W. B. Yeats

The Tower. By W. B. Yeats. (Macmillan. 6s.)

A raw years ago, turning his back on England, Mr. Yeats „ . sang:— " Much did I rage when young,

Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue

It speeds the parting guest."

But that is unfair both to himself and those who, like the present writer, are truly enslaved by his magic tongue, and are spiritual drunkards on his rare wine. To study his craftsman- ship, especially that of the later poems, is gradually to be lured away to the same willing and passionate bondage that tied the brain of Tristan standing in the prow of the King's_ barge.

Mr. Yeats carries us away into this world of his making, peopled by ghosts which we discover, after much pain and discipline; to be figures and essences of a coherent reality such as our material and over-thumbed shapes can never embody. We drink Platonic' draughts from the simple transparent glasses; whieh his hand has spun-;: but what a soul-disturbing wine it is. It is terrible ; it penetrates to our inmost being ; it makes the mature and settled heart break with all the pains of youth; and it drowns the careful logie and-politic of age in a newer.-:inebriation that is older than the piercing intuition-of childhood. It is a wine that " Bubbles upon the table. A ghost may come ;

For it is a ghost's right, His elenierit is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink frSia the whole wine."

How can the critic begin to talk about this quality which grows richer : and richer in Mr. Yeats's work as it matures ? One can only linger over it, half-angry because one finds the palate spoiled for former and favourite vintages, finds them now rough to the tongue and raucous.

One ponders over this thing, hopeless because of the massive intangibility of it, trying all the time to find some quality to which it is analogous, so that at least it may be given an historical relationship that will half-capture it. Is there not in Mr. Yeats resemblance to the early Dante, and his friends, especially Cavalcanti, those fierce zealots who made a passion out of scholarship, with the Rose and the Compasses for their love-tokens; so that when they sang of a woman she became the living- tissue of philosophy and the articulate form of contemporary science ? Mr. Yeats has ruled and directed, with • whaf agony only he can know, the stream of his blood info the more permanent lusts of the mind, making loss, denial, and personal yearnings into a treasury of beauty, the vintage of renunciation. Where, like Dante on the bridge, he has in the past burned at sight of the beloved, the same reso- lution has taught him a way of converting the dumb and hopeless pain into an ecstasy of thought, that real and external contemplation out of which alone the best poetry emerges :—

,!= For that pale breast and -lingering hand ieome -from a more dream-heavy land,

,A more dream-heavy hour than this ; And Iv.hen_you sigh from kiss to kiss hear-'white Beauty sighing, too,

For hours when all must fade like dew, All but the flarnes,, and deep on deep, one over throne Where_ in half sleep, Words upcmt. Mieir iron knees,

ronelY mystnries."

• noi4his 'the right poetic process, the conversion of ac*Ient1ilint_PeiScitid-experienee to the-timeless, and there- fore static, apotheosis of the Mind, where the perfect creative gesture is revealed, of which our own comings and goings, and even the motions of the stars, are but fragmentary jerkings ?

Plotinus wrote :— . _

" Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author bf all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky ; it is the, maker of the sun ; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythinie motionand it is a principle distinct from all these to -which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more- honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them, life or abandons them; but soul, since it can never abandon itself', is of eternal being."

. , .

This passage from the difficult philosopher has been singled

_ . . . .

out by Mr. Yeats, and I have, quoted it because it so perfectly .

expresses the conviction in which he because That is lib axiom, and he has goni hither and thither loOkinifor a tech; pique by which he can justify that faith by reason. AitrOlogy, the teachingSof the followers of the BlossOining Cross, Alcherny. with all the fudge and smells of .the darker activities- of the Renaissance world, ifaiOnic fore, esoteric Chifstianity, these and more channels he has-explored, exercising an ictiVe and subtle mind in the most tortuous mental athletics. TO quote, his own words :7--

•

" In pity for man's darkening thought . He walked that room and issued thence In Galilean turbulence ;

The Babylonian Starlight brought - A fabulous formless darkness in ; Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made Plato's tolerance in vain And vain the Dorie discipline."

But after a life of these grapplings with the intangible monsters of reality, whose limbs will not be spanned by the hands of the intellect, the poet emerges refined but unchanged, even more stark and simple in faith than when he began in all the pride of young manhood wearing the harness of successive masters. He writes to-day :— " And I declare my faith ;

I mock Plotinns' thought And cry in Plato's teeth, Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul, .

Aye, sun and moon and star, all, And further add to that That, being dead, we rise, Dream and so create Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace With learned Italian things And the proud stores of Greece, Poet's imaginings - And memories of love, Memories of the words of women, All these things whereof Man makes a superhuman Mirror-resenibling dream."

So he emerges from the obscurations of these systems built like Babels, by the mind -of man. He finds his spirit fir-ed from "silly over-subtle thought

- - - - Or anything--called-conscience. once," .

and discovers that he ends as he began, with- faith only in direct poetic action, the freedom of the imagination and the conviction that the poet should be the perfect man of action, direct, intuitive, graceful, and above all, sudden-!

RICHARD CHURCH.