Jan
15
Birth of a Nation: On Yeats’ Easter 1916
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For my students. In my arrogance, I will assert them to be the makers of the coming peace: nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Comment:
Our observations start with the second and third stanzas, in the midst of things: we want to know why all has “changed, changed utterly,” and what the nature of the “terrible beauty…born” is. Our narrator elaborates formally on those problems beginning with the second stanza.
There, he discusses a woman of “ignorant good-will” who became “shrill” and “rode to harriers.” He then moves to a man who “kept a school” and “rode our winged horse,” the only winged horse perhaps, Pegasus. That man, in turn, had a friend who “might have won fame” - the friend had a “sensitive” nature, “daring and sweet” thought. Finally, there is a gentleman who is a “drunken, vainglorious lout.”
What happens to the four archetypes - the beautiful who is perhaps just, the wise, the magnanimous who is courageous, the sensual who is most certainly intemperate? They seem like they’ve dropped out of the poem entirely after they’re mentioned. In a sense, they have - consider the third stanza. There is a “horse that comes from the road.” It almost seems riderless, except our narrator does mention a “rider,” as well as birds that “range from cloud to tumbling cloud” (see here for the link between those birds, Pegasus, and learning). All seems silent; no “shrill” voice, no “teaching.” Then, a horse that falls and makes a light splash, and hens that call but do not seem to receive a reply.
The horse that comes from the road is riderless - she rode to harriers but never got there. Pegasus’ rider is also dead; he’s up there with Pegasus only in the sense of birds moving away, from cloud to cloud. The noiseless are fatefully linked. The one who dared slipped, and won his fame only in the sound of a light splash. And the lout is probably being referenced in the missing “moor-cock:” he doesn’t merit a horse, apparently. We wonder about noise - a light one that is both a mockery of sensitivity and fame to be had by anyone. We wonder about the nobility of a horse. In Xenophon and Machiavelli, horses are signs of the aristocracy. To be able to dismount a horse and fight alongside one’s men is of the greatest importance in a democracy (cf. Machiavelli’s “condescension,” Lincoln’s “Temperance Speech”).
These are the reminders of those lost because of the failed rebellion of 1916: they were not archetypes, but rather real people Yeats himself knew and whom the British executed. Yet the proper names are not invoked until the very end. And the third stanza is notable not merely for being cryptic, but for being the stanza which introduces natural imagery - the “living stream,” the “stone,” “the shadow of cloud,” and the puddle (or, the horse could be along the beach of a lake or ocean or even the bank of a stream. We don’t know where the horse falls). We are told “the stone’s in the midst of all,” in the midst of “change” and “life.”
What is the relation between the nature invoked in the third stanza and the cityscape of the first? “What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death:” the stone brings us back to the “close of day,” but not the “vivid faces” as much as the “grey eighteenth-century houses.” The stone is a tombstone: it links the current rebellion with rebellion past. Because of it, “polite meaningless words” are gone - we will “murmur name upon name,” as if our children have died. For our future was dead as long as we “sacrificed” and made a “stone of the heart.” And it is only the actual, literal death of the future that creates the stone at rest around which life can emerge and fall. The “stone” in the third stanza sits between the “living stream” - life currently - and perhaps two elements of primordial Chaos: darkness and water.
Life is motion; without rest, there is no motion. Once we moved from desks merely to sit around the fire. We were as stone then. Now the fire burns within, and the problem of excess of love emerges: the English and Irish even of this poem are linked far more than first appears. We note the temporal abandonment of piety - Heaven is only to there to tell us when sacrifice is acceptable, and universal peace for the speaker is no longer a goal. This is how it has to be if we are to wear green, the color of hope. A terrible beauty is born, whose consequences will get out of hand (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, Preface - note the “wandering about the earth” by “great things” in “monstrous guises”).
Has all changed, changed utterly? That is the question I leave you with. The speaker’s world has changed. The finality of death has created myth, and blood has renewed the land at the price of “never again.” Why is very clear, and the tasks originally set forth are complete. But Yeats is acutely aware of when an age ends, when communication between falcon and falconer stops because of the very motion the falcon was set on originally. I am not a revolutionary, and neither are any of you. Yet a Presidential candidate noted the other day that the price for signing the Declaration of Independence, should the war fail, was death. Lincoln has noted the price paid merely to make equality and charity serious issues in the American mind. We will begin with Yeats’ contemplation of the problem that divides the Irish and English while simultaneously uniting them - the demands of universal peace and the demands of the justice-loving heart. And we will wonder.
Sep
8
In Exile: On Yeats’ "Sailing To Byzantium"
Filed Under poetry, yeats | 3 Comments
I owe two people whose names I don’t know fully for their comments and thoughts on this poem - without them, this commentary might have been even more cryptic and misleading.
Sailing to Byzantium
W.B. Yeats
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
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,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Commentary:
Our speaker is old and learned, pointing back at the country he’s leaving while on a ship to Byzantium. His first words are bitter and seem confused - he starts by listing the “young,” “birds,” “salmon” and “mackerel.” But then he immediately changes that list to “fish, flesh or fowl,” placing the fish first instead of last. “Whatever is begotten, born and dies” corresponds easily to the second list: fish are made as the Incarnation was, we humans use the word born to mark our own birth, and our lives fly away much like birds do in winter.
But the first list also corresponds to the cycle mentioned. That fish die in the same place they are born and live is most telling. If the flight of the soul marks death, it can also mark birth. And so what does it mean for the “young” to be begotten?
Typically we would say a lineage is implied, and there must be a descent of some sort in the poem. But there is no descent. There is only this cycle of “sensual music” in which all “natural” things are caught. All who breed are young, all who are bred are young.
In stark contrast to the first stanza stands the second: “a coat upon a stick” is all that is left of the flesh. This “aged man” celebrates his mind growing at the expense of body. The “singing school” reminds us that while fish are produced, fish produce nothing. They just move. Mind has created a monument, however, and can study what is within itself. Finally, as birds migrate, so does our speaker.
We must wonder, in the second stanza, why we are given yet another order for the list of the first stanza: now the order is flesh, fish, fowl. A suspicion I have is that the various permutations of the list mark time in the poem: the cycle never changes in essence, but what comes last in the ordering tells us what defines a particular moment. When musing on the “sensual music,” he first ended with “fish,” countless as “generations.” He moved to “fowl” to suggest the temporality of such creatures, and that resulted in “dying generations.”
Now he has ended with fowl/fish (”sailed the seas”), his own singular moving away from a country, after beginning with a flesh/fowl confusion (”louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress”). Where can he possibly end up finally?
The third stanza is a prayer, but a prayer to “sages,” not God. In fact, it looks like God’s holy fire preserves the sages. Furthermore, there is music here, but the music is internal, a harmony consonant with the destruction of desire. His prayer might as well be a Stoic prayer - even though eternity is made (”artifice”), it seems like the Maker serves our speaker.
Our speaker is learned and religious, and in this day and age those things are in tension, and back in Socrates’ time those things were in tension. He could be a monk; he disdains “nature” in the fourth stanza for the sake of being a perpetual servant. And certainly, “monuments of its own magnificence” need not imply egotism: like anyone who creates, one has to wonder where one’s audience truly lies.
If one creates something near perfect, has one not attested to the existence of divinity? Of eternal forms that can indeed be recalled, a music of the spheres that animates the soul? What we are seeing in this aged man is a particular point where intellect and religion can converge: both do disdain sensuality, and make the soul their chief concern. Perhaps all true intellectuals are secretly religious, believing that they are giving something lasting.
That logic is a trap, of course: nature is explicitly rejected in the final stanza, as if the intellect never had anything to do with nature. It was always about making and that implied a Maker. The flesh is taken away and our speaker is a bird - one which does not fly but awakens and sings, and one has to wonder with “flesh” and “fowl” where “fish” has gone to. The movement from the salmon-falls to the mackerel-crowded seas implies a river, and knowing that life is that river we can never step into twice, there is an irony at work here. Our speaker is finally happy, and the anger of the first stanza has fallen away as he sings for the many. Unfortunately, he is singing about the whole of life from outside of life. The journey the soul wants to take implies that Heraclitus perhaps understood the truth better - escaping becoming is a wish that ends our being, even as it defines our being.
Aug
22
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Comment:
We have considered the problem of Man fundamentally alienated from Nature. Here, divinity rapes a girl, taking the guise of Nature. There is a unity, but a forced unity, and the tragic beginning brings forth a tragic ending.
The Homeric understanding of Zeus is being used here, but perhaps also rejected. Zeus is the god whose plan causes the withdrawal of all gods and the rule of heroes on this Earth throughout the course of the Illiad and Odyssey. For all his problems, Zeus puts in action a plan that brings about the possibility of justice between humans, the possibility of all too human rule.
But here, Zeus is committing an act of horrific injustice. He turns himself into a beautiful creature that is monstrous in its attempt to pursue beauty. “A sudden blow” testifies not just to the violence, but the lack of a plan on Zeus’ part. And yet, there is a strange order to the whole incident. - And that order is not merely the rough arrangement of the stanzas into past, present, future. -
There are “wings” above the “staggering girl;” “dark webs” caressing the “thighs,” and her “nape” is “caught” in his bill. The unity of Man and god involves a correspondence of motions. The middle image of her thighs being unable to move and the last image of her head being unable to move are motions we can understand in terms of appetites (sexual is included here) and rationality.
But what about that less metaphorical motion, the one of one creature flying and the other one walking? Why did god choose to fly?
The strangest word in that middle stanza is “vague.” Why are her fingers vague? Is it that Leda’s hand looks overwhelmed by the white around it, and that one cannot see it anymore? Or is something else going on, perhaps with her state of mind (i.e. the last two lines of the poem)? Whose “strange heart” are we talking about?
An answer is suggested by way of contrast with Among School Children. There, Yeats, contemplating Helen of Troy, brings forth the topic of Leda once again:
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.
The issue is Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes, the comic poet, is portrayed in that work as giving the most tragic account of love. Man was originally a creature who had two faces, two sets of arms, two sets of legs. The back and sides were rounded, but other than that, this being looked like it could be split in two. This creature was able to roll around the Earth and was exceedingly powerful and almost rolled up to Olympus, before Zeus and Apollo split the creature and twisted each half around to create Man. Hence, love now is a result of a fundamental alienation from our better halves, where we would be more powerful than the gods if we were the way we were before. It can’t ever be had that way, though, because of the artifice of the gods: we have a back and a front, a direction built into us now, that takes us far away from what we were, and what we experienced.
But Yeats is changing this story too, or at least his narrator in “Among School Children” is. The change is that he is saying this “globular” creature was more like an egg - eros wasn’t a claim to power, so much, as a beginning.
And now we see what is happening. The question of human and divine beginnings is a competition: Who can work with Nature the best? That competition brings Man and god into a strange, deadly unity: we are loved by divinity even as we are abused by it and even as we are seeking to use it.
That last comment, “use divinity,” seems out of line given the emphasis in both these poems on beauty’s innocence. Someone is being raped, another watches a city be destroyed over her. And we know from Shakespeare that beauty is best preserved in writing of an immortal beauty, an intellect which is the product of all ages. It does not seem like beauty wants to put on power, especially not to beget anything.
The rape metaphor is the sticking point. One does not want to say “this rape didn’t happen,” especially not in a world where women are still treated awfully. But it is curious that divinity does the rape, divinity being that which we aspire to in many ways. It is even more curious when one considers the distant yet very human love in “Among School Children,” where generational unity is seen as the product of a new age. The narrator of that poem is going to die, and what will be is his concern, not his own power.
That human/divine contrast is making me wonder whether the divine exists in any significant sense in this poem. The issue more like this: the age eclipsed by Christianity had a serious flaw - it put too much trust in eros. Knowledge is literally an afterthought in this poem. The question of freedom is submerged under the reality of power.
Another age requires another beginning. It might be that all beginnings are erotic, where revolution and competing wills and an attempt to conjure a divinity that masters one more than one masters it erode any possibility of self-rule. That is the question of this poem, whether all ages are the same.
My own thought is that “Among School Children” is a companion to this, that there are alternatives if one takes knowledge and freedom more seriously. But it should be noted that the ultimate Platonic teaching holds that eros is everything, and as we can see from this poem, that is a curse as well as a foundation.
May
29
Originally posted on WritingUp over a year ago. I don’t know if that site will ever be back up again, so I’m going to start transferring the entries I have saved here for good now:
When Helen Lived
W.B. Yeats
We have cried in our despair
That men desert,
For some trivial affair
Or noisy, insolent, sport,
Beauty that we have won
From bitterest hours;
Yet we, had we walked within
Those topless towers
Where Helen walked with her boy,
Had given but as the rest
Of the men and women of Troy,
A word and a jest.
Commentary:
What destroys civilization is not war, but negligence when there is peace. Negligence when there is peace is the same thing as desertion in wartime: duty is neglected for the sake of some private good.
In wartime, we leave battles because we think a greater love lies elsewhere, or that we can achieve so much more in another arena, one where lives are not at stake. What is ironic in both instances is the lack of recognition that there is a real prize for the struggles of war, that there is a real peace that can be effected because of war.
War is not being glorified in the first 6 lines in any way. To see that, one must consider what condition man is in perpetually: according to the Social Contract theorists, man began in a state of war before society; according to Judges, even life with God can be indistinguishable from primordial chaos because of our human fallibility. Life is struggling with one another; we are continually at war for scarce resources for ourselves and friends, for love, for self-respect. Diplomacy in some ways is another way of waging war, another way of capturing that “beauty” men seek. It is a miracle that at war’s end the means of diplomacy or the fact of total conquest can be used to preserve something that was never really sought - a moderated struggle, the end of war. It is a miracle that struggle can bring forth the reconception of beauty as peace.
The last 6 lines, where the speaker considers himself to be the same as Trojans were before the war, force us reflect on our misunderstanding of beauty. “Helen” is emphasized at the expense of Paris; it is as if we are all like Paris. We would make “insolent sport” of our power so as to pursue a “trivial affair,” but since we are not Paris himself, we snicker in envy. We make jokes based on our morals, our morals stemming from our pride and pride only. Peace, the absence of shared struggle, allows us to indulge our pride. We do not do what should be done, which is observe the law of God and man, and return Helen to her homeland.
I wonder if the title, “When Helen Lived,” is supposed to give us the view of the conquering Greeks. They, while destroying the Trojans for great plunder, saw many men desert. They also saw their cause change from robbery to something far deeper as the war went on, as they each lost friends in the enterprise. It was war that taught them what true beauty is, and it was what they saw of themselves, during war, that taught them it is impossible to preserve.
Apr
24
The Spirit of A Nation: A Brief Comment on Yeats’ "Easter 1916"
Filed Under poetry, politics, yeats | Leave a Comment
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
- from “Easter 1916,” by William Butler Yeats
We have discussed this issue before - whether an entire nation can lose its spirit and go through life as if life were mere motion. And the issue unnerves us: it evokes notions of Sparta and fascism as the “spirited” alternative to Constitutionalism.
But perhaps we only see such an “alternative” because our hearts are stone, and we can only conceive of strength as being stone.
The cycle is the problem. When our spirit is manifest in making, hoping that Providence will carry our works beyond us, we produce necessarily an “excess of love.” That same “excess of love” can be stared at incomprehensibly by those who only dream. They are not aware of what is in front of them, the very real promise and problems of love.
How is this a cycle? We who are loving chant and remember and pray - they, on the other hand, sleep and dream and are thus disconnected from this world. In order for them to “keep faith,” they would have to invest faith in the fact others do or say things.
You can see the Dionysian/Apollonian distinction at work here, if you wish to use some fancy terms, but the point is simple: these are two sides of a whole being discussed here, but a whole that is falling apart. To pray is to dream, to dream is to pray. People are not so distinctly different they cannot become the other.
One could say that love underlies both, and that love is omnipresent. But that wouldn’t be quite correct. Love underlies everything, and exhausts itself in dreaming and praying. Thus it is possible for one activity to bleed the other dry.
And that is what could happen if the names are not repeated and remembered, if the tombstone is not seen as the only stone there should be. The murmuring of name ties the motion of life (”limbs that had run wild”) to a particular sort of dream - the external utterance stems from whatever formed internally. Some dreams empty life of all content. But if we can dream better, we can love better, and make life for all something more beautiful. Tragedy is the realization of what is at stake, of the fact that life is worth living, and things are worth fighting for.
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