Book 6:17-20), despite the admonition of Scipio’s ghostly ancestor,

‘Why not fix your attention upon the heavens and contemn what is mortal?’ young Scipio admits he ‘kept turning’ his ‘eyes back to earth.’ According to Macrobius, Scipio ‘looked about him everywhere with wonder. Hereupon his grandfather’s admonitions recalled him to the upper realms.’ Though the agon between the Yeatsian Self and Soul is identical to that between young Scipio and his grandfather’s spirit, the Soul in Yeats’s poem proves a much less successful spiritual guide than that ghost.°
Turning a largely deaf ear to Soul’s advocacy of the upward path, Self (revealingly called ‘Me’ in the poem’s drafts) has preferred to focus downward on life, brooding on the blade upon his knees with its tattered but still protective wrapping of ‘Heart’s purple,’ Tower and Winding Stair writ small. Its ‘flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn/ From some court-lady’s dress and round/ The wooden scabbard bound and wound’ makes the double icon ‘emblematical’ not only of ‘love and war, but of the ever-circling gyre: the eternal, and archetypally female, spiral. When Soul’s paradoxically physical tongue is turned to stone
5 For these unpublished notes, connecting Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Macrobius’s Commentary with Balzac’s Swedenborgian novel Séraphita, see my Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition, 142-47.
70 Making the Void Fruitful
with the realization that, according to his own austere doctrine, ‘only the dead can be forgiven,’ Self takes over the poem. He goes on to win his way, despite difficulty, to a self-redemptive affirmation of life.
Self begins his peroration defiantly: ‘A living man is blind and drinks his drop./ What matter if the ditches are impure?’ This ‘variation’ on Neoplatonism, privileging life’s filthy downflow, or ‘defluction,’ over the Plotinian pure fountain of emanation, is followed by an even more defiant rhetorical question: ‘What matter if I live it all once more?’ ‘Was that life?’ asks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ‘Well then! Once more!’® But Self’s grandiose and premature gesture is instantly undercut by the litany of grief that Nietzschean Recurrence, the exact repetition of the events of one’s life, would entail—from the ‘toil of growing up,’ through the ‘ignominy of boyhood’ and the ‘distress’ of ‘changing into a man,’ to the ‘pain’ of the ‘unfinished man’ having to confront ‘his own clumsiness, then the ‘finished man,’ old and ‘among his enemies.’ Despite the Self’s bravado, it is in danger of being shaped, deformed, by what Hegel and, later, feminist critics have emphasized as the judgmental Gaze of Others. Soul’s tongue may have turned to stone, but malignant ocular forces have palpable designs upon the assaulted Self:
How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
The triple repetition of ‘shape’ is significant. For this malicious imposition would involve, as Yeats says in ‘Ancestral Houses’ (the 1921 opening poem of his sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’), the loss of the ability to “choose whatever shape [one] wills,’ and (echoing Browning’s arrogant Duke, who ‘choose[s] never to stoop’) to ‘never stoop to a mechanical/ Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.’ As the aristocratic language of ‘Ancestral Houses’ makes clear, this is Yeats’s rejection of ‘slave morality’ in favor of Nietzschean ‘master morality.’ In the ‘Dialogue,’ master morality takes the apolitical and far more appealing form of self-redemptive autonomy, but not without a struggle.
6 “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,’ III.2:1; in The Portable Nietzsche, 269. Italics in original.
5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption 71
The centrality of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ is enhanced by its repercussions elsewhere in Yeats’s own work and by its absorption of so many influences outside the Yeatsian canon. Aside from the Body / Soul debate-tradition, from Cicero to Milton and Marvell, and the combat between Nietzsche on the one hand and Neoplatonism on the other, this Yeatsian psychomachia incorporates other poems in the Romantic tradition. Among them is another Robert Browning poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,’ which supplies those ‘malicious eyes’ that cast upon Self a distorting lie so powerful that he temporarily falls victim to it, and Blake’s remarkably feminist text, Visions of the Daughters of Albion.’ Self’s eventual victory, like Oothoon’s in Visions, is over severe moralism, the reduction of the body to a defiled object. In Yeats’s case, Self’s victory is a triumph over his own Neoplatonism. Gnosticism, too, seeks liberation from the body, but the heterodox Gnostic emphasis on self-redemption makes it compatible with Blake, Nietzsche, and Yeats. ‘Dialogue’ represents Nietzschean Selbstiiberwindung, creative ‘self- overcoming,’ for, as Yeats said in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, ‘we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Myth, 331).
Since this ‘Dialogue’ is a quarrel with himself, the spiritual tradition is not simply dismissed, here any more than in the ‘Crazy Jane’ or ‘A Woman Young and Old’ sequences. For Yeats, the world of experience, however dark the declivities into which the generated soul may drop, is never utterly divorced from the world of light and grace. The water imagery branching through Self’s peroration subsumes pure fountain and impure ditches. There is a continuum. The Plotinian fountain cascades down from the divine One through mind or intellect (nous) to the lower depths. As long, says Plotinus, as nous maintains its contemplative
7 In the opening stanza of Browning’s quest-poem, Childe Roland first thought was that he was being ‘lied’ to by that sadistic cripple, ‘with malicious eye/ Askance to watch the working of his lie/ On mine.’ (The earlier allusion, to Browning’s Duke, refers of course to ‘My Last Duchess.’) Even closer to Self’s temporarily mistaken belief that that ‘defiling’ shape ‘cast upon’ him by mirroring eyes ‘must be his shape’ is the initially deluded, masochistic cry of Blake’s Oothoon (2:36-39) for her ‘defiled bosom’ to be rent away so that she ‘may reflect/ The image’ of the very man (the moralistic sadist, Theotormon, who, having raped her, now brands her ‘harlot’) whose ‘loved’ but unloving ‘eyes’ have cast upon her this ‘defiled’ shape—one of Blake’s, now Yeats’s, grimmest ironies. But both—Oothoon and the Yeatsian Self—recover.
72 Making the Void Fruitful
gaze on the divine ‘Father,’ it retains God’s likeness (Enneads 5.2.4). But, writes Macrobius (Commentary 1.14.4), by increasingly ‘diverting its attention,’ the soul, though itself incorporeal, ‘degenerates into the fabric of bodies.’
Viewed from Soul’s perspective, Self is a falling off from higher Soul. When the attention, supposed to be fixed on things above, is diverted below—down to the blade on his knees wound in tattered silk and, further downward, to life’s ‘impure’ ditches— Self has indeed degenerated into the ‘fabric,’ the tattered embroidery, of bodies. And yet, as usual in later Yeats, that degradation is also a triumph, couched in terms modulating from stoic contentment through fierce embrace to a casting out of remorse, leading to self-forgiveness and redemption:
Iam content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch, A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
Iam content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot, forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
Following everything to the ‘source’ within, Self spurns Soul’s tongue- numbing Neoplatonic doctrine that ‘only the dead can be forgiven.’ Instead, having pitched with vitalistic relish into life’s filthy frogspawn, Self audaciously (or blasphemously) claims the power to forgive himself. Ina similar act of self-determination, Self ‘cast[s] out’ remorse, reversing the defiling image earlier ‘cast upon’ him by the ‘mirror of malicious eyes.’ The sweetness that ‘flows into’ the self-forgiving breast redeems the frogspawn of the blind man’s ditch and even that ‘most fecund ditch of all,’ the painful but productive folly that is the bitter-sweet fruit of
5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption 73
unrequited love. (There is no need to name that ‘proud woman not kindred of his soul.’)
That sweet in-flow also displaces the infusion (infundere: ‘to pour in’) of Christian grace through divine forgiveness. Despite the repeated ‘must’ (‘We must laugh and we must sing’), it is a claim to autonomy at once redemptive and heretical, and a fusion of Yeats’s two principal precursors. ‘Nietzsche completes Blake, and has the same roots,’ Yeats claimed (L, 379). If, as he also rightly said, Blake’s central doctrine is a Christ-like ‘forgiveness of sins,’ the sweetness that flows into the suffering but self-forgiving ‘breast’ (in which Blake also said ‘all deities reside’) allies the Romantic poet with Nietzsche. He had been preceded by the German Inner Light theologians, but it took Nietzsche, son and grandson of Protestant ministers, to most radically transvalue the Augustinian doctrine that man can only be redeemed by divine power and grace, a foretaste of predestination made even more uncompromising in the strict Protestant doctrine of the salvation of the Elect as an unmerited gift of God. One must find one’s own ‘grace,’ countered Nietzsche in Daybreak, a book studied by Yeats. In Nietzsche’s words, he who has ‘definitively conquered himself, henceforth regards it as his own privilege to punish himself, to pardon himself’—or, as rephrased by Yeats, ‘forgive myself the lot.’ We must cast out remorse and cease to despise ourselves: ‘Then you will,’ says Nietzsche, ‘no longer have any need of your god, and the whole drama of Fall and Redemption will be played out to the end in you yourselves!”
But, as I earlier suggested, this is as Gnostic as it is Nietzschean. The most formidable of the historical Gnostics, Valentinus, claimed that the person who received gnosis could purge himself of the ignorance associated with matter. He describes the process in the ‘Gospel of Truth, a Valentinian text unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945. In stark contrast with the orthodox Christian doctrine of salvation through the grace of God, Valentinus declared that ‘It is within Unity that each one will attain himself; within gnosis he will purify himself from multiplicity into Unity, consuming matter within himself like a fire, and darkness by light, death by life.’ Here, and elsewhere in Gnostic literature, salvation
8 Nietzsche, Daybreak (§437, §79), 186-87, 48. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 11, Blake insists that in setting up a religious ‘system’ presided over by a “Priesthood,’ men and women “forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.’
74. Making the Void Fruitful
is defined, as it is in Romanticism (from which Gnosticism occasionally seems less a deviation than a precursor), as an escape into the self, where, through introspective private vision, we find true knowledge, gnosis. The spiritual quest tends to be solitary. When Sturge Moore, who was designing the book cover for the volume containing ‘Byzantium, asked if the poet saw ‘all humanity riding on the back of a huge dolphin, Yeats responded, ‘One dolphin, one man’ (LTSM, 165). There is no real need for any Other; the individual who has attained gnosis is the whole and sole agent of redemption. (It should be added that Yeats valued community. In ‘What Then?’ he cherished ‘Friends that have been friends indeed.’ He loved the women celebrated in ‘Friends, and meant it when he ended ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited,’ after reflecting with emotion on the dead companions whose portraits hung there: ‘Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,/ And say my glory was I had such friends.’)
In the now-celebrated Gospel of Thomas, the most audaciously heterodox of the Nag Hammadi texts, the Gnostic Jesus of Thomas tells us, ‘Whoever drinks from my mouth will become as I am.’ The central teaching is redemption from within: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ If Emerson, prophet of self-reliance, hadn’t been speaking more than a century before the Gospel of Thomas had been rediscovered, he might have been accused of plagiarizing from it in his Divinity School Address, the bombshell he exploded at Harvard in 1838. Reflecting the spiritual and Romantic concept of divinity within, Emerson celebrated Jesus not as the Lord, but as the religious thinker who first realized that ‘God incarnates himself in man.’ He informed the shocked ministers and thrilled graduating students in the audience: ‘That is always best which gives me to myself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.’ As heterodox as Thomas’s, Emerson’s Jesus is imagined saying, in ‘a jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think’.
9 Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 81. The Divinity School Address controversy shook New England. Condemned as a ‘pagan,’ an ‘infidel,’ and a ‘cloven-hoofed’ pantheist
5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption 75
Despite such assertions of autonomy and of heretical (high Romantic or Gnostic) self-redemption, Yeats never fully appreciated Emerson. But he echoed the American sage’s best-known essay, ‘Self-Reliance,’ in describing, in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter,’ the radically innocent soul as ‘self-delighting,/ Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,’ and he embraced Emerson’s most ardent European disciple, Nietzsche, with whose thought the Irish poet always associated Blake. It is primarily under the twin auspices of Blake and Nietzsche that the Self of ‘Dialogue’ finds the bliss traditionally reserved for those who follow the ascending path. Recovering radical innocence, the battered but ultimately childlike Self of ‘Dialogue’ concludes, ‘We must laugh and we must sing,/ We are blessed by everything,/ Everything we look upon is blest.” Though recalling King Lear’s projection of happiness with Cordelia (‘we'll sing like birds i’ the cage’; we'll ‘live, and pray, and sing, and laugh’), and the blessing of the water-snakes by Coleridge’s Mariner, the more thematic echo is of Oothoon’s final affirmation in Visions, addressed to everything we bless and are blest by: ‘sing your infant joy!/ Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!’ Of that Blakean ‘praise of life, “all that lives is holy”,’ Yeats noted that ‘Nietzsche had it doubtless at the moment he imagined the “Superman” as a child,’ referring both to Zarathustra’s third and final metamorphosis of the spirit (as an ‘innocent child,’ that ‘sacred Yes’ to life) and to Nietzsche’s evocation, in The Gay Science, of ‘a second innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.’ This childlike second innocence has a Gnostic parallel (the Logos dramatically revealed itself to Valentinus in the form of ‘a child’); but it would have tallied for Yeats with the final stage of the Blakean dialectical progression from ‘Innocence’ through ‘Experience’ to a higher or ‘Organiz’d Innocence, what the American Romantic poet Hart Crane, having read both Blake and Nietzsche, would later call ‘an improved infancy.’
who had defiled the citadel of Unitarianism, Emerson was ostracized from his alma mater for thirty years. On Thomas’s ‘bringing-forth’ passages, see Pagels, Beyond Belief, 49, 32. On the affinity between Gnostic Thomas and the Romantics, see Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 260.
10 King Lear V.iii11-12. Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Plate 8:9-10. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ (The Portable Nietzsche, 139); The Gay Science, Preface. Yeats, 1909 Diary (Au, 474-75). Blake’s higher ‘innocence’ and Nietzsche’s ‘second innocence’ are captured in Crane’s ‘an improved infancy’ (from his poem ‘Passage’).
76 Making the Void Fruitful
Whatever its myriad sources and analogues, Yeats’s alteration of the orthodox spiritual tradition in the ‘Dialogue’ completes Blake, for whom cyclicism was the ultimate nightmare, with that Nietzsche whose exuberant Zarathustra jumps ‘with both feet’ into the ‘golden- emerald delight’ of self-redemption and Eternal Recurrence, exultantly embraced as the ultimate affirmation of life in the ‘Yes and Amen Song’ that concludes Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
In laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss; and if this is my alpha and omega, that all that is heavy and grave should become light, all that is body, dancer, all that is spirit, bird—-and verily that is my alpha and omega: oh, how should I not lust after eternity and the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence? (111.16:6, The Portable Nietzsche, 342)
We might say that Zarathustra here also ‘jumps’ into a cluster of images and motifs we would call Yeatsian, remembering, along with Self’s laughing, singing self-absolution, ‘Among School Children,’ where ‘body is not bruised to pleasure soul,’ and we no longer ‘know/ The dancer from the dance’; the natural and golden birds of the Byzantium poems; and the final transfiguration of Yeats’s central hero, both in The Death of Cuchulain and ‘Cuchulain Comforted,’ into a singing bird. In ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ the Yeatsian-Nietzschean Self, commandeering the spiritual vocabulary Soul would monopolize, affirms Eternal Recurrence, the labyrinth of human life with all its tangled antinomies of joy and suffering. (As we will see in Part Two, in ‘On Woman,’ written a dozen years earlier, Yeats, echoing The Gay Science §341, had embraced the joy and despair of Nietzschean Recurrence precisely because, brought ‘to birth again,’ he could ‘find what once I had’: that ‘one/ Perverse creature of chance,’ the fatal beloved not kindred of his soul.) In subverting the debate-tradition, Yeats leaves Soul with a petrified tongue, and gives Self a final chant that is among the most rhapsodic in that whole tradition of secularized supernaturalism Yeats inherited from the Romantic poets and from Nietzsche. In a related if somewhat lower register, it is also the vision of Crazy Jane and the Woman Young and Old.
Of course, as even the stanza-form they share in the ‘Dialogue’ suggests, Self and Soul are aspects of the one man, and, as Yeats jotted in his 1930 diary, ‘Man can only love Unity of Being.’ The internal ‘opponent’ with whom we debate ‘must be shown for a part of our
5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption 77
greater expression’ (E&I, 362). This resembles the Valentinian Unity ‘each one will attain himself,’ overcoming ‘multiplicity.’ Yeats’s friend, AE (George Russell), to whom he sent a copy of the 1929 edition of The Winding Stair, said that of the poems in that volume he liked ‘best’ of all ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” Acknowledging his friend’s gift, he wrote, ‘Iam on the side of Soul, but know that its companion has its own eternal claim, and perhaps when you side with the Self it is only a motion to that fusion of opposites which is the end of wisdom.’ Having astutely synopsized the central Yeatsian dialectic, Russell was tentatively noting its reflection in the poem’s impulse, beneath the manifest debate of opposites, toward fusion. We seem to achieve fusion in the secular beatitude of Self’s final chant. But Yeats was not AE, the ‘saint,’ as Mrs. Yeats described him, to her husband’s ‘poet,’ and the poet in Yeats, the Self, gives us—in the whole of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ and particularly in this magnificent final affirmation—an overcoming of Christian and Neoplatonic dualism and defilement of the body by way of a heterodox, ‘heretical’ self-blessing at once Blakean, Nietzschean, and Gnostic.
11 Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Finneran, et al., 2:560.
12 Yeats quotes George in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, written after Russell’s death in July, 1935: ‘My wife said the other night, “AE” was the nearest thing to a saint you and I will ever meet. You are a better poet but no saint. I suppose one has to choose’ (L, 838).
6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult
Despite Self’s triumph in the ‘Dialogue,’ Yeats remained torn between what he called in ‘Vacillation’ (echoing Kant) ‘the antinomies’ of soul and body. As ‘On Woman’ alone would demonstrate, Yeats’s occult speculations were always entangled in his emotional life. ‘His aim,’ to repeat Graham Hough’s conclusion, ‘was to redeem passion, not to transcend it, and a beatitude that has passed beyond the bounds of earthly love could not be his ideal goal.’ In the alembic of Yeats’s paradoxical imagination, the search for hidden spiritual knowledge is often merged with carnal knowledge.
Autobiographically and symbolically, the object of desire was Maud Gonne: the never fully attainable Muse that haunts the life and work of the century’s greatest love poet. But the beloved proves to be ultimately unattainable, even with physical consummation attained, as it was, in December 1908, with the elusive Maud. Yeats was both impressed and deeply moved by Dryden’s translation (Vis, 214) of a famous passage of Lucretius, asserting that sexual union can never provide complete satisfaction.
In a 1931 conversation with John Sparrow, Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, Yeats cited and expanded on Lucretius’ lines from the end of the long passage (1037-1191) on sexual love concluding Book IV of De rerum natura. In glossing Dryden’s translation of the Roman poet, Yeats seems to echo the Gnostics’ doubly radical dualism, a dualism between man and nature, but also between nature and the transmundane God. Yeats’s citation and comment suggest that he is looking back to four of his own poems, three written in 1926/27, the fourth in 1931. Two, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ and ‘Among School Children,’ are indisputably major. The other two, lesser lyrics but closely related to
1 Hough, The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats, 119.
© 2021 Patrick Keane, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0275.06
80 Making the Void Fruitful
those major texts, are ‘Summer and Spring,’ from Yeats’s ‘A Man Young and Old’ sequence, and, the most splendid of the ‘Crazy Jane’ lyrics, the poignant yet triumphant ‘Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman,’ written in 1931, the same year as his conversation with John Sparrow. But here, finally, is what Yeats told Sparrow:
The finest description of sexual intercourse ever written was in John Dryden’s translation of Lucretius, and it was justified; it was introduced to illustrate the difficulty of two becoming a unity: ‘The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.’ Sexual intercourse is an attempt to solve the eternal antinomy, doomed to failure because it takes place only on one side of the gulf. The gulf is that which separates the one and the many, or if you like, God and man.”
In ‘Summer and Spring’ (poem VIII of the autobiographical sequence in which the poet is masked as an anonymous ‘Man Young and Old’), two lovers grown old reminisce ‘under an old thorn tree.’ When they talked of growing up, they: ‘Knew that we’d halved a soul/ And fell the one in ‘tother’s arms/ That we might make it whole.’ We recall, as we are meant to, ‘Among School Children,’ written in the same year. In transitioning from the first to the second stanza of this great poem, we shift abruptly from Yeats’s external persona as senator and school inspector, ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man,’ to the private, inner man, the poet himself reporting an incident Maud Gonne once related from her childhood:
I dream of a Ledaean body bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy— Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
In ‘Summer and Spring’ the lovers ‘Knew that we'd halved a soul.’ Though the blending of our two natures in ‘Among School Children’
2 Cited by Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul, 148, 52, 135. Yeats improves on Dryden, whose Lucretian lovers, in ‘the raging foam of full desire,’ twine ‘thighs’ and lovely limbs, yet couple ‘In vain; they only cruze about the coast,/ For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost.’
6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult 81
is poignant, the tragedy lies in the qualifying ‘seemed’ and in the need ‘to alter Plato’s parable’—a ‘Lucretian’ alteration, since the merging is empathetic and partial (yolk and white remain separated even within the unity of the ‘one shell’) rather than the full sexual / emotional union of Aristophanes’ haunting fable in Plato’s Symposium. It is precisely this ‘whole’ union that the old man claims in ‘His Memories’ (poem VI of ‘A Man Young and Old’)* and in ‘Summer and Spring,’ which concludes with a sexual variation on the Unity of Being symbolized by the dancer and ‘great-rooted blossomer’ of ‘Among School Children’: ‘O what a bursting out there was,/ And what a blossoming,/ When we had all the summer-time/ And she had all the spring)’
But even here, despite that fecund blossoming, it is all memory and heartache. Two decades later, that night in December 1908, no matter how fleeting, remains paramount among the ‘memories’ of Yeats’s ‘Man Old.’ In ‘real life,” however, after their night of lovemaking in Paris, Maud had quickly put the relationship back on its old basis, a ‘spiritual marriage,’ informing Yeats in a morning-after note that she was praying he could overcome his ‘physical desire’ for her. In a journal entry the following month (21 January 1909), Yeats referred despairingly but realistically to the ‘return’ of Maud’s ‘old dread of physical love’ (first confided to him in 1898), which has ‘probably spoiled her life [...] I was never more deeply in love, but my desires must go elsewhere if I would escape their poison.’ Hence, those ‘others,’ including Yeats’s wife, destined to become ‘friends,’ or sexual partners, if never a fully satisfactory replacement for ‘that one’ (as he refers to her, namelessly and climactically in ‘Friends’).
Maud was aware that her status as an unattainable Muse-figure was not only a painful but productive source of the poet’s creativity, but, ironically, acause of happiness. ‘Poets should never marry,’ she repeatedly informed him in what became a Maud-mantra. ‘The world should thank me for not marrying you’ because ‘you make such beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness.’ Since Maud was unmarriageable
3. Aside from ‘To a Young Girl’ (1915), addressed to Iseult Gonne, ‘His Memories’ is the only poem where Yeats claims that his passion for Maud was sexually reciprocated. Readers used to the Maud / Helen association would know who ‘The first of all the tribe’ was who lay in the speaker’s arms, ‘And did such pleasure take—/ She who had brought great Hector down/ And put all Troy to wreck—/ That she cried into this ear,/ “Strike me if I shriek”.’
82 Making the Void Fruitful
and, ultimately, ‘not kindred of his soul,’ Yeats sought complete union (physical and spiritual) in memory, and in poetry, masked as a ‘Man Young and Old’—or, empathetically switching genders in Words for Music Perhaps, as embodied in the vision of his ‘Woman Young and Old’ or of ‘Crazy Jane!’
Partly based on an old, crazed Irish woman, Jane is not merely promiscuous. Yeats’s occult experiences had led him to a belief in feminized, often sexualized, spirituality, early embodied in the beautiful, highly-sexed actress Florence Farr, one of the most gifted women visionaries of the Golden Dawn (and, briefly, his lover). Such female adepts, whose powers he admired and envied; women of ‘second sight’ (his own sister, ‘Lily,’ his uncle George Pollexfen’s servant, Mary Battle); and his experiences at séances, where the mediums were almost invariably women: all convinced him of a female and erotic dimension in spirituality. The artistic result was the two powerful poetic sequences, ‘A Woman Young and Old’ and the ‘Crazy Jane’ poems. The third poem in the latter sequence, ‘Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment,’ begins with Jane insisting that ‘Love,’ to be satisfied, requires ‘all’—by far the most frequent word in the vocabulary of Yeats and of Blake, for whom ‘Less than All cannot satisfy Man.’
“Love is all
Unsatisfied
That cannot take the whole Body and soul’:
And that is what Jane said.*
It ends with Jane still holding forth, now emphasizing her version of gnosis, but one that would certainly resonate with most Gnostics. While mystical experience was possible during life, virtually all Gnostics believed that the true ascent, in which (in Jane’s phrase) ‘all could be known,’ took place after death, with the return of the spirit to its divine origins, the spark of life redeemed and reunited with the One from which it had been severed and alienated by its immersion in the material, temporal world. For most of the ‘Crazy Jane’ sequence,
4 Italics in original. ‘All’ appears 1,019 times in Yeats’s poetry, almost twice as frequently as the runner-up, ‘old.’ ‘Less than All cannot satisfy Man’ is the fifth axiom in Blake’s ‘There is NO Natural Religion’ (b).
6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult 83
unconventional Jane, making the most of her time on earth, will take a decidedly unorthodox Itinerarium mentis ad Deum. But here we find her, yearning for ‘Time’ to disappear and gnosis to be achieved, again with the emphasis on ‘all’:
“What can be shown?
What true love be?
All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.’
Jane’s male interlocutor—responding, ‘That’s certainly the case’—might be Yeats himself, who thought Lucretius remained justified in insisting on the ‘failure,’ in this life, to bridge ‘the gulf,’ the insuperable ‘difficulty of two becoming a unity.’
The poem that immediately follows Jane’s thoughts on the Day of Judgment, ‘Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman,’ responds more audaciously to the Lucretius- and Epicurus-based assertion that “The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.’ Writing on Lucretius in 1875, the Victorian essayist J. M. Symonds qualified what Dryden before him and Yeats after him designated a ‘tragedy,’ though Symonds goes on to emphasize, even more than Yeats, the Lucretian, Epicurean—and, I would add, Gnostic—bleakness and frustration of lovers whose immaterial souls are entrammeled in the flesh: ‘There is something almost tragic,’ writes a sympathetic but austere Symonds, ‘in these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, and the incomplete fruition of souls pent up within their frames of flesh.” Symonds seems to reflect, along with the frustration described by Lucretius (and Platonism and Neoplatonism in general), the dualism of the Gnostics, concerned above all with freeing the spirit dwelling within the garment of flesh imprisoning the spark of life.
Before birth, we are in what Platonic Shelley called in ‘Adonais’ the ‘white radiance of eternity.’ What makes us free, the Gnostics insisted, is the knowledge of who we were then, when we were ‘in the light’ of pre-natal innocence. Crazy Jane, returning to the One, ‘Shall leap into the light lost/ In my mother’s womb.’ That Blakean infant joy marks the
5 ‘Lucretius,’ Fortnightly Review (1875); reprinted in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, 12.
84 Making the Void Fruitful
exuberant climax of her vision. But she had begun by asserting her own gnosis, shaped by earthly experience:
I know, although when looks meet
I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the door unlatched The sooner love is gone,
For love is but a skein unwound Between the dark and dawn.
Her knowledge of the transience of sexual love has not driven Jane to abstinence, despite the hectoring of the Bishop (her antagonist in this sequence) that she should ‘Live in a heavenly mansion,/ Not in some foul sty.’ In that poem, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ (the sixth in the sequence), Jane tells the Bishop, a ‘religious’ Soul-spokesman nevertheless fixated on ‘those breasts,’ where her God—neither Jehovah nor Jesus, but Eros—has ‘pitched’ (temporarily set up as one would a tent) his mansion. It is not up among the stars as a ‘heavenly mansion’ (Yeats has the Bishop borrow that lofty sty-disdaining phrase from Urbino’s Platonist, Pietro Bembo, and the Gospel of John, 14:2). Love’s mansion is ‘pitched’ (with a probable pun on darkened), not up but down, inter urinam et faeces, ‘in/ The place of excrement.’ And her final words, definitely punning but serious news for the Bishop, are that ‘Nothing can be sole, or whole/ That has not been rent’: a sexual / spiritual variation (in keeping with ‘Plato’s parable’) on the archetypal cycle of original unity, division, and reunification and completion.
Despite the graphic nature of her language in Poem VI, Jane is no more a simple materialist than is Augustine, or Swift, or Blake, an unlikely trinity whose shared excremental yet visionary vocabulary Yeats has her echo. What Jane insists on is the beauty of both the physical and the ideal world, with ‘Love’ the ‘tertium quid’ mediating between them. ‘Fair and foul are near of kin,/ And fair needs foul,’ Jane tells the Bishop. Love is the ‘great spirit’ or ‘daemon’ celebrated by that Sophia-figure, Diotima, presented in the Symposium by Socrates, whose simplistic dualism between good and evil, ‘fair’ and ‘foul,’ she corrects (‘Hush,’ she quiets him in mid-argument) by presenting Love as ‘a mean between them,’ a yoker of apparent opposites, a creator of unity out of division. (Symposium 202-3).
6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult 85
Whatever its other parallels and sources, Jane’s vision is also reflective of some aspects of Gnosticism, hostile to ‘law,’ especially law- orientated scripture, such as in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and the sort of puritanical strictures the Bishop wants to impose on Jane. Historical Gnosticism ran the ethical gamut from extreme asceticism to, at its most unconventional, robust promiscuity. The charges, by early Christian opponents, of Gnostic orgies were exaggerated (or at least unsupported by evidence). However, two Gnostic sects (the Carpocratians and the Cainites) held that, in order to be freed from the Archons, the world- creating angels who would ‘enslave’ them, men and women had to ‘experience everything.’ To ‘escape from the power’ of the Archons, Carpocrates said, one ‘must pass from body to body until he has experience of every kind of action which can be practiced in this world, and when nothing is any longer wanting to him, then his liberated soul should soar upwards to that God who is above’ the Archons. By ‘fulfilling and accomplishing what is requisite,’ the liberated soul will be saved, ‘no longer imprisoned in the body.” This is certainly in accord with Jane’s notably embodied theory of illumination through a sexual liberation that is ultimately spiritual and salvific:
A lonely ghost the ghost is
That to God shall come; I—love’s skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb—
Shall leap into the light lost
In my mother’s womb.
But were I left to lie alone
In an empty bed,
The skein so bound us ghost to ghost When he turned his head
Passing on the road that night,
Mine must walk when dead.
6 The Carpocratian doctrine is synopsized and condemned in Adversus Haereses (§2952) by the Bishop of Lyon, Irenaeus, whose work has been invaluable to scholars studying the beliefs of various Gnostic sects. Yeats did not read the Bishop’s attack on heresies, but he did (as Warwick Gould recently reminded me in an email) read G.R.S. Mead’s Simon Magus: An Essay (1892), which draws on Irenaeus for a story in The Adoration of the Magi.
86 Making the Void Fruitful
Most readers of Yeats, even most Yeatsian scholars familiar with the finale of the Enneads of his beloved Plotinus, misread the central and crucial stanza, a misreading based on an understandably negative response, when the word is taken out of context, to the adjective ‘lonely.’ It is in fact an ultimate affirmation. Jane will come to God as a ‘lonely ghost,’ the climax of her ‘flight of the alone to the Alone.’ These, the final words of the Enneads, are also memorably recalled by Yeats’s friend Lionel Johnson at the climax of “The Dark Angel,’ a poem Yeats rightly admired: ‘Lonely unto the lone I go,/ Divine to the Divinity.”
Jane’s transcendence is earned not (to echo the final stanza of ‘Among School Children’) through a body-bruising, soul-pleasuring abstinence, but (since nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent) by utterly unwinding, through experience, what Blake called (in The Gates of Paradise and elsewhere) ‘the sexual Garments.’ Though ‘love is but askein unwound/ Between the dark and dawn,’ if left unwound, it would bind her to the earth, condemning her ghost, like that of her true lover, Jack, to ‘walk when dead.’ That skein fully unwound, we are to go to our graves (to borrow a phrase of Milton, but hardly his meaning), ‘all passion spent.’ Yeats told an interviewer at this time, ‘If you don’t express yourself, you walk after you’re dead. The great thing is to go empty to your grave.’
In order to liberate the soul, escaping the Archons who would enslave us, we must, Carpocratian Gnostics insisted, exhaust earthly ‘experience.’ Ina letter of January 1932, Yeats confided to Olivia Shakespear, ‘I shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my death-bed of all the nights I wasted in my youth’ (L, 790). He was writing to the one woman on earth best equipped to know what he meant by nights wasted in his youth; he had been a virgin until, at the age of thirty-one, Olivia had relieved him of that burden. Yeats was also fond of a passage from Blake’s Vision of the Last Judgment: two sentences which, with their emphasis on both the
7 My oneally on this point is Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, who accurately notes that Jane claims ‘that unsatisfied desire binds us to the earth; the exhaustion of desire through its fulfillment is the precondition for union with the divine.’ She follows Yeats in enlisting Aquinas in the political fight against Irish puritanism. In his Senate speech against Catholic censorship, Yeats had cunningly cited the Thomistic formulation, ‘anima est in toto corpore’ [the soul inhabits all parts of the body.] See Cullingford, ‘Yeats and Gender, in Howes and Kelly, 182.
8 W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Mikhail, 2:203.
6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult 87
‘realities of intellect’ and the need for the passions to ‘emanate’ ina way alien to Plotinus, would appeal to some Gnostics: ‘Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory’ (E&I, 137-38).°
The Gnostic Carpocrates would endorse that vision of the Last Judgment. Whatever he might have thought of Crazy Jane’s promiscuous theology, Blake, though aware of the limitations of sexuality, saw no puritanical line demarcating the human heart and loins from the human head and spirit. Yeats, who habitually couples Blake with Nietzsche, cited with approval the latter’s ‘doctrine’ that ‘we must not believe in the moral or intellectual beauty which does not sooner or later impress itself upon physical things’ (E&I, 389). As Nietzsche insisted in an epigram (§75) in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘the kind and degree of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.’ What Yeats described, in the title of a bold 1926 article defending life and art against religious censorship, as ‘The Need for Audacity of Thought,’ took the form of an increasingly candid celebration of the body. Already present in the ‘Solomon and Sheba,’ ‘A Man Young and Old,’ ‘A Woman Young and Old,’ and ‘Crazy Jane’ sequences, that candor dominates his final years. Ribh, the unorthodox monk of ‘Supernatural Songs,’ tells us in the opening poem of that sequence that ‘Natural and Supernatural with the selfsame ring are wed,’ and reads his ‘holy book’ in the incandescent Swedenborgian light shed by the sexual ‘intercourse of angels.’ The graphically sexual ‘Three Bushes’ sequence was co-written with Dorothy Wellesley, and it was she who best characterized Yeats in old age: ‘Sex, philosophy and the occult preoccupy him. He strangely intermingles the three’ (LDW, 374).
That intermingling is also prominent in ‘A Woman Young and Old,’ the eleven-poem sequence written between 1926 and 1929. In the alluring ‘Before the World was Made,’ which, following the framing ‘Father and Child,’ is the first poem in her own voice, the young woman applying
9 Blake goes on to excoriate those who, lacking passion and intellect, spend their lives ‘curbing and governing other peoples.’ He is thinking of ‘the modern church, which ‘crucifies’ the ‘true’ imaginative Christ ‘upside down.’ Yeats’s Bishop leaps to mind.
88 Making the Void Fruitful
her make-up mixes the sensuous with the spiritual, the aesthetically erotic with Neoplatonic philosophy:
If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity’s displayed:
I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made.
What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was Before the world was made.
In Yeats’s gender-crossing empathy and in the alembic of his lyricism, an apparently self-centered coquette and budding femme fatale is transformed into a heroic quester for her archetype in eternity. Any potential lover courts her at his peril, if, failing to see beyond the surface, he is not equal to her challenge: a task ironically made more difficult by her own attempt to align mask and spiritual reality through beauty- enhancing artifice. Though she lures him on with brightened eyes and crimsoned lips, her blood will remain cold, her heart unmoved, unless he is able to love the eerie, non-sensuous ‘thing that was/ Before the world was made’—a Neoplatonizing allusion to God being ‘still where he was before the world was made,’ a description by John Donne, whose work Yeats was reading intensely at this time."
Donne also figures in ‘Chosen,’ the sixth and central lyric of this concentrically structured sequence. The flanking poems provide context. In ‘Parting,’ the Romeo-and-Juliet-like aubade that immediately follows ‘Chosen,’ the young woman claims that the light they see ‘is from the moon’ and the song she and her lover hear that of the nightingale.
10 John Donne: The Sermons. In Sermon 23, Donne observes that, having planted Adam in Paradise, God remained unmoved, ‘still where he was before the world was made.’
6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult 89
When he points out that it is the dawn-announcing lark and, indeed, that ‘Daylight already flies/ From mountain crest to crest,’ she ends the debate by making him an offer he cannot refuse: let the bird ‘sing on,/ I offer to love’s play/ My dark declivities.’ In ‘Chosen,’ the now-mature woman also struggles ‘with the horror of daybreak’; but she chooses, along with ‘the lot of love,’ an esoteric concept to celebrate that serene post-coital moment when she and her lover seemed to exchange hearts. If questioned on
my utmost pleasure with a man By some new-married bride, I take That moment for a theme Where his heart my heart did seem And both adrift on the miraculous stream Where—wrote a learned astrologer— The Zodiac is changed into a sphere.
Though Yeats, as in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ plays a variation on his esoteric source (the Neoplatonic Commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis by the Latin encyclopedist Macrobius), readers oblivious to astrology can still perceive the sexual analogue to this transformation of the whirling zodiacal gyre of the poem’s opening stanza into the motionless ‘sphere’— symbol of perfection not only for Yeats’s ‘learned astrologer,’ Macrobius, but for more prominent thinkers, among them Parmenides and Plato, whose Myth of Er and its ‘lottery’ in the final sections of The Republic (619-620), is the source of the phrase ‘the lot of love.’
But why delve into this arcana at all? Because Yeats took it seriously and, at the same time, with the jocoseriousness that allowed him to yoke seeming opposites. After amusing Olivia Shakespear by distilling all that was worthy of attention to two topics: ‘sex and the dead’ (L, 730), he confided to her in his very next letter that perusing Blake’s Dante designs captured ‘my own mood between spiritual excitement, and the sexual torture and the knowledge that they are somehow inseparable!’ (L, 731). In ‘Parting,’ the woman is erotically playful; in ‘Consolation,’ the poem immediately preceding ‘Chosen,’ she stands orthodox spiritual doctrine on its head with a felix culpa variation emphasizing the intensification of erotic pleasure by the awareness of sex as forbidden fruit. She acknowledges ‘wisdom’ in what is said by the ‘sages,’ referring to Neoplatonic philosophers like Plotinus and Christian Neoplatonists like Augustine, with his obsessive emphasis on original sin. But, adopting
90 Making the Void Fruitful
the Yeatsian agon between ‘wisdom’ and ‘ecstasy,’ she has news for those who would bruise the body to pleasure soul. She tells her lover, ‘lay down that head/ Till Ihave told the sages/ Where man is comforted.’
How could passion run so deep Had I never thought
That the crime of being born Blackens all our lot?
But where the crime’s committed The crime can be forgot.
It would not have occurred to Augustine, for all the sexual experience of his youth, that the lot-blackening crime he was convinced we inherited at birth could be so pleasurably forgotten: returning to the scene of the crime by re-entering a woman’s ‘dark declivities.’
In ‘Chosen,’ Yeats has his protagonist memorialize her moment of ‘utmost pleasure with a man’ in arcane language nuanced by what I hear as a note of urbanity. To have her answer the new-married bride with no saving urbanity would be to parody the role famously assigned by Dryden to Donne, who (as we saw in discussing ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’), even in his ‘amorous’ poems, ‘perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softness of love.’ To capture that post-orgasmic euphoria in which she and her lover were ‘both adrift’ on a ‘miraculous stream,’ Yeats’s woman cites an abstruse text. In doing so, she mimics the simultaneous detachment and participation of a pedantic scholar. One assumes that the ‘new-married bride’ questioning the older woman on her utmost sexual pleasure has not come fresh from a perusal of A Vision, nor of Macrobius, nor of John Donne—the stanza, meter, and astronomical imagery of whose ‘Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’ Yeats adapted for ‘Chosen.’ This is the ‘just finished’ poem Yeats mentions in his 21 February 1926 letter (L, 710) to Donne scholar H. J. C. Grierson, in which he refers to Donne’s ‘Nocturnall’ as a passionate and ‘intoxicating’ poem, which it is, and ‘proof that he was the Countess of Bedford’s lover, which, despite Yeats’s revealing insistence, it most certainly is not.
In two late poems, Yeats pushes audacity of thought to the limit. Yeatsian physicality and revulsion from the abstract are at their most blasphemously sensationalistic in the quatrain whose titular ‘Stick of Incense’ is revealed to be that of St. Joseph, who ‘thought the world would melt,’ but, probing the ‘virgin womb’ of Mary, ‘liked the way his
6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult 91
finger smelt.’ Yeats is less sacrilegious than insouciant in ‘News for the Delphic Oracle.’ Even in this poem’s predecessor, ‘The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus’ (1931), Yeats had altered the Oracle’s report, as given in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, which Yeats had read in both the Thomas Taylor and Stephen MacKenna translations. Porphyry describes clear- eyed Plotinus swimming through the sea of generation to reach the Platonic Choir of Love. Characteristically, antithetical Yeats devoted his most sharply memorable line to the temporary obliteration of Plotinus’s spiritual vision: ‘Salt blood blocks his eyes.’ In the poem written seven years later, Plotinus has arrived, ‘salt flakes on his breast,/ And having stretched and yawned awhile/ Lay sighing’ like the rest of the ‘golden codgers.’ Yeats mocks his own early pastorals, ending in a salty, sexual tumult that makes even the dolphin-torn finale of ‘Byzantium’ seem tame by comparison:
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum
Flash fishlike,
Nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
This orgiastic scene would be ‘News’ indeed, not only for the Delphic Oracle and the ‘sages standing in God’s holy fire’ in ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ but for the John Milton of the Nativity Ode. The ‘Delphic Oracle’ poem’s opening lines were scribbled in a copy of Milton’s poems, with Yeats’s ‘sighing’ wind and water echoing the suspended calm of wind and water in the Nativity Ode. In revisiting Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’ Yeats had been preceded by Blake, in Europe: A Prophecy, and Coleridge, in Religious Musings (both 1794), and, a quarter-century later, closer in time and theme, in the ‘Ode to Psyche.’ Though Keats’s warm sexual union of Eros and Psyche is a far cry from the orgiastic doings in the ‘Delphic Oracle’ poem, those copulating nymphs and satyrs suggest that Yeats may be recalling the excited questions in the ‘Grecian Urn’ ode: ‘What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?/ What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?/ What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?’
To return to Milton's ode: the great Puritan’s fatal news for Apollo, driven from his shrine on ‘the steep of Delphos,’ is that he, Pan, and the other pagan deities are to be replaced by the newborn infant Jesus. Though Yeats includes in his pagan paradise the ‘Innocents’ slaughtered
92 Making the Void Fruitful
by Herod in his attempt to kill infant Jesus, a focus on Christ would not do for antithetical Yeats. At the end as at the beginning, in The Wanderings of Oisin, a palpably sexual paganism is preferred to Christianity. Yeats’s example, ‘Homer and his unchristened heart,’ is companion to Sophocles’ antithetical Oedipus, who—Yeats reminds us in the Introduction to A Vision, alluding to Oedipus’ wondrous end at Colonus—‘sank down body and soul into the earth’: an earth, Yeats adds to the Greek text, ‘riven by love,’ in contrast to primary Christ who, ‘crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body’ (Vis, 27-28).
That preference, the chthonic, earthy down over the abstract heavenly up, is echoed in the ‘Delphic Oracle’ poem: ‘Down the mountain walls/ From where Pan’s cavern is/ Intolerable music falls.’ Yeats replaces Milton’s ‘Pan’—the newborn infant Jesus, his birth accompanied by ‘musick sweet’—with the lusty, half-goatish pagan Pan and the fallen but resonant basso profundo attending caverned Pan and the copulating nymphs and satyrs: sensual music ‘intolerable’ to spiritual orthodoxy, Neoplatonic or Christian or both."
In this witty and exuberant poem—part parody of Neoplatonism and of Christian Milton, part mischievous potpourri of mythological personages—Yeats almost debases love to lust. Almost, for the Choir, wading in ‘some cliff-sheltered bay,’ sings of Love, and we are told of Peleus, Thetis’ husband, that, gazing on her ‘delicate’ limbs, ‘Love has blinded him with tears.’ But it is Thetis’ ‘belly’ that listens to that sexual music. Despite the Neoplatonic sources of his vision of the Isles of the Blest, Yeats emphasizes, not transcendent serenity beyond desire but a generative fecundity that would make Milton’s or even Swedenborg’s copulating angels blush—to say nothing of the virginal siby] at the shrine of Apollo, the titular recipient of ‘news’ actually intended for Plotinus and Porphyry. And, since the infant in Thetis’ belly is fetal Achilles, we have another iteration of Yeats’s Nietzschean motto: ‘Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.’
11 In the first edition of A Vision, Yeats described the ‘sacred and profane’ as having ‘fallen apart in the hymn “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, making Milton’s mythology ‘an artificial ornament,’ whereas ‘no great Italian artist’ of the Renaissance ‘saw any difference between them, and when difference came, as it did with Titian, it was God and the Angels that seemed artificial.’ A Vision (1925), 205. Yeats’s partial parody of Milton’s ode was first noted by Daniel Albright, The Myth against Myth, 122-23. According to Albright, George gave her husband’s annotated copy of Milton to Richard Ellmann as a gift.
7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things
In Part Two, in dealing with ‘last things, I’ll focus on ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ ‘Man and the Echo,’ and ‘Politics’ in the context of Maud Gonne and of Yeats’s final affirmation of life. Here, I’ll focus on ‘Lapis Lazuli, and on two death-poems, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ and the colloquial debate-poem, ‘What Then?’ If I had to select one final testament of Yeats, the choice might narrow to ‘Among School Children, or Self’s chant at the end of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ or to the final movements of ‘Lapis Lazuli, ‘Cuchulain Comforted,’ and ‘Man and the Echo.’ Such deeply moving retrospective poems are the fully ripened fruit of an aged but major poet working at the height of his undiminished creative power. Each of these poems constitutes wisdom writing, a quest for gnosis, or the acknowledgment that it may not be attainable in this life. That is true as well of the more casual, but no less momentous, ‘What Then?’
Written in July 1936, ‘Lapis Lazuli,’ which Yeats himself recognized as ‘almost the best I have made of recent years’ (L, 859), was, like ‘Politics,’ published with war imminent. Yeats is annoyed by those who cannot abide the gaiety of artists creating amid impending catastrophe, unaware of the deep truth—known to Hindu mystics, to the Nietzsche of gaya scienza, and to Arthur O’Shaughnessy, whose creative artists ‘built Ninevah’ and Babel out of their own ‘sighs’ and ‘mirth’—that ‘All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay.’ To counter the consternation of those who are ‘sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,/ Of poets that are always gay,’ women dismissed as ‘hysterical,’ Yeats presents Shakespearean figures who—like Ophelia, Cordelia, and (by implication) Cleopatra—‘do not break up their lines to weep.’ Above all, ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay;/ Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.’
© 2021 Patrick Keane, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647 /OBP.0275.07
94. Making the Void Fruitful
Fusing Shakespearean heroism with Eastern serenity and Nietzsche’s Zarathustrian joy (‘Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness’ ),' the poem turns in its final movement to the mountain-shaped lapis lazuli sculpture given to Yeats as a gift, and which, in turn, giving the poet his title, serves as the Yeatsian equivalent of Keats’s Grecian urn. “Two Chinamen, behind them a third,/ Are carved in lapis lazuli.” Over them flies ‘a long-legged bird,’ a ‘symbol’ not of eternity but ‘of longevity.’ The third carved figure, though ‘doubtless a serving man,’ is the resident artist; like Keats’s piper, he ‘Carries a musical instrument.’
Aside from the obvious resemblance of the lapis lazuli sculpture to the Grecian urn, the repeated ‘or’ in the lines that follow seals the connection, with description yielding to a stunning exercise of the creative imagination, worthy of its precursor, the fourth stanza of Keats’s ode. Since the place of origin of the figures in the sacrificial procession is not depicted on the urn, Keats speculates: ‘What little town by river or sea-shore,/ Or mountain-built [...]?” Yeats ups the ante to four repetitions of or:
Every discoloration of the stone;
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.
Yeats turns every discoloration and ‘Every accidental crack or dent’ (damage I nearly added to in 1995 when, visiting Michael and Grainne
1 ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra,’ 1.7 ‘On Reading and Writing,’ in The Portable Nietzsche, 153.
7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things 95
Yeats, I almost dropped the piece of lapis I’d been invited to examine) into a feature of the mountain landscape. But the even greater creative leap in this marvelous final movement is the setting of those sculpted figures, frozen in lapis as Keats’s were on the marble urn, into motion, with the poet delighting to ‘imagine’ them having attained the prospect of the gazebo half-way up the mountain. That the perspective is not quite sub specie aeternitatis; that the ‘little half-way house’ is situated at the midpoint rather than on the summit, makes this a human rather than divine vision. To that extent, the Chinese sages’ mountain vision may not achieve the gnosis attained by the naked hermits caverned on another Asian mountain, in Yeats’s 1933 sonnet, ‘Meru.’ Those hermits, aware of the ‘manifold illusion’ of one passing civilization after another, ‘know/ That day brings round the night, that before dawn/ [Man’s] glory and his monuments are gone.’ Yet the affirmation of the Chinese sages of ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is also registered in full awareness of ‘all the tragic scene.’ The eyes of these Yeatsian visionaries, wreathed in the wrinkles of mutability, glitter with a tragic joy lit by the poet’s own creative ‘delight,’ and by something resembling the Gnostic ‘spark.’
The end of mutability is death. The ancient Chinese sages’ gaiety in the face of tragedy recalls Yeats’s central mythological figure, Cuchulain. Yeats’s ultimate ‘Swordsman’ and the epitome of tragic joy, Cuchulain, the great warrior of Irish myth, is the hero of several Yeats poems and a cycle of five plays, ending with The Death of Cuchulain. Though indebted to the translations of Celtic mythology by Standish O’Grady and Lady Gregory, Yeats’s Cuchulain also reflects his reading of Nietzsche, who, though ‘exaggerated and violent,’ had ‘helped me very greatly in building up in my mind an imagination of the heroic life.”
The poet's final encounter with his Celtic Achilles takes place in a ghostly poem completed on 13 January 1939, two weeks before his death. ‘One of the greatest ever death-bed utterances,’ in the discerning judgment of Seamus Heaney, the eerie and magnificent ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ is composed, appropriately, in Dante’s terza rima, Yeats’s sole
2. In ‘The Phases of the Moon,’ after eleven phases pass, ‘Nietzsche is born,/ Because the hero’s crescent is the twelfth.’ In a September 1902 letter to John Quinn, who had sent him copies of Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morals, and The Case of Wagner, Yeats wrote: ‘I don’t know how I can thank you too much,’ reporting that he and Nietzsche ‘had come to the same conclusions on several cardinal matters, including the ‘heroic life.’ Cited by William Murphy, Prodigal Father, 596n69.
96 Making the Void Fruitful
venture into the form Shelley too had chosen for his final masterpiece.* Yeats’s poem finds the nameless hero, wounded in battle and slain by a blind man, in the Underworld among ‘Shrouds that muttered head to head,’ and ‘Came and were gone.’ He ‘leant upon a tree/ As though to meditate on wounds and blood.’ The newcomer is among his polar opposites—‘convicted cowards all,’ according to one ‘that seemed to have authority/ Among those birdlike things,’ and who informs the still armed hero: ‘Now must we sing and sing the best we can.’ The poem ends with the hero’s apotheosis imminent. Having set aside his warrior’s sword and taken up a tailor’s needle, he has joined these spirits in a communal, almost emasculating sewing-bee, making shrouds, his own included. He is soon to undergo their transfiguration, described in haunting final lines reminiscent of Zarathustra’s vision of evil absolved by its own bliss so that all that is ‘body’ becomes ‘dancer, all that is spirit, bird’: ‘They sang but had nor human tunes nor words,/ Though all was done in common as before./ They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds,’
That uncanny final line (an alexandrine which Conor Cruise O’Brien once remarked to me in conversation seemed to him ‘to have been written on the moon’) is also a final fusion. Marrying the posthumous continuation, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ of a bird-like poet’s need to sing with the transformation and liberation of the soul, it should thrill Romantics and Gnostics alike. Valentinus insists, ‘what liberates us is the gnosis of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereunto we have been thrown; whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.’* This formula of salvation, now famous but unknown to Yeats, is cited by Harold Bloom as a ‘good motto’ for ‘Cuchulain Comforted,’ which he considers ‘Yeats’s finest achievement in the Sublime.” The triumph of this mysterious, yet confessional death- poem is that, like ‘Man and the Echo,’ it discloses—along with an
3 Heaney’s comment was made in The Irish Times on 28 January 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats’s death. The Shelley poem, earlier discussed, is The Triumph of Life, interrupted by the poet’s drowning while sailing during a storm: a death eerily anticipated on what became the last page of the MS, filled with Shelley’s sketches of a sailboat.
4 Valentinus, Excerpts from Theodotus. Theodotus was a leading Valentinian of the Eastern school. The second century Excerpts were quoted and thus unintentionally preserved by the Christian theologian, Clement of Alexandria.
5 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 230, 228.
7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things 97
unexpected aspect of the solitary Cuchulain, ‘a heroic figure because he was creative joy separated from fear’ (L, 913)—Yeats himself: the man under the many macho-heroic masks. He is neither fearful ‘coward’ nor stricken rabbit, but still ‘one that,’ in yet another bird image, ‘ruffled in a manly pose/ For all his timid heart’ (‘Coole Park, 1929’). No wonder Yeats, shortly before his death, referred to the self-revealing ‘Cuchulain Comforted,’ a poem in process at the time, as ‘strange’ and ‘something new’ (L, 922).°
§
Inthe spring of 1936, not quite three years before that death, Yeats received a request for a ‘representative’ poem for The Erasmian, the magazine of his old Dublin high school. He selected ‘What Then?,’ which lays out for the Erasmus Smith students a planned life of disciplined labor, aimed at achieving what Yeats’s ‘chosen comrades’ at school believed to be his destiny: the conviction, in which he concurred, that he would ‘grow a famous man.’ Writing intimately though in the third person, ‘he’ tells the young students and us that he ‘crammed’ his twenties ‘with toil, and that, in time, ‘Everything he wrote was read.’ He attained ‘sufficient money for his need,’ true ‘friends that have been friends indeed,’ and that predestined yet industriously sought-after fame. Eventually—fulfilling his deliberate ‘plan’.—All his happier dreams came true’: house, wife, daughter, son; ‘Poets and wits about him drew.’
But this self-satisfied rehearsal of accomplishment has been challenged by the italicized refrain ending each stanza: ‘”What then?” sang Plato’s ghost, “What then?”’ As in ‘Man and the Echo’ (‘what do we know?’), despite best-laid plans, an ultimate uncertainty attends the certainty of death. In the fourth and final stanza, as the litany of achievement mounts in passionate intensity, the opposing challenge from the world beyond earthly accomplishment also reaches a crescendo:
‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,
6 Unfortunately ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ was not Yeats’s last poem. A week later, he dictated to his wife on his deathbed ‘The Black Tower,’ in which he resumes the heroic mask shed in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ and ‘Man and the Echo.’ ‘The Black Tower,’ with its ‘oath-bound men’ valiantly defending a lost cause, has its own merits, but we are right to regret its place of honor as Yeats’s very last poem.
98 Making the Void Fruitful
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, ‘What Then?’
In ‘The Choice,’ written a decade earlier, Yeats had declared that ‘the intellect of man is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work.’ The ‘something’ brought to ‘perfection’ in ‘What Then?’ is clearly the second choice. Must ‘he’ therefore, as in “The Choice,’ ‘refuse/ A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark’? Momentous in import despite its casual tone, ‘What Then?’ revisits ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ with the spiritual spokesman, despite being restricted to two words, at last mounting a potent challenge. The refrain Yeats places in the breathless mouth of that formidable ghost—‘What then?’—fuses the Idealism of that ‘Plato,’ who (in ‘Among School Children’) ‘thought nature but a spume that plays/ Upon a ghostly paradigm of things’ with the ‘Plato’ who, as the principal ‘advocate of the “Beyond,” the greatest slanderer of life,’ Nietzsche said presented ‘the complete, the genuine antagonism’ to Homer, the ‘instinctive deifier, the golden nature.’ In ‘What Then?’ the ghost of Plato, linking West and East, reiterates the question raised in the synoptic gospels—what do you profit if you gain the whole world but lose your immortal soul?—and couples it with the Hindu ‘tatah kim’|What’s the use?]; to quote the hermit-poet Bhartrihari: ‘you may by your good fortune have gathered friends about you: what further? You may have gained glory and accomplished all your desires: what further?’”
What further? What then? That relentless question also tallies with the Gnostic insistence that the liberating spirit within, the ‘divine spark,’ was the sole agent of salvation. That spark, once ignited, redeems ‘inner’ spirituality, freeing us from all Archon-imposed limitations, especially enslaving attachment to earthly things. However, powerful though the Otherworldly challenge is in ‘What Then?,’ here as always—from “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ on—dialectical Yeats is not quite succumbing to the spiritual, a realm at once alluring, demanding, and life-denying. ‘His’ litany of achievements, in the poem Yeats himself chose to represent his life-work to the students of his former high school, are triumphs of the imagination even more than they are flauntings of
7 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 11.25. The Satakas, or Wise Sayings, of Bhartrahari, Vairagasataka §71 (italics in original). In 1913, J. M. Kennedy translated both Bhartrihari and Nietzsche’s Die Morgenréte (Dawn or Daybreak).
7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things 99
material success; and, given the massiveness of the poetic achievement of Yeats, awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, ‘his’ is far from empty boasting.
As Nietzsche concluded after asserting his crucial agon, ‘Plato versus Homer’: to place himself ‘in the service’ of ascetic Platonism is ‘the most destructive corruption of an artist that is at all possible.’ In ‘What Then?’ the ghost of Plato gets the last word, but the poem consists of more than its refrain. Taken as a whole, ‘What Then?’ shows us an artist once again vacillating ‘between extremities’ (‘Vacillation,’ I), and, in the process, making poetry of the quarrel with himself. Yeats was reading at this time Nietzsche’s Genealogy and Daybreak (the latter translated by the same man who had, speaking of extremities, translated Bhartrihari), and it was Homeric Nietzsche—Yeats’s chosen counterweight to Plato and Christianity, that ‘Platonism for the people’—who said, in the Genealogy (III.3), ‘It is precisely such “contradictions” that seduce us to existence.’
Nietzsche’s prophet famously advises us, at the outset of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to ‘remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes.’* In ‘What Then?,’ Yeats seems in part to be following Zarathustra’s imperative; but he had not yet been introduced to Nietzsche when, almost a half-century earlier, he wrote ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland,’ a poem to which ‘What Then?’ responds almost point for point. As we have seen, in that earlier poem every earthly pleasure and achievement had been spoiled by a repeated, cruel ‘singing’ whose theme was a golden and silver Fairyland, an Otherworld of immutable, but unattainable beauty. Everything lost in the early poem, including the ‘fine angry mood’ required to rebut mockers, is re-gained in this late poem, where the speaker, his work done, cries out, ‘Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,/ Something to perfection brought.’ The mature, accomplished man has ‘succeeded’ beyond his dreams, and thus exposed the folly of the man who wasted his life away by fruitlessly dreaming of Fairyland.
And yet, that ‘singing’ from the Otherworld continues: ’” What then,” sang Plato’s ghost, “What then?”’—an amplified, more insistent ‘singing’ from the ‘Beyond’ that grows ‘louder’ the more the speaker rehearses his accomplishments. Seven years earlier, in his 1930 diary, Yeats had set out ‘two conceptions’ of reality that ‘alternate in our emotion and in history, and are not reconcilable. ‘I am always in all I do, driven to
8 ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra,’ 1.3,/Zarathustra’s Prologue’ (Portable Nietzsche, 125).
100 Making the Void Fruitful
a moment which is the realization of myself as unique and free, or to a moment which is the surrender to God of all that I am [...] Could these two impulses, one as much a part of truth as the other, be reconciled, or if one could prevail, all life would cease’ (Ex, 305). It is hardly unique thematically, but ‘What Then?’ in its very simplicity as a text suitable for high school students, offers us a late and almost uniquely accessible example of a recurrent phenomenon in Yeats: evidence that the tension between the temporal and the eternal, the pagan and the Christian, the Homeric antithetical and the Platonic primary, persists, as both challenge and imaginative stimulus, to the very end.
§
On 14 October 2019, Harold Bloom passed away, in his ninetieth year and having just taught two classes at Yale. He was on the verge of completing yet another book, this one exploring ‘the figurations we term immortality, resurrection, and redemption’ (published posthumously as Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death, a titular fusion of Hamlet and Paradise Lost). My own