The Environment of the Quest: The Poetic Dream
[In the following excerpt, Byrd interprets animal and plant imagery as important aspects of Yeats's poetry, suggesting that such images authenticate the "poetic dream" of art's eternal power.]
Directly connected with Yeats's use of specific landscapes are his references to the animals and plants that inhabit these areas. Yeats's poems are very heavily populated with various forms ofanimal and vegetable life, and in such a natural way that the reader is not so much aware of their importance as he is conscious of their presence, just as the average person is aware of the natural life around him without thinking about it. With a few obvious exceptions such as the rose, animal and plant life—mice, worms, marigolds, and the like—are presented on a level that is almost subconscious. We know they are there, but their presence is so natural in context that we think no more of it. Yet their existence is very important to the total meaning of the poems.
Concerning the poetry written before 1889, Forrest Reid [W.B. Yeats: A Critical Study, 1915] observes that "on nearly every page we meet with the wild, delightful creatures Mr. Yeats himself met with in the rambles of his boyhood." The rose did not overpower all the lesser flowers and animals in Yeats's poetry. Small birds, animals, and flowers appear just as frequently in the poems published between 1889 and 1900, and Yeats realizes the importance of their function. In the first poem in The Rose, "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," the Rose is seen as the power that relates the poet to the world of "common things that crave." The worm and the field-mouse are integral parts of the world of "heavy mortal hopes," a world Yeats knows he must not lose while seeking the "strange things said / By God to the bright hearts of those long dead." For valid poetry, the two worlds must mesh and mingle; they must be seen as one universe.
Yeats was aware of the importance of the function of animal and plant life throughout his career as a poet. From the very first, he senses the coexistence of the two worlds, and he illustrates their coterminous existence through animal and plant imagery of the same sort found in the Irish poetry. Even though his earliest poetry may seem artificial to the modern ear, Yeats counters the artificiality of Arcadia with a constant undertone of living reality. In "The Island of Statues" alone, the following plants and animals are mentioned at least once, and in some cases many times: daffodil, lilac, pansy, ash, willow, cypress, pine, alder, foxglove, rose, lily, sloe berries, hawthorn; heron, sheep, squirrel, crane, panther, owl, drake, woodpecker, grasshopper, bee, adder, moth, wolf, boar, steer, cuckoo, robin, lynx, kine, mouse, cankerworm, fish, kestrel, frog, otter. In addition, there are many general references to trees, flowers, and animals. The little pastoral play literally teems with life.
The poems on Indian subjects, which through mood, tone, and subject matter are the most languorous of Yeats's early poetry, do not, as one might expect, have as many references to plants and animals as Yeats's other poems. Lesser life is nevertheless present, often a more exotic life, such as the peahens and parrot in "The Indian to His Love," but sometimes a life just as common to Ireland as to India. "Anashuya and Vijaya" contains the following: corn, flocks, panthers, poppies, flamingoes, the lion, birds, deer, antelope, the hound, lambs, kine, flies, mice.
In the Irish poetry, as Mr. Reid suggests, the animals and plants are more specifically Irish, and they do occur on virtually every page. With the exception of the rose and the lily, which more often, as in The Shadowy Waters and in the poems about the rose, have specifically Pre-Raphaelite and Rosicrucian overtones, the lesser life not only suggests motion; it also affirms the presence of life itself and testifies to the continuing existence of the mundane world in the presence of myth, legend, and fantasy. Taken together with the rose and the lily, the life of earth forms a background tapestry for the whole of the poetry, providing the reader with continuous reminders that the world he knows has not been abandoned or rejected.
Significantly, in "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland" the world of nature provides the visions of the land of faerie. The man standing in Dromahair and, later, by the well of Scanavin is told of the other world by extremely commonplace creatures and objects—a pile of fish, a lugworm, a small knot-grass. The fish
… sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where a people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs.
The lugworm
Sang that somewhere to north or west or south
There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race
Under the golden or the silver skies.
The knot-grass
Sang where—unnecessary cruel voice—
Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice.
In this poem the man is disturbed: at the end he "has found no comfort in the grave," but the world of faerie and the world of nature are seen to be directly interrelated.
By their functions as a motif of reality, as a background for the major concern, and—sometimes—as a link between man and the supernatural, the animals and plants serve to augment and amplify Yeats's use of the landscape. In all of Yeats's early poetry—on Arcadian, Indian, or Irish subjects—they reinforce the value of the natural world. The animals and plants, especially in the Arcadian and Indian poetry, provide the reader with a link of familiarity and make the setting seem less removed and foreign. In the specifically Irish poetry, these functions become more effective because the plants and animals are more tightly integrated in the totality of the poem. The landscape is already real; the animals and plants add to the existing reality. Their primary effect here is to link the legendary world to the present. We are in a world far from cities, and sometimes in a misty world of legend, but Yeats always indicates that we are in an eternal world that is always present. In "The Madness of King Goll," for example, Yeats immediately plunges us into the times and places of Ireland's legendary past:
I sat on cushioned otter-skin:
My word was law from Ith to Emain,
And shook at Inver Amergin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen.
However, instead of drifting completely into the mists of the past (as he is sometimes accused of doing), through his use of forest life Yeats relates the world of Ith and Emain to the world that is always present:
And now I wander in the woods
When summer gluts the golden bees,
Or in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-coloured trees;
Or when along the wintry strands
The cormorants shiver on their rocks.
The exotic connotations of "leopard-coloured" are carefully balanced with the "ordinary" creatures, the bees and cormorants, and the four seasons of the Irish climate. Amid the natural seasons, King Goll wanders in the company of the wolf, the deer, and the hares of the forest.
Yeats often suggests motion through the use of small creatures. Animals in Yeats are not used for the sake of imagery alone. In most cases they, like the wind and the leaves in "The Hosting of the Sidhe," are present in the poem because they are present in life, or occasionally, like the hound with one red ear in The Wanderings of Oisin, because they are present in Yeats's original source. In specific relation to the poetic dream, the function of the many fish, mice, birds, and the like, is to suggest the constant movement of these lower forms of life:
Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
("The Falling of the Leaves")
Amidst the yellowing decay and coming of the death of winter, Yeats does not overlook the presence of the mice.
The totality of the landscape, then, becomes more than a setting: it is a philosophical entity that, together with the other elements of Yeats's poetic vision, makes the poetry not an abstract criticism of life but the embodiment of life itself. This is not to say that Yeats subscribes to a form of pantheism, nor that he finds in nature the same type of power or inspiration that Wordsworth feels. In Yeats's poetry, the natural surroundings do more than surround: they become an integral part of existence. Man is not detached, and there is no man-nature conflict. Although Yeats does not idealize in the manner of Rousseau, he does consider man and nature to be inseparable. He does not present to us an Eden, and his views of man and environment appear primitivistic only to the modern town- or city-dweller who has lost his intimate relationship with the natural world….
In the structure of the poems related to the theme of poetseeker, such as The Wanderings of Oisin, there can be discerned three levels directly informed by motion or lack of motion. Oisin is dominated and controlled by Oisin's wanderings, his search: in this sense it is all motion. Yet in another sense the poem is all stillness. Time is suspended for Oisin. His travels last for three hundred years; he remains on each island for one hundred years; when he again sets foot physically upon Ireland, he ages immediately. He is young throughout his travels; when he talks of them in his dialogue with Saint Patrick, he is "bent, and bald, and blind." Within the stillness of the time suspension there is the movement of lesser life—the birds, the deer, the hounds. Herein lies the tension of motion and rest. In this poem there are worlds within worlds, from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic.
The complexity of time, motion, stillness, and dream, of sound and silence, gradually becomes intensified as the poem progresses. First, in Oisin's travels outward from Ireland to the first island, and onward to the second and third islands, time becomes confused. Each time Oisin leaves the shore for the open sea, his sense of time becomes blurred; each time, until he leaves the last island and Remembrance returns to him, the same is repeated with only slight modifications:
Accompanied by sound, or, on the last segment of the journey, the consciousness of lack of sound, Oisin travels farther away from the world he knows into the world of eternal mists and disillusion. In the first part of the journey, leaving Ireland, Niamh sings continuous songs of the other world; between the first island and the second, her song is "troubled" by tears; after leaving the second island, Niamh no longer sings.
Paralleling the intensifying sorrow of Niamh, the islands are progressively more removed from active, physical life and more and more involved with life as seen in a dream. In the first island, called significantly "The Island of the Living" in the 1889 version, there are many contrasts between action and stillness. After the mysterious journey over the water, we are introduced to the world of twilight and the dream. However, even though we see Aengus in his hall dreaming "a Druid dream of the end of days," when even "the stars are to wane" and a literal twilight exists throughout, there is the contrasting action of the Immortals, the movement of the dance, the sounds of the harp and the song. In eternal summer, Oisin engages in the traditional heroic sports of hunting, fishing, and wrestling. As we leave the Island of the Living, Yeats shows us a vignette of action and inaction that, in essence, summarizes the existence of the first island. In the golden light of evening, some of the Immortals move among the fountains, dance, and wander hand in hand; others sit in dreams on the water's edge, singing and gazing at the setting sun while the birds keep time to the music.
On the second island, called "The Island of Victories" in the 1889 version, Oisin finds himself in an atmosphere of greater mystery. On The Island of Fears, as it was named in the definitive edition, eternity consists of actions perpetually repeated. In the attempt to deliver a maiden chained to two ancient eagles, Oisin fights with a demon. This action begins an endless fight, for the demon perpetually renews himself: Oisin fights and defeats the demon; after the third day of the victory feast, the demon reappears. Thus, for one hundred years Oisin endures, without dreams, fears, languor, or fatigue, "an endless feast. / An endless war."
When Oisin reaches the third island, the Island of the Sleepers ("The Island of Forgetfulness" in the 1889 version), Yeats's subtlety in dealing with rest and motion reaches its height. Oisin lives only in dreaming of life:
So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of dreams,
In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.
In describing the island, Yeats tells us that "no live creatures lived there." In context, however, much life is suggested in the description of deathly stillness:
But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled
the ground.
The trees seem to loom larger in Oisin's eyes; the trees and the ground exude noises; Oisin thinks of weasels. A few lines later the horse whinnies when he catches sight of the huge, white, sleeping bodies. The presence of owls (in spite of the statement made in line 19) provides an effective contrast of life with the slumberers:
So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests in their locks,
Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes.
And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came,
Now in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow-place wide;
And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees in the soft star-flame,
Lay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side.
In these lines Yeats gives us not only life but continuing life, with "generations" of owls. Perception is suggested by the use of "eyes" in line 40. The busy and ordinary activity of nest-building complements the action of Niamh and Oisin in reining their horses, while the slow wandering movement, related through inversion in line 41, effectively complements the mysterious sleepers. In addition, the movement of life is sustained in the mind of the reader throughout this island of sleep-enchantment by frequent references to life in the world of man as Oisin relates to Saint Patrick the things the island caused him to forget: "How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron's plot"; "How the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide." Yeats thus maintains an awareness of life and motion even when describing their absence. No matter how removed the dream world is from the world of men—and the islands visited by Oisin are fabled and eternal, removed from time—the dream never loses consciousness of reality. Even in the early Arcadian play The Island of Statues, in which one might expect from the very nature of the Arcadian subject matter a complete removal from the world, the sleepers awake from their enchantment asking about men and events from the lives they were living before the spell was cast upon them.
A clear example of Yeats's use of various types of motion and motion suggestion, of time and timelessness within the dream, can be seen in the short, nine-line "Love Song from the Gaelic," which appeared in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888):
My love, we will go, we will go, I and you,
And away in the woods we will scatter the dew;
And the salmon behold, and the ousel too,
My love, we will hear, I and you, we will hear,
The calling afar of the doe and the deer.
And the bird in the branches will cry for us clear,
And the cuckoo unseen in his festival mood;
And death, oh my fair one, will never come near
In the bosom afar of the fragrant wood.
This very early and immature lyric is quoted here for an important reason. Many critics, and Yeats himself, would probably refer to it as "escape poetry"; yet, even in this admittedly trivial lyric (it was never published in any edition of Yeats's works), it is clear that the so-called "escape" is not a true flight from reality, and that this escape is part of the seeker theme and an important part of trie complex poetic dream. In this small poem Yeats introduces the important elements found in later, more sophisticated poetry dealing with the seeker. As in "The Stolen Child," "The Hosting of the Sidhe," and The Wanderings of Oisin, there is the summons to go. The world into which the loved one is summoned is eternal and timeless: "death … will never come near"; but it is also a forest world filled with creatures. This poem does represent a yearning for the pastoral, but it is a pastoral that exists among familiar and living things. When the eternal world is gained, the best of the transitory world is not lost.
In discussing Yeats's poetry, one must be cautious in making a distinction between eternal and transitory states of existence. The question of time in Yeats's poetic dream needs further investigation, for here we reach an ambiguity that is unresolved. It is too easy to conclude that in the later verse Byzantium provides the solution when the poet is "gather[ed]" into "the artifice of eternity," for even in "Sailing to Byzantium" Yeats echoes the concern for old age that pervades his later verse and that is actually a manifestation of a concern found in Yeats from the beginning: Can man, through his art, conquer time? Though man dies and buildings fall into ruins, Yeats hopes that poetry is eternal. But it is a hope, not a certainty:
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.
("To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee")
As Yeats prophetically predicts, this very old tower—Yeats liked to think it was Norman, though no one seems to know its age—did fall into ruin (it is now being restored), and these lines, carved on a stone of the tower, do remain. Somehow, though, Yeats's hope seems wistful; the inscription of Ozymandias is the best one can hope for.
The lines carved on the tower comprise the statement of a practical man and the enunciation of a conclusion that is pessimistic and almost cynical for a poet so conscious of the importance of his art. Yeats obviously did not operate from the philosophy implied by these lines throughout his poetic career. In his use of the dream it is clear that he was searching for the true relationship existing between time and his art.
The dream state, by its very nature, involves a focus on time different from that of the waking state, and under special conditions the dream state can involve a negation of time. The true vision pierces eternity, and a state of enchantment, such as that of Oisin or the sleepers in The Island of Statues, can suspend time. If immortal creatures could be found, it should be in the supernatural world, but for Yeats there seems to be some doubt:
A man has a hope for heaven,
But soulless a fairy dies.
Is there, then, a world of eternity? If so, where does it exist?
In the poetic dream, one does not escape from reality: one escapes to reality. The true meaning of escape—the meaning indicated earlier—and the true Celtic Twilight can be seen in the short poem "Into the Twilight." The spiritual condition of the poet and the summons to the quest are contained in the first two lines:
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right.
To find reality, the poet must escape the petty, middleclass world of the dull, smugly complacent, and spiritually ignorant shopkeeper, the "nets of wrong and right" that can ensnare a person into a world in which everything is seen in terms of black and white, good and evil; the same world discussed later in connection with Saint Patrick in The Wanderings of Oisin. If one can leave modern city life, the poem implies, "Eire is always young," and in Ireland the poet can find reality:
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And willow and stream work out their will.
Eternity and the dream are found in the soil and in nature. The poet is summoned to leave the "nets of wrong and right," but he does not enter a clear, uncomplicated paradise. Yeats juxtaposes the "grey twilight" with the "dew of the morn"; the heart is summoned to laughter and sighs; the heart laughs in the greyness and sighs in the shining dew. The loneliness of God coexists with the "mystical brotherhood" of nature. This is the eternal youth of Ireland, which will remain even though "hope fall from you and love decay."
"Time and the world are ever in flight." Yeats is affirming these things that endure, the "shining dew" and the "grey twilight." Hope and love do not endure, for they are the kind of hope and love that can be destroyed "in fires of a slanderous tongue." In this context, Yeats could be implying a Neoplatonic distinction between higher and lower types of love and hope. The modern world, the world of the slanderous tongue, the world containing the type of love and hope prone to decay, is most probably the world he writes about later, in which "Romantic Ireland" has been replaced by men who
… fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone.
("September, 1913")
In his radio talk "Players and Painted Stage," which has been reprinted by Denis Donoghue in The Integrity of Years, Frank Kermode quotes Yeats's observation that art is "the struggle of the dream with the world." Kermode defines the dream as "a transcendent reality, the truth of the imagination." According to Kermode, the world is more complex than the mere opposite of the dream; it is not simply a place to be hated and shunned. He accurately defines the world as it is seen in Yeats's poetry:
The world is something to be both hated and loved:
the spiritless sphere of realists, shopkeepers, "thinkers,"
and also the place of admired animal vitality—"the
young in one another's arms"—and heroic action.
The poet is summoned not from the world but from a world, the world of pettiness and minor values, the "nets of wrong and right," in which the major values are obscured and lost. Yeats states his position quite clearly in "To Ireland in the Coming Times," which was entitled more explicitly in the first printing in 1892 as "Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days." This poem is the personal credo of Yeats as an Irish poet, and even though couched in the language and style of the early poetry, it is a credo he never abandoned. In the first four lines, Yeats fits himself into a tradition and shows that he is escaping into a world of artistic purpose:
Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song.
In the world of the Irish poetic tradition, time operates in a special way in relation to art:
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured quietude.
Perhaps Time's candles can, for a moment, "light a measure" even for the world of the "greasy till."
When living in a world necessarily and unavoidably governed by time, the poet is in a state of existence in which the dream is essential:
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
This is one of Yeat's clearest statements of the function of the dream in poetry. The dreams supply the meaning of the poetry, and they become the key to the unity for which the poet is searching.
An examination of Yeats's revisions of this poem will confirm the continued and steady importance of the dream throughout his career; the revisions also reveal an earlier emphasis on the dream. The version quoted here is that of the definitive edition. Although Yeats made no revisions that directly change the meaning of this poem, he was more explicit in the versions that appeared in and before the 1924 revision of Poems (1895). In this and earlier editions, lines 21 and 22 read: "Of the dim wisdoms old and deep, / That God gives unto man in sleep." In all versions of this poem, both early and late, Yeats alludes, in the lines immediately following, to mysterious forces that come "about [his] table" through the dream. These forces are called "magical powers" in 1892, "elemental beings" in all versions from 1895 through 1924, and "elemental creatures" in the definitive edition. Yeats was always aware that dreams provide the poetic insight.
In "To Ireland in the Coming Times," Yeats reveals that he is living in an intermediary state between the materialistic world of pounds, shillings, and pence and the eternal world for which he is searching. The dream is an essential part of the poetic search, and that search is not over: unity has not been attained and knowledge is not complete; therefore, the ambiguities, the "vagueness" and cloudiness often deplored in Yeats's early poetry are unavoidable, and indeed essential, at this stage of artistic development. The last stanza of this poem gives us the perspective we need in order to understand the dream and its importance to the poetic search:
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
In these lines the dream and the poetry itself are very closely connected. In the short life allotted to man, the poet's heart went "after the red-rose-bordered hem" that is specifically Ireland, the hem of Cathleen ni Houlihan; but by suggestion, Yeats is following all that is implied by the red rose. In his note to "Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge," Yeats observes that "the Rose has been for many centuries a symbol of spiritual love and supreme beauty." He goes on to enumerate many uses of the rose in religion and in poetry. In the notes to The Rose, Yeats says that "the quality symbolised as The Rose differs from the Intellectual Beauty of Shelley and of Spenser in that I have imagined it as suffering with man and not as something pursued and seen from afar." This last note was written in 1925, and Yeats tells us that he noticed this quality of the rose "upon reading these poems for the first time for several years." The element of pursuit is implied, however, by the use of the word after in the last line. Nevertheless, the retrospective statement in the note does give an added insight. A concept such as intellectual beauty is a logical goal for the poetic search, and Yeats's use of the rose in many of his early poems makes it clear that the rose is one symbol of the goal of his search. Here, though, we see the goal as something attainable, even as something present. The rose can be seen in the poetic dream.
The dreaminess, cloudiness, and ambiguity found in Yeats are usually defended or condemned primarily on artistic and philosophical grounds, following one or more of the standard methods of literary criticism. What many critics fail to see, or at least fail to mention, is the strong element of plain common sense found in Yeats. Like the peasants he admired, he could combine the affairs of daily life with glimpses and concern for the supernatural. If the trait of common sense is overlooked, there are unsurmountable difficulties in interpreting Yeats's poetry and prose. (On the other hand, it should be noted that Yeats is not a literate Margery Kempe, who was so bound to life on earth that her relation with Christ, as seen in her Booke, is simply another sexual affair.) Such critics as Harold Bloom [in Yeats, 1970], for example have difficulties with Yeats's religion and his mysticism. The confusion found in Yeats's poetry and in his comments about his symbols and his philosophy is understandable, and even sometimes erased, when they are read in the light of such statements as those found in the lines "To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee," which are quoted above. Yeats accepts the fact that man and his creations are not eternal; at the same time, ideas and thoughts can remain.
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