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Yeats: Violence, Tragedy, Mutability

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SOURCE: "Yeats: Violence, Tragedy, Mutability," in Bucknell Review, Vol. XVII, No. 3, December 1969, pp. 1-17.

[In the following excerpt, Oates asserts that the violent events and "farfetched and grotesque" images of Yeats's work are a result of his view of life as a dynamic chaos that needs to be shaped and controlled through art.]

In his last poems Yeats moves toward a contemplative and dispassionate assertion of the joy that can arise out of tragedy, and the poem that ends his career, "Under Ben Bulben," leaves us with the image of a cold eye looking upon life and death equally, unmoved, like the golden bird of "Sailing to Byzantium" that sings equally of what is past, or passing, or to come. Yet the jagged tonalities of the last poems will not be reconciled by the theoretical claim for a dispassionate unity, just as certain poems, examined individually, will not support their apparent themes. Yeats' genius lies not in his ability to hammer his multiple thoughts into unity, but rather in his faithful accounting of the impossibility—which may lead one to the edge of madness—of bringing together aesthetic theory and emotional experience. His final work is characterized by irony, but more importantly by an incomplete blend of the "tragic" and the "mutable." What is tragic is intended to transcend or insome way justify the suffering Yeats or his legendary personae have experienced, and takes its most frequent immortality in the shape of a work of art; what is mutable is all that is left out, all that will not fit in—in short, life itself, the material of art itself….

In "Prometheus Unbound" (1932) Yeats states surprisingly that it is not Blake, after all, who had most shaped his life, but Shelley: a visionary, a 'psychic' being, but an unconverted man. And he speaks of Balzac changing men's lives, saving Yeats himself from the obsessive pursuit of absolute and external beauty which, to strike a balance, would have required "hatred as absolute." His art has been carefully imagined, carefully worked and reworked; legendary, archetypal beings have been given new life in order to transform the secular age into something approaching holiness, or at any rate into an age which can, through the study of Yeats' monumental verse, appreciate the passing of holiness. Yet the effort seems out of proportion to the primary, fundamental argument of the poems. For they are continually dehumanizing their subject even to the point of thwarting the demands of a gay tragedy in "The Gyres" Yeats insists upon the joyousness of tragedy, he insists that those witnesses to the modern chaos look on and laugh "in tragic joy," without signs or tears:

For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word "Rejoice!"

The refrain "What matter?" is set against the vision of a world in which "irrational streams of blood are staining earth," where "Empedocles has thrown all things about." The soul of man has coarsened, approaching the darkness of nothing; yet the gyres will bring round all things once again, disinterring the dead. In "Lapis Lazuli," which Yeats believed to be one of his most successful poems, the theme of Nietzschean gaiety is continued. We must believe that our sufferings are enacted upon a tragic stage, and that our human gaiety transfigures "all that dread." The poem ends, like the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with a contemplation of a work of art, the Chinamen carved in lapis lazuli, whom Yeats imagines as staring down upon the tragic scene of temporal life with "ancient, glittering eyes" that are gay.

The basic difficulty with this position is its abstracting of the human, its forcing upon animate life a certain theoretic and ultimately epistemological shape. For no matter what aesthetic position we finally give to Yeats, the very fact of his various responses to formal unity and "profane perfection" will contradict it. Thus these poems, insisting upon an impersonal logic that transcends human suffering, can be read in the context of certain other poems and plays as ironic statements, partial statements, to be qualified or questioned by the poet. So long as the world is conceived dynamically one cannot come to rest, either in a piece of lapis lazuli or in a formal, completed tragedy. Like Wallace Stevens, who inherited many of Yeats' preoccupations with the duality of man's imaginative response to the world, Yeats knows that "We keep coming back and coming back / To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns / That fall upon it out of the wind."

Approaching death inspires the poet to a frenzy of self-fabrication. He will "make his soul," compelling it to take on the colossal tragic shapes of Lear and Cuchulain, and the "second-best" shape of the wild old wicked man In the form of a pilgrim he journeys to the purgatorial world of the dead, only to be told in reply to his questions Fol de rol de rolly O. The knowledge available to man, and which becomes in turn the knowledge that the poet will give back to the world, is nonsense, verbal nonsense—Fol de rol de rolly O. The formal perfection of tragedy is now lost. Ironically, the poet understands in "The Municipal Gallery Revisited," in the very place of formal images and "deep-rooted things," that the mathematical movement of the gyres does not promise any human salvation, any human meaning at all. It is the earth itself that is lost:

And I am in despair that time may bring
Approve patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.

Two difficult poems, "The Statues" and "News for the Delphic Oracle," offer us twin and warring interpretations of life. What is reality? Yeats' central question, his maddening question, deals with the extension and limitation of reality, man's power, man's will—for as he states arrogantly in "The Tower," "Death and life were not / Till man made up the whole, / Made lock, stock and barrel / Out of his bitter soul"—in confrontation with the silence of nothingness, the ultimate chaos which has no meaning and is not concerned with meaning. Not human evil, but inhuman chaos, is for Yeats as it was for Shakespeare the supreme horror. Therefore, what lies beyond the human imagination, being horrible, must be constantly given a shape, "named."

In "The Statues" we are told of artists, men that "with a mallet or a chisel" modelled the speculative philosophers' calculations, and "put down / All Asiatic vague immensities." It is not knowledge that redeems, for "knowledge increases unreality"; it is, rather, the power of the creative imagination, whether working in stone or with words or with certain noble men of Ireland that is important. The switch to "We Irish" is surprising, even in a poem by Yeats, since the poem has dealt with so vast a landscape, and signals the poet's ironically arrogant conclusion to the metaphysical problem he has brought up. Born into an ancient race but thrown "upon a filthy modern tide," the Irish can yet find it possible to climb to their proper level in order to "trace the lineaments of a plummet-measured face"—that is, to read with their fingers the shape of a heroic face or personality, to trace in the darkness an archetypal vision that will redeem them, since passion is equal to creation: "passion could bring character enough," and brings the living to press their lips against a work of art, as if it were indeed living. Here the living, the Irish, are to remake themselves in the image of a colossal vision. It is formlessness that is to be conquered, a climbing out of the spawning fury of the modern world. [Peter Ure sees the poem as embodying the "God" or force or "dramatist" of history, history being like the image of the dancer—its soul of meaning one with its body of accomplishment. See Yeats, 1963.]

"News for the Delphic Oracle," however, imagines a pastoral dimension where all the "golden codgers" lay, old men refined of the mire and fury of human blood, where the dew itself is silver. Everyone sighs, in this paradise of completed forms, of stilled gestures. Plotinus, having swum the buffeting seas of "The Delphic Oracle Upon Plotinus" (Words for Music Perhaps), now stretches and yawns. These "Innocents" relive their ancient patterns, "dreaming back through their lives," until the burden of their humanity is finally thrown off. Like the spirits of "Byzantium," they have achieved "death-in-life," "life-in-death." But the third stanza focusses upon the union of Peleus and Thetis, the union of bodies and of beautiful parts of bodies. Thetis' "limbs are delicate as an eyelid" and Peleus' eyes are blinded with tears. The "intolerable" music of Pan falls upon them and suddenly the poem breaks into a confusion of jarring images, of finite, joyous, profane parts that contradict the world of golden forms:

Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.

The poem ends with this violent activity, an activity that hardly seems willed by human beings so much as by parts of bodies, the frenzy of the flesh one with the foaming sea. It is a stunning reversal of the poem's opening, where the "golden" people lay sighing in their completion. Their choir of love with its "sacred laurel crowns" and its Pythagorean beauty contrasts feebly with the music of Pan, felt as intolerable.

That the static resolution of human complexity cannot be sustained is examined in the famous Byzantium poems, the "Byzantium" of The Winding Stair taken as a qualification of "Sailing to Byzantium" of The Tower. For here purgation effects its magic only at night, when the images of the day recede. Though a golden bird can crow like the cocks of Hades (imagined as real birds?), it is curiously enough "embittered" by the moon—though why the miraculous bird should be embittered by the changing, subjective moon, since it is immune to mortality, is puzzling. And the poem itself ends with images that yet "fresh images beget," the rage and wilderness of the foaming sea, which no amount of human artifice can transform into art. So the poem works itself out, like "News for the Delphic Oracle," as a deeply ironic turning upon itself, a drama of the challenge of two opposing dimensions, whose tragic irony is visible only to the poet himself. The dialectic is grasped only by the poet: the world of artifice is immune to change, and does not exist; the world of nature is immune to abstraction, and exists only in dying generations, without control or consciousness.

Therefore Yeats achieves, even through his intensely autobiographical and confessional poems, a rendering of the self's basic impersonality, at the point at which it enters art. Here he finds, to his distress, the very negation of the younger Yeats. For at the core of his mature art is the puzzled insistence upon the formlessness of all substance, and the insubstantial nature of all form—in short, a vision of human tragedy destroyed by mutability. It is no wonder that events in his work are violent, his images farfetched and grotesque. Very little has been said about the madness of some of Yeats' images. His superhuman Cuchulain will die at the hands of a beggar, for twelve pennies, and will find himself transformed into something wildly antithetical to his soul:

Cuchulain is answered only by the senile muttering of the Blind Man, who is trying to behead him. When Cuchulain dies he dies into song, the singing of a bird; his symbolic death "dies" us into the modern age, its music being that of some Irish Fair. A Street-Singer tells of what the harlot sang to the beggar-man, recalling "what centuries have passed" since these heroic men lived. Cuchulain himself wakes in the poem of 1939, "Cuchulain Comforted," where the "violent and famous" man must sew his shroud in the company of convicted cowards who have died in fear. He becomes one of them, he who in life had been their opposite; he sings with them, changing his throat into the throat of a bird, for only in such profound humiliation can his life grow sweeter. It is a conclusion like that of The Herne's Egg—ironic and ambiguous. "I think profound philosophy must come from terror," Yeats says in the essay-broadcast, "Modern Poetry," of 1936. Whatever geometrical structure he has imagined for man and history, whatever fate appears to control individuals, it is ultimately the abyss that silences all questions:

An abyss opens under our feet; inherited convictions, the pre-suppositions of our thoughts … drop into the abyss. Whether we will or no we must ask the ancient questions: Is there reality anywhere? Is there a God? Is there a Soul? We cry with the Indian Sacred Book: "They have put a golden stopper into the neck of the bottle; pull it! Let out reality!"(Essays and Introductions)

"The Man and the Echo" is another of Yeats' poems about death. Intensely personal, almost desperate, it shouts its secret in a place of stone:

All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the questions right.

He questions his personal role in history, his effect upon certain people's lives. To what extent was he responsible for Irishmen shot by the English? (Auden's famous line in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "poetry makes nothing happen," is a curiously simplistic resolution of Yeats' specific doubts; one of the crucial points about Yeats' life and work is that poetry does make something happen.) All seems to him evil; simply to die would be to shirk "the spiritual intellect's great work." What is desired is a single, clear view that arranges an entire life. He wants to stand in judgment on his own soul, yet he ends by asking, "What do we know but that we face / One another in this place?"; and even this beautiful, helpless thought is destroyed by the sudden plundering of nature:

Up there some hawk or owl has struck,
Dropping out of sky or rock.
A stricken rabbit is crying out,
And its cry distracts my thought.

Understanding himself a great poet, having conceived of himself in a great tradition, Yeats is nevertheless distracted by so commonplace and brutal an event—it is reality itself, the impersonal and gratuitous, the ever-changing, the unheroic, that cheats him of a final form. A violent gesture is the final gesture, simply because it silences all that has come before. Violence will disarm the tragic player, whether it rises out of his own body or out of the body of nature. It reminds us of the quiet, gentle ending of the ambitious and proud "The Tower," when Yeats' death will seem no more than the clouds of the sky at twilight "Or a bird's sleepy cry / Among the deepening shades."

The most the poet can hope for is a kind of equanimity with the powerful chaos of nature. In "High Talk" and "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Yeats dismisses his creations as "all metaphor," "those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, / Lion and woman and the Lord knows what."

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.
All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.
("High Talk")

Here the poet's ego manages a difficult balance with the prodigious and unthinking forms of nature. The barnacle goose has the magical power to break loose the dawn, which will take place regardless of the poet's words; the poet's triumph is to "stalk on" through the "terrible novelty of light," keeping his own place, his own proper dark, while the sea-horses—perfect images of energy, like the nymphs and satyrs in the foam—laugh at the breaking of a new day. The poet's activity, his stalking, is a kind of animal activity; he must imitate the animals in order to partake of their power. [It is difficult to interpret the poem as a humanistic work, imagining the poet successfully imposing his will upon the cosmos itself. See B. L. Reid, William Butler Yeats: The Lyric of Tragedy, 1961. Reid sees the poet's passion stretching until it "dominates fate and creates its own world."]

One of Yeats' most beautiful poems is "The Circus Animals' Desertion." Here he confesses that his own "animals" are no more than emblematic; they have not the power of real animals, real energy. Their existence has come from the poet's own bitterness, his starvation for life, the dreams that resulted from his own deprivation. "Heart-mysteries" give rise to dreams that, in turn, enchant the poet, until he dreams several moves from reality—he himself betraying the mighty Cuchulain, for it is ultimately the symbolic Cuchulain that engrosses Yeats, his own creation: "Players and painted stage took all my love, / And not those things that they were emblems of."

The poet is able to make such images masterful and complete, simply because they are images and not reality. He creates them out of the "purity" of his mind, having refined them out of their grosser origins. Thus, the sublimative poetic process is seen to be a betrayal of nature, or an inability to deal with nature itself. Yeats' statement of 1900 (in "The Symbolism of Poetry") that "Solitary men make and unmake mankind, and even the world itself, for does not 'the eye altering alter all?'" seems the remark of a very young and ambitious artist; it is the central doctrine of Yeats' poetry, yet it cannot bear a confrontation with the dynamic world. When the world and the self collide, the marketable drama is epistemological but, more than that, it is a moral confrontation—jarring and devastating to the ego. In his essay "Prometheus Unbound" Yeats speaks of the incomplete art of Shelley, where "sex is sublimated to an unearthly receptivity"; the poet is compelled to imagine whatever "seemed dark, destructive, indefinite" [Essays and Introductions.] Shelley is like Beardsley, who was under a compulsion to include something obscene in his drawings: "Something compels me to sacrifice to Priapus." The artist, acting upon his own sense of autonomy, is nevertheless forced to "secret the obscene" in some corner of his art; sublimation is a possibility only when the artist denies his basic self. Sublimation is a "ladder" but when the ladder is gone, the poet must acknowledge the origin of all his art: "In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."

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