SOURCE: "Re-envisioning Yeats's 'The Second Coming': Desmond O'Grady and the Charles River," in Learning the Trade: Essays on W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Deborah Fleming, Locust Hill Press, 1993, pp. 135-47.

[In the following essay, Moloney reads Desmond O'Grady's poem "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River" as a response to the ideas expressed in "The Second Coming."]

In "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River" (Contemporary Irish Poetry 260-62), the narrator, Desmond O'Grady as a young Harvard graduate student, engages in conversation one April afternoon with John Kelleher, professor of Celtic Studies. Nearby runs the gentle but polluted Charles River, whose meandering course assumes, in these stanzas, apocalyptic dimensions: as O'Grady asserts in the poem's first line, the Charles "reaps here like a sickle." The image recalls both the sickle-shaped curve the river makes as it flows past the campus and the tendency of that curve to "harvest" floating debris. The phrase also alludes to a larger harvest, in which death acts the role of "the grim reaper."

This dramatically charged image resides at the heart of O'Grady's setting, in turn the unequivocal center of the poem. Indeed, each succeeding stanza contributes further details to the development of the initial scene. Stanza two introduces us to "the ivy wall,/The clock towers, pinnacles, the pillared university yard," and the adjacent Protestant cemetery. In stanza three, we learn that student crews are rowing down the river; stanza four focuses on "a leafing tree" rooted at the edge of the water; and stanza five mentions that "beyond" can be seen "some scraper, tower or ancestral house's gable end." Stanza six anchors its action "there by the blood-loosed tide"; and in the seventh stanza "The saffron sun sets." Taken together, such details increase our sense that this conversation between professor and student is actually occurring at a particular place and moment. More meaningfully, though, O'Grady's images—remarkably resonant and often, as we shall see, deliberately opposed to one another—stimultaneously assert the poem's challenge to Yeats's prophetic pronouncements in "The Second Coming."

David Perkins notes that largely because Yeats's "achievement and reputation were too great and too much in everyone's mind" (474), he actually had "relatively little" influence on other Irish writers of this century. More accurate, however, is Robert Garratt's assessment that "so essential was the role Yeats played in determining the direction of modern Irish poetry that those poets who followed him, try as they would, could neither ignore him nor escape his influence" (16). Indeed, Garratt's Modern Irish Poetry is largely a study of the various responses of post-Yeatsian poets to the insistent, imperious presence of "the great Yeats, whose long and prolific literary career changed modern literature and made Ireland a land of imagination for readers all over the world" (17). Certainly, even Perkins concedes that while its style may not be Yeatsian, "the work of contemporary Irish poets frequently alludes to specific phrases of Yeats or to his attitudes and opinions" (474). Still, Perkins groups Desmond O'Grady with Joyce, Beckett, Denis Devlin, and Thomas MacGreevy as "Irish poets who lived abroad and adopted international styles" (474-75), and one might therefore expect O'Grady to affect indifference to the earlier poet. Instead, O'Grady invites deliberate comparison with Yeats in his frequently anthologized poem set by the Charles River—and patently validates Garratt's thesis in the process.

Should we be surprised? Yeats himself, after all, did not choose to ignore his own predecessors. Indeed, Harold Bloom's study of Yeats's Romanticism devotes a full five chapters to questions of influence; the pervasive influence of Blake and Shelley is "studied throughout" (vii). Particularly relevant for our analysis here is Bloom's comment that

As much as any other poem by Yeats, "The Second Coming" bears its direct relation to Blake and Shelley as an overtly defining element in its meaning. The poem quotes Blake and both echoes and parodies the most thematically vital passage in Shelley's most ambitious poem, Prometheus Unbound. (Yeats 317)

Specifically, as first pointed out by Margaret Rudd (119, noted in turn by George Bornstein 202, 207), Urizen's "stony sleep" in The Book of Urizen (III.57) reappears in "The Second Coming" as the sphinx's "stony sleep" (19). Even more tellingly, Bloom demonstrates that Shelley's "central insight" (320) in Prometheus Unbound—

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill

(I.626-629)

—is echoed in Yeats's poem: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" (187).

As Bloom notes, however, what for Shelley was "an insight of the Left. . . Yeats proceeds to appropriate for the Right" (320). "His mind," Bloom explains further,

[was] on the Russian Revolution and its menace, particularly to aristocrats. . . . But unlike his Romantic precursors, Yeats is on the side of the counter-revolutionaries, and his apocalyptic poem begins by seeing the intervention against revolution as being too late to save the ceremoniously innocent. (318)

It would be a neat twist to announce now that O'Grady re-adopts the cause of the left in yet another rewriting of the original Shelley: would that it were quite so simple.

Set side by side, Yeats's rewriting of Shelley and O'Grady's reworking of Yeats do provide the most direct point of comparison between "The Second Coming" and "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River." Consider, first, these lines from "The Second Coming":

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

(187)

Compare them, next, with their transformation in "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River":

Locked in their mute struggle there by the blood-loosed tide
The two abjure all innocence, tear down past order—
The one calm, dispassionate, clearsighted, the other
Wild with ecstasy, intoxicated, world mad.
Surely some new order is at hand;
Some new form emerging where they stand.

(261-2)

The echoes here of Yeats's well-known lines naturally also adapt Shelley's. More importantly, O'Grady's lines suggest a fundamentally different approach to "apocalypse" than does Yeats's poem.

Perkins may define O'Grady as working outside the traditions of modern Irish poetry, but even O'Grady takes on the master, countering Yeatsian transcendence with echoes of the very language—and techniques, as we shall see—Yeats used to create it. Indeed, both "The Second Coming" and "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River" contemplate a new world order, but with a crucial difference. Where Yeats prophesies the demise of the ruling classes and an age of horrifying violence, O'Grady celebrates personal realization, awareness, and responsibility—for the historically marginalized as well as for the elite, for the left and for the right. More precisely, O'Grady rejects Yeats's vision of a Second Coming, the superimposition of a new historical gyre upon an old, to favor perennially renewable personal vision, as available to the peasant as to the aristocrat. To understand the exact nature of this challenge to Yeats, it becomes helpful now to examine the quality and purpose of the tension generated in the poem among sets of sharply antithetical images.

As in the likening of the Charles River to a sickle, O'Grady's images are often multi-layered. Even more frequently they are also at odds with each other and thus embody the struggle in which Kelleher and his student are caught. In fact, tension and conflict, in my estimate, are the primary source of the poem's rhetorical energy. For example, in the second stanza, the scene to the west is contrasted with the scene to the east, and the cemetery dead vie in our imagination with the living Irish farmer. In stanza three, student rowing crews are juxtaposed against the memory of O'Grady's father on the Shannon, just as John Kelleher's lecturing is set against the memory of earlier history lessons at home in Limerick; and in stanza four, the water and the land are linked in hostile partnership: "The secret force/Of the water worries away the live earth's under-surface" (261). The oxymoronic phrase, "dying conceptual motion," chosen to epitomize the wave's erosive power, also epitomizes the poem's thematic preoccupation with antitheses. The poem is, after all, a record of a conflict between an aging professor's and a young student's views of the past, one contender "dispassionate," if not "lackfing] all conviction," the other "full of passionate intensity," to characterize both using Yeats's counterpart phrases.

Such a pointed interest in opposites is, of course, yet another invocation of Yeats, who, believing with Blake that "without contraries is no progression" (A Vision; see Olney 86-124), muses in poem after poem on the opposing energies of "nature and art, youth and age, body and soul, passion and wisdom, beast and man, creative violence and order, revelation and civilization, poetry and responsibility, and time and eternity" (Perkins 596). O'Grady's knack for mimicry, however, is subordinated in "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River" to a much more intriguing rhetorical purpose, a purpose brought into clearest focus by an analysis of the conflicts pervading the religious imagery in the poem.

The Charles River is described approvingly in stanza one as "living water," and more neutrally but still with respect in stanza four as a "secret force," as well as dismissively in stanza five as a "bitch river" and menacingly in stanza six as a "blood-loosed tide." The Atlantic itself, into which the Charles flows, is, we learn in stanza two, "godless." If "living water" did not so strongly imply a vital, life-giving, spiritual sustenance, reconciling the remaining four descriptive phrases would not be so difficult. One could acknowledge, for example, that "secret force" might suggest, on one level, a classified military unit, or at least an unspecified form of strong and insidious power. "Living water," on the other hand, calls to mind connotations of eternal sustenance and rebirth, certainly to include the Christian rite of baptism; indeed, the phrase can even allude to Christ himself. What is so positively charged a phrase doing in such close conjunction to the more negative descriptions of the river and ocean?

Assuming, as I am, that such an odd juxtaposition does not represent simple Yeatsian parody, the puzzle is further compounded by the poem's seasonal setting. The action of the poem, of course, occurs during spring, the traditional month of resurrection, yet every contemporary poet knows also that "April is the cruellest month" (Eliot 63), and O'Grady embraces this dichotomy. It is April in his poem, yet the sun "sweeps flat as ice," and although "the spring air . . . thaws," it is "still/Lean from winter." Moreover, the thawing graveyard clay and "harvesting" river of stanza one actually host a resurrection in stanza seven: "The great dim tide of shadows from the past/Gathers for the end—the living and the dead"; but the resurrection occurs in darkness, processioning shadows among stars. Although the poem's final, climactic line, "All shadows procession in an acropolis of lights," commands rhythmic majesty, the fact remains that shadows are processioning—and shadows, especially a "great dim tide of shadows," however majestic, connote the solemnity and gloom of Hades. Just as spring in the poem is not unequivocally warm and life-affirming, resurrection in the poem is not unquestionably good.

Another disturbing religious crosscurrent emerges
when
Overhead, far from the wave, a dove
White gull heads inland.

Of course, the dove is a traditional symbol of peace, innocence, and gentleness, as well as a widely recognized emblem of the Holy Ghost; the appearance of the word dove in its prominent position at the end of line three is clearly designed to elicit such associations. However, this emphasis is immediately undercut by enjambing "dove/White gull," and the reader realizes with some disappointment that it is a gull, not a dove, that flies inland—a scavenger bird, not Noah's harbinger of hope.

Tension is heightened, then, in stanza four when the ominous shadow of the "leafing tree," "With all its arms, crawls on the offal-strewn meadow." Certainly, the shadow's steady lengthening indicates much more than the passage of time: the tree is also the cross (both crucifix and burden) of traditional Christianity, and its shadow falls over the age, slowly advancing like a riflecarrying soldier crawling across a battlefield.

What purpose is served by such religious allusions and images as these—including the explicit, venerable-in-this-context, Protestant past of Cambridge and the implicit, plebeian-in-this-context, Catholic heritage shared by O'Grady, Kelleher, and the ploughing Irish peasant, their "common [both shared and proletarian] brother"? The answer to this question, I must emphasize, is central to the poet's vision; the key to the answer is the poem's last stanza.

No line in the poem is more straightforward than the line, "All force is fruitful. All opposing powers combine." Neither is another line more weighted with meaning. Here O'Grady declares that the conflicts he depicts in the poem like a fervent Yeatsian apprentice—conflicts between west and east, the dead and the living, memory and the present, water and land, youth and age, water-as-life and water-as-destruction, spring and winter, dove and gull, tree and cross, Protestantism and Catholicism, aristocracy and peasantry—merge, unite, combine, and do so with O'Grady's blanket endorsement that "All force is fruitful." But can one stanza in which direct statements of resolution are made resolve six stanzas of images at war with each other? Perhaps not, if there existed no rich literary tradition for O'Grady to build upon, no Blake, Shelley, Yeats—or Joyce—to whom to add his voice. Such voices, of course, do exist.

"All force is fruitful. All opposing powers combine" is surely a restatement of Blake's "Without contraries is no progression"; recognizing this, we are at once in touch with the familiar existential discussion about the necessity of opposites, not to mention the Jung-prescribed need to integrate the shadow within our own natures. Even so, if O'Grady were to rely solely on this restatement to resolve the ambiguities of the poem's religious images, the conclusion would be disappointingly weak; I would argue, in consequence, that there is no resolution in the poem. In actuality, though, the line is integrated carefully within a final stanza whose striking images and lyrical majesty transcend the conflicts at hand and conclude the poem on a powerfully unifying note:

Dusk. The great dim tide of shadows from the past
Gathers for the end—the living and the dead.
All force is fruitful. All opposing powers combine.
Aristocratic privilege, divine sanction, anarchy at last
Yield the new order. The saffron sun sets.
All shadows procession in an acropolis of lights.

In "The Second Coming," Yeats's pronouncement that "Surely some revelation is at land;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand" is followed immediately by his vision of the rough, sphinx-like beast slowly approaching Bethlehem. In O'Grady's poem, his own pronouncement that "some new order is at hand;/Some new form emerging where they stand" immediately precedes a great gathering of shadows, "the living and the dead." This is perhaps the ultimate antithetical pair, at least for Yeats, for whom "the ultimate antithesis is that between antithesis itself, as the moral structure of human existence, and a realm or state of being in which all antitheses are annihilated" (Perkins 596).

Another echo in these lines, however, deepens their richness and underscores their ability to reconcile the conflicts of preceding stanzas. In the concluding scene of James Joyce's "The Dead," as Gabriel Conroy lies quietly in his hotel room contemplating that "one by one they [friends, family, acquaintances] were all becoming shades" (223), he himself experiences a powerful form of vision:

. . . he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. .. . the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling (223).

The final, climactic paragraph of the story, then, describes the soft fall of snow over all of Ireland, "like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" (224). The snow of Joyce's conclusion is absent from the last stanza of "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River," but both scenes link the living with the dead. Apparently, both authors are comfortable with the interdependence of the two forms of entities, perhaps because interdependence can represent a particularly fruitful form of interaction between opposites.

The Joyce passage, certainly, has generated markedly divergent interpretations. Some critics hear in it only a death knell for Gabriel Conroy; "others read the conclusion as a moment when Gabriel is gifted with the selfrecognition and selfless awareness of all humanity denied to the other characters in Dubliners" (Scholes and Litz 303). I personally am persuaded by Florence Walzl, who argues for the validity of both interpretations. In her view, the ambiguity of the passage is utterly intentional. "Every image in it," she writes,

is a symbol, and since each symbol is multi-faceted in reflecting earlier ambiguities, the epiphany allows for either a life or death interpretation. Paradoxical images of arrest and movement, darkness and light, cold and warmth, blindness and sight, are used in this conclusion to recall both the central paralysis-death theme of Dubliners as a collection and the rebirth-life theme of 'The Dead" as a narrative. (431 )

According to Walzl, in order to achieve this complex rhetorical purpose, Joyce deliberately creates paradoxical pairs of images. For example, "in some contexts [Joyce] equates the east with dawn and life and the west with sunset and death, but in other contexts [he] associates the east with the old and sterile and the west with the new and vital" (433).

An equal complexity operates in "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River." In stanza two the Irish peasant is ploughing, "East, over the godless Atlantic." East typically suggests dawn, awakening, resurrection, images associated with viable Christianity; yet, eastward also lies an ocean which is "godless," a term which defies religion. In fact, each of O'Grady's positive religious images is undercut by their darker, religion-defying contraries. The living water becomes a "bitch river," the dove is in fact a gull, and the shadow of the cross crawls menacingly over the two men's conversation, aware somehow that its influence is threatened. The resurrection itself is godless, irreligious. And along with the aristocratic privilege which O'Grady did not inherit (even if he has qualified for a Harvard education) and the anarchy loosed in "The Second Coming," divine sanction (far too often a weapon in traditional Christianity) is superseded in stanza seven by the new order immediately at hand. Religion is superseded in O'Grady's vision of new order.

O'Grady's vision, then, is steeped in irony. Indeed, how could so momentous an event as the ushering in of a new world order be preceded by a mere conversation, even a significant conversation, on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge? Admittedly, O'Grady has endowed the incident with cosmic ramifications by describing it as an "ageless," "mute struggle" initiated "as in some ancient dance." Even so, one strains to visualize a new order ushered in by an incident introduced with a statement like "Walking, John/Kelleher and I talk on the civic lawn." The lines, "Surely some new order is at hand;/Some new form emerging where they stand," result from a professor and student's dismantling of "past order." The irony here satirizes the whole idea of resurrection and religious rebirth into a new world. Really, is it a new world being ushered in? Is a Second Coming presaged?

The answer is, "No." The poem instead recalls the setting for a moment of heightened personal awareness for a young student "mad" for change—and his acceptance, even if only temporary, of personal responsibility for that change as he "abjuref[s] all innocence." The "new form" to replace "Aristocratic privilege, divine sanction, [and] anarchy" is an order as personal to the poet as his struggle with Kelleher while they walk on Harvard's civic lawn. The vision is not Yeats's vision of an apocalyptic Second Coming, but an intensely personal realization, "selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time" (Portrait 212), and, like Gabriel Conroy's, "initiated by a moment of deep, if localized sympathy" (Loomis 417). For O'Grady, this is the only valid order, order which can be renewed not only every two thousand years, but as perennially as the seasons themselves renew and as often as a young man conflicts with an old.

Despite, then, the profound Yeatsian echoes in the poem, O'Grady ultimately aligns himself with Joyce—with whom he shares not only his early Catholic education, but his need as well to leave Ireland and adopt an international outlook. In a way, in fact, O'Grady—with Joyce—represents the achievement of a class of people whose insensitivities and materialism the great Protestant Ascendancy poet railed against and for whom he predicted only disaster. Indeed, if "The Second Coming" prophesies the unfortunate demise of the world's aristocracy with all the customs and ceremonious privileges Yeats so openly valued, then Joyce and O'Grady—in particular the latter with his humble Limerick beginnings—represent in many ways the new men whom Yeats feared. Need Yeats have been so wary? O'Grady may invert the Yeatsian vision, appropriating Yeats's own methods in the process, but he does so with an aplomb that Yeats himself could not have failed to acknowledge. If, in O'Grady's new order, primacy is given to the common man, surely Yeats would have admitted that this common man, at least, deserves it.

"Professor Kelleher and the Charles River" is a vivid, memorable depiction of Desmond O'Grady's version of "new order." His vision emerges out of conflicting images which embody struggle, religious undercutting which vivifies the need at the helm for something other than traditional Christianity, and irony which pushes for the validity of personal experience and insight. This vision may not be as powerful or far-reaching as Yeats's in "The Second Coming," but it is not meant to be. O'Grady's vision is a response to a contemporary, post-Yeatsian world, and although "Professor Kelleher and the Charles River" might be said to chronicle the demise of Christianity that Yeats predicted in his more famous poem, the slouching beast whose reign Yeats also prophesied is conspicuously absent from O'Grady's stanzas. The two poets thus agree that the old ways are coming to an end, but they diverge sharply on the question of what comes next. I for one believe that O'Grady's emphasis on the validity of individual epiphany, particularly in a post-modern world where one can do no better than perennially create new personal order, represents, ultimately, the more relevant response.

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