expiring' militia to drones in a Middle-sex hive, and, second, to weigh into his weeds with gusto, mockingly imbued with military fervour . Pan out from Thoreau to Yeats, and the replication is intended to impart Yeats' awareness, here in London, that his Innisfree resounds--bee-loud--with militarism . It imparts too Yeats' objection to that militarism, while asserting his nationalism, and it asserts his youthfully self-confident belief in his powers to insulate himself from that swarm of noisy occupants while providing them with a habitat whence Irish political life--and therefore the social setting for his poetical life--will be mellifluous . In sum, this poem asserts Yeats' nationalism, freedom, independence, confidence, self-reliance,imaginative powers, skill in allusion and semantics, control of conversational tone, and an idealism embracing both a realistic awareness of the status quo in Ireland and a belief in his powers of self-detachment and of control over the honey-bee that in situ proves to be unrealistic . Yeats builds a small cabin not in the Thoreau sense, but in the transferred sense of Latin 'insula', a detached house : an 'island' in the mind pointing forward to the Tower, but which here is material solely through the poet's cerebral action--just as on Innisfree the physical action of manifold Nature and of the journeying then labouring Yeats proceed entirely from the immobile (I stand on...on...line11) poet's cerebral action . The bee-loud glade, in that it signifies Irish militarism, is the sole instance in the poem of physical action that is conceded to be beyond the poet's control . Once in Ireland, these horns--cerebral and physical action--of the agonist's dilemma prove to be for Yeats not merely subjects for detached rumination, but, rather, he is subject to them, for they necessarily proceed from the drama of life .
His first poetical Insula is the aorist world of Celtic Twilight, the sum of which is subsequently self-defined as a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies (A Coat) . Having seen Yeats' play on the meaning of words and names in non-Celtic poems, e.g.
(a) Lake Isle of Innisfree, as related ,
(b) from 'salley', meaning 'willow' in Down by the Salley Gardens
to now am full of tears (l.8) ,
(c) from The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner to the Biblical O.T.
Lamentations, specifically I :6 and II :15 on beauty, plus the
Pensioner's 'dependence' asserted syntactically in concessive
clauses ,
I feel sure that , with a grasp of Erse, the strangeness of names--Knocknarea,Scanavin, Clooth-na-bare, Caoilte, Niamh--in the Celtic-topic poems would disappear and so reduce the distance felt with, and amplify the internal significance of, these poems to the point of self-sufficiency and worth on their own terms . The Celtic backdrop of Shakespeare's Macbeth apart, Yeats' Celtic themes--tribal feud, deception and betrayal, bewitchment by supernatural powers--and symbols--the Siddhe, wind, threatening sea--are outwith the European tradition, and Yeats' difficulty is clear from the necessity of adjoining, explicatory and lengthy paraphrase . In At Galway Races, Yeats concedes that he and his fellow proponents of a native Irish literature misread the national mood in pinning their hopes to a Celtic Pegasus . Delight makes all of the one mind (l.2) : Yeats is aware that Delight is something to be conjured up in the poet's readers, with a view to their moral elevation by way of that pleasure--as Spenser, a similar redactor of an anterior literature, had done for English literature . Here Yeats ascribes their failure to the suborning, neo-Genesis bourgeoisie's inspiration of the crowd, but in the matter of Delight, the poet must look for failings within, and in his work . Taking the Celtic poems from an Irish reader's viewpoint, it seems to me that they lack the proportions of, and the continuity in, say, the Norse sagas, and that potential organicism is reduced to the occasional . And, further, it may well be that Yeats' criterion for inclusion in his Celtic mythography is a theme--feud, deception, betrayal-- that sets forth in ancient clothes his feelings on and in present-day Ireland, the like of which surface in the non-Celtic poems : his empathy with the frustrations of old age, the attention given to passion--Is anything better ? (A Faery Song)--and its loss (Ephemera), his fascination with the contumacious, world-transforming girl...that had red mournful lips (The Sorrow of Love) . Yeats' early poems, Celtic and non-Celtic, serve solely to articulate the emotion within, and, to further cloud one's access to Delight, he intrudes a European traditional symbol, the rose, but with specific local significance, attaching it both to Ireland (To the Rose upon the Rood of Time) and to Maud Gonne (The Rose of the World) .
The result is the poet's cerebral action in diaspora : diffused in a staccato rendition of Celtic Twilight and an occasional treatment of the present . This early Yeats eschews the bee-loud glade in the hope that it will go away . It and Maud Gonne are meanwhile growing louder, and Ireland is on the verge of presenting Yeats with a host of present, living Morituri to replace dead passions and dead Celts . Yeats grasps the opportunity, finds his poetical direction, when he makes the physical action in the bee-loud glade the subject of his cerebral action--a process that, in the face of variegated heroism, calls into question the poet's heroism amid the furore of sacrifice and change, thus placing Yeats the poet at the centre of his own poetry : the figurant who let Celtic heroes, a detached He...He, or objective types--Pensioner, The Man Who Dreamed, The Lover [who] Pleads--speak for him now dons The Green Helmet and becomes protagonist whose lyricism is in direct relation with the reader, via an immanent assertive ' I ' who has come into my strength, And words obey my call (Words) .
The foregoing stress on cerebral and physical action was to show predisposition towards a political idea--that of Hobbes in his Leviathan . Now, with the old mythologies sloughed off, this idea from Hobbes is forefronted in disposition--a disposition attuned to an Irish scenario of increasing civil disorder, redolent of Leviathan . Hobbes posits all human performance as Action, manifest either in animal motion or in cerebral motion . Yeats' field of action is cerebral. That of Ireland's past and present political and military activists is animal, and these are Yeats' materiel . His remit is To write for my own race And the reality (The Fisherman ) . The hagiographised wild geese (September 1913 ) are written forth to point up the reality that nationhood is now the Irish godhead . Petty mercenariness gives way to the grand transaction that They weighed so lightly what they gave . The religiosity of shivering prayer palls before the secular pantheon of national saints . The dragon-guarded land (The Realists), once scoured of dragons by St Patrick is now rife with a real, living Leviathan .
Yeats is by leanings if not by blood an aristocrat, and this aristocrat has the problem--which he does not shirk--that his Leviathan is not demotic, but has the affections and active involvement of blood aristocrats--the Markiewiczes, the Gore-Booths--as well as of the crowd . Hobbes's resolution of civil disorder lies in the individually-willed, communal-in-effect transference of political sovereignty to the single figure of king . Yeats has been seen not to identify with British imperial purple . In Ireland, there the king is but as the beggar (Running to Paradise)--the italics setting off the extant 'is' . And the politically inactive, the cultivated, life-enhancing blood aristocracy, with Lady Gregory set forth as their archetype, is in eclipse before the majesty of the clouds, before the lese-majesty wherein The weak lay hand on what the strong had done (These are the Clouds) . These are the realities of the Irish Leviathan, with no framework for a Hobbesian resolution . Yeats assumes his Responsibilities by realistically depicting the demographic parameters of Leviathan, responsibility for which is variously ascribed to bourgeoisie, to loss of culture before pandemic mercenariness (To a Wealthy Man...Wanted Pictures), to the eclipse of cultured aristocracy, and to secular religiosity and hagiology--all of which, though pertinent, subside before The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor (The Magi) . Yeats realises that the dynamism of Leviathan in his country is universally based, surfacing variously in Maud Gonne, 16 Dead Men or the Falstaffian irregular--particular expressions of the manifold . Consequences of untold significance can proceed from the existential physical motion of every mother's son (September 1913) . Here we have the Gyres-vision in embryo, which pans out onto the world stage and the significance of physical action with Leda and the Swan, Helen, and Caesar in the tent...A hand under his head (Long-legged Fly) .
The tone of Responsibilities is conversational and, predominantly, questioning--of the poet's motives in relation to the wider motivation behind Leviathan . The effect, for Yeats, is cathartic . The volume is both a clearing-ground--of old mythologies, of Our Father Rosicross (The Mountain Tomb), of Romantic Ireland (September 1913)--and springboard to a greater thematic florescence . In When Helen Lived, Yeats moots two kinds of beauty superficially akin to Kant's distinction between dependent and free beauty : that of the artist won From bitterest hours , and that of Helen, which a war-obsessed--and thereby culturally bereft--society reduces to A word and a jest . It is at a similar juncture in a strife-torn Ireland that Yeats proceeds to two volumes, The Wild Swans at Coole and Four Plays for Dancers, where the parameters of beauty and the role of the artist are central considerations--this at a time when Easter 1916 and Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen are both poem topic and crucial political development . At first sight, Yeats' immersion in aesthetics seems like a fruitless attempt to escape the political torrent that is subsequently articulated in full flood in Michael Robartes and the Dancer . But that 'and the Dancer' is the justificatory connecting link, for Yeats needs an intervening period to clarify some area of self-sufficiency that stands self-containedly apart from the surrounding furore, and he finds its essence expressed in The Dancer .
Dependent beauty is in the artifice of the artist, and the artist has a Responsibility to fulfil his internal dynamic in cerebral action . For Hobbes, the greatest evil is 'to forsake the course', and Yeats repeatedly forefronts that, rather than forsaking, he discharges his responsibilities in cerebral action to the bitter end--a course marked by the strain of effort--won From the bitterest hours--and by a periodic dearth of creativity--dried the sap out of my veins (The Fascination of What's Difficult) ; I sought a theme and sought for it in vain (The Circus Animals' Desertion)--as well as by the visible emblems of service in his lineaments and physique . As admonitory, distinguishing contrast there is forefronted Major Robert Gregory--Soldier, scholar, horseman, he--and potentially great painter who eschews his artistic responsibility for the momentary delight ['Eden' means 'delight'] and Edenic Fall of knowing that I shall meet my fate...(An Irish Airman foresees his Death) . He is an Air-man, the artist with the ability to transcend the contemporary, who exchanges cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn...stern colour and...delicate line for the cross-barred tartanesque gun-sight figuring a country of numerable dead, of kills at Kiltartan Cross . For good measure, Yeats as medium summons to the narrow stair other Mortui turned Morituri : to salute Johnson and Synge for not forsaking their artistic course ; to cite Pollexfen as precedent for Gregory, as one who eschewed natural bent for an unnatural and deleterious course . For the artist, past or present, whatever his bent, it is a matter of artistic responsibility, and Robert Gregory is Major in Yeats' eyes because of his major eschewal .
In The Living Beauty, Yeats cites two examples of dependent beauty--that...cast out of a mould In bronze, or that in dazzling marble--dependent because the product of artifice . In contrast, there is the living beauty of Woman, whose dynamic quality is remedial and restorative to the artist, a quality carried within, once felt and beheld . This is what Kant calls 'free beauty'--self-sufficient, not dependent on man, his categories, or his artifice--and he ascribes it to flowers and birds-of-paradise . We have already seen Yeats in London infused with the natural dynamic of Innisfree, but Yeats' main concern is people, and the free beauty he found there he finds in Maud Gonne . I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day (His Phoenix)--to each his own beauty . Yeats has the memory of Gonne's beauty, even though now There is grey in your hair (Broken Dreams) . Hobbes's account of cognitive experience is that Imagination, mental imagery, is 'decaying sense', and that Memory is the act of having recourse to these fading images . For Yeats, female beauty is a transcendent saving grace that has restorative function for the artist when all else is 'decaying sense', 'fading images' . It has eternity so long as the beholder has memory . For the woman herself, it renders her self-sufficient, to the extent that, like a Dancer, she best expresses her essence in a type of physical action which is simply being . This self-sufficiency can be a springboard, with the right nature, to a cultivated, aristocratic-by-nature feminine life of which Lady Gregory is the archetype . Lady Gregory, even into old age and physical decay--With the old kindness, the old distinguished grace, She lies (Upon a Dying Lady)--is, simply by being, remedial and restorative to the artist . To this passive form of physical action, that is life-enhancing life-long to the agent, is contrasted Maud Gonne, whose active form of physical action takes her out of self-sufficiency and into the political furore that is life-destroying . In a bitter old age, Maud will never be a Lady Gregory, and her essential beauty is contingent on Vague memories, nothing but...memories (Broken Dreams), just as Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle, who, similarly having become political activists, are for Yeats mere Pictures of the mind...Dear shadows (In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz) .
These two forms of feminine physical action--the one recommended, the other to be eschewed--are relayed in detail in A Prayer for my Daughter . But for Yeats this topic of woman's role in life is not simply a matter for analysis of, or advice to, relatives and close friends . Just as Caesar or every mother's son can set off a Gyre of untold significance, so can an Helen or 'every mother's daughter' . Woman, therefore, as Mother holds the key position of living example and instiller of values to her children . Yeats is distinguishing Woman's Responsibility, for any one of her children can be such as to set off a Gyre--can be a Hitler or Gandhi, a Lucretia Borgia or Mother Teresa--and the responsibility for the tenor of that child-grown-adult's course and for the quality of the Gyre unleashed lies with the Mother and the quality of upbringing she determines . For the girls at puberty (Long-legged Fly), this is the significance to be read from Michelangelo's depiction of the Sistine Chapel Creation of Adam, wherein Eve is given foreknowledge that childbirth--that first setting-off of a Gyre by a human--will proceed from her womb, as will, generatively, the human continuum . The depicted God transfers the responsibility for the eventualities arising out of the human continuum into human hands, and Michelangelo depicts Eve's awareness of this awesome responsibility in her anxious wide-eyed stare . Eve has this prescience . Other girls at puberty do not--thus Yeats' wish that they absorb Michelangelo's lesson . The Long-legged Fly is the climax of Yeats' long consideration of feminine physical action, of Woman's role in life, and Woman's responsibility to the future through herself .
Once Yeats has worked through the parameters of beauty and the role of the artist, he sets to male physical action, which in Ireland in his times is coextensive with political activity, through to military activity, to more deaths and an embellished secular hagiography . As the furore increases, Yeats' tone becomes increasingly apocalyptic, visionary--probably necessarily visionary, because Yeats in situ is too close in time and locale to be able to definitively allocate a Gyre as springing from a specific action out of a welter of potentially significant actions : thus the amorphous beast out of Spiritus Mundi--Leviathan on the march . As for these men seen in particular, the cerebral Yeats shows himself to be a mixture of emotions : he deplores the human waste while admiringly recognising their heroism, and, further, is intrigued by the nature of militarism--ruminating on Sato's sword, talking with affable Irregular and brown Lieutenant on The Road at My Door . Yet perhaps in the next poem Yeats is ranting, doom-laden : Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep : a drunken soldiery... (Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen) . And this frenzy is rendered manic in the crashing plosives of Byzantium . Yeats' confused emotions are a register of the confusion of loyalties and motives all around him .
Perhaps because of the surrounding furore, Yeats is at times tempted to 'forsake the course', and retire to a completely cerebral, contemplative existence after the fashion of Plato, Plotinus and Il Penseroso--to be content with abstract things . Ancestral houses such as Coole would be a fitting location, but My House is a more ancient tower (Meditations in Time of Civil War,II)--a fortification emblematic not of contrived but of genuine action, it renders appositely Yeats' determination to stay 'on course' . A similar determination emerges from a different scenario : Sailing to Byzantium . Here Yeats the poetic activist asserts his strength : that of the Iconodule's Image, where the Image is mere intermediary to the prototype Idea, as opposed to the Iconoclastic Image for decoration and entertainment . The poet may find himself in the leisurely ambience of drowsy emperor...lords and ladies--drowsy because lacking in an inspiring prototype Idea--but he has been purified by sages standing in God's holy fire, and his self-allocated role there is not to plausibly entertain, but to sing Of what is past, passing and to come--to relay the eternity of Godhead to which the supplanted Iconodules' Image formerly mediated . As with Innisfree, so with Byzantium .It is not escapism, but a voyage in the mind serving to articulate, in a hostile environment, the poet's self-control, direction of purpose, and command over his work . Here Yeats affirms that his strength is manifest in cerebral action, it lies with the image relaying the prototype Idea, and that the Iconodule artistic purpose will be his, whatever the prevailing ambience--drowsy or frenetic .
Once the momentum of Apocalypse and political furore subsides, Yeats emerges into old age like the renovated King Lear emerging from the hovel--the past sloughed off, the present a half-lunatic, half-perspicacious vision . This is Yeats' final reality, a depoeticised reality shorn of myth, symbol and reverberating significances, commensurate with common-or-garden Irish people-in-the-life, -in-the-streets, -in-the-pubs, -in-the-minds : minds like Crazy Jane's and Tom the Lunatic's, which would have no truck with literary embellishments, no more than they would with the foregoing grand thematic baggage--nationalism, one's role in life, etc. In my view, this late surge is the closest one gets in Yeats to real people, as opposed to the perennial 'what they signify' . They are, of course, intellectually barren, bur are part of everything outside us--human life, in which participated Yeats' fellow members of the author's Pantheon : the Mad as Mist and Snow, those with the capacity, like snow, to eclipse everything . Even the aristocratic Yeats is self-mocked : keeping his distance by clomping around in the guise of Malachi Stilt-Jack .
Yeats' final poems are a clearing-ground for the grave, until he discovers that his circus animals--Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what (Circus Animals' Desertion)--have deserted him . The circus reference marks the fact that the poet has completed his poetic circle . And, to emphasise this fact intratextually, he goes full circle back to his starting-point on Celtic Twilight--Oisin, The Countess Cathleen, and Cuchulain . That done, he returns to the centre where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart .
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