YEATS
How to
judge the effectiveness of a poem? Well,
if it makes the hair on your neck stand up then that seems to be an effective
measure of how effective a poem is.
I first
came across Yeats at the University of Stirling around 1980. I somehow ended up at a meeting in the
English Department and was somehow co-opted on to the committee headed by two
professors, one of whom was Professor Jeffares.
He was a keen lover of Yeats’ poetry and at the time I didn’t appreciate
poetry very much, except those written by modern poets such as Felinghetti,
Ginsberg and Corso.
Old Dan
Cavin further influenced me in my fascination with Yeats and I began to learn
some of his poetry off by heart. The
first was “The Song of Wandering Aengus”, from The Wind Among the Reeds”.
Originally called “A Mad Song”, faeries were sometimes called shape changers and signifies a
metamorphosis from fish to woman, fish = woman.
The poem was suggested to Yeats by a Greek folk song – the folk beliefs
of Greece being similar to those of Ireland.
The “hazel wand” is an instrument of magical transformation. The “apple blossom” is associated with Maud Gonne who eventually marries John McBride despite the fact that Yeats had proposed marriage to her. Ironically, Maud Gone separated from McBride after 5 or 6 years and Yeats proposed again only to be turned down…again.
The poem is
light-hearted and doesn’t have any connection to the real world except the
world of dreams where events and the material world are unsubstantiated. The “fire in the head” relates to madness and
the last two lines were used for a volume of short stories by Ray Bradbury, the
science fiction writer – “the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of
the sun”.
“He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” was originally “Aedh (Ay) Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”. Here, Yeats sees himself as a kind of “Cosmic Sir Walter Raleigh”. In the poem there are no rhymes, only repetitions of words at the end of the lines – cloths, light, feet and dreams.
There is
beauty in its brevity. Consider the
colours: blue, dim, dark cloths of night,
light, half light; and the image again of dreams. The dream-like quality of the poem is typical
of a lot of Yeats’ poetry.
“The
Lake Isle of Innisfree” is another of his well-expressed poems about his wish
to escape. The place name has
connotations of freedom from society, as if an important, life-changing
decision has been made. “I will arise…”
connotes movement and awakening.
He was
influenced in this poem by his father who had read him some passages out of Walden.
Yeats had decided to live as Thoreau lived. This feeling came over him while walking
through Fleet Street when he heard the sound of a water fountain in a shop
window he was passing. On top of the jet of water was balanced a little ball.
(Actually, Yeats became embarrassed by the success of the poem.)
The poem is
immediately appealing in its accessibility.
The syntax is simple and the commitment is clear. The images are related to self-sufficiency
with the small cabin, basically a mud hut, the rows of beans and the beehive for honey.
The “purple
glow”, Yeats explained in a radio broadcast, was the reflection of the heather
in the water. And “pavements grey” seem
to refer to the streets of London.
But
“Evening full of the linnet’s wings” strikes me as being the most poetic
image. There is the use of synesthesia –
a blending of the senses mixing sound with vision.
The
subject of the poem, “The Second Coming”, is about the second coming of Christ
of a Christ-like figure – a saviour, although Yeats’ saviour is in the shape of
a sphinx.
The
beginning of the poem depicts a falconer losing control of his falcon. Where once he used the falcon for hunting, it
is now let loose in the sky. This is
further stressed with the words, “Things fall apart”, used as the title for a
novel by Chinua Achebe about corruption in Nigeria. The idea of “the centre does not hold” emphasises
this idea.
The poem is
really a prediction of what is now occurring in the Middle East with Syria and
bordering countries, in particular Israel.
We can see that the “blood-dimmed tide is loosed” in most middle-eastern
countries with, in many cases, the failed uprising in Egypt, in particular,
where many Christians are now being targeted by Muslims and the extreme Muslim
Brotherhood has been ineffectively banned.
In the
line, “The best…intensity”, Yeats has anticipated extremism that is now causing
so many problems in the world.
Then, “The
Second Coming” conjures up this sphinx-like creature made of stone and instead
of a saviour we have this animated creature lumbering across the desert,
disturbing the “indignant desert birds”.
Again,
Yeats sees the twentieth century as being nightmarish with this “rough beast” "slouching" across the desert “to be
born”.
This poem
subverts the idea that a “second coming” will resolve any problems in the
world. The gyre represents the movement
of history as a mathematical formula where all returns to chaos and violence.
The
“Spiritus Mundi” is the soul of the world. The sphinx is to be born, not from a virgin,
but from a tomb, the awakening of the dead.
On a much lighter note, “When You Are Old”, is one of Yeats’ earlier poems from his collection The Rose. It is one man’s reflection on someone he loves and how that person has changed. He is aware that the subject of his poem, a woman he once loved, has rejected his advances and has now grown old and regrets her reciprocated love for the poet. The final lines are particularly moving: “And…stars”.
The
last two-poems are, I think, two of the most noteworthy poems in his collection
– although the volume of his is prodigious.
Firstly, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”. The poem is well-balanced and there is a
feeling of melancholy that is evident in many of his other poems. The poem is about Robert Gregory who died in
1918 at the end of the First World War fighting in Italy.
Of course,
the battle was against the Germans and “those that I guard” refers to the
British. “this lonely impulse to
delight” is in contrast to his impending death.
He thinks what happens in the war will have little effect on his
countrymen in “Kiltartan Cross”. There
is madness in his lost vision of the future and what he feels to be “a waste of
breath” in the past.
Finally,
“The Wild Swans at Coole” written in 1919.
The theme is one of the passing of time.
Yeats was interested in the occult, especially automatic writing of his
wife, Georgia Hyde-Lees. She wanted to
play a trick on him and pretend that she could indulge in automatic writing but
found that she could actually do it. She
went into a trance and scrawled her writing over a page, usually without breaks.
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| Example of automatic writing |
Yeats
communed with two dead men Dionertes and Thomas who spoke through his wife.
The poem is
romantic where the swans symbolic of the human soul liberated from human flesh.
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| Lady Gregory |
“The nineteenth
Autumn”, Yeats first visited Lady Gregory’s Coole Park in 1897, trying to sever
his relationship with Maude Gonne who had rejected his two proposals of
marriage. Cf. “great broken wings” again
brings to mind the falcon out of control.
The sound
of “clamorous wings” reminds me of the sound of swans passing overhead at
Arthur’s Seat.
Maude Gonne
(1866-1953) was the love of his life.
She was 6 feet tall and considered to be the most beautiful woman in
Ireland. He bet her in the apple blossom
season Cf “Wandering Aengus”.
She
eventually became the lover of Lucien-Milleroye and had a child who died in
infancy. They conceived a child under
the tomb of her dead child in the hope of reincarnating her and Iseult Gonne
was born.
Then things
became more complicated: In 1903 she
married John McBride but they separated in 1905. He was eventually executed by the British in
1916.
Again, Yeats asked her to marry
him.
In 1915, at
the age of twenty, Iseult asked Yeats to marry her but Yeats was 52 years old
at the time. He eventually married a 23
year old, Geortgie Hyde-Lees. He sees
himself and the three women as having known each other in the past countless
times as one identity.
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Maude Gonne
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