D. H. Lawrence shares Yeats’s heroic vitalism, but for Blake, more is

required than sexual exaltation if we are to become fully human.”
That is true, and yet Yeats, trying to ‘put all into a phrase’ in his final letter, written in the month he died, insisted, ‘Man can embody truth but
10 Diana Wyndham offers a psychological analysis in ‘Versemaking and Lovemaking,’ 25-50. On Haire’s near-solicitation, see Ethel Mannin, Privileged Spectator, 80-81.
11 Possessed by Memory, 193. Despite his hostility to Eliot, Bloom excepted ‘Little Gidding,’ which he admired, just as Eliot, despite his general hostility to Shelley, admired The Triumph of Life.
1. Introduction: Bodily Decrepitude and the Imagination 21
he cannot know it.’ He continued, allying himself with both the primary and the antithetical in the struggle against a shared enemy: ‘The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence’ (L, 922). Yeats rejects all those ‘thoughts men think in the mind alone,’ since he that ‘sings a lasting song/ Thinks in a marrow-bone.’ That is from a poem, ‘A Prayer for Old Age,’ written in 1934, in the wake of the Steinach operation: a prayer that he ‘may seem, though I die old,/ A foolish, passionate man.’ ‘Seem’ is a crucial qualifier, though some, even his friend and former fellow-Senator Oliver St. John Gogarty (Joyce’s Buck Mulligan), thought he’d become a sex-obsessed fool confusing himself with his own ‘Wild Old Wicked Man’ (1937), ‘mad about women’ and ‘a young man in the dark.’
But Yeats, unwilling to divorce imagination from the senses, often cited Blake as an ally in repudiating the abstract in favor of embodied wisdom. In ‘The Thinking of the Body,’ he insists that ‘art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories and emotions of the body’ (E&I, 292-93). Blake, for whom the body lacking ‘The Imagination’ is ‘Foolish,’ surrounded his Laoco6n engraving with visionary axioms: “The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION,’ and ‘Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed.”
In the magnificent third and final movement of ‘The Tower,’ writing his ‘will’ in vital, pulsing trimeters, Yeats declares his ‘faith’ by mocking ‘Plotinus’ thought’ and crying ‘in Plato’s teeth.’ Instead, he tells us, even amid ‘the wreck of body,/ Slow decay of blood,’ ‘dull decrepitude,’ or worse:
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece, Poet’s imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women.
12 The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 271-72.
22 Making the Void Fruitful
And at the end, there is still a vestige of the natural world, faint but audible: ‘a bird’s sleepy cry/ Among the deepening shades,’
At the opposite pole, the mystical ideal has never been more austerely expressed than by St. John of the Cross: ‘the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union until it has divested itself of the love of created things.’ T. S. Eliot employed the statement as an epigraph to Sweeney Agonistes (a performance of which Yeats attended on 16 December 1934). When challenged by a friend who regarded the sentiment expressed in the epigraph ‘with horror, Eliot replied that ‘for people seriously engaged in pursuing the Way of Contemplation,’ and ‘read in relation to that way, the doctrine is fundamentally true.’ For Yeats, in stark, or, rather, ‘fruitful’ contrast, the ‘Way’ of St. John and of Eliot, ‘a sanctity of the cell and of the scourge,’ was the most perverse form of the primary, ‘objective’ tendency. ‘What is this God,’ he asked in a cancelled note to his play Calvary, ‘for whom He [Christ] taught the saints to lacerate their bodies, to starve and exterminate themselves, but the spiritual objective?’ Since ‘the Renaissance the writings of the European saints [...] has ceased to hold our attention.’ We know that we must eventually forsake the world of created things, ‘and we are accustomed in moments of weariness or exaltation to consider a voluntary forsaking. But how can we, who have read so much poetry, seen so many paintings, listened to so much music, where the cry of the flesh and the cry of the soul seem one, forsake it harshly and rudely? What have we in common with St. Bernard covering his eyes that they may not dwell upon the beauty of the lakes of Switzerland?’“
The cry of the flesh and the cry of the soul seem one in much of Yeats’s later poetry: a poetry celebrating embodied wisdom. As we have seen, Yeats’s surrogate, Michael Robartes, tells the Dancer that women can achieve ‘uncomposite blessedness’ and lead men to a similar state, if they ‘banish every thought, unless/ The lineaments that please their view/ When the long looking-glass is full,/ Even from the foot-sole think it too.’ In ‘Among School Children,’ the ‘body swayed to music’ is swept up into such Unity of Being that we cannot ‘know
13 Bonamy Dobrée, ‘T. S. Eliot: A Personal Reminiscence,’ 81. 14 This cancelled but thematically crucial note is cited by F. A. C. Wilson, Yeats’s Iconography, 323n41.
1. Introduction: Bodily Decrepitude and the Imagination 23
the dancer from the dance.’ In Words for Music Perhaps, featuring the ‘Crazy Jane’ and ‘Woman Young and Old’ sequences, we have frequent distinctions between, and final fusions of, spirit and flesh. In Poem IV of the sequence ‘Vacillation,’ in a climactic moment foreshadowed at the conclusion of Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Myth, 364), the sixty-six-year-old poet recalls sitting, a decade and a half earlier, ‘solitary’ in a crowded London shop, a receptively ‘open book and empty cup’ on the tabletop. Echoing the equally climactic moment in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul, when ‘sweetness flows into the breast,’ and ‘We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest,’ epiphany and reciprocal blessing occur. But, more explicitly than in the prose passage in Per Amica, or even in the secular beatitude attained in ‘Dialogue,’ it is the body that is set ablaze:
While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blesséd and could bless.
In what follows, after a preamble establishing context, I intend to focus on specific poems, often quest- or dialogue-poems, which tend to reassert the wisdom of the body, putting in contention the provisionally opposing claims of the temporal and spiritual worlds, body and soul. More often than not, these opposites turn out to be Blakean Contraries, polarities without whose dialectical friction, Blake tells us in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Plate 3) ‘no progression’ would be possible. The second part of the book focuses on Yeats’s poems to and about Maud Gonne, arguably the most remarkable, though somewhat scattered, sequence of love poems in Western literature since the Canzoniere of Petrarch, in whose spiritual-erotic tradition of obsessive and unrequited love Yeats was consciously writing.
Here, too, the spiritual and the erotic are in fruitful if often bittersweet polarity and confluence. For all his ‘occult yearning,’ as Bloom notes, the body and sexual exaltation mattered enormously to Yeats, and had to be ‘sufficient.’ Part of Yeats realized that it wasn’t sufficient and, in fact, could never suffice; that it took more than sex, even more than sexual love, to resolve what he called, borrowing from Kant, ‘the antinomies.’
24 Making the Void Fruitful
He endorsed that dark truth by synopsizing, in a resonant phrase, a passage to which I will return: Lucretius as translated by Dryden: “The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.’
And yet, it also remains true, as Hough observes, and the poems demonstrate, that for Yeats, passion was to be redeemed rather than transcended, and that ‘beatitude’ required, more than Eliot’s ‘shadow fruit, earthly consummation. That ‘ideal goal’ doomed the actual relationship of W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne, while giving birth to what Maud called, in a 1911 letter to Yeats, their ‘children,’ who ‘had wings’ (G-YL, 302). She was referring, not to human offspring, but to the poems that had emerged from unfulfilled love, fecundity replacing barrenness and frustration. In the pursuit of both occult wisdom and of Maud Gonne, the void is somehow made fruitful.
2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism
‘Her favorite reading as a child was Huxley and Tyndall,’ Virginia Woolf tells us of Clarissa Dalloway. As Yeats was fond of saying, ‘We Irish think otherwise.’ He was quoting the most famous Irish-born philosopher, George Berkeley, reinforcing that Idealist’s resistance to Locke’s materialist version of empiricism with his own defense of visionary powers in an era unsettled by philosophic and scientific skepticism. In the section of The Trembling of the Veil covering the period 1887-91, Yeats says he was ’
unlike others of my generation in one thing only. Iam very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, [had made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions [...] passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians.'
Though Yeats was not religious in the normative sense, he did seek a world, as he says later in this passage, that reflected the ‘deepest instinct of man,’ and would be ‘steeped in the supernatural.’ That was his own instinct. It was his conscious intention, as well, to offset the scientific naturalism of John Tyndall and T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog,’ and to buttress his rebellion against his father’s forcefully expressed agnostic skepticism. In making up his own religion, Yeats relied essentially on ‘emotions’ (with the heart as their repository) and on art (‘poetic tradition,’ ‘poets and painters’). But he included in his ‘fardel’ strands from interrelated traditions Western and Eastern. Seeing them all as a single perennial philosophy, ‘one history and that the soul’s,’ he gathered
1 Yeats, Au, 114-15. For Clarissa’s reading, see Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 106-07.
© 2021 Patrick Keane, CC BY 4.0 https: //doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0275.02
26 Making the Void Fruitful
together elements from Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, British Romanticism (especially Shelley and Blake, whose Los ‘must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s’); Platonism and Neoplatonism; Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, Cabbalism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, along with other varieties of spiritualist and esoteric thought, including Gnosticism. Though Yeats was not a scholar of Gnosticism, there are persistent themes and emphases in his thought and poetry that Gnostics would find both familiar and congenial. Others, not so much. Most obviously, whereas Gnosticism (with the exception of two sects I will later discuss) stressed the conflict between body and spirit, with the ultimate goal freedom from the body, Yeats’s instinct was to heal this breach in favor of what he called Unity of Being.
After this preamble, I will, in discussing the spiritual dimension in Yeats’s work, sometimes focus on Gnostic elements. But this is an essay on Yeats rather than Gnosticism. I bring in historical Gnosticism and the tenets of certain Gnostic sects only where they illuminate particular poems; for example, “The Secret Rose,’ ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul, ‘Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman, and ‘What Then?’ Otherwise, I will have little to say of the religious movement drawing on, but competing with, Judaism and Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries, CE.’ Instead, I will emphasize gnosis as differentiated from historical Gnosticism, precisely the distinction made at the 1966 international conference, the Colloquium of Messina, convened to examine the origins of Gnosticism. In the colloquium’s final ‘Proposal,’ the emphasis was on the attainment of gnosis, defined as ‘knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved for an elite.’
Such knowledge was individual and intuitive. For most Gnostics, this intuitive esoteric knowledge had little to do with either Western philosophic reasoning or with the theological knowledge of God to be found in Orthodox Judaism or normative Christianity. For spiritual
2 Even that Gnosticism is syncretist and complex, steeped not only in Hebrew and early Christian writing, but with roots in India, Iran, and of course in Greece (Orphism and Pythagoreanism, Platonism and Neoplatonism). That kind of cross- fertilization simultaneously enriches the tradition and complicates analysis. In addition, the various sects were secret. Because of its value as the way to break out of our imprisonment by the flesh and the material world, and thus the path to salvation, the knowledge was kept hidden, reserved for the spiritual elite capable of achieving and exercising gnosis.
2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism 27
adepts, such intuition derived from knowledge of the divine One. For poets like Yeats, it was identified with that ‘intuitive Reason’ which, for the Romantics—notably, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their American disciple, Emerson—was virtually indistinguishable from the creative imagination. Yeats was also steeped in the dialectical thinking of Blake, and much of his strongest poetry derived its power from the tension between the spiritual ‘perennial philosophy’ of Plato and Plotinus and the formidable and welcome challenge presented, after 1902, by ‘that strong enchanter, Nietzsche,’ who, Yeats believed, ‘completes Blake and has the same roots’ (L, 379). It was, above all, Nietzsche, enemy of all forms of the otherworldly, who provided Yeats with the antithetical counterweight required to resist the primary pull of body-denigrating spiritualism, whether Christian, Neoplatonic, or (in most forms) Gnostic.
At the same time, there is no denying the centrality of spiritual quest, of esoteric knowledge, mysticism and ‘magic,’ in Yeats’s life and work. In July 1892, preparing to be initiated into the Second Order of the Golden Dawn, he wrote to one of his heroes, the Irish nationalist John O’Leary, in response to a ‘somewhat testy postcard’ the kindly old Fenian had sent him. The ‘probable explanation,’ Yeats surmised, was that O’Leary had been listening to the poet’s skeptical father, holding forth on his son’s ‘magical pursuits out of the immense depths of his ignorance as to everything that Iam doing and thinking.’ Yeats realizes that the word ‘magic,’ however familiar to him, ‘has a very outlandish sound to other ears.’ But it was ‘surely absurd’ to hold him ‘weak’ because
I chose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life [... ] If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write [...] I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance—the revolt of the soul against the intellect—now beginning in the world. (L, 210-11)
Just as he had emphasized art and a ‘Church of poetic tradition’ in the creation of his own ‘new religion,’ even here, in his most strenuous defense of his mystical and magical pursuits, Yeats inserts the caveat that they were paramount, ‘next to my poetry.’ But this is hardly to dismiss
28 Making the Void Fruitful
the passionate intensity of Yeats’s esoteric and mystical pursuits. What seemed to W. H. Auden, even in his great elegy, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats,’ to be ‘silly’ or, worse, to Ezra Pound, to be ‘very very very bughouse’ (it takes one to know one), or by T. S. Eliot to be dreadfully misguided, was taken, not with complete credulity, but very very very seriously, by Yeats himself. His esoteric pursuits, in many heterodox guises, remained an energizing stimulus, if not an obsession, throughout his life. In his elegy, written just days after the poet’s death in January 1939, Auden says, ‘You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.’ But the interest in mysterious wisdom, dismissed by Auden and Eliot and Pound, actually enhanced Yeats’s artistic gift—as Virginia Woolf perceived the very first time he engaged her in conversation.
When she met Yeats in November 1930, at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s, Woolf knew little of his thought and not all that much of his poetry, but she was overwhelmed by his personality and by an immediate sense of a body of thought underlying his observations on ‘dreaming states, & soul states,’ on life and art: ‘I perceived that he had worked out a complete psychology that I could only catch on to momentarily, in my alarming ignorance.’ When he spoke of modern poetry, she recorded in her diary, Yeats described deficiencies inevitable because we are at the end of an era. ‘Here was another system of thought, of which I could only catch fragments.’ She concludes on a note seldom found in Bloomsbury self- assurance: ‘how crude and jaunty my own theories were besides his: indeed I got a tremendous sense of the intricacy of his art; also of its meaning, its seriousness, its importance, which wholly engrosses this large active minded immensely vitalized man. Wherever one cut him with a little question, he poured, spurted fountains of ideas.”
§
The Golden Dawn was a major source of that ‘system of thought,’ that abounding glittering jet of ideas, that so impressed Virginia Woolf. Yeats was, along with his friend George Russell (AE), a founding member, in 1885, of the Dublin Hermetic Society, which, the following April, evolved into the Dublin Theosophical Society. Though he ‘was much among the Theosophists, having drifted there from the Dublin Hermetic Society,
3. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 3:329.
2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism 29
Yeats declined to join, believing that ‘Hermetic’ better described his own wider interests as a devotee of what he called the study of ‘magic.’ He did join the Theosophical Society of London, in which, eager to push mystical boundaries, he enlisted in the ‘Esoteric Section.’ He resigned in 1891, amid tension, though not, despite rumor, expelled, let alone ‘excommunicated.’ Yeats was for more than thirty years a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he joined in London in March 1890; he stayed with the Golden Dawn until it splintered, then joined one of its offshoot Orders, the Stella Matutina. During its heyday in the 1890s, the G.D. and its Inner Order of the Rose of Ruby and the Cross of Gold (R.R. & A.C.) was ‘the crowning glory of the occult revival in the nineteenth century,’ having succeeded in synthesizing a vast body of disparate material and welding it into an effective ‘system.
Yeats took as his Golden Dawn motto and pseudonym Demon Est Deus Inversus (D.E.D.I.). That sobriquet’s recognition of the interdependence of opposites is anod to both William Blake and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the eleventh chapter of whose seminal text, The Secret Doctrine (1888), bears this title. The most extraordinary of the many exotic figures that gathered in societies and cults, making Victorian London ground zero in the revolt against reductive materialism, Madame Blavatsky (HPB to her acolytes) was, of course, the co-founder and presiding genius of the Theosophical Society. In a letter to a New England newspaper, Yeats referred to her with wary fascination as ‘the Pythoness of the Movement, and as a half-masculine ‘female Dr. Johnson.” Unless we accept her own tracing of Theosophy to ancient Tibetan roots, the movement was born in 1875, in part in Blavatsky’s New York City apartment, where she kept a stuffed baboon, sporting under its arm a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to represent the creeping tide of scientific materialism she was determined to push back—though it should be mentioned that
4 Ellic Howe, ix. The admission ceremony to the R.R. & A.C. required an initiate to commit to the ‘Great Work’: to ‘purify and exalt my Spiritual nature,’ and thus, with divine help, to ‘gradually raise and unite myself to my Higher and Divine Genius.’ The main point of Yeats’s 1901 pamphlet Is the Order of R.R. & A.C. to Remain a Magical Order? was that frivolous ‘freedom’ was inferior to ‘bonds gladly accepted.’ That emphasis illuminates his later philosophy in A Vision, as well as the tension in his poetry between freedom and traditional forms.
5 Yeats, Letters to the New Island, ed. Bornstein and Witemeyer, 84. The volume collects pieces Yeats sent between 1888 and 1892 to The Boston Pilot and the Providence Sunday Journal.
30 Making the Void Fruitful
The Secret Doctrine was promoted as an audacious attempt to synthesize science, religion, and philosophy.
While he never shared the requisite belief in Blavatsky’s Tibetan Masters, Yeats, without being anti-Darwinian, did share her determination to resist and turn back that materialist tide. And he was personally fascinated by the Pythoness herself, whom he first met in the formidable flesh in 1887 when he visited her at a little house in Norwood, a suburb of London. She was just fifty-six at the time but looked older (she would live only four more years). Young Yeats was kept waiting while she attended to earlier visitors. Finally admitted, he ‘found an old woman in a plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant, with an air of humor and audacious power.’ Their first conversation was a whimsical exchange on the vagaries of her cuckoo clock, which Yeats thought had ‘hooted’ at him. On subsequent visits he found her ‘almost always full of gaiety [...] kindly and tolerant,’ and accessible—except on those occasions, once a week, when she ‘answered questions upon her system, and as I look back after thirty years I often ask myself, “Was her speech automatic? Was she a trance medium, or in some similar state, one night in every week?””°
Her alternating states were adumbrated in the phases, active and passive, HPB called, in Isis Unveiled (1877), ‘the days and nights of Brahma.’ Yeats had read that book and Blavatsky’s alternating phases may have influenced his lifelong emphasis on polarity, the antinomies: the tension between quotidian reality and the spiritual or Romantic allure of the Otherworld, in forms ranging from the Celtic Fairyland to that city of art and spirit, Byzantium; and, early and late, between things that merely ‘seem’ (Platonic ‘appearance,’ Hindu maya) and the spiritual reality perceived by Western visionaries and Hindu hermits contemplating on Asian mountains. After reading Isis Unveiled, Yeats had delved into a book given him by AE. This was Esoteric Buddhism
6 Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), in Au, 173-74, 179. The report issued on Blavatsky by Richard Hodgson, a skilled investigator employed by the Society for Psychical Research, assessed her claimed activities in India to be fraudulent, but concluded that she was no ‘mere vulgar adventuress. We think she has achieved a title to a permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters of history’ (cited in Peter Washington, 83.) Yeats, writing in 1889, and registering Blavatsky’s magnetism and skills as an eclectic magpie, found that conclusion simplistic, noting, with his usual mixture of skepticism and credulity, that ‘the fraud theory,’ at least at ‘its most pronounced,’ was ‘wholly unable to cover the facts’ (Mem, 281).
2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism ok
(1883) by Madame Blavatsky’s fellow Theosophist and sometime disciple, A. P. Sinnett, whose earlier book, The Occult World (1881), had already had an impact on Yeats. ‘Spirituality, in the occult sense,’ Sinnett declared, ‘has nothing to do with feeling devout: it has to do with the capacity of the mind for assimilating knowledge at the fountainhead of knowledge itself.’ And he asserted another antithesis crucial to Yeats: that to become an ‘adept,’ a rare status ‘beyond the reach of the general public,’ one must ‘obey the inward impulse of [one’s] soul, irrespective of the prudential considerations of worldly science or sagacity’ (101).
That Eastern impulse is evident in Yeats’s three hermit poems in Responsibilities (1914). It was even more evident a quarter-century earlier, in three poems in his first collection of lyrics. ‘The Indian upon God,’ ‘The Indian to his Love,’ and the lengthy (91-line) ‘Anashuya and Vijaya,’ were written under a more direct and visceral influence.’ For the lure of the East had another source, also related to Madame Blavatsky. Yeats had been deeply impressed with the roving ambassador of Theosophy she had sent to Dublin in April 1886, to instruct the members of the Dublin Hermetic Society in the nuances of Theosophy. The envoy was the charismatic young Bengali swami, Mohini Chatterjee, described by Madame Blavatsky, with perhaps more gaiety than tolerance, as ‘a nutmeg Hindoo with buck eyes,’ for whom several of his English disciples ‘burned with a scandalous, ferocious passion,’ that ‘craving of old gourmands for unnatural food.’* Despite his inability to resist the sexual temptations presented to him (he was eventually dispatched back to India), Chatterjee preached the need to realize one’s individual soul by contemplation, penetrating the illusory nature of the material world, and abjuring worldly ambition. His 1887 book, Man: Fragments of a Forgotten History, described reincarnational stages, and ascending states of consciousness. The fourth and final state, which ‘may be called transcendental consciousness,’ is ineffable, though ‘glimpses’ of it ‘may be obtained in the abnormal condition of extasis’ (64).
7 The latter anticipates Yeats’s later and greater debate-poems as well as two late mountain-poems: the sonnet ‘Meru’ (1933), centered on caverned Hindu hermits, and ‘Lapis Lazuli’ (1936), which ends with a mountain vision. In ‘Anashuya and Vijaya,’ the young priestess Anashuya compels Vijaya to swear an oath by the gods ‘who dwell on sacred Himalay,/ On the far Golden Peak’ (66-70). Like Meru, Golden Peak is a sacred mountain.
8 Quoted in Washington, 88-89. Italics in original.
32 Making the Void Fruitful
‘Ecstasy, an antithetical state, whether spiritual or sexual or both, became a crucial term in Yeats’s lexicon, at war with abstract wisdom or knowledge, though not with a deeper gnosis. Perhaps Yeats was not completely hyperbolic in later saying that he learned more from Chatterjee than ‘from any book.’ There is no doubt that he was permanently affected by the swami’s concept of ecstasy and by the idea of ancient and secret wisdom being passed on orally from generation to generation, fragmentary glimpses of an ineffable truth. There are distinctions between East and West, but, as in Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Mohini Chatterjee presents an unknown Absolute, from which souls emanate as fragments, or ‘sparks,’ separated from the divine substance, and longing to return to the One from which they came. The principal Eastern variation is that, to achieve that ultimate goal requires a long pilgrimage through many incarnations, living through many lives, both in this world and the next.
Many years later, in 1929, Yeats wrote an eponymous poem, ‘Mohini Chatterjee.’ Its final words, ‘Men dance on deathless feet,’ were added by Yeats ‘in commentary’ on Chatterjee’s own words on reincarnation. There is no reference to a God, and we are to ‘pray for nothing,’ but just repeat every night in bed, that one has been a king, a slave, a fool, a rascal, knave. ‘Nor is there anything/ [...] I have not been./ And yet upon my breast/ A myriad heads have lain.’ Such words were spoken by Mohini Chatterjee to ‘set at rest/ A boy’s turbulent days.’ When that boy, almost forty years later, published ‘Mohini Chatterjee’ in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), he placed it immediately preceding what is certainly his most ‘turbulent’ poem of spiritual purgation and reincarnation: ‘Byzantium,’ in which impure spirits, ‘complexities of mire and blood, are presented ‘dying into a dance,/ An agony of trance,/ An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.’ Yet, like most of the other poems we will examine, ‘Byzantium’ participates, though in this case with unique fury and surging energy, in the dominant Yeatsian agon between Time and Eternity, flesh and spirit.
§
As we've seen, Yeats wondered if, on heightened occasions, HPB’s speech might not be ‘automatic,’ and she herself a ‘trance medium.’ But, since he never gave full credence to the astral dictations of Blavatsky’s
2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism oie)
Tibetan Masters, it is ironic that his own major esoteric text had a related genesis. His book A Vision, first published in 1925 and revised in 1937, is based on the ‘automatic writing’ for which Mrs. Yeats discovered a gift when, in the early days of their marriage in 1917, she sensed that her husband’s thoughts were drifting back to the love of his life and his Muse, the unattainable Maud, and to her lush daughter, Iseult, to whom Yeats had also proposed before marrying his wife. Whatever its origin, psychological or occult, the wisdom conveyed to George by her ‘Communicators,’ and then passed on to her husband, preoccupied the poet for years. Alternately insightful and idiosyncratic, beautiful and a bit bananas, A Vision may not be required reading for lovers of the poetry, except for advanced students. Informed scholarship has illuminated the collaboration that led to A Vision, but Tindall’s old witticism still resonates: ‘a little seems too much, his business none of ours.’
But Yeats’s purpose was serious, and, as always, a balancing attempt to exercise individual creative freedom within a rich tradition. In dedicating the first edition of A Vision to ‘Vestigia’ (Moina Mathers, sister of MacGregor Mathers, head of the Golden Dawn), Yeats noted that while some in the Order were ‘looking for spiritual happiness or for some form of unknown power, clearly Hermetic or Gnostic goals, he had a more poetry-centered object, though that, too, reflects the intuitive Gnosticism of creative artists seeking their own visions. As early as the 1890s, he claimed in 1925, he anticipated what would emerge as A Vision, with its circuits of sun and moon, its double-gyre, its tension between Fate and Freedom: ‘I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of one history and that the soul’s.’” Contemptuous of Yeats’s specific supernatural beliefs (‘obstacles’ he had to overcome to achieve his ‘greatness’), T. S. Eliot had himself memorably described creative freedom operating within a larger and necessary historical discipline as the interaction between ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’”°
9 A Vision (1925), xi.
10 Rejecting Yeats’s occultism, along with other forms of ‘modern heresy,’ Eliot opined that Yeats had ‘arrived at greatness against the greatest odds.’ After Strange Gods, 50-51.
34 Making the Void Fruitful
If it is not mandatory that those drawn to the poetry read A Vision, it was absolutely necessary that Yeats write it. It illuminates the later poetry, and even provides the skeletal structure for some of his greatest poems, the best known of which, ‘The Second Coming,’ was originally accompanied by a long note, reproducing the double-gyre, that central symbol of A Vision. Yeats tells us, in the Introduction to the second edition of A Vision, that, back in 1917, he struggled for several days to decipher the ‘almost illegible script,” which he nevertheless found ‘so exciting, sometimes so profound,’ that he not only persuaded his wife to persevere, but offered to give up poetry to devote what remained of his own life to ‘explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences’ which he believed contained mysterious wisdom. The response from one of the unknown writers was conveniently welcome news for him and for us: ‘“No,” was the answer, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry” (Vis, 8).
Yeats was a man at once credulous and rational, a believer among skeptics, a skeptic among believers. In a letter to Ethel Mannin, written a month before his death, Yeats asked and answered his own jocoserious question: ‘Am I a mystic?—no, I am a practical man. I have seen the raising of Lazarus and the loaves and the fishes and have made the usual measurements, plummet line, spirit-level and have taken the temperature by pure mathematic’ (L, 921). Though always open to the possibility of miracle, when confronted by it, he tended to test, as he did in surreptitiously sending samples of blood said to be dripping from a religious icon off to the lab for scientific analysis. The response of Maud Gonne, who had crossed the Channel with Yeats in wartime to view the bleeding icon in the village of Mirebeau, was quite different: having long since converted to Catholicism, she dropped devoutly to her knees."
Yeats’s lifelong quest for spiritual knowledge was countered by the circumspection of a self-divided man and notably dialectical poet, who also wanted to ‘remain faithful to the earth, to cite the opening imperative of the Zarathustra” of ‘that strong enchanter, Nietzsche,’ whose astringent and electrifying impact on Yeats, beginning in 1902, changed the poet, if
11 George Mills Harper, ‘“A Subject for Study”: Miracle at Mirebeau,’ in Yeats and the Occult, ed. Harper, 172-89. For Maud’s reaction to the bleeding holograph, see Cardozo, 292.
12 Prologue to ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra,’ in The Portable Nietzsche, 125. Italics in original
2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism 35
not utterly, substantially. But unlike Nietzsche, Yeats had no doubt that there was a spiritual realm. He strove to acquire knowledge of that world through any and all means at hand: studying the ‘perennial philosophy,’ but not excluding the occasional resort to hashish and mescal to induce occult visions, and belief in astrology and séances, of which he attended many. A séance is at the center of one of his most dramatic plays, Words upon the Window-pane (1932), which helps explain the emphasis on ‘a medium’s mouth’ in his cryptic poem ‘Fragments,’ written at the same time, and which—since it condenses a world of history, philosophy, and mythology in its ten lines and forty-five words—I will later explicate at some length.
Though it is difficult to track and disentangle intertwined strands of thought and influence, let alone make conclusive pronouncements, two significant Yeats scholars, Allan Grossman (in his 1969 study of The Wind Among the Reeds, titled Poetic Knowledge in Early Yeats) and Harold Bloom, in his sweeping 1970 study, grandly titled Yeats, both concluded that their man was essentially a Gnostic. The same assertion governs an unpublished 1992 PhD thesis, written by Steven J. Skelley and titled Yeats, Bloom, and the Dialectics of Theory, Criticism and Poetry. My own conclusion is less certain. What is certain is that Yeats envisioned his life as a quest: first as a search for the secret and sacred, whether a book, a system, or an Otherworldly paradise; but also, early and finally, as a quest for the power to create, which meant elevating the role of the Poet over that of the Saint. It therefore meant refusing to submit to the authoritative and prescriptive demands of any ‘religion,’ orthodox or occult, Christian or Neoplatonic or Gnostic, that he deemed, whatever its attractions, ultimately hostile to imaginative creativity and to human life itself.
3. The Seeker
Yeats was a lifelong Seeker. He was influenced, early on and powerfully, by Shelley’s visionary quester in Alastor, and Tennyson’s in ‘Ulysses,’ heroic solitaries who engage in idealist quests, unconstrained by conventional ties, and whose version of the archetypal peregrinatio vitae ends in death. The crucial lines Yeats puts in the mouth of his nameless death-foreseeing Irish airman—‘A lonely impulse of delight/ Drove to this tumult in the clouds’—echo the lines (304-5), in which the narrator of Alastor epitomizes what impels Shelley’s nameless Seeker, in quest of an ideal represented by an irresistible but inaccessible woman: ‘A restless impulse urged him to embark/ And meet lone death on the drear ocean’s waste.’!
‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,’ a concise fusion of solitary ecstasy, fate, and gnosis (the poem begins ‘I know’), is deservedly one of Yeats’s best-known short lyrics. Inreferring in my subtitle and throughout to Yeats as a Seeker, I am alluding to a very early, little-known ‘dramatic poem in two scenes’ with that title. Though Yeats later struck The Seeker from his canon, its theme—the perennial quest for secret knowledge, usually celebrated but always with an acute awareness of the attendant dangers of estrangement from ‘mere’ human life—initiates what might be fairly described as the basic and archetypal pattern of his life and work.
The Seeker of the title is an aged knight who has been made ‘a coward in the field,’ and been ‘untouched by human joy or human love,’ sacrificing ‘all’ in order to follow a beckoning voice. In his dying moments, he discovers that the alluring voice he has been pursuing all
1 The Irish airman was, of course, Robert Gregory, with Yeats himself supplying the dead pilot’s supposed final words. The profound influence of Alastor on Yeats’s thought and poetry is well known. George Mills Harper once told me that ‘one of
we
the controls in an unfinished notebook of Vision materials is named “Alastor”.
© 2021 Patrick Keane, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0275.03
38 Making the Void Fruitful
his ‘dream-led’ life is that of a ‘bearded witch,’ who knows not what she is, though men call her ‘Infamy.’ That final turn looks back to Spenser’s Faery Queen (I, ii), where the evil witch Duessa, outwardly ‘faire,’ is actually ‘fowle,’ and to Banquo describing the witches he and Macbeth encounter as ‘bearded.’ There are also hints of Keats’s wasted and doomed knight-at-arms in “La Belle Dame sans Merci.’ In the final exchange, the bearded figure, bending triumphantly over the dying knight, sardonically whispers, ‘What, lover, die before our lips have met?’ With his last breath, the knight responds: ‘Again, the voice! The Voice!’ (VP, 681-85).?
Celtic mythology has thematic variations, often exacting a price. In the most famous modern version, Yeats’s 1902 play Cathleen ni Houlihan, written for and starring Maud Gonne, the old hag is climactically transformed into a beautiful woman: ‘a young girl with the walk of a queen,’ Ireland herself, her regal beauty rejuvenated by blood-sacrifice. In that sense she is a devouring female, Ireland as Stephen Dedalus’s ‘old sow that eats her farrow,’ a queen anticipating Wallace Stevens’s devouring earth mother, whose male victim’s ‘grief’ is that she ‘should feed on him.’ Resembling as well the ‘bearded witch’ of Yeats’s The Seeker, ‘Madame La Fleurie’ is revealed in Stevens’s final line as ‘a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.”
The first of two points to be made concerns Yeats’s ambivalence in such quests. What was sought, once achieved, turns out to be more, or less, than the Seeker bargained for. A variation on the theme occurs in a famous poem written a year after The Seeker. In ‘The Stolen Child,’ the naive mortal is an abducted child rather than an active Seeker. He is seduced by the fairies into an Otherworld at once remote and localized in Sligo, a hauntingly beautiful natural world as ominous as it is enchanting. The fairies’ italicized choral refrain, until the final iteration, is certainly enticing:
2 The grotesque ending in The Seeker also anticipates Rebecca du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now,’ in which the father of a drowned daughter pursues and is slain by a serial-murdering dwarf he mistakes for that dead daughter: a short story turned by director Nicholas Roeg into a haunting film starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.
3. On this lethal archetype, see my Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland, and the Myth of the Devouring Female.
3. The Seeker 39
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The fairies themselves are childlike, immortal yet mischievous and not to be trusted. Despite the poem’s beauty, signs of impending trouble abound. On “a leafy island/ Where flapping herons wake/ The drowsy water-rats,’ the fairies have ‘hid our faery vats/ Full of berries/ And of reddest stolen cherries.’ On the moonlit sands ‘Far off by furthest Rosses, where the souls of sleepers are said to have been stolen by fairies, they ‘foot it all the night,/ Weaving olden dances,/ Mingling hands and mingling glances’: conspiratorial, knowing looks to which the child is not privy. The fairies leap to and fro, chasing ‘frothy bubbles,/ While the world is full of troubles/ And is anxious in its sleep.’ In the penultimate and most beautiful stanza, set ‘Where the wandering water gushes/ From the hills above Glen-Car’ (the waterfall on the side of Ben Bulben, a little cataract particularly loved by Yeats), there are tiny ‘pools among the rushes/ That scarce could bathe a star,’ but large enough to contain fish. There the fairies
Seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears, Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams.
In the final stanza, the focus shifts (as it does, though more subtly, in the ‘Byzantium’ poems) to the world left behind, to be heard and seen ‘no more.’ We have a backward glance, not to a world of felt but incomprehensible adult weeping, but to the warm, pre-Disneyesque images of a home now irretrievably lost to the deceived child taken away by the sinister fairies:
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed;
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
40 Making the Void Fruitful
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.
As Yeats acknowledged two years later ina letter to his friend Katharine Tynan, his early poetry ‘is almost all a flight into fairy land from the real world,’ a theme ‘summed up,’ he says, by the ‘chorus’ to ‘The Stolen Child.’ That is ‘not,’ he continued, ‘the poetry of insight but of longing and complaint—the cry of the heart against necessity. I hope some day to alter that and write a poetry of insight and knowledge’ (L, 63). But of course, as in ‘What Then?’—a poem written half a century later, and again pitting the song of the supernatural against the pleasures of this world—‘The Stolen Child’ consists of more than its refrain. As the title suggests and the poem gradually reveals, culminating in the perspective-altering final ‘chorus,’ the child is now in the power of the fairies. As Emerson tells us, ‘nothing is got for nothing’; longing and susceptibility to the siren song of the fairies has led to ‘solemn- eyed’ buyer’s remorse, a palpable sense of terror at having lost forever a world full not only of weeping but of familiar things to be cherished on this warm earth. Even as early as ‘The Stolen Child’ (1886), Yeats was already writing a poetry of ambivalence, and thus of ‘insight and knowledge.”
The second point to be emphasized is that it was precisely such ‘insight and knowledge’ Yeats was seeking. Whether poetic or Hermetic, it was knowledge aligned with the quest for an intuitive knowledge of spiritual truth. On the other hand, Yeats wanted, as he told ‘Vestigia,’ to participate in a spiritual tradition that ‘would leave my imagination free to create as it chose.’ The imaginative power and passionate intensity of much of his best poetry derive from Yeats’s
4 Yeats’s The Land of Heart's Desire (1894) equates this seduction by the fairies with death, as in Goethe’s famous ballad, often set to music, Der Erlkénig. The elf-king tries to seduce a child, being carried on horseback by his father, with promises of a blissful world where the demonic king’s daughters will ‘dance thee and rock thee and sing thee to sleep.’ The child is aware of the danger, but the father remains oblivious, until it is too late. When he arrives home, the child is dead in his arms: ‘In seinem Armen das Kind in war tot.’
3. The Seeker 4]
commitment to the paradox that the ‘sacred,’ unquestionably valid, was to be found through the ‘profane’ and in the here and now, in the tangible things of this earth.
A profound point was made precisely eight decades ago by a perceptive student of Yeats’s life and work, Peter Allt, later the editor of the indispensable Variorum Edition of the poems. Allt argued persuasively that Yeats’s ‘mature religious Anschauung’ consists of ‘religious belief without any religious faith, notional assent to the reality of the supernatural’ combined with ‘an emotional dissent from its actuality.’ As a student of secret wisdom, Yeats responded, not to the orthodox Christian emphasis on pistis (God’s gift of faith), but to gnosis, derived from individual intuition of divine revelation. What Allt refers to as emotional dissent illuminates Yeats’s resistance to Christianity, and his occasional need to ‘mock Plotinus’ thought/ And cry in Plato’s teeth,’ as he does in the final section of ‘The Tower’ in the very act of preparing his ‘peace’ and making his ‘soul’. But emotional dissent and the making of one’s own soul in an act of self-redemption are hardly alien to the concept of individual gnosis.
Paramount to understanding Yeats as man and poet is a recognition of the tension between the two worlds, between the primary and the antithetical, the never fully resolved debate between the Soul and the Self (or Heart). That tension plays out from his earliest poems to the masterpieces of his maturity. Though foreshadowed by the uncanonical The Seeker, the theme is publicly established with ‘The Stolen Child,’ in which the human child, torn between realms, is ‘taken,’ irretrievably absorbed into the Celtic Otherworld. Three years later, the tension is developed at length in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), Yeats’s quest- poem anchored by another debate between paganism and Christianity, here embodied by the Celtic warrior Oisin and St. Patrick. The theme continues with his pivotal Rosicrucian poem, ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ (1892), and culminates in the great debate-poems of his maturity: ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ (1927) and the career- synopsizing debate between ‘Soul’ and ‘Heart’ in section VII of the sequence revealingly titled ‘Vacillation,’ which appeared in 1933, forty years after “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time.’
5 Peter Allt, “W. B. Yeats,” Theology 42 (1941), 81-99.
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The eighth and final section of ‘Vacillation’ ends with the poet blessing—gently and gaily, if somewhat patronizingly—yet rejecting the Saint, here represented by the Catholic theologian Baron von Hiigel, who had, in his 1908 book The Mystical Element of Religion, stressed ‘the costingness of regeneration.’ In the last of his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot aligns himself with von Hiigel by endorsing, in the conclusion of ‘Little Gidding’ (lines 293-94), ‘A condition of complete simplicity/ (Costing not less than everything).’ In section I, in the Dantesque ghost- encounter (seventy of the finest lines he ever wrote and, by his own admission, the ones that had cost him the most effort, Eliot respectfully but definitively differentiated himself from the recently deceased Yeats. In that nocturnal encounter with a largely Yeatsian ‘familiar compound ghost,’ Eliot echoes in order to alter Yeats’s poem ‘Vacillation,’ and the refusal of ‘The Heart’ to be ‘struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!’ In the present context, the contrast between Eliot and Yeats is illuminating; and Eliot is right to perceive as his mighty opposite in spiritual terms the man he pronounced in his 1940 memorial address, ‘the greatest poet of our time—certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language,’ but who was also, from Eliot’s Christian perspective, an occultist and a pagan.°
The charges were hardly far-fetched. In the final section of ‘Vacillation’ the poet wonders if he really must ‘part’ with von Higel, since both ‘honor sanctity’ and ‘Accept the miracles of the saints’—the report, for example, that the dead ‘body of St. Teresa’ of Avila was discovered ‘undecayed in tomb,/ Bathed in miraculous oil’ and exuding ‘sweet odours.’ Yeats was not being casual about Teresa’s supposedly uncorrupted corpse. He had alluded to the same phenomenon five years earlier, in ‘Oil and Blood,’ and once asked a skeptic how he accounted for ‘the fact that when the tomb of St. Teresa was opened her body exuded miraculous oil?’ (LTSM, 122)
6 Though Eliot later removed that phrase, perhaps judging it too fulsome, his final tribute to Yeats is registered more powerfully at the end of this ghost-encounter in ‘Little Gidding.’ Fusing the pivotal ‘unless’ of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ with the ‘agony of flame’ in which blood-begotten spirits are depicted ‘Dying into a dance’ in ‘Byzantium,’ Eliot has the ghost conclude on what amounts to a rapprochement: ‘From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit/ Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire/ Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
3. The Seeker 43
Yet he must part with von Hiigel. His heart ‘might find relief/ Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief/ What seems most welcome in the tomb,’ but he is fated to
play a predestined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said? So get you gone, von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.
In sending the poem to Olivia Shakespear, his first lover and most intimate lifetime correspondent, Yeats, having just re-read all his lyric poetry, cited that line, and observed: ‘The swordsman throughout repudiates the saint, but not without vacillation. Is that perhaps the sole theme—Usheen and Patrick—“so get you gone Von Hugel though with blessings on your head?”’ (L, 798). Having, in the preceding line, cited scripture (Samson’s riddle in Judges 14) to insist that sweetness comes out of strength, Yeats ends by blessing the Catholic mystic even as he asserts as his own exemplar pagan Homer and ‘his unchristened heart.’ As we will see in the next chapter, Yeats adopted Nietzsche’s agon of Homer and paganism versus Plato and Christ. The choice of a Nietzschean ‘Homer and his unchristened heart’ is doubly exemplary, since this is the central line of the stanza Yeats himself chose to represent his life’s work in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, published three years after ‘Vacillation.’
§
Marked by tension between the material and spiritual worlds, the Seeker theme, at once Gnostic and high Romantic, illuminates, along with several of Yeats’s most beautiful early quest-lyrics, two explicitly Rosicrucian poems: “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ and, a poem I will get to in due course, ‘The Secret Rose.’
“To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,’ the italicized poem opening the group known after 1895 as The Rose, establishes, far more powerfully than The Seeker, this poet’s lifelong pattern of dialectical vacillation, of being pulled between the temporal and spiritual worlds. In his 1907 essay ‘Poetry and Tradition,’ Yeats would fuse Romanticism (Blake’s dialectical Contraries without which there can be ‘no progression’) with Rosicrucianism. ‘The nobleness of the Arts,’ Yeats writes, ‘is in
44 Making the Void Fruitful
the mingling of contraries, the extremity of sorrow, the extremity of joy, perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrender; and the red rose opens at the meeting of the two beams of the cross, and at the trysting place of mortal and immortal, time and eternity’ (Myth, 255). In “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,’ the symbolist poet seeks to ‘find’ the immortal within the mortal; yet there is an inevitable tension between ‘all poor foolish things that live a day’ and ‘Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.’ That mingling, or contrast, concludes the first of the poem’s two 12-line movements. The second part begins by invoking the Rose to ‘Come near, come near, come near—, only to have the poet suddenly recoil from total absorption in the eternal symbol. He may be recalling Keats, who, at the turning point of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ suddenly realizes that if he were to emulate the nightingale’s ‘pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy,’ by dying, he would, far from entering into unity with the ‘immortal Bird,’ be divorced from it, and everything else, forever: ‘Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—/ To thy high requiem become a sod.’
Yeats’s recoil is no less abrupt, and thematically identical: ‘Come near, come near, come near—Ah, leave me still/ A little space for the rose-breath to fill!’ Marked by a rare exclamation point, this seems a frightened defense against the very beauty he remains in quest of. A hesitant Yeats is afraid that he will be totally absorbed, engulfed, in the spiritual realm symbolized by the rose. Along with Keats at the turning point of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ another parallel, with St. Augustine, may be illuminating. The Latin Epigraph to The Rose—’Sero te amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova! Sero te amavi’ [Too late I have loved you, Beauty so old and so new! Too late I have loved you ]—is from The Confessions, a passage (X, 27) in which Augustine longs to be kindled with a desire that God approach him. Yeats would later, in 1901, quote these same Latin lines to illustrate that the religious life and the life of the artist share a common goal (E&I, 207). But the plea in the poem for ‘a little space’ may remind us of a more famous remark by Augustine, also addressed to God, but having to do with profane rather than sacred love. A sinful man, still smitten with his mistress, he would, Augustine tells us, pray: ‘“O Lord, give me chastity and continency, but not yet!” For I was afraid, lest you should hear me soon, and soon deliver me from the
3. The Seeker 45
disease of concupiscence, which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished’ (Confessions XIII, 7:7; italics in original).
In pleading with his Rose-Muse to ‘leave me still/ A little space for the rose-breath to fill,’ Yeats also fears a too precipitous deliverance from the temporal world. Augustine is ‘afraid, lest you [God] should hear me too soon.’ Yeats is afraid ‘Lest I no more hear common things that crave.’ Becoming deaf to the transient world with its ‘heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass,’ he worries that he will ‘seek alone to hear the strange things said / By God to [...] those long dead, and thus ‘learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.’ The hidden wisdom and eternal beauty symbolized by the rose is much to be desired. But this quester is also a poet; and a poet, as Wordsworth rightly said in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, is above all, ‘a man speaking to other men.’ Early and late, Yeats, thinking of the warning example of the eccentric MacGregor Mathers, head of the Golden Dawn, was aware that ‘meditations upon unknown thought/ Make human intercourse grow less and less’ (‘All Soul’s Night,’ 74-75). The ‘rose-breath’ is the crucial breathing / speaking ‘space’ between the two worlds. Here, as always, self-divided Yeats is pulled in two antithetical directions. Hence the debates, implicit and often explicit, embodied in so many of his poems, over thirty in all.
A memorable paragraph in his most beautiful prose work, Per Amica Silentia Lunae, begins, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Myth, 331). Almost forty years after he wrote “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,’ Yeats presented, in section VII of ‘Vacillation,’ a stichomythic debate between ‘The Soul’ and ‘The Heart,’ already cited as the second of my epigraphs to Part One. Once again, and more dramatically, the more Yeatsian of the interlocutors resists the option of chanting in ‘a tongue men do not know,’ The Soul offers ‘Isaiah’s coal, adding, in an imperious rhetorical question, ‘what more can man desire?’ But the Heart, ‘a singer born,’ refuses to be ‘struck dumb in the simplicity of fire,’ his tongue purified but cauterized by the spiritual fire of that live coal the angel took from God’s altar and brought to the prophet’s lips in Isaiah 6:6-7. Having refused to ‘seek out’ spiritual ‘reality,’ the Heart goes on, after indignantly rejecting Isaiah’s coal and ‘the simplicity of fire,’ to adamantly spurn Soul’s final promise and threat: ‘Look on that fire, salvation walks within.’
46 Making the Void Fruitful
The Heart anachronistically but dramatically responds, ‘What theme had Homer but original sin?’ Though it firmly stands its antithetical ground, the Heart does not deny the lot-darkening concept of original sin, and accepts the notional distinction (Platonic and Neoplatonic, Hindu and Christian) between spiritual ‘reality’ and material ‘things that [merely] seem.’ But since it is these things of the world that fuel an artist’s fire and provide a resinous theme, the Heart emotionally dissents. I am here alluding to the final Dionysian lines of the curtain- closing song (written the year before ‘Vacillation,’ VII) for Yeats’s play, The Resurrection: ‘Whatever flames upon the night/ Man’s own resinous heart has fed.’ In this second of ‘Two Songs from a Play,’ Yeats echoes and alters Virgil’s Fourth, so-called Messianic, Eclogue. In the song as in the play, ambivalent Yeats remains torn between the world of spirit and more human images. As a reader of Nietzsche, who celebrated Dionysus rather than ‘the Crucified,’ Yeats is recalling that torches of resinous pine were carried by the Bacchantes: the devotees of Dionysus, whose heart was torn out of his side in the opening song. With that marvelous adjective ‘resinous,’ Yeats ends by emphasizing Dionysus as much as Jesus, even in a play focused on Christ’s Resurrection. The tension between interdependent contraries, the divine and the human, and the titular vacillation, persists—as does the desire to merge the antinomies at some ‘trysting place,’ Yeats’s heart-language characteristically ‘mingling’ the spiritual and the erotic.
But we have jumped ahead four decades. Before turning to ‘The Secret Rose,’ which appeared in Yeats’s next volume, three other poems from The Rose merit comment. The first of these, ‘The Rose of the World,’ is also the first to suggest a connection linking Celtic and Greek mythology with Maud Gonne, her beauty resembling that of Deirdre and of Helen, for whose red lips, ‘Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam.’ The other two—‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ (later added to The Rose) and, immediately following, “The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’—are both beautiful, and both embody the tension between the two worlds. The first suggests that the peace promised by an alluring Otherworld is more tumultuous than it appears; the second, like The Seeker and “The Stolen Child,’ stresses the human cost of seduction by Otherworldly dreams. I will return to ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’ later in this volume, juxtaposing it with ‘What Then?,’ a poem written almost
3. The Seeker 47
a half-century later, and which, I believe, amounts to a point-by-point refutation of the earlier poem—except, crucially, for the refrain.
The ‘Faeryland’ poem is a catalog of might-have-beens. The ‘tenderness’ of love; the ‘prudent years’ that might have freed him from ‘money cares and fears’; the ‘fine angry mood’ leading to ‘vengeance’ upon mockers; and, finally, ‘unhaunted sleep in the grave’: all have been lost, spoiled by the repeated ‘singing’ of ‘an unnecessary cruel voice’ that ‘shook the man out of his new ease, paralyzing him so that he dies without ever having lived.’ The voice—a variation on the siren call of the fairies in ‘The Stolen Child’ (‘Come away, O human child!’) and on the ‘voice’ that beckons and deceives the victim of The Seeker—emanates, ultimately, from the Otherworld, in this case from a Celtic ‘woven world-forgotten isle,’ where
There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race Under the golden or the silver skies;
That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot
It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit; And at that singing he was no more wise.
The poem ends, “The man has found no comfort in the grave.’ But that closing line is immediately preceded by a rather cryptic couplet: ‘Why should those lovers that no lovers miss/ Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?’ In Fairyland, where the boughs are ‘changeless’ and the waves ‘dreamless,’ all dreams are presumably fulfilled, as are the desires of those perfect lovers. There is no need for further dreaming, ‘until God burn Nature with a kiss.’ The poems of early Yeats have their apocalypses, the most dramatic the windblown Blakean conflagration in ‘The Secret Rose.’ But the apocalypse in the ‘Fairyland’ poem is unexpected—unless one knows Yeats’s Celtic Twilight tale, ‘The Untiring Ones,’ where fairies dance on and on, ‘until God shall burn up the world with a kiss’ (Myth, 78).
We also have a supposedly perfect world, with the ‘deep wood’s woven shade’ and lovers who ‘dance upon the level shore,’ in ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ Originally a song in the earliest version (1892) of Yeats’s
7 In his jauntily bleak ‘Miniver Cheevy’ (1910), American poet Edward Arlington Robinson gave us another frustrated Romantic dreamer (as chivalry-intoxicated as Don Quixote) who, wasting his life, ‘sighed for what was not,/ And dreamed, and rested from his labors.’
48 Making the Void Fruitful
play The Countess Kathleen, it was a favorite among the early Yeats poems memorized by James Joyce—the song he sang in lieu of the requested prayer at his mother’s deathbed and whose words haunt his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, throughout Bloomsday. The King of Ulster who put aside his crown to be ‘no more a king,/ But learn the dreaming wisdom’ of the Druids, now lives in the deep woods. He invites, or tempts, others, specifically a pair of troubled lovers, to join him (is he lonely?) in his ostensibly perfect and peaceful paradise:
Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
And no more turn aside and brood Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars, And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all disheveled wandering stars.
As indicated by the chiasmus linking the last line of the first stanza with the first line of the second, these two 6-line stanzas partially mirror each other. But while the wood and the sea of the second sestet parallel ‘the deep wood’s woven shade’ and the ‘level shore’ of the first, the final and most striking line of the poem, elevating and expanding our gaze to those ‘disheveled wandering stars,’ has no precursor. As such, it requires particular attention. Fergus’s otherworld seems peaceful and untroubled, but there are echoes of the false paradise offered by Milton’s Satan; and the final three lines (anticipating the turbulent final lines of ‘Byzantium’) amount to a disturbance of the peace. For despite the emotional respite promised by Fergus, the poem’s culminating imagery—‘shadows’ of the wood, the ‘white breast’ of the dim sea, above all those ‘disheveled’ wandering stars—extends to the forest, the sea, and the heavens themselves, all the erotic tumult of ‘love’s bitter mystery,’ albeit naturalized and sublimated.
This sublimated erotic tumultis not unprepared for; it is foreshadowed in retrospect by the displaced sexuality of Fergus’s poem-opening verbs,
3. The Seeker 49
‘drive’ and ‘pierce.’ But the enchanting and disturbing final line suggests, by allusion, other erotic connections. ‘All disheveled wandering stars’ fuse the ‘golden tresses’ Eve ‘wore/ Disheveled’ and in ‘wanton ringlets’ in Paradise Lost (IV. 305-6) with Pope’s echo in The Rape of the Lock, which ends with Belinda’s shorn tresses consecrated ‘midst the Stars’: ‘Not Berenice’s Locks first rose so bright,/ The Heavens bespangling with disheveled Light.’ Those sexual undercurrents are also present in ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’
In the next chapter, we will move from quest to reincarnation, from Fairyland to Byzantium, and, via the final ‘Rose’ poem, the violent but benignly apocalyptic “The Secret Rose,’ to the far better-known and bestial apocalypse of “The Second Coming.’
4. The Byzantium Poems and Apocalypse in ‘The Secret Rose’ and ‘The Second Coming’
The quest-theme, first established crudely in The Seeker, beautifully if ambivalently in ‘The Stolen Child,’ ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland,’ and ‘Who Goes with Fergus?,’ and, perhaps most seminally in ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,’ also provides the structure for the two ‘Byzantium’ poems. Before discussing the last of the Rose poems, “The Secret Rose,’ I would therefore like to jump ahead three decades, leaving behind for a few moments Fairyland and the Celtic Twilight in order to engage the more vigorous poetry attending the imaginary voyages to a very different Otherworld. Taken together, the two ‘Byzantium’ poems feature, first, a sailing after knowledge and, second, a process of purgation, both of which turn out to be simultaneously spiritual and erotic. The subject of both ‘Byzantium’ poems is the opposition of flesh and spirit, natural flux and spiritual form; but their shared theme is that these antitheses are polarities—Blakean Contraries inextricably interdependent. The ‘Byzantium’ poems seem proof of the artistic truth of Yeats’s Golden Dawn name, Demon Est Deus Inversus, and of Blake’s proverb, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ That proverb, the tenth, is from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake’s affirmation of the polar nature of being, privileging, in the dialectic of necessary Contraries, ‘Energy’ and the active ‘Prolific’ over the ‘Devouring,’ the passive and religious (Plates 3, 7, 16). Yeats is pulled between these Contraries.
In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1926), a sixty-year-old and temporarily impotent poet, painfully aware that the world of youth and sexual vitality is ‘no country for old men,’ sets sail for and has finally ‘come/
© 2021 Patrick Keane, CC BY 4.0 https: //doi.org/10.11647 /OBP.0275.04
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To the holy city of Byzantium.’ But is all changed? The opening stanza’s ‘young/ In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,/ —Those dying generations—at their song’ are reversed yet mirrored in the final stanza. ‘Once out of nature,’ the aging speaker, his heart ‘sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal,’ imagines that heart, purged in ‘God’s holy fire,’ consumed away and himself (with what Denis Donoghue once wittily characterized as ‘the desperate certainty of a recent convert’) transformed into a bird of ‘hammered gold and gold enameling,’ set ‘upon a golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come.’
In a 1937 BBC broadcast, Yeats glossed the golden bird and Virgilian golden bough as symbolic ‘of the intellectual joy of eternity, as contrasted to the instinctual joy of human life.’ That Platonic/Plotinian contrast with nature is most certainly there. But these golden artifacts are still, however changed, recognizable ‘birds in the trees,’ so that, whatever the ostensible thrust of the poem, the undertow of the imagery recreates— as in the ‘white breast’ and ‘disheveled’ stars of the supposedly tumult-free final stanza of ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’—the world being ‘rejected.’ Further, the now-avian poet is singing to ‘lords and ladies’ of Byzantium, the sexual principle surviving even in that ‘holy city’; and his theme, ‘What is past, or passing, or to come,’ repeats—in a Keatsian ‘finer tone,’ to be sure—the three-stage cycle of generation presented in the opening stanza: ‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.’ ‘Caught in that sensual music,’ those ‘dying generations [...] neglect/ Monuments of unageing intellect.’ But the golden bird set on the golden bough, however symbolic of ageless intellect, still seems partially caught in that sensual music, singing of the cycle of time to lords and ladies. Despite the poem’s haughty dismissal of ‘any natural thing,’ nature is the source of art, which, in turn, expresses nature; and the audience will always necessarily be men and women.
I’ve referred to ‘Byzantium’—borrowing the adjective from ‘Mohini Chatterjee,’ the poem that immediately precedes it—as Yeats’s most ‘turbulent’ engagement in the tension, marked by conflict and continuity, between flesh and spirit, natural and supernatural, Time and Eternity. Though he admired the first ‘Byzantium’ poem, Yeats’s friend Sturge Moore expressed a serious reservation: ‘Your “Sailing to Byzantium,” magnificent as the first three stanzas are, lets me down in the fourth, as such a goldsmith’s bird is as much nature as a man’s body, especially if
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it only sings like Homer and Shakespeare of what is past or passing or to come to Lords and Ladies’ (LTSM, 164). It’s difficult to believe that this was news to Yeats; but, agreeing with Moore to the extent that his friend had shown him that ‘the idea needed exposition,’ he set out to address the issue in a second poem.
The result, written in September 1930, was ‘Byzantium,’ a poem that complicates rather than resolves Sturge Moore’s intelligent quibble. Holy and purgatorial though the city may be, as the ‘unpurged images of day recede,’ the ‘Emperor’s’ soldiery are described as ‘drunken’ and ‘abed,’ perhaps exhausted from visiting temple prostitutes, since we hear, as night’s resonance recedes, ‘night-walkers’ song/ After great cathedral gong.’ Amid considerable occult spookiness, including a walking mummy (more image than shade or man), two images of the eternal emerge: the works of architect and goldsmith, both transcending and scorning the human cycle, sublunary and changeable: ‘A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains/ All that man is,/ All mere complexities,/ The fury and the mire of human veins.’
The second emblem of eternity reprises the first poem’s icon of ‘hammered gold and gold enameling,’ the form the speaker of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined himself taking once he was ‘out of nature.’ This avian artifact,
Miracle, bird, or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden bough, Can, like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire and blood.
However golden and immutable it may be, that the miraculous bird can be moon-embittered and scornful suggests that it may be ‘almost as much nature’ as the golden bird Moore found insufficiently transcendent in the first Byzantium poem. Even in the overtly primary or soul-directed ‘Byzantium’ poems, the antithetical or life-directed impulse is too passionate to be programmatically subdued. We remember (as with the ‘Byzantium’ poems’ precursors, Keats’s ‘Nightingale’ and ‘Grecian Urn’ odes) the rich vitality of the sexual world being ‘rejected’ in the first poem, and the possible ambiguity of the famous phrase, ‘the artifice
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of eternity.’ And the final tumultuous stanza of ‘Byzantium,’ especially its astonishing last line, evokes a power almost, but not quite, beyond critical analysis.
The multitude of souls (‘Spirit after spirit!’) riding into the holy city, each ‘Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,’ cannot be controlled, even though that surging power is said to be broken by the Byzantine artificers and artifacts. The poem ends with a single extraordinary burst, asserting one thing thematically, but, in its sheer momentum and syntax, suggesting quite another:
The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
The marbled floor is not only the site for the preceding stanza’s ritual of purgation, where the spirits are envisioned ‘dying into a dance’; the floor itself seems to be ‘dancing,’ the city almost lifted off its dykes under the inundation of the prolific sea of generation. There is a protective barrier against the full impact of the waves. The Emperor’s smithies and marbles, we are twice told, ‘break’ (defend against, order, tame) these ‘furies,’ these ‘images,’ and the sea itself. All three are the direct objects of that one verb; but, as Helen Vendler has observed, ‘Practically speaking, the governing force of the verb “break” is spent long before the end of the sentence is reached.’ The artistic defenses erected to order and transform the flood end up emphasizing instead the turbulent plenitude of nature, and those spawning ‘images that yet/ Fresh images beget.’ We end with what is, phonetically and in tension-riddled power, one of the most remarkable single lines in all of English literature: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’ Along with the images that yet fresh images ‘beget,’ that final line overpowers even the teeming fish and flesh—all that is ‘begotten, born, and dies,’ the ‘salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas’—of ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ The dolphin is at
1 Vendler, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays, 118. The floor is ambiguously ‘marbled.’ One draft, referring to the ‘emperor’s bronze & marble,’ suggests statuary, as in the statues of ‘Among School Children,’ that ‘keep a marble or a bronze repose.’
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once the mythological savior and transporter of souls to paradise and kin to us, who share its complexities of ‘mire and blood.’ Inversely, the ‘gong,’ though emblematic of Time, also, since it recalls the semantron of the opening stanza, the ‘great cathedral gong,’ has to be seen and heard as tormenting the surface of life, yet pulling the sea of generation up, to the spiritual source of life’s transcendence. Once again—though more powerfully than usual—we are caught up in the dialectical conflict between time and eternity, sexuality and spirituality, self and soul.
§
We may now return to ‘The Secret Rose’ (1896) which appeared in Yeats’s third collection, the autumnal The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). This fin- de-siécle and symboliste volume (his friend Arthur Symons’s influential The Symbolist Movement in Poetry appeared the same year), evokes a fallen world, soon to be visited by a longed for apocalyptic wind. This volume includes what may be Yeats’s most beautiful early poem. The exquisite ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’ projects ultimate union between the temporal and eternal as a sublime yet sexual mingling (as in that dreamt of ‘Faeryland,’ where ‘the sun and moon were in the fruit’) of lunar apples of silver and solar apples of gold: a marriage of alchemy and Deuteronomy. I discuss this poem in Part Two in connection with Maud Gonne.
Less entrancing poems in The Wind Among the Reeds feature a world- weary speaker who, to quote the longest-titled poem in a volume of many long titles, ‘mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World.’ That consummation devoutly to be wished is far more dramatic in ‘The Secret Rose,’ which I have deliberately delayed discussing until now. The last of Yeats’s explicit ‘Rose’ poems, it begins and ends, ‘Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose’: a rondure suggesting that all will be enfolded (the verb ‘enfold’ appears twice in the poem) within the petals of the symbolic flower. The Seeker is among those questers who have ‘sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,/ Or in the wine vat,’ a questing alternately Christian or Dionysian. Wandering Aengus sought his elusive beauty (the ‘apple- blossom in her hair’ allying her with Maud Gonne, associated from the day Yeats met her with apple blossom) through hollow lands and hilly lands suggestive of a woman’s body. The Seeker in ‘The Secret Rose’
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also, over many years, ‘sought through lands and islands numberless [...]/ Until he found’—unsurprisingly since this poem, too, was written for Maud Gonne—‘a woman, of so shining loveliness’ that one desired consummation suggests another. No sooner is the beautifully tressed woman of shining loveliness ‘found’ (a state projected in “The Song of Wandering Aengus,’ where ‘I will find out where she has gone’) than we are told:
I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die? Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows, Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
This early apocalypse, with its approaching ‘hour’ and final questions, looks before and after. That ‘surely’ anticipates (‘Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand’) Yeats’s most powerful, terrifying, yet longed-for apocalypse: his reversal of the Parousia of Christ in the century’s most-quoted poem. ‘Surely thine hour has come’: foreshadowing the advent of the rough beast, ‘its hour come round at last,’ this line echoes and reverses Jesus’ initial retort to his mother, who suggests that he miraculously resupply the wine that has run out during the wedding at Cana: ‘Woman, what has this to do with me? My hour is not yet come’ (John 2:4). As Helen Vendler has recently suggested, that allusion is compounded by its Shakespearean reverberation in the remark of the French nobleman on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, who looks forward to English corpses and the carrion crows that will ‘Fly o’er them, all impatient for their hour.’ That line from Henry V, Vendler observes, ‘adds the malice and impatience that will be incorporated by Yeats in his image of the rough beast.”
Just as the apocalyptic ‘hour’ of ‘The Secret Rose’ looks before as well as after; and just as “The Second Coming’ had a genesis both occult and literary, so too with the apocalypse of “The Secret Rose.’ In both cases, the primary literary source is Blake. The slouching rough beast of the later poem fuses (among other creatures) Blake’s sublime Tyger
2 ‘Loosed Quotes,’ 133-34. Vendler argues that critical focus on the opening octave of ‘The Second Coming’ has caused this ‘intricate’ poem as a whole—in which Yeats ultimately repudiates and disavows the ‘vain human temptation to prophesy’—to be ‘regularly misread’ (139).
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with his striking illustration (in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and elsewhere) of bestial Nebuchadnezzar slouching on all fours. In ‘The Secret Rose,’ whatever its Rosicrucian sources, the precursor passage is Blake’s description, in the apocalyptic final ‘Night’ of The Four Zoas, of ‘The stars consumed like a lamp blown out,’ which reappear as Yeats’s ‘stars,’ extinguished after being ‘blown about the sky/ Like the sparks blown out of a smithy.’ Even Yeats’s substitution of a smithy for a lamp pays tribute to Blake’s blacksmith-god, Los (in Eternity, Urthona).
The Blakean echo is hardly accidental. Of Yeats’s three 1890s Rosicrucian short stories, the first, Rosa Alchemica, is most closely related to ‘The Secret Rose.’ The hero of Rosa Alchemica, the magician Michael Robartes, is a student of comparative literature, especially drawn, as was Yeats, to the prophetic poems of William Blake. Blake’s epic The Four Zoas (first titled Vala, and abandoned in manuscript in 1807) was rediscovered and published in 1893 by none other than Yeats (and Edwin Ellis). In the finale, from which Yeats lifted his image of stars dying after being ‘blown’ about the sky like ‘sparks,’ redeemed ‘Man’ (meaning the redeemed human being), having finally purged all the evil in himself, looks at infinity unharmed. Los ‘rose in all his regenerative power’; the hour of transformation has arrived:
The sun has left his blackness & found a fresher morning,
And the mild moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night,
And Man walks forth from midst of the fires, the evil is all consumed: His eyes behold the angelic spheres arising night & day;
The stars consumed like a lamp blown out, & in their stead, behold: The expanding eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds. (IX.822-27)
Here we have the potentially divine ‘Man’ envisioned by so many Gnostics, Hermeticists, Cabbalists, Rosicrucians, and Alchemists. The great Gnostic Valentinus was unknown to Yeats, who was, however, familiar with the half-mythological medieval alchemist, Basilius Valentinus, whose ‘Twelve Keys’ are cited by Yeats in Rosa Alchemica. This Valentinus compares ‘the fire of the Last Day to the fire of the alchemists, and the world to the alchemist’s furnace,’ in which ‘all must be dissolved before the divine substance, material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake’ (Myth, 270). Basilius Valentinus’ ‘new man, more noble in his glorified state’ than he was before ‘the conflagration,’ is a ‘Man’ fully human, liberated from all imprisoning limitations, whether of materialism, the
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Lockean / empiricist senses, or political tyranny.’ In the final lines of The Four Zoas, Urthona, the eternal form of Los, ‘rises from the ruinous walls/ In all his ancient strength.’ (One of Yeats’s, and Joyce’s, favorite phrases of Blake comes from an 1800 letter to William Hayley: ‘The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.’) In Blake’s anything-but-static Eternity, Urthona, though still ready for the creative strife of Contraries in the Blakean Eden, is now armed to wage ‘intellectual war,’ the ‘war of swords’ having ‘departed’ (IX.849-51).-In his most famous appeal (in what is now known as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’) for an imaginative art prophetically inspired and intended to achieve individual and societal redemption, building a new ‘Jerusalem’ in England, Blake says his ‘sword’ will not ‘sleep’ in his hand. But his weaponry (sword, ‘Bow of burning gold,’ ‘Arrows of desire,’ spear, and ‘Chariot of fire’) is to be employed in ceaseless ‘Mental Fight.’ He has, Gnostics would say, achieved gnosis, a state anticipated in Yeats’s longed for apocalypse in ‘The Secret Rose.’
These two apocalypses are benign. That of “The Second Coming,’ though also anticipated and partially longed for, is different. The ‘vast image’ of the sphinx-beast that rises up from ‘sands of the desert’ had its occult (as opposed to literary / Blakean) origin in an 1890 symbolic- card experiment conducted with Yeats by MacGregor Mathers, head of the Golden Dawn, an experiment also participated in by Florence Farr, not only a great beauty, accomplished actress and musician to whom Yeats was attracted, but a gifted adept. Yeats suddenly saw ‘a gigantic Negro raising up his head and shoulders among great stones’ (Mem, 71), changed in its published version to ‘a desert and a Black Titan’ (Au, 180). In his description of the occult experiment with Mathers, Yeats acknowledges that (unlike the ‘crowning moment’ achieved by Florence Farr) ‘sight came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been cut with a knife’ (Au, 185). That simile reappears in the drafts of ‘The Second Coming.’ Introducing the moment preceding the vision of the vast image rising up out of Spiritus Mundi, Yeats first wrote: ‘Before the dark was cut as by a knife.’ That he cancelled the
3 In Rosa Alchemica, Yeats cites the ‘ninth key,’ to which should be added the ‘Fourth Key’: ‘At the end [...] the world shall be judged by fire,’ and, the alchemist adds, alluding to Isaiah, ‘After the conflagration, there shall be formed a new heaven and a new earth, and the new man will be more noble in his glorified state than he was before.’ Waite, I, 331.
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line is one of several indications of the shift from the poem’s opening certitude to the uncertainty of the second movement, beginning with that twice repeated but nevertheless equivocal ‘Surely.
Like ‘The Secret Rose,’ ‘The Second Coming’ ends in a mysterious question mingling breathless anticipation with ambiguity, in an uncertain certitude. The final movement begins ‘But now I know,’ yet ends with a question, the mark of the excited yet terrified reverie that defines the Sublime. Whatever visionary certitude is claimed, knowledge was reserved, in the drafts, to the apocalyptic ‘rough beast’ itself: ‘And now at last knowing its hour come round/ It has set out for Bethlehem to be born.’ In the published text, Yeats ends, grammatically, with an assertion. But his subjective perplexity, at variance with the objective omniscience of the opening eight lines, compels him to conclude with a question mark—a terrified and humbling response reflecting that of the Hebrew apocalyptic visionary, Daniel.
In his long note to the poem, occultist Yeats anticipated and welcomed a post-Christian civilization. But then there is the actual poem. Unlike the opening octave of oracular declarations (a parody of naively optimistic Christian certitude), the second part, its fourteen lines taking the unexpected form of an unrhymed sonnet, is less aloofly visionary than human and uncertain. In the Ninth Night of The Four Zoas and ‘The Secret Rose,’ destruction is the prerequisite to re-creation, the consummation of time and the onset of eternity, or at least the re-emergence of a better historical era. That archetypal pattern dominates Yeats’s occult note to the poem, in which, having reproduced the double cone of A Vision, he informs us that ‘the end of an age’ is represented by ‘the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction.’ What will be swept away is not only primary Christianity but ‘all our scientific, democratic, fact-finding [...] civilization,’ to be replaced by an antithetical aristocratic civilization, based on the esoteric materials allegedly given to Michael Robartes by a fictive Arab sect (the ‘Judwalis’), but sounding decidedly Nietzschean. ‘When the revelation comes it will not come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish again for two thousand years prince & vizier. Why should we resist?’ (VP, 823-25)
4 I quote the drafts as transcribed in my Yeats’s Interactions, 65, and, for the beast ‘knowing its hour’, 100.
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This is the welcome change, the confident occultist assures us, to be ushered in by the birth of the rough beast. But the poem itself has a decidedly different tale to tell. For, ‘surely,’ the newborn age is likely to take the un-civilized, chaotic shape prefigured by its brutal engendering. With that plot shift or peripeteia, the theoretician and cold- eyed clairvoyant in Yeats yields to the poet and man whose vision of the beast, however titillating, truly ‘troubles my sight.’ Yeats is here in accord with the response of Daniel (two centuries before an echoing John of Patmos in Rev. 13) to the final and most ‘terrifying and dreadful’ of the ‘four great beasts’ he sees in a dream: ‘my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me [...] I was dismayed by the vision and did not understand it’ (Dan 7:19-20, 8:15-27).
This deeper insight, knowing that we do not know, in a Daniel or a Yeats, is also a form of gnosis, but a higher form, more human and accurate than recklessly prophetic and oracular.’ In her 1996 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska celebrated the three words, ‘I don’t know,’ a small phrase that ‘flies on mighty wings.’ She noted that ‘Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “1 don’t know.”’ Her predecessor as a Nobel laureate, the man who wrote that long note about history-determining gyres and cycles, was an occultist and something of a right-wing crank. The man who envisioned and wrote ‘The Second Coming’ was a poet, and the poem that emerged burst the limits of Yeats’s own accompanying prose note. As D. H. Lawrence reminds us, ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
5 The dangers of pseudo-historical cyclicism are exemplified by The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny (1997), by William Strauss and Neil Howe, a book that asserts that violence must necessarily precede full ‘Awakening.’ The projected crisis may not ‘require total war, but it does require a major discontinuity or ekpyrosis—the death of an old order and the rebirth of something new’ (51). Barely tolerable in Yeats, this apocalyptic gibberish has been enthusiastically endorsed by Steve Bannon and other architects of the seditious attempt on 6 January 2021 by Donald Trump and his more conspiracy- addled followers (QAnon, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, et al.) to carry out a violent insurrection in an attempt, with the passive complicity of a craven Republican Party, to overturn the 2020 US presidential election. See Adele M. Stans.
6 Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 14. Szymborska, ‘The Poet and the World.’
5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption
Gnosis takes many forms. I just noted what the visionary poet of “The Second Coming’ claims to ‘know,’ and the very different acknowledgment in the punctuation and in the drafts, where the role of seer is usurped by the rough beast itself, ‘knowing its hour come round.’ The annunciation to the Virgin Mary two thousand years earlier, though it resulted in the Incarnation, left Yeats’s Magi, the star-led Seekers who had come to Bethlehem, ‘unsatisfied’ by the subsequent crucifixion on Calvary. Thus, they long—to quote the memorable final line of ‘The Magi’ (1913)— for another ‘uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.” As with so many questers in Yeats, they would be disappointed by the coming, two thousand years later, of something bestial indeed but hardly what they hoped for. ‘Leda and the Swan,’ the fused sonnet (a Shakespearean octave and Petrarchan sestet) initiating the three-part cycle that ends with the rough beast slouching ‘towards Bethlehem to be born,’ also prefigures that mystery on the stable floor. Itself bestial, ‘Leda and the Swan’ signals and embodies the annunciation of the Classical era, and it, too, involves a sexual engendering accompanied by a hint of gnosis. Did Leda, raped by the swan-god Zeus, ‘put on his knowledge with his power/ Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’ Here is another poem, like ‘The Secret Rose’ and ‘The Second Coming,’ ending in a question, the mystery-marker of the Sublime.
There is, of course, no question about the brutality of the sudden rape, and the indifference of the God following the ‘shudder in the loins,’ which, impregnating Leda, completes Zeus’s mission. For in fathering Helen of Troy, he also ‘engenders there’ the Trojan War (depicted in imagery at once military and sexual: “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower’) and its sequelae (‘And Agamemnon dead’), initiating an historical cycle destined to last until, two thousand years later, another
© 2021 Patrick Keane, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0275.05
62 Making the Void Fruitful
lady, the Virgin Mary, would be visited by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove: another divine bird, his ‘great wings beating about the room’ in Yeats’s ‘The Mother of God.’ (Before appearing in The Tower, ‘Leda and the Swan’ introduced the ‘Dove or Swan’ chapter of A Vision.) ‘The Mother of God’ (1931) is a dramatic monologue spoken by the terrified village girl singled out to bear ‘the Heavens in my womb.’ Mary’s questions (‘What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,/ This fallen star my milk sustains [...] ?’) concern the central human / divine mystery. And the question raised at the end of ‘Leda and the Swan’ is not merely rhetorical. Did Leda, whose ‘loosening thighs’ (an echo of Sappho’s famous ‘limb-loosening Love’?) are rather tenderly ‘caressed/ By the dark webs,’ so intrigue the swan-god that he inadvertently held her just long enough (‘Before the indifferent beak could let her drop’) for her to participate momentarily in ‘his knowledge,’ the divine gnosis of Zeus?
§
Gnosis also figures in the cryptic poem, ‘Fragments,’ which features, like ‘The Mother of God’ and its more celebrated cousins, ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘The Second Coming,’ a strange birth, and a revelation derived from counter-Enlightenment intuition. Written between 1931 and 1933, but placed in later editions of The Tower (1928),' this epigrammatic poem is in two short sections, both of which require considerable unpacking. Here is the first part, a quatrain:
Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
In this parody of Genesis, the role of sleeping Adam, from whose rib God created Eve, is usurped by John Locke, whose empiricist
1 Yeats emphasized the connection among various miraculous births and rebirths. First appearing in the canon in the 1933 Collected Poems, ‘Fragments’ was, in the final collection, inserted in the 1928 The Tower, with Yeats carefully placing this poem about the birth of the spinning jenny immediately after the equally epigrammatic ‘Two Songs froma Play’ (The Resurrection) and just before ‘Wisdom’ (with its strange account of the begetting of Jesus) and that history-telescoping dramatization of another mythological begetting, the sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan.’
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epistemology and distinction between primary and secondary qualities seemed to Yeats, as to George Berkeley and Blake before him, to have fractured the organic unity of the living world, and thus destroyed not only nature but its archetype, the Edenic ‘Garden.’ That the resultant birth, of the ‘spinning-jenny,’ bears a woman’s name accentuates the irony, and the horror. It was not altogether to the benefit of humanity and a sign of progress, Yeats once mordantly observed, for the home spinning-wheel and the distaff to have been replaced by the robotic looms and masculinized factories of the Industrial Revolution. Blake’s god of the fallen world, Urizen, presides over an Enlightenment world- machine perceived as ‘the Loom of Locke’ washed by the ‘Water-wheels of Newton,’ all ‘cruel Works’ with ‘cogs tyrannic’ moving each other ‘by compulsion’ (Jerusalem Plate 15:15-19).
Yeats is never closer to Blake than in this first part of ‘Fragments, where he emulates not only his mentor’s attack on Locke (and Newton), but also his genius for epigram and crystallization, Blake being ‘perhaps the finest gnomic artist in English literature.’ In Yeats’s gnomic vision in ‘Fragments’ (1), which has been called ‘certainly the shortest and perhaps not the least comprehensive history of modern civilization,’ the Enlightenment is revealed as a nightmare for the creative imagination; and the monster that rides upon this spirit-sealing sleep of reason is the mechanistic conception of matter, indeed the whole mechanistic rather than organic way of thinking (a crucial contrast Yeats knew from Coleridge, who had borrowed it from A. W. Schlegel), here symbolized by the invention that epitomizes the Industrial Revolution.” Yeats replaces the divinely anesthetized flesh of Adam with Locke’s imaginatively inert body (sunk into that fall into division Blake called ‘Single Vision & Newton’s sleep’), and substitutes for Eve, the beautiful embodiment of Adam’s dream, a mechanical contraption, a patriarchal cog in the dark satanic mills of which it is proleptic.
But how does Yeats know all this, and know it to be the ‘truth’? It wasn’t only from absorbing Blake. Or only from reading Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925), a chapter of which, ‘The Romantic Reaction,’ Yeats synopsized with a related variation on
2 For Blake’s ‘gnomic’ genius, see Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 5. On Yeats’s synopsis of modern civilization in ‘Fragments,’ see Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry, 158.
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the creation metaphor in the second chapter of Genesis, jotting in the margin: ‘The dry rib (Pope) becomes Eve (Nature) with Wordsworth.” Yeats answers his own question in ‘Fragments’ (II), not, however, by turning to Wordsworth, whose French Revolution-centered books of The Prelude figure prominently in the evolution of ‘The Second Coming,’ but to the occult:
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth. Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay The crowns of Ninevah.
Is this mere occult mumbo-jumbo, intended to twist the tail of positivists and empiricists? Well, yes and no. But before coming to conclusions, let’s pause to appreciate the wit of the three couplets, alive with reversals and allusions. Yeats’s ironic reversal of the birth ‘out of’ the side of Locke takes the form of a counter-‘truth,’ born ‘out of’ (repeated four times in succession) a variety of sources. The anaphora is Whitmanian—‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,/ Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,/ Out of the Ninth-month midnight.” And Whitman’s poem-opening birth images may have suggested Yeats’s equally fertile sources: the female ‘medium’s mouth,’ the ‘forest loam,’ and ‘dark night,’ all in organic and fecund contrast to the mechanical, sterile ‘birth’ of the spinning jenny.
Yeats deliberately begins with what rationalists would dismiss as among the least reputable sources of truth: ‘Out of a medium’s mouth.’ Even Madame Blavatsky, whose own experiments had been discredited, told Yeats, who reported it to John O’Leary in a May 1889 letter, that she ‘hates spiritualism vehemently—says mediumship and insanity are the same thing’ (L, 125). In ‘Fragments’(II) Yeats is having some fun, but it is worth mentioning that the poem was written shortly after the first production of Yeats’s dramatic ghost-play, The Words upon the Window-pane, which centers on a séance, climaxing with our shocked
3. Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog, item 2258. And see ‘Revolutions French and Russian: Burke, Wordsworth, and the Genesis of Yeats’s “The Second Coming”,’ in my Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition, 72-105.
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recognition that the female medium is authentic. The one scholarly skeptical character attending the séance, a specialist in the life and work of Jonathan Swift, is refuted once the post-séance stage is bare except for the female medium, who is suddenly revealed, not to be faking it as he had been sure all along, but to be channeling the tormented ghost of Swift, and thus speaking the sort of spiritual truth Yeats, half-skeptic himself, sought all his life. ‘All about us,’ he concludes his Introduction to the play, ‘there seems to start up a precise inexplicable teeming life, and the earth becomes once more, not in rhetorical metaphor, but in reality, sacred’ (Ex, 369).
The second source is philosophically and theologically scandalous. Subverting the venerable axiom, ex nihilo nihil fit, employed by metaphysicians from Parmenides on and by theologians arguing for the necessary existence of God, Yeats boldly declares that the ‘truth’ revealed to him came ‘Out of nothing,’ only to instantly add details that deepen the mystery and sharpen his thrust against the Enlightenment. Coming ‘Out of the forest loam,/ Out of dark night,’ Yeats’s ‘truth’ is generated from fecund earth, once more become ‘sacred,’ and teeming with inexplicable ‘life,’ replacing or restoring the ‘Garden’ earlier said to have ‘died.’ It also comes out of a mysterious, or occult, ‘dark night.’
If the spinning jenny epitomizes the Industrial Revolution, Alexander Pope’s intended epitaph for Isaac Newton epitomizes the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,/ God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.’ Pope’s couplet, like Yeats’s opening quatrain, plays off scripture, with Newton now assuming God’s role as creator by verbal fiat: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light’ (Genesis 1:3). Pope avoids blasphemy; after all, it was God who said, ‘Let Newton be!’ Until the advent of the principal scientific genius of the European Enlightenment, the universe existed, but ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.’ Adopting that darkness, and reversing the laws that prior to Newton ‘lay hid in night,’ Yeats tells us that his counter-Enlightenment truth came ‘Out of dark night where lay, not Nature’s scientific laws, but “The crowns of Ninevah.’
Why Ninevah in particular? For one thing, Yeats loved Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s ‘Ode’ celebrating poets as music makers and prophets. The famous final stanza (and these are the lines Yeats always cited) begins: ‘We, in the ages lying/ In the buried past of the earth,/ Built
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Ninevah with our sighing,/ And Babel itself with our mirth.’ When, in ‘Fragments,’ the golden crowns of Ninevah flame up ‘Out of dark night,’ what is evoked is more O’Shaughnessy’s city of the poetic imagination than Ashurbanipal’s capital, majestic as that may have been. Yeats was looking, not merely back to old Ninevah, but cyclically ahead, to the resuscitation of the ancient—a past buried, dark, chthonic, and, here, female. For, as Yeats seems to have known, the Assyrians named their capital city Nin-evah—after ‘Holy Mother Eve’: the Mother-womb, or Goddess of the Tree of Life in their mythology. Displaced by a machine in the withered garden of the first part of ‘Fragments,’ Eve, in a return of the repressed, is restored, re-surfacing in the final word of Part II, in the disguised but detectable form of the city named for her. Like ‘the holy city of Byzantium,’ Ninevah emerges as another Yeatsian variation on, or occult alteration of, the biblical topos of the lost Edenic garden become a city, which, in Romans, in Revelations, and in Blake is also a woman: the ‘holy city, new Jerusalem,’ adorned as the ‘bride’ of the Lamb of God. Recalling the role of Sophia, often opposed to the male Logos in esoteric tradition, including Gnosticism, one is reminded as well that gnosis is a Greek female noun.
At his most winning, Yeats reminds us of Hamlet’s rejoinder to his skeptical and scholastic friend: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ But we are right to be wary when Yeats crosses the threshold into the occult. Though concurring in, in fact shaping, Yeats’s cavalier dismissal of Locke and Newton as Enlightenment icons, Blake would be appalled by his disciple’s delving into the occult darkness. Though Yeats tended to mystify him and turn him into an occultist, Blake in fact condemned the heathen ‘God of this World & the Goddess Nature/ Mystery, Babylon the Great’ (Jerusalem Plate 93: 22-25). But what Blake rejects here are the very things his prodigal son celebrates as the matrix of vision: the forest loam and the mysterious dark night where lay the crowns of ancient Ninevah, repository of Assyro-Babylonian mythology.
Of course, Yeats’s recourse to the occult is one measure of the intensity of his need to expedite what he called in that earlier-cited 1892 letter to John O'Leary ‘the revolt of the soul against the intellect’ (L, 211). That is, somewhat reductively, a description of the Romantic revolution, the noble attempt to beat back, through restored wonder at a re-enchanted
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nature and the transformative power of the creative imagination, the passivity of mind and mechanistic materialism that had reigned (Yeats insists in introducing his 1936 anthology of modern poetry) since ‘the end of the seventeenth century’ down to the present. With, he emphasizes—as had Alfred North Whitehead, though his Romantic hero was Wordsworth rather than Blake or Shelley—‘the exception of the period beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and ending with the death of Byron’: that is to say, the ‘brief period’ of the Romantic revolt, a span ‘wherein imprisoned man beat upon the door.’*
That compelling metaphor was repeated that November in ‘An Acre of Grass,) a companion of ‘What Then?,’ in which Yeats prays to be granted the creative ‘frenzy’ and ‘old man’s eagle mind’ he had been reading of at just this time in Nietzsche’s Daybreak (§347, §575). He also specifically invokes ‘That William Blake/ Who beat upon the wall/ Till truth obeyed his call’—a ‘truth’ related to, but not identical to, the ‘truth’ Yeats claimed in ‘Fragments’ (II) came to him ‘Out of’ counter-Enlightenment sources both Romantic and, most dubiously, out of a mysterious ‘dark night’ whose counter-Enlightenment frisson will be offset for many readers by resistance to the dangerously irrational aspect of the occult. And yet, to again quote Heaney on Yeats’s power and appeal, ‘true poetry’ had to be more than the ‘artful expression of daylight opinion and conviction; it had to emerge from a deeper consciousness of things,’ evoking ‘the mystery which lies all about us, out of which we have come and into which we shall return.’ Reading Yeats, Heaney remarked in a private letter to Joseph Hassett, ‘every time you part the drapes and enter into that inner chamber of his, you realize you've only been surfacing an external, daylight world, while the real thing has been going on in the poetry sanctum.’
§
Though, as we shall see in Part Two, Yeats was alternately fascinated and fearful of the creative yet potentially maddening power of a lunar Muse, night was not normally privileged over day in Yeats’s thinking. Blake and Nietzsche, his great mentors, were both celebrants of ‘daybreak,
4 Yeats, ‘Introduction’ in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xxvi-vii. In Whitehead’s account of the ‘Romantic Reaction,’ the principal figure was Wordsworth, influenced by Coleridge on imagination and organicism.
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of Blake’s ‘glad day.’ In 1902, enthralled by his ‘excited’ reading of Nietzsche, Yeats drew in the margin of page 122 of an anthology of ‘choice’ selections (Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet) given to him as a gift by John Quinn, a diagram crucial to understanding much if not all of his subsequent thought and work. Annotating primarily On the Genealogy of Morals, Yeats grouped under the heading ‘NIGHT’: ‘Socrates’ (as presented by Plato), ‘Christ,’ and ‘one god’—symbolizing what he would later call the primary: the ‘denial of self, the soul turned toward spirit seeking knowledge.’ And, under ‘DAY’: ‘Homer’ and ‘many gods’—symbolizing the antithetical ‘affirmation of self, the soul turned from spirit to be its mask & instrument when it seeks life.’ ‘Plato versus Homer’: that, proclaimed Nietzsche in the Genealogy (III.25), ‘is the complete, the genuine antagonism—there the sincerest advocate of the “Beyond,” the greatest slanderer of life, here the distinctive deifier, the golden nature’ (italics in original). Reminiscent of Madame Blavatsky’s alternating ‘days and nights of Brahma,’ that diagrammatical skeleton is fleshed out in the pull between eternity and the temporal from such early poems as “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ to the late “What Then?,’ where the achievements of earthly life are countered by the Otherworldly singing of ‘Plato’s ghost.’ The tension is embodied in Yeats’s own chosen exemplar in ‘Vacillation.— Homer is my example and his unchristened heart’/—and made tangible in Self’s choice, in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ of Sato’s sword wound in silken ‘embroidery’ of ‘Heart’s purple’: ‘all these I set/ For emblems of the day against the tower/ Emblematical of the night.’ And yet that sword is also described as a ‘consecrated blade,’ and ‘Unspotted by the centuries.’ Ultimately, it is the emblem of a life-seeking poet who, without ‘denial of self,’ attempts to transcend the antithesis set up a quarter-century earlier in that Nietzsche anthology, usurping Soul’s role by also being oriented ‘toward spirit seeking knowledge,’ or gnosis.
‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ is in many ways Yeats’s central poem since its ramifications reach before and after, and it features perhaps the greatest of Yeats’s fused symbols: the ‘ancient blade’ (a 1920 gift from Japanese admirer, Junzo Sato) scabbarded and bound in complementary ‘female’ embroidery. That sword and winding silk are not only ‘emblems of the day against the tower/ Emblematical of the night.’ Fusing East and West, the sacred and profane, war and love, the phallic and the vaginal,
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the sheathed and silk-wound sword becomes Yeats’s symbol of gyring life, set against the vertical ascent urged by the Neoplatonic Soul. What Neoplatonists and Gnostics put asunder, body and spirit, Yeats unites. And yet, as we will see, Self’s final act of self-redemption, magnificent but heretical, is as Gnostic as it is Nietzschean.
In the opening movement of the poem, the half in which there is still a semblance of actual dialogue, hectoring Soul repeatedly demands that Self ‘fix’ every thought ‘upon’ the One, ‘upon’ the steep ascent, ‘upon’ the occult Pole Star, ‘upon’ the spiritual quarter where all thought is done. But the recalcitrant Self remains diverted by the Many, by earthly multiplicity, by the sword wound in embroidery replicating the windings of mortal nature. In unpublished notes, Yeats describes ‘Dialogue’ as ‘a variation on Macrobius’ (the ‘learned astrologer’ of ‘Chosen,’ the central poem of ‘A Woman Young and Old’). Yeats had been directed by a friend (Frank P. Sturm) to Macrobius’s Neoplatonic Commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. In Cicero’s text (De re publica,