Yeats Now E-Book

Joseph M. Hassett

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 145

Beschreibung

W. B. Yeats believed that lyrics can 'take on a second beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life'. By focusing on Yeats's most memorable lines of poetry, Joseph Hassett reveals new ways of enjoying a body of work that speaks to the twenty-first century. For example, 'The Stare's Nest by my Window' is informed by the circumstances in which it was written. Locked in his tower amid the violence and uncertainty of civil war, Yeats felt 'an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty of nature'. Finding the perfect metaphor for a necessary balm, he spotted an empty bird's nest and 'began to smell honey in places where honey could not be'. The poem's plea – 'O honey-bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare' – addresses readers in any state of physical or emotional isolation. This book is an enriching companion to the work of one of the world's great poets. Its iconography – portraits, photographs, book designs, manuscript letters – illuminates the poems and the life. Its continuing dialogue with writers past and present, from Joyce to Beckett, Heaney and others, offers up an enduring harvest of wisdom for our age.

Leseprobe

yeats

now

Echoing into Life

joseph m. hassett

the lilliput press

dublin

Contents

Introduction

On Friendship

The Moment Alive

Working

Making Your Soul

Loving

Hospitable Places

The Lingering Dead

Cycles

Inventing and Reinventing the Self

Marrying

A Prayer for a Child

War and Peace

Learning

Lauding the Olympians

Growing Old

Facing Death

Last Words

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Copyright

Introduction

Not many people think of themselves as readers of poetry. Yet when facing threshold occasions such as falling in love, marriage, the birth of a child, illness, and death, we often look for a poem to express feelings for which we don’t quite seem to have the words. Why is this?

One reason is that poems can encapsulate a sentiment that cannot be grasped or expressed in any other way. John Keats alluded to this when he said that a poem ‘should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance’. Another is that poets are fascinated by words and spend enormous time tracking them down, pondering them, and putting them into memorable form. W.B. Yeats had an extraordinary ability to intuit the sometimes puzzling emotions that hover over recurring life experiences and to distil them into unforgettable words. His phrases seem tailored to our lives because they arose directly out of passionate moments in his own life. Believing that ‘a poet’s life is an experiment in living’, he sought ‘not to find one’s art by analysis of language or amid the circumstance of dreams but to live a passionate life, and to express the emotions that find one thus in simple rhythmical language.’ Robert Frost could have been describing this aspect of Yeats’s work when he wrote that a poem ‘ends in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion’.

Memorable Yeats lines clarify a wide range of subjects, including the meaning and comforts of friendship; the proper balance between work and life; our relationship to the universe; the intervention of a spiritual world in human life; the possibility and nature of life after death; and the role of religion in a good life. Yeats’s words illuminate the path when we are pursuing or engaging with a lover; responding to hostility; finding purpose in life; searching for meaning in daily routine; growing old; suffering loss; and, inevitably, facing death. The subjects are as varied as life itself.

Many of Yeats’s lines are so striking that they’ve taken on a life of their own and stand ready to help us express ourselves in moments of intense emotion or troubling doubt. Time and again, Yeats seems to have just the right words for the occasion. When Samuel Beckett was walking from his friend Con Leventhal’s cremation, he stopped to recite lines from Yeats’s ‘The Tower’ about death and the death of friends. The young James Joyce, lost for words at the death-bed of his fourteen-year-old brother Georgie, sang his own setting of Yeats’s ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’. Confronting serious illness toward the end of his life, the painter Richard Diebenkorn found creative energy in Yeats’s admonition,

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress …

Yeats’s words often have the magical air of an incantation or a spell. This is no surprise because he believed that poetry has its origins in magic. ‘Have not poetry and music arisen’, he asked, ‘out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by?’

Yeats the enchanter is at work in his much-loved poem ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’. We can hear rhythm, rhyme and repetition cast a spell in the lines describing the cloths as

Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half-light …

The mesmerizing sounds suggest that language has magical powers, and thus prepare the reader to accept the talismanic conclusion,

I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Patti Smith was enchanted by the magic of this poem when her mother read it to her at age five. She asked for a book by its author, and Yeats became an important influence on her life as a poet, songwriter, singer and memoirist.

Part of poetry’s magic is that its words are linked together so skillfully that they lodge themselves in the memory, ready to be retrieved in response to a new experience. In addition, Yeats’s poems were written to be spoken, and their rhetorical quality is a big part of what makes them so memorable. We can hear Yeats insisting on the importance of rhythm in a 1932 recording in which he warns, ‘I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm and that may seem strange if you are not used to it.’ He tells of the poet William Morris raging about a public reading of one of his poems: ‘“It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble”, said Morris, “to get that thing into verse!” It gave me’, Yeats added, ‘a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’

Yeats was so strongly committed to the oral performance of his poems that, after hearing a recitation by Florence Farr, he wrote, ‘I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect respect for its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people to learn the art, I would never open a book of verses again’.

Yeats’s words are meant to be listened to in both senses of the word: they are to be both heard and heeded, even when heeding opens a dialogue that ends in disagreement.

Great poets can bring coherence not only to our personal lives, but also to bewildering events in the world around us. Yeats’s poems often reflect what Virginia Woolf called ‘the poet’s gift of turning far, abstract thoughts, if not into flesh and blood, at least into something firm and glittering’. Indeed, some of Yeats’s words, such as ‘the centre cannot hold’ from ‘The Second Coming’, are quoted so often by politicians and journalists that it has been suggested that they be retired. This is a bad idea. The recurring attraction of Yeats’s words is actually a testament to their magical ability to channel swirling currents of thought and emotion into memorable form. Yeats believed that the form – the style – in which ideas are expressed, quite apart from their content, can make ‘us live with a deeper and swifter life’.

A sense of the magic his words could work informs Yeats’s assertion that a lyric can gain ‘a second beauty, passing as it were out of literature into life’. This book seeks to capture that second beauty in a compendium of words from Yeats that can help clarify and articulate our response to the world around us. The words are placed in the context of the poem, but this book focuses on the words themselves, the building blocks of poetry. To be sure, reading the complete poem will convey more of Yeats’s ideas, but, as Mallarmé reminded Degas, poems are not made out of ideas; they are made out of words. Joan Miróexpressed the same concept from the painter’s perspective: ‘I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.’ Susan Sontag may have had this in mind when she told her diary, ‘I think I am ready to learn how to write. Think with words. Not with ideas.’

In the poem opening his Collected Poems, Yeats proclaimed, ‘words alone are certain good’. Trying to explain to himself his endless quest for Maud Gonne, he wrote a poem entitled ‘Words’ that reveals how, for him, the great life force of Eros was inseparable from language. Reflecting on all the words he had used trying to persuade Gonne, he wondered what might have happened had he succeeded, and answered, ‘I might have thrown poor words away / And been content to live’. Toward the end of his life, as he looked death in the eye, his impulse was to tame death with words by composing his epitaph and announcing it in a poem that describes his tombstone and declares, on its face, ‘By his command these words are cut’. In life, love and death, words alone were certain good.

Focusing on some of Yeats’s words enlarges the imagination and pulls us more deeply into life. This is what William Carlos Williams had in mind when he wrote in ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

On Friendship

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,And say my glory was I had such friends

At about the time Yeats wrote these lines in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, he told the audience at a banquet that, during a recent visit to the gallery, he had been ‘overwhelmed with emotion’ at the sight of ‘pictures painted by men, now dead, who were once my intimate friends’, and ‘portraits of my fellow workers’.

The poem brings to life ‘the images of thirty years’, a pantheon of ‘an Ireland / The poets have imagined, terrible and gay’. Here are John Synge, ‘that rooted man’; Lady Augusta Gregory exuding ‘all that pride and that humility’; Hugh Lane, the ‘onlie begetter’ of the gallery; Arthur Griffith ‘staring in hysterical pride’; and Kevin O’Higgins, his ‘soul incapable of remorse or rest’. Yeats’s words caught the ear of Samuel Beckett. Late in life, he struggled to remember Yeats’s capsule biography of Synge. Poet Anne Atik found ‘that rooted man’ in this poem.

It is no overstatement to apply to Yeats’s verbal sketches Shakespeare’s prediction in Sonnet 18:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The poem tempts us to have the fun of describing it with the Greek-based adjective for a poem about a painting, ekphrastic. But the poem is not so much about paintings as about the friends depicted in the paintings, or, more broadly, about friendship itself. The closing couplet (quoted above) hovers above the particulars with a general statement that enables a speaker to honour friends by basking in their reflected glory.

The portrait of John Synge pictured here was painted by the poet’s father, John Butler Yeats, who maintained that ‘the best portraits will be painted where the relationship between the painter and the subject is one of friendship’. In fact, he went so far as to insist, ‘I can only paint friendship portraits.’

‘that rooted man’: John Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge,reg. no. 54, collection and image © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

Friendship is all the house I have

Cicero’s enduring essay De Amicitia tells us that friendship ‘projects a bright ray of hope into the future, and upholds the spirit which otherwise might falter or grow faint’. Hearing that his friend Lady Gregory was seriously ill in February 1909, Yeats sought a much-needed ray of hope by writing a remarkable passage in his journal in which he exalted friendship above family and defined it as home.

When Yeats wrote about Gregory’s illness he had never had a permanent home. As he was growing up, his father, a portrait painter, had financial difficulties, which Yeats attributed to an ‘infirmity of will’ that kept him from finishing a painting. The family moved from one rented premises to another, and from the time Yeats moved out on his own in the early 1890s until his marriage in 1917 at age fifty-two, he lived in rented rooms.

Against this background, Yeats wrote of Gregory’s illness that ‘more than kin was at stake’. Omitting reference to his father, he noted that Gregory ‘has been to me mother, friend, sister and brother. I cannot realize the world without her – she brought to my wavering thoughts steadfast nobility. All day the thought of losing her is like a conflagration in the rafters. Friendship is all the house I have.’

Wandering Yeats turned Gregory’s friendship into a house. His deft use of words is an extreme instance of the phenomenon observed by philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics ofSpace that the idea of home is so powerful that ‘wherever the human being has found the slightest shelter, we shall see the imagination build “walls” of impalpable shadows’.

The depth of Yeats’s reaction to Gregory’s illness engendered his poem ‘A Friend’s Illness’:

Sickness brought me thisThought, in that scale of his:Why should I be dismayedThough flame had burned the wholeWorld, as it were a coal,Now I have seen it weighedAgainst a soul?

Yeats sent this ‘scrap of verse’ to Gregory, explaining that what he meant by sickness and the scales was that, ‘when one we love is ill we weigh them against a world without them’.

‘all that pride and that humility’: Antonio Mancini, Lady Gregory, reg. no. 44, collection and image © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

no thought … Could ever come betweenMind and delighted mind

In these lines Yeats is describing his relationship with one of the three subjects of his poem ‘Friends’. Its dramatic opening sets the stage for a meditation on three women and the joy, delight, ecstasy and sweetness they brought to his creative life:

Now must I these three praise –Three women that have wroughtWhat joy is in my days:

This impulse to praise friends reflects a general Yeatsian tendency captured in critic Graham Hough’s observation, ‘No poet in our day has written more about his family and his friends than Yeats, and no one has been more successful in enlarging them to heroic proportions.’ The three friends of the poem are Augusta Gregory, Olivia Shakespear and Maud Gonne. Shakespear was Yeats’s first lover but he left her to resume his long quest for the unattainable Maud Gonne. The deep friendship between Yeats and Shakespear, although interrupted, continued until her death in 1938, just months before Yeats’s own death. The delight generated by Shakespear lingers in this salute to friend and lover:

One because no thought,Nor those unpassing cares,No, not in these fifteenMany-times-troubled years,Could ever come betweenMind and delighted mind;

After Long Silence

In his unpublished memoirs Yeats tried to understand why he turned away from Olivia Shakespear. He couldn’t resist, he wrote, ‘the old lure’, the Siren call of Maud Gonne. He explained it this way:

All our lives long, as da Vinci says, we long, thinking it is but the moon that we long [for], for our destruction, and how, when we meet [it] in the shape of a most fair woman, can we do less than leave all others for her? Do we not seek dissolution upon her lips?

He told the story more simply and poignantly in a poem addressed to Gonne, but dominated by earlier memories. He called it ‘The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love’:

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,I had a beautiful friendAnd dreamed that the old despairWould end in love in the end:She looked in my heart one dayAnd saw your image was there;She has gone weeping away.

Reminiscing in 1926, thirty years after Shakespear went ‘weeping away’, Yeats wrote to tell her, ‘I came upon two early photographs of you yesterday, while going through my file – one from “Literary Year Book”. Who ever had a like profile? – a profile from a Sicilean coin. One looks back to one’s youth as to [a] cup that a mad man dying of thirst left half tasted. I wonder if you feel like that.’

The conversation continued in person. ‘After Long Silence’ tells the story:

Speech after long silence; it is right,All other lovers being estranged or dead,Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,That we descant and yet again descantUpon the supreme theme of Art and Song:Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; youngWe loved each other and were ignorant.

The love and friendship embodied in this poem reflect a different Yeats from the poet envisioned by Nick, a character in Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends who asserts that ‘No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.’

friendship never ends

This line comes from Yeats’s meditation on friendships that endured beyond the grave, ‘All Souls’ Night’. The poem, set in Oxford, jumps to life with this opening:

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church BellAnd many a lesser bell sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night,

Olivia Shakespear from Literary Year Book, 1897: ‘young / We loved each other and were ignorant’.

Letter in which Yeats sends ‘After Long Silence’ to Olivia Shakespear.