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Old Man's Anger BY THOMAS HOGAN SINCE 'Eng. Lit.' became a University subject, poets have found themselves the subject of more analysis and critical examination than they ever expected—or probably, indeed, cared— to expect. Having hoisted the flag of symbolism, they may have thought that they were safe from the little men in the white coats, complete with all the instruments of analysis approved by Drs. Leavis and Richards. But the tenacity of the doctorate student is not to be underrated, and even the tattered flag of independence is subject to the squabbling microscopy of earnest• experts.
Mr. F. A. C. Wilson is a student of Mr. T. R. Henn and, equipped with card-index, copies of Porphyry, Plotinus, Paracelsus, Old Auntie Blavatsky and all, he sets to work to reconstruct the Yeatsian symbolic scheme of things entire,* basing himself mainly on the five last, most difficult and anfractuous plays, A Full Moon in March, The King of the Great Clock Tower, The Berne's Egg, The Death of Cuchulainn and Purgatory.,He has, of course, no difficulty in find- ing the symbolism. The recurrent theme of the woman who dances with the severed head of her beloved—the Salome theme it may be called— the Morrigu who is at once the evil spirit of Cuchulainn and is at the same time the supreme but unknown and unseen God, the Great Herne, the warrior who fights the waves, the sinister Fool, the Queen, with an impotent husband, who awaits the coming of the lover who must first be sacrificed—the scope for the student of symbolism is almost unlimited.
Mr. Wilson has done his work with great in- dustry and great earnestness. He casts much illumination on such a baffling work as The Herne's Egg. Yeats, like Joyce, whom he re- sembled in no other way, was obsessed with the cyclical theory of history. Everything was on the way to becoming something else and, in a certain sense, everything was something else. Reality was something beyond 'all the choir of heaven and the furniture of earth.' The gross things of earth represented only something that the Self had to purge itself of, in a kind of spiritual game of snakes and ladders—until, it emerged into the pure Platonic heaven.
It is the fashion nowadays to ta}ce this kind of thing seriously. Blake has had his cosmogony and his cosmology resuscitated by Miss Kathleen Raine and others, and an elaborate kind of mysti- cal machine has been invented into which Blake's poems can be fed at one end, while their signifi- cance comes out at the other. Mr. Wilson, who acknowledges his debt to Miss Raine, is obviously out to do the same thing for Yeats. It is a pity that he has not used the many and striking parallels between the symbolism of Blake and that of Yeats which were carefully studied in a recent work by Miss Margaret Rudd. Yeats, like Blake, was a man who had developed a talent for which the society he lived in had no further use —poetry was as otiose in the new Ireland as engraving was in the England of the Industrial Revolution. In both cases, rejection by society led to the creation of private mystical worlds, in which the degradation of society by bourgeois standards of thought and morality was to be fol- lowed by catastrophes that were to herald the dawn of a new Heroic Age. For Yeats this led to a flirtation with Fascism, with which he combined a bitter belief that a true and noble Aristocracy (in fact a race of unlettered and greedy squireens), with which, on very feeble grounds, he identified himself, was being overthrown by a new genera- tion of money-grubbing shopkeepers.
The elaborate structure of mysticism that Yeats built from wide, if undirected, reading, and which Mr. Wilson so painstakingly analyses, is essential to an understanding of his poetry, but not in the way that mystical students of both Blake and Yeats would have us believe. John Butler Yeats put it well when he wrote, in a letter to his son in 1915: 'You will remind me that Blake was a mystic. I know that Blake's poetry is not intel- ligible without a knowledge of Blake's mystical doctrine. Yet mysticism was never the substance of his poetry, only its machinery. . . . The sub- stance of his poetry is himself, revolting and desiring. His mysticism was a make-believe, a sort of working hypothesis as good as another' Yeats was not a systematic thinker. Mr. Wilson can draw out leading ideas from his work—the reconciliation of opposites, death-in-life and life- in-death, the perns and the gyres that rule the destinies of the world, the spirit world that is the only real world, the purgation that the spirit must go through to achieve the Nirvana of true reality, the hero who dies a ritual death, only to be subsumed into a more valid world. This is the inescapable infrastructure of Yeats's poetry, but it hardly touches the poetry itself. It gives full- time occupation to the thesis-writer but is not of much concern to the ordinary reader, The whole edifice—though Mr. Wilson ap- proaches it with commendable piety—is decidedly gimcrack. Yeats never had a head for the sordid details of fact. It is related that on one occasion he harangued his fellow members of the Abbey Theatre Board on the beneficial effects of the Reformation, which had prepared the way for the Renaissance. Another member, a distinguished economist, expostulated mildly that, in fact, the Renaissance had come before the Reformation, only to be met with a magisterial denunciation: 'You are the kind of man that would bring down the Archangel Gabriel from Heaven with a brick.' His efforts to relate what little he knew of Old Irish literature to the scraps he had picked up of 'mystical' literature were equally devoid of any kind of factual basis. There is a remarkable• con- nection between Old Irish and Hindu mythology and literature, but it needs no Jungian collective unconscious or anima mundi to explain it. Yeats was, more than he realised, one of 'the last romantics.' His Celtic Ireland is in the tradition of Macpherson—it is a romantic creation of Gods and fighting men that has no relevance to the curious, uncouth society that one can dimly discern behind literary sources that are all Christian and sophisticated. •
Yeats's world was a private world, for all the seemingly universalising symbols it had. And it comes • alive for us whenever those faded and familiar myths suddenly catch fire and blaze angrily against the pastel background of legend. For Yeats was essentially an Angry Old Man. Whatever it was, his failure to find a place in the Irish Nationalist movement, his rejection by Maud Gonne, or the Steinach operation of 1934, he was as a poet at his best when he was swept by gusts of passion :
Moon-crazed, moon-blind, Fighting and wounded, wounded and fighting•
It accounts, probably, for the fact that, next to Coleridge, he is the most fragmentary of poets, that it is the sudden images, the lines and half- lines that come into the mind when Yeats is thought of. However consistent the academic critics may make his symbolism, his impact is much like that of the Ravenna mosaics, from which he drew the inspiration for his Byzantium poems—a sudden shock that leaves eddies and whirlpools of disquiet. From his lofty tower, the sage, immersed in Plotinus, catches disturbing glimpses, of : That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
* W. B. YEATS AND TRADITION. By F. A. C. Wilson. (Gollancz, 25s.)
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