Poetry

LAST POEMS & PLAYS--W. B. Yeats--Macmillian ($1.75).

The life of Eire's great Poet William Butler Yeats (died 1939, at 73) was a wild-goose chase after poetical wisdom--a chase that did not end before the goose was caught, cooked and eaten. How Yeats swallowed his bird--beak, bones and feathers--he has told in detail in his classic Autobiography. How the meal sat on his stomach is made plain in his motley, fearful, sometimes scabrous, more often superb Last Poems & Plays.

Man 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 answers right.

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English Shot?

Did words of mine put too great a

strain

On that woman's reeling brain?

. . .

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and die.

Echo Lie down and die.

Man That were to shirk

The spiritual intellect's great work. . . .

Nor can there be work so great

As that which cleans man's dirty

slate.

Beak. The Irish are a people whose memory of wrongs is so ancient that their ideas about right tend to be either factional or mythical. From childhood up Yeats believed in Ireland's myths more than in its factions, believed also that the Irish, to become a self-respecting nation, would have to develop a literature so eloquent of truths about the Irish race that Irishmen would pore over its books with the intensity they customarily reserved for putting God's curse on the English and each other.

Yeats, in trying to give poorly read, faction-ridden Ireland such a literature, had to promote a writer's faction, to put the gift across. Because of his great natural ability and the sophistication he had gained from his literary associations in London and Paris, Yeats became the leader of this faction--whose foes, it was agreed, were the blackguards and fools who championed moral complacence, social respectability and badly written books. Among these foes Yeats circulated bravely and ceaselessly. With his long, flowing cloak, hair, tie and pince-nez ribbon, hawk face and eagle brow, he impersonated a priestly poet so perfectly that many were won to believe that such a thing could exist. With Edward Martyn, George Moore and Lady Gregory he founded the Abbey Theatre (1904), gave the often mocking and protesting public large doses of mythological drama, forced it to swallow the romantic proletarianism of Synge's folk plays.

Yeats slaved for his faction until it began to foster realistic writing: then he proudly withdrew. But, as a Free State Senator and Ireland's Nobel Prizewinner, he skirmished on loyally for the literary cause, won for the Abbey a national subsidy, and founded, with George Bernard Shaw, the Irish Academy of Letters. He was 70 before he received his first friendly public tribute from his countrymen--a birthday dinner at Dublin's Hibernian Hotel. Members of all factions were present. All found it impossible not to cheer their heads off.

The applause was genuine because Yeats's war cry had been genuine. It continued genuine to the end.

You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,

"Send war in our time, O Lord!"

Know that when all words are said

And a man is fighting mad.

Something drops from eyes long blind,

He completes his partial mind,

For an instant stands at ease,

Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.

Even the wisest man grows tense

With some sort of violence

Before he can accomplish fate,

Know his work or choose his mate.

Bones. Four days after his wedding in 1917, Yeats's wife surprised him by trying her hand at automatic writing. What she put down seemed of such profound import that Yeats pressed her to continue the experiment. For over two years thereafter he was busy filling notebooks with what certain self-styled "instructors," writing or speaking through his wife's mediumship, had to tell him. When he finally pieced his notes together into A Vision,* Yeats felt satisfied that he had got hold of something that, grasped fully, would "explain the world."

To explain the world had always been the ruling aspiration implicit in Yeats's writing, even in that dreamlike fairy-poetry, full of haunting music, names and symbols, which brought him popular fame. Granting the fact that many people found such poetry haunting, it remained a question why the human mind was so mysteriously hauntable. Yeats had looked for an answer, not in psychoanalysis, but in psychological religions -- Rosicrucianism, Cabalism, Swedenborg, Boehme, Blake-- and in the memorabilia of men of literary and artistic genius, from Homer to Ezra Pound. Through this darkling maze Yeats resolutely followed his nose. He was hot on the track of the thing that would enable a poet to know just what he is doing, when he writes a poem that will haunt some other man like an unforgettable dream.

Yeats never fully grasped the thought-system that came to him "from beyond" his own mind; and no reader of A Vision will succeed where its author failed. The book's symbolic diagrams need Yeats's mind to work them: they will not work at all for the majority who will find Yeats's synthetic occultism repellent. The book remains, nevertheless, a remarkable integration of Yeats's feel of himself with his knowledge of mankind. By its rules of thumb he was enabled to sharpen the edges of his knifelike insights into men's personalities, to face the conflicts of his own nature with increased resolve, and to go on writing, up to his death, poems that presented what both his art and his life were aimed to present,

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate

memory.

A Vision, like all of Yeats's philosophizing, is full of tall talk. But it is the tall talk of a tall man, and one who drew himself up to his full Irish height to speak.

Many times man lives and dies

Between his two eternities,

That of race and that of soul,

And ancient Ireland knew it all.

Whether man die in his bed

Or the rifle knocks him dead,

A brief parting from those dear

Is the worst man has to fear.

Though gravediggers' toil is long,

Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,

They but thrust their buried men

Back in the human mind again.

Feathers. Exaggeration, to the Irish, is the spice of life. Yeats received his baptism as Ireland's greatest poet by having a burning handful of the spice thrown full in his face.

In the late '80s Yeats was a boyish, poetic dreamer, with his head in the clouds and his sexual nature in limbo. One day into his father's house walked a being who looked less like a woman than "a classical impersonation of the Spring." Yeats never forgot that trembling moment. "Her complexion was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window." It was Maud Gonne (later Mrs. John McBride), a young Nationalist agitator, whose incredible beauty was to become one of Ireland's modern myths. But Yeats was to discover that for him her mind, hagridden with fanatic factionalism, was as unlovable as a dog fight.

When Yeats looked on this blessing that he could only curse, this curse that he longed to bless, the world became a prison, and his mind roamed all its circuits looking for a really blessed good, a really cursed bad. It found both in his own emptiness of heart. That, at least, was not exaggerated.

From the vantage of such self-candor Yeats could see at first hand that a world in which mind and body are divorced reaches its dead centre in a loveless heart. Conversely, in a world centred in a not impossible love, mind and body might be one. In his poems Yeats did what a man could, in view of the fact that his own heart had gone on a lifelong hunger strike, to get the world centred right. He exaggerated the human soul's "magnificence" to the point of making it supernatural, and the world's foulness ("Love . . . in the place of excrement") to the point of making it subhuman, and so made the universe an emptiness that real men and real women alone might fill. He made the closest, cleanest merger of abstract ideas and concrete words yet achieved in English, and he left the world poetry in which oppositions between mind and body, by beginning to be stripped of exaggeration, begin to cease to exist.

Picture and book remain,

An acre of green grass

For air and exercise,

Now strength of body goes;

Midnight, an old house

Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end

Neither loose imagination,

Nor the mill of the mind

Consuming its rag and bone,

Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,

Myself must I remake

Till I am Timon and Lear

Or that William Blake

Who beat upon the wall

Till Truth obeyed his call:

A mind Michael Angela knew

That can pierce the clouds,

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind,

An old man's eagle mind.

* Published in a revised edition in 1937 (Macmillan).

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