Yeats and the Critical Pendulum

By T. R. HENN

IN this centenary year some interesting cross- currents are perceptible in the valuation and revaluation of Yeats; and they are, I think, a little different from those which one was aware of in 1947-48, when the confusion of the death-bed had ceased to mingle with the confusion of the larger war. There are various detractions. The first is based (as one would expect) on sociologi- cal grounds. Yeats's work is distanced, aristo- cratic, lacking contact with humanity; to others It is 'bardic.' Yeats is a fascist, expressing fascist Ideals, the writer of marching songs for O'Duffy and his blue-shirts; and this the well-worn theme of Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien. To others he has failed to express adequately the 'ideals' of Irish nationalism. He is a sentimental dreamer; this, perhaps, because the earlier poems are those that are most frequently anthologised, and the longer poems—such as 'Vacillation' and 'Under Ben Bulben'—do not lend themselves readily to excerpts., To others, again, the beliefs that are discerned behind the writing are wholly repug- nant; and they are presumed to include 'magic,' occult ritualism and various objectionable kinds of supra-naturalism. There appears to have de- veloped in Dublin (which has been subjected to a flood of reminiscences of varying relevance) a curious critical comparison with the poetry of 'A.E.'; to the disadvantage of Yeats. This Phenomenon may perhaps be explained by the fact that A.E.'s nationalism is impeccable, and his religion of the Elder Gods removed from the anti-clerical ironies of Yeats and Synge. It is Probable, too, that there were and are wounded feelings among the poets who were young in the 1930s at the eccentricities of personal taste Shown in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

All this is comprehensible. We may add the suggestion that the Yeatsian technique—of an immense but traditional range—the strong attack- ing rhythms are against the fashion. Fuyther, this is a poetry designed to be read aloud, dependent (like the prose of Synge and Lady Gregory) on certain subtleties of tone and accent not easily compassed by English professional readers (Day Lewis's interpretations are a brilliant exception). The Plays for Dancers, which are those most Often acted, demand a good deal of background knowledge. Nor do the poems lend themselves to the critical technique of close but isolated Verbal analysis. The greatest of them must be considered, I believe, in relation to the totality of the work; the other poems, the plays, the prose-writings (and in particular the preface to the Ellis-Yeats Blake) and finally A Vision and On the Boiler. If we do not read them in such a context, we become aware of a further current detraction, that of obscurity; in spite of, perhaps because of, the mass of exegetical work that has been produced in the last decade. Yet if we read them with a 'rich poetical memory,' most of the Obscurities dissolve; we should be aware of tradi- tional patterns for, say, the Progress of the Soul to clarify the Byzantium poems, and a .know- ledge of his rhetorical techniques can be helpful.

There remains, it is true, a residue of com- Plexity, but not, I think, in more than half a dozen poems, two of the Plays for Dancers, 'The Player Queen' and The Herne's Egg.' In dealing with those it is as well to look for the

impler explanations (which are often to be found in sources or in the draft metrical that Stall- Worthy and Parkinson have examined so fully) rather than in the more complex. We should be aware that there may well be a secondary 'underlay' from, say, Plutarch, Plotinus, Malory, Cornelius Agrippa, Taylor, for Yeats ploughed with many heifers; but it is all too easy to lose sight of the poems themselves. Thus The Black Tower,' one of the last poems, may have this 'underlay' (as Keith has pointed out) from Malory, but it is primarily a gesture against the new order in politics: Those banners come to bribe or threaten, Or whisper that a man's a fool

Who, when his own right king's forgotten, Cares what king sets up his rule

If he died long ago Why do you dread us so?

And here the second movement of `Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn' is relevant, together with the last stanza of The Statues,' while the difficulties in the third stanza of this last poem are made clear in the letter in which Yeats ex- plains the difference between the Romantic and Shakespearian conceptions of Hamlet.

We may turn again to the denigration of the values transmitted, on the grounds that they are concerned with the supra-natural, and with a cyclic view of history in the manner of Spengler (whom he seems to have anticipated in some degree). Both offered a framework for a dramatic apprehension of Unity of Being. His view of the supra-natural seems to have originated in the theosophical movements of the Nineties, and their many ramifications; so attractive to those who had 'cast off Christianity and Hebrew Old Clothes'; hence what Yeats called his 'fardel' of beliefs, the association with Madame Blavatsky, the Order of the Golden Dawn. But that tedious ritual, which we can still read in the four volumes of Regardie, accounts for a negligible part of his symbolism, no more than might have been , equally well derived from the sources to which his studies of Blake had sent him. The 'magical' or supra-natural aspects can, in fact, be reduced to certain simple propositions. There is a tradi- tional 'wisdom.' ranging from alchemy to folk- lore, which provided a link between, say, Agrippa and Vi.sions and Beliefs of the West of Ireland.

Within that framework, the dead, individually or in this communion, influence or aid the living, and may be helped by them in turn; they could on occasion appear to them, either as ghosts or in visions. In the progress of the soul the dead might 'dream back' the life-span until they had recovered 'radical innocence': the knots or ob- stacles in that progress might give rise to a ritual visionary enactment of crime or suffering, so that the Noh plays appear to support the themes of 'The Dreaming of the Bones,' Calvary,"Pur- gatory,' and are relevant to the fourth stanza of 'Byzantium.' When innocence has been re- covered, some form of reincarnation is envisaged, and in certain circumstances the soul might choose its new shape. Dreams and visions could be significant, and are of the nature of the medimval Somnium Coeleste: they might be stimulated or even caused by the use of visual symbols as well as by invocation or meditation. Visions of this kind might be archetypal in their significance, or suggest some immediate tem- poral event. History and personality are both seen as a series of complicated interlocked Pat- terns in terms of cyclic progressions based on the phases of the moon; and provided material for those metaphysical alignments, those dramatic correspondances, in which he delighted. For events, cultures, personalities converged in myth and history; converging ultimately towards the perception of a unity of being.

These considerations seem relevant to some of the kinds of statement he is making. I suppose that any selection of his most important poems would include the two 'Byzantiums,"The Second Coming,' Leda and the Swan,' Among School Children,' and the series called 'The Tower' and 'Vacillation.' Close behind them would come 'A Woman Old and Young,' Ribh at the Tomb . . .,' the 'Crazy Jane' poems; after, one is hard put to choose. Among them we are aware of the perpetual division into Dante's triad of love, war and death. The love poems assert a Donne-like ambivalence, its pain, adoration, ecstasy; accompanied by a ceremony (as also of friendship, birth and death), in the sense of Chapman's Time and all-states-ordering Ceremony.

The values are traditional, in love and in. the art of living; its emphasis on 'ancient lineaments,' the 'old faces' at Coole, the pride of race in the dying ladies. That sense of tradition was to Yeats an essential aspect of the vision of a unified Ireland. He continued to assert it (as in 'The Gyres') when it had clearly passed beyond recall. It was natural to one who had envied the great houses, such as Coole and Lissadell, envied their hospitality, and built a myth about them.

The statement contains a search for unity; sometimes Wordsworthian (as in 'Stream and Sun at Glendalough'), sometimes through the recurrent patterns of religions and myths. It con- cerns, as does much Christian teaching, the 'wavering and uncertain thoughts' on the rela- tionship between life and death, the progress of the soul, the mystery and exaltation of tragedy; so that the 'dark tomb-painter' is justified by a mass of speculation in many literatures, the many bobbins of thread to explore the labyrinth.

It contains the experience of, and infinite medi- tation on, a war of liberation, small enough and perspicuous enough to be the object of a total view. In it 'a terrible beauty' was born; yet 'that crazy fight,' with its cruelties, contradictions, ambivalences, became not only the culmination of three centuries of rebellion, but an archetypal emblem of the fertility and the mystery of war. Yet—might war not, one day, unify the country? 'Desire some just war . . ."On the Boiler' is a violent and erratic and revealing document; we would give, much to have had another number a year later. In his own complex self-dramati- sations the Swordsman, 'though with reluctance,' had repudiated the Saint. It is a harmless enough imagination for those who have not been soldiers.

What remains? A poetry that is, as he wished it to be, 'distinguished and lonely': concerned with traditional values set in matrices of great complexity; employing vast resources of images and their resonances in a way for which there is no recent precedent in poetry. Yeats is beyond imitation or parody; yet a certain infec- tion of nobility has passed to some of his suc- cessors. We know, through his vast body of work, his letters, his criticism, more of him than we know of any other great poet. To study the fragments from his workshop is an exercise and a discipline in poetics.

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence.

There is much that may be found to blame, and the critical pendulum will swing to and fro for a long time; but it is not easy to suggest a poet who is his equal.