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Xerox University Microfilms 900 North Zaab Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 49100 ll i!

75- 19,461 LENSE, Edward Louis, 1945- W. B. YEATS IN PARADISE.

The Ohio S ta te U niversity, Ph.D ., 1975 Language and L ite ra tu re , modern

Xerox University Microfilms Ann Arbor, Michigan48100 j j ...... _ 4

0 1975

EDWARD LOUIS LENSE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. W. B. YEATS IN PARADISE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Par tlal Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Dactor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio S tate U niversity

By

Edward Lense

* * * * *

The Ohio State University

1975

Reading Committee: Approved By

Gordon K. Grigsby, Adviser

Morris Beja

Anthony Libby

Depart TABLE OF CONTENTS

VITA...... i i

CHAPTER ONE Introduction ...... 1

CHAPTER TWO A ncient Ire la n d Knew I t A ll

Part 1 ... Introduction ...... 61 P a rt 2 . . . Hollow I^rnds and H illy L a n d s 75 P a rt 3 . . . T ir na n O g ...... 95 Part 4 ... Getting There ...... 113 Part 5 ... Paradise Lost ...... 140

CHAPTER THREE . . * Two Ways o f Looking a t a Golden B i r d ...... 182

CHAPTER FOUR .... The Fifteenth Phase of the Moon and the Clarified Body ...... 230

BIBLIOGRAPHY 278 VITA

Edward Lense

Home: 33 East 17th Ave. 17312 Campus: The Ohio State Univ. Columbus, Ohio 43201 Department of English (614) 291-2046 164 Vest 17th Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43210

EDUCATION 1969-present The Ohio State University Ph.D. expected December 1974 M.A. December 1972 (by Qualifying Examination) 1968-69 New York University B.A. September 1969 1963-66 Capital University

DISSERTATION D irector: P ro f. Gordon K. Grigsby Title: "W.B. Yeats in Paradise: The Other Vorld as T^r na nOg. Byzantium, and the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon"

HONORS 1969-73 University Fellow at Ohio State' 1970 Vandewater P riz e in Poetry (Ohio State Univ.) 1969 Dean's List, New York University

TEACHING EXPERIENCE English 100, 101, 102 (Freshman Compo­ s itio n ) English 301 (Advanced Composition) English 160 (Introduction to Literature) English 260 (Introduction to Poetry) English 261 (Introduction to Fiction) English 266 (Creative Writing, Poetry)

TEACHING INTERESTS Creative Writing; Composition, Twentieth Century British and American Literature, including contemporary literature

PUBLICATIONS Poems in l i t t l e m agazines: Epos. Escut­ cheon, The Graduate Voice. North Country A nvil, The Ohio a Journal Poems in c o lle c tio n s (published through the Columbus Gallery of Fine A rts ): Sand and Snow, Stopped Dead

i i i l l

ACADEMIC SERVICE Editor, Escutcheon. 1970-72

E lected member o f: English Department Graduate Committee, 1972-73 English Department Council and Graduate Faculty Council, 1970-73 University Senate, 1973-74

RECOMMENDATIONS Prof. John B. Gabel, Chairman, Depart­ ment of English Prof. Gordon K. Grigsby (Advisor) P ro f. D aniel R. Barnes Prof. Morris Beja Prof. Donald W. Good Prof. Robert C. Jones W. B. YEATS IN PARADISE

Chapter One

Poetry concerns Itself with the creation of Paradises. I use the word in the plural for there are as many paradises as there are individual men — nay — as many as there are separate feelings.

— J. B. Yeats in a letter to W. B. Yeats (1)

This advice, written in 1914, was entirely unnecessary since Yeats had been creating paradises in his poems for nearly thirty years. They

ranged from the elaborate Symbolist constructions of The Shadowy Waters and The Wanderings of Plain to the almost straightforward Imagery of poems lik e "The Man Who Dreamed o f F aery lan d ." All th e s e , and th e forms of Paradise that he created for his later poetry, are tied together by

one concept: that human life would be perfect if it were not tied to a physical world subject to time and decay, and that Paradise is therefore

a state of human perfection. It is not a change from human conscious­ ness, or even from the body (in an ideal form), but human life made perfect. It is a state that can be reached, occasionally and momentarily,

in this life, but which can be fully realized only after death.

The sort of Paradise that Yeats constructs falls somewhere in the

ambiguous area between religious belief and simple manipulation of con­ ventional symbolism. It is unlikely that Yeats ever expected to reach heaven on a dolphin's back, or that he thought the Isles of the Blessed

1 are in the Atlantic Ocean; he hedged a great deal about whether he

''believed1' in the system of A Vision. But he did think of the Great

Memory as something th a t re a lly e x is ts , and looked on Images as tokenB

of a quite real spiritual world. The images that he returned to again

and again, including the various Paradises that run through all of his

work, are among the Images that he thought are stored in the Great

Memory, and that, therefore, represent a spiritual reality. They are

also part of the psyche of every man. At times Yeats overlaid the

archetypal linages with more personal symbolism, and wrote poems that

turned the images into mostly "literary" constructions (The Shadowy

Waters is the most complete example of this process), but thatdoeB not

mean th at he regarded any o f the b a sic Images o f P aradise such as T lr * na nOR or the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon as literary counters.

There is a constant tension between personal imagination and the

spiritual world, as he conceived it, in Yeats's poetry. As a result of

this tension, things that seem at first to be almost arbitrary images

shade into his religious beliefs. It is rarely clear, for example,

whether he intended to use t£t na nOg. the land of Youth, because it is

an ancient tradition and so a potent literary symbol or because he felt

that it puts the mind in touch with a higher order or reality. I think

th a t i t 1b usually pointless to try to distinguish between metaphor and

direct statement whenever Yeats is talking about the Other World, exact­

ly because he saw such images as both metaphors and direct representa­

tions of the spiritual world. So, to keep my language as simple as

possible, I shall talk about "this world" and "the Other World" as if

both were equally accessible places, and reserve the sticky questions 3 of what Is "real" and what is "metaphorical" for close readings of specific poems.

One thing that is certain about the Other World Is that It can be described as a state of being. It Is not a stasis, but something like ordinary human life raised to a higher power. It Is the way of life le d by th e s p ir its of The I s l e of Dancing In The Wanderings o f P la in , the lords and ladles of Byzantium, and the bodiless spirits under the full moon. Although Yeats generally preferred to represent It by linages like these, he did at times use more abstract language, and called it "Unity of Being," or, several times, "fulness of life."

This last phrase comes close to defining what It is like when the visionary Martin describes Paradise in The Unicom From the Stars;

No man can be alive, and what is Paradise but fulness of life, If whatever he sets his hand to In the daylight cannot carry him from exal­ tation to exaltation, and if he does not rise Into the frenzy of contemplation In the night silence. (2)

In other words, It Is first of all freedom from all the distrac­ tions of normal life. In a perfect state, a man can complete what he starts, and it will In turn lead him to a sort of mystical awareness of his own being. If this vision seems unduly abstract, that is because It is Martin's interpretation of what he has seen In a trance

(he was not using "Paradise" as a figure of speech):

I have seen beyond the earth. In Paradise, in that happy townland, I have seen the shining people. They were a ll doing one thing or another, but not one of them was at work. All that they did was but the overflowing of their Idleness, and their days were a dance bred of the secret frenzy of th e ir h e a rts , or a b a ttle where th e sword made a sound that was like laughter. (3) 4

This vision Is not at all eccentric. The people are not at work because

“work," In this context, Is a worldly distraction that keeps a man from

examining his own being. (In Martin's case, work means building a

rather baroque carriage for Dublin Castle.) But, aside from the ab­

sence of work, the “happy townland" Is simply a perfect version of human life. It Is an unfallen community where passion, even In battle,

Is not destructive but rather creates a “frenzy" that Is perpetual joy.

Although Its perfection Is remote from normal experience, nothing about

It la unusual except for Its overwhelming harmony: It Is ordinary life with everything bad taken out.

This Is a simple vision of Paradise, although the implications of

Martin's vision are not at all simple In the play. Other ways of

describing the state of perfection are more complex, especially the

concept of Unity of Being. Since this Is a phrase that will occur many times in this paper, a rough gloss Is in order. Essentially,

Unity of Being Is a state in which a man Is free from all the contra­

dictions and self-induced confusions that constrict him In his ordinary

life. It is a state in which he is purely himself, or, in the language . of A Vision, totally subjective. But It is more than a state of mind, being a kind of self-transcendence by means of perfect knowledge of

one's self. This description is not really a paradox, since Yeats con­

ceived of the Self as divided between awareness of Itself and awareness of the world. It is at war with itseilf because of this division, it

contradicts itself, and cannot reach any unity until it tears free from

the world. (The alternative, total Immersion in the world, is not 4 attractive because it destroys the self.) 5

Although Unity of Being is an abstraction, it is a powerful one that takes on very exact meaning whenever Yeats applies it to images or even to other ideas. It lieB just below the surface Imagery of the

Other World; the shining people and their relatives in other paradises exist as models of what it is like to be a unified being. And, aside from being a controlling idea for his Imagery, the concept was impor­ tant to Yeats and a central part of his philosophy. When, near the end of his life, he summed up his career and ideas in "A General Introduc­ tion for my Work," he put it at the top of all ideas and used it to define Christ:

... my Christ, a legitimate deduction from the Creed of St. Patrick as I think, is that Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly propor­ tioned human body, Blake’s "Imagination," what the Upanishads have named "Self": nor is this unity distant and therefore Intellectually understandable, but immanent ... (5)

This comment makes the concept of Unity of Being as an ideal of human perfection quite clear: like Dante (and Blake), Yeats visualizes it as a perfect human body. It is equally clear that Yeats was not over­ whelmingly concerned with Christian ideas about Heaven and salvation.

His "Christ" is not a person, but an idea that shapes his conception of Paradise. His Christ is the complete man, not, it seems, because of his divinity but because of his perfect humanity; this may be a more sophisticated version of the Irish folk belief that only Christ, of all men, was exactly six feet tall — the ideally shaped man whom others approximate but cannot match. ^

All this is less theological than it sounds. It is possible, of course, to use YeatB’s work as a starting-point for endlessly complex 6 and abstract theological and philosophical speculations, but doing so would only lead away from the work itself. Rather than supplying the starting-point for anything like that, Yeats wrote about Paradise and human perfection in an attempt to define direct experience: the state of perfection is not an ideal to be used as a symbol, but something

"immanent," as he says, and not to be removed from experience. A vision like Martin's is an extrapolation from experience, and the know­ ledge of perfection is, in its simplest form, a kind of mystical exper­ ience, a flash of awareness like the one he describes in "Vacillation":

My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless. (7)

This, for Yeats, is about the best that anyone can reasonably expect in this world. There Is a severe irony in the contrast between mystical ecstasy and the notation that it lasted maybe twenty nlnutes, as if he had timed himself to see how long he could keep it up. (Boehme once stayedIn an ecstatic trance for three days, but even he had to come out of It.) The body, even if It is momentarily transformed, or, more likely, seems to be transformed, draws the soul back into the physical world; besides, the soul is not pure. It is not coaplete in itself, not only because it is tied to an imperfect, material body but because it has not achieved Unity of Being and is full of self-contradictions.

Life has compromised it.

Things said or done long years ago, Of things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something i s re c a lle d , My conscience or my vanity appalled. (8) 7

Yeat s had sa id the same th in g years before he w rote th is poem, and had

. used the problem of vanity and conscience as an illustration of the

way we lack Unity of Being:

One is never a unity, a personality: to oneself, small acts of years ago are so painful in the memory that often one starts at the presence a little below 'the threshold of consciousness' of a thought th a t remains unknown. I t sheds a vague light like that of the moon before it rises, or after its setting. (9)

Human life may be a model for Paradise, but human life as it works in

thin world is irredeemable. A soul can achieve perfection only after

it :.s purified by death, just as the souls in, for example, "Byzan-

tiun" must pass through a holy fire to have "the fury and the mire of

human veins" burned away.

But the situation is not hopeless. If it were, there would be no

poems about Paradise. The concept of Unity of Being, the state which

cou.d sustain perfect happiness, and the "fulness of Life" that it \ would bring about, are present in Yeats's work as ends that can be

reached, both momentarily in this world and permanently in the Other

Wori.d. There are several ways to transcend ordinary consciousness and

reach toward the ideal of human perfection: through sexual passion,

through a state Yeats sysfoollzed by the dance (which is often, but not

always, sexual), and through artistic creation. Artists, lovers and

dangers a re the people most lik e ly to become p e rfe c t. They are also

the most likely to escape at least some of the misery of old age, some­

thing that obsessed Yeats throughout his career because it eafoodies

eve:ything wrong about life in the physical world.

The problem of old age, and the Images of sexual love, dancing 8

and artistic creation that stand opposed to It all need much more

exploration, but they cannot be treated separately because together

they form a large integrated pattern of imagery and symbolism that

pervades Yeats's work. The same thing is true of the central part of

design, the Other World Itself, but since the images of the Other

World in Yeats's poetry take on most of their meaning because of the

symbolism of the dance, sex, art and old age that they contain, it is necessary to look first at those abstract ideas, and then to examine

the Other World in more detail. However, a very brief survey of the

Other World in its different forms might give some shape to the ab­

stractions, and serve as a good way to introduce them.

The Other World takes several forms in Yeats's poetry, and, at

first look, they seem entirely different. But, in spite of their

apparent diversity, they all describe pretty much the same state, or place: the one place where human perfection is possible. Heaven, for

Yeats as for Blake, is both inside the mind and separated from our

usualstates of being. It is, as the phrase "fulness of life" implies^

something that transcends normal life but does not lead the soul (or,

in less exalted terms, the personality) entirely out of itself. It is not like the Christian Heaven, the soul's direct knowledge of God;

rather, it is the soul’s direct and perfect knowledge of Itself, freed

from the contradictions and imperfections of this life. It la not like

Nirvana, since nothing is extinguished and there is no stasis. Every­

thing is more alive in the Other World than in this one.

That is the one substance of the Other World, but, to continue in

language that Yeats would deplore, it has many forms. There is, first, the ancient Celtic tradition of Tlr na n6g, the Land of Youth, which

Yeata used both as a convenient symbol of the Other World and as an image that would connect his work with a great tradition. Tfr na nOg. in a sense, is the basic form of Paradise in his work, the starting- point for his later, more elaborate personal versions of the Other

World. Eden, another traditional version, is mostly just a name he uses for Tir na nOg, but occasiona?Cly4lg_usep the image of a walled city rather than the Western islands; in one play, The Country of the . * * Young, the Other World is both Tir na nOg and Eden. Byzantium, to the extent that it is more than a symbol for art, is another version of / j# / / Tir na nOg. but a rather exotic one. It is Tir na nOg with new land­ scaping, but also with a new reason for being: the joy of living in the traditional earthly paradise is less Important than the joy of art, and the two are at least partially opposed. The final version, the

Fifteenth Phase of the Moon, is all Yeats' own in its form,although the ideas that control it are the same ones that underlie his early use of Celtic mythology.

All of these states of being have in common the idea that perfec­ tion comes, first of all, from freedom, especially freedom from the body and its greatest weakness, old age. Old age is one of the most pervasive and important themes in Yeats's poetry, from his earliest poems to the last. It is also a natural counterpart to the theme of the Other World, since the main problem with physical existence is that it Is subject to decay, while the spirits in Paradise are not. Physical life defines Itself in his poetry as the state in which people grow old and die; the Other World is a state in which they are immortal and, 10 usually, eternally young as well.

One drastic example of this opposition Is the setting of The Wan- * derlngs of Plain: that poem Is the narrative of Olsln, over three hundred years old, about his adventures In the Land of Youth. He had spent three centuries there with Nlamh dancing, fighting and sleeping

In a trance, but had left this strange Paradise because he was unable to te a r him self away from the Idea o f human sorrows. P erfectio n was impossible for him because he was unable to leave his memories of more ordinary life. When he returned to Ireland, he began to experience all human sorrows for himself; having given up Immortality, he had to accept old age and suffering. His extreme old age has made him almost a personification of misery:

Ah met to be shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain, Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear; All emptied of purple hours as a beggar's cloak In the ra in , As a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir. (10)

The contrast between the two states of existence could hardly be clearer or more dramatic; In the one youth and pleasure and heroic struggles,

In the other pain and weakness. And Olsln's misery Is nothing unusual in Yeats: his lament Is familiar because all of his old men complain about their age, not always so loudly but always to the same purpose.

Olsln even uses a familiar image: a beggar's cloak like the "tattered coat upon a stick" in "Sailing to Byzantium."

The theme of old age Is too large for me to survey here In any detail, and too explicit and pervasive in Yeats's poetry to need 11 demonstration. Also, It will get more than enough treatment In the course of this essay, since it is implicitly part of everything Yeats says about the Other World. Rather than go into a discursive analysis of it here, then, I want to give a few examples of how it works in relation to the themes of sexual fulfillment, dancing and artistry, and to let those stand, for the moment, for the symbolic pattern it makes in opposition to thoBe themes.

Sexual decline 1b one of the more obvious results of old age, and one that Yeats often used to illustrate the body's betrayal of Itself.

For example, he used old age as a controlling symbol in two different ways in "A Man Young and Old" and "A Woman Young and O ld," in each case to describe the process of aging as a constant frustration that strips away or disfigures youthful ideals about love. The titles themselves suggest this process by juxtaposing youth and age. "A Man Young and

Old," a consistently grim series of poems (in keeping with the general tone of The Tower), begins with the man's betrayal by his.first love and proceeds, through the images of a peacock (pride), a stone wrapped up like a child, and broken trees, to outline the falsity of human love.

Love is destructive in this sequence, and the effect of age is to make him realize how bad it can be; but old age also torments him with his

Impotence. He spends most of his time wishing he were young again any­ way. The knowledge old age brings is bitter, and it is not wisdom. In contrast, "A Woman Young and Old" describes not only physical love but also spiritual love that uses the body and goes beyond it. This sequence splits the body and soul very sharply, for example in "A Last

Confession," where the old woman insists that physical love is not really important in itself: 12

. . . I gave my soul And loved In misery, But had great pleasure with a lad That I loved bodily.

But when this soul, Its body off, Naked to naked goes, He It has found shall find therein What none other knows . . . (11)

This Is very comforting, but the body cannot always be treated so casually; before she can take her body off she has to endure old age, and In "Her Vision In the Wood" It drives her to torture herself out of sexual frustration:

Too old for a man's love I stood In rage Imagining men. Imagining th a t I could A greater with a lesser pang assuage Or but to find If withered vein ran blood, I tore ny body that its wine might cover Whatever could recall the lip of lover. (12)

She hates her body because of what it has done to her by growing old, and, when she and an old lover come face to face In "Meeting," they hate each other because they have grown old:

Hidden by old age awhile In masker's cloak and hood, Each hating what the other loved, Face to face we stood: "That I have met with such," said he, "Bodes me little good." (13)

The idea th a t they are "hidden" by age 1 b a recurrent one through­ out Yeats's poetry, and part of the body-soul duality: the body Is not only the soul's prison, but a mask for it, one that hides it from other souls. Physical ugliness, and especially the ugliness of old age, hides the soul's beauty and mocks it constantly. (There is a great deal of this bitter mockery in "A Man Young and Old.") By turning the body into an object of mockery, old age makes sexual fulfillm ent impossible, and 13

turns the memory of love Into pain and bitterness.

The only escape from this decline (other than death before old age)

Is the union of souls In sexual love, which Is one way of achieving

Unity of Being. Sexual love is another theme, and will have to wait its

turn, but it is clear that if a lover can come to see spiritual bodies

through the enlightenment of love he can escape some of the worst

effects of old age. One young lover, for example, reflects that his

girlfriend will grow old and shrivel up; he is depressed, hut his heart tells him to

"Uplift those eyes and throw Ihose glances unafraid: She would as b rav ely show Did all the fabric fade; No withered crone I saw Before the world was made." (14)

That is, the soul does not grow old; the body is its "fabric," its

clothes, and Is nothing but appearance. This is not as aescetic a

doctrine as it may seem to be, since Yeats believed in getting at the soul by way of the body; but it does point up one part of his loath­

ing for age, and his contempt for the body as an end in Itself, Unless

a person can come to some awareness of spiritual realities, the normal'

realities of the Other World, he w ill be trapped entirely in his body and w ill suffer without hope from old age. Old age is bad enough oven

to a mystic, or to someone like the woman of "A Woman Young and Old":

it is intolerable to a person like the man of "A Man Young and Old" who looks forward only to death and has nothing but bitter memories left.

Memory does nothing but make him despair:

I'd have a peacock cry, For that is natural to a man 14

That liv e s in memory, Being all alone I'd nurse a stone And sing it lullaby. (15)

Yeats naturally associated sexual love with youth» and dancing with both of them; they go well together. especiaL'/ in the Other

World. The dance is another theme that I shall treat in detail later; for the moment, it is enough to oversimplify and say that the dance is

Yeats's celebration of the order of the world.' Sexual ecstasy is one way of gaining a vision of that order, so it can take the form of a dance. But since a vision like this arises from passion, it Is in­ herently dangerous and the dance is one in which the dancers are balanced between ecstasy and death. Ecstasy and death, for that matter, seem to be much the same thing in poems like "Crazy Jane Grown Old

Looks at the Dancers." The dance can even be demonic, like the bizarre rituals in "Rosa Alchemlca"; in any case, it leads to illumination

(one way or another) by joining the dancers to the order of things.

But it is not for the old. Crazy Jane, for one, cannot join in the dance she is watching but can only reminisce about her own dancing days:

God be with the times when I Cared not a thraneen for what chanced So that I had the limbs to try Such a dance as th e re was danced . . . (16)

The association of dancing, sex and youth makes it Inevitable that dancing should be one of the main attractions of the Land of Youth.

There every spirit is eternally young, and, according to tradition, the spirits spend most of their time dancing. From The Celtic Twilight to

The King of the Great Clock Tower Yeats insists on their eternal dance.

The fairies in his early poems and prose do practically nothing else, except to steal human souls occasionally for new partners. In his late work he Identifies this spiritual dance, considerably raised in dignity, with the whirling of the Gyres:

If I consider deeply, lad and lass, Nerve touching nerve upon that happy ground, Are bobbins where all time Is bound and wound. (17)

If the dance Is the order of the world, and If the soul caught up In

It cannot even be distinguished from the dance Itself (how shall we tell the dancer from the dance?), then It is clear that an aged or woman shuffling along on a cane Is not part of the order of the world, but is superfluous and perhaps even meaningless. It Is easy to understand why they should want to get out of this world as soon as possible.

Art can be an escape from old age, but the weight of "time's filthy load".. 1® Is just as heavy for the artist as for anyone else. He has to create beauty even when he is, because of old age, ugly himself, and he seems ridiculous because of that paradox. His body has become an

"absurdity," a "caricature." In "The Tower" Yeatp, speaking in his own person, finds himself mocked by his own body and forced to retreat Into his art. Like the man of "A Man Young and Old" and Crazy Jane, he has to live In his memory: not just the memory of his own life, but, be- . cause he is a poet, the memory of hiB poems as well. He spends most of the poem "calling" his old images back, hoping to find a way out of his bitterness. He finds the way out in content of the body and the whole physical world. He has dreamed all his images Into being, and equates the world's existence with that kind of artistic creation. The physi­ cal world is the soul's bad dream. The Other World, he says in one of 16 his most grandiose claims for art, Is also a dream of the soul, a work o f a r t :

. . . being dead, we r i s e , Dream and so c re a te Translunar Paradise. (19)

The poem makes as g reat a claim fo r a r t as I t p o ssib ly can, and I t makes that claim out of distaste for old age. The final result of this reliance on the spirit and Its Infinite creative power Is to make old age, and the physical world It Is part of, seem almost trivial. "The

Tower" ends with the Image of a swan singing Its last song as It is released from the world; the poet's soul Is at Its best when it passes

Into its own Paradise, its own creation. As It slips Into the Other

World it has the satisfaction of starting on better dreams.

There Is, of course, much more to the theme of artistic creation than an answer to old age. It is the main burden (along with old age again) of the Byzantium poems, and one of Yeats's most important ideas.

But it is, like sexuality and the dance, a theme that will be more fully treated later on, especially in Chapter Three when I journey to

Byzantium and explore It extensively. Later in this chapter I shall also deal with art and Its relation to T^r na ntfg in the unpublished play The Country of the Young, where Yeats shows that the "young" are artists first of all.

One point that needs to be clarified about old age Is that it has no effect on the soul. The woman of "A Woman Young and Old" Is quite right about her ability to escape the body's decay after death. Old lovers like her, old artists and, no doubt, old dancers are all waiting for death to free them from their physical indignities, but, otherwise, 17

they are no different from what they were In their youth. Their bodies have changed but they have not. In "The Tower" Yeats Insists that his

imagination is more powerful than ever, even if it has turned bitter because of his suffering. And the wil'd old wicked man of his last poems is as g reat a le c h e r as he had ever been.

The radical dualism of body and soul in Yeats' poetry makes death a

separate problem from old age. Traditionally, the worst thing about

the passing of time is that it leads to death; old age is a prelimi­ nary decay before the final one. But in Yeats' poems the opposite is

true: old age is the problem and death the solution. Death frees the

soul, either for a final escape from the wheel of incarnation (the

Phases of the Moon), or for a new human life that will lead it to un­

derstand Itself and the world more fully. Old age, horrible as it is

in Itself, provides one way to recognize that the physical world has no

permanent hold on the soul, since the body's decay leads to the soul's

escape. Even though the soul will come back in another body, it will be purified first.

Old age 1b a grim reminder that the soul ia immortal, but sex, which is a kind of death in Yeats's work, is a more pleasant one.

Although mere physical love Is just another detail of the body's life­

span, love that unites body and soul can foreshadow in this world what

the so u l can expect in th e Other World. The woman of "A Woman Young

and Old" is confident about her future bliss because she has already experienced, In a partial way, the spiritual joy of the Other World.

Her sexual passion, like the powerful emotions of other lovers in Yeats, 18 has given her an insight Into the nature of reality that she could not have had otherwise.

"Passion," a loaded word for Yeats, Is a key element In his concept of Paradise. Any really strong and unmixed emotion may create Unity of

Being, provided that the emotion is Intense enough; passion resolves

the usual complexities and self-contradictions of personality Into a u n ity , a t le a s t fo r a moment. P aradise Is "fulness o f l i f e " a t le a s t piartly because Its Inhabitants live at a higher pitch of intensity than we do; to them, human life must be muddled and Insipid. Their life is not, by the way, a ll love and beauty; in The Unicorn from the Stars

Martin, the visionary, makes it clear that they experience all kinds of

passion:

It is not quiet, it is not singing and making music, and all strife at an end. I have seen it, I have been there. The lover still loves, but with a greater passion, and the rider still rides, but the horse goes like the wind and leaps the ridges, and the battle goes on always, always. That is the joy of Heaven, continual battle. (20)

Although Yeats usually stresses love as the essence of Paradise, It is

important to remember that any passion exists there in its pure form,

and that it is a violent place. Yeats rarely mentions battles, but

the Other World is inherently violent because of the free-floating emotional intensity that fills it, and his version of love is also rather violent. Crazy Jane's vision of the dancers killing each other

is an extreme case, but love in his poems is always close to death, both because it is dangerous and because, like death, it is able to release the soul from its limited perception of the world and allow it

to perceive the Other World. 19

Of course, Yeats was not about to make his Other World an Irish

Valhalla. Hatred and emotions like It might create Unity of Being, but the most appropriate form of passion in Paradise is love since only

love is Intrinsically Joyful. Sexual passion on earth is physical, and

like anything physics*. it is impermanent, but at least it foreshadows

the fuller joy of the Other World.

There is a difficulty here, since sex is physical and love (at least in Paradise) la spiritual. The body Itself cannot serve as an escape from the material world, since the body is the part of the material world that keeps the soul in bondage. Yeats resolved this problem by distinguishing sharply between love that is merely physical and love that is also spiritual. In "A Man Young and Old," for example, he.shows that sex by itself leads, because of old age, merely to bitter nostalgia and despair. The woman of "A Woman Young and Old," although she is certainly not against sex, makes the distinction very clearly in

"A Last Confession," which I have already quoted. In the course of that poem she contrasts her true lover, whom she expects to meet again in eternity, with a more mundane but apparently ardent lover, who had given her "great pleasure" and seemed to think that the great pleasure meant something to her:

Flinging from his arms I laughed To think his passion such He fancied that I gave a soul Did but our bodies touch, And laughed upon his breast to think Beast gave beast as much. (21)

So much for sex as an end in itself. Her contempt must have start­ led her lover, but it would not have surprised any of Yeats' true lovers 20 who, essentially, use their bodies only as a means and whose end is spiritual enlightenment. They are not aescetlc; rather, -they start from ordinary sexual lust, and, having reached a high pitch of emotion, translate it into an ecstasy that brings their souls, as well as their bodies, into one being. Each soul completes itself in the other, and the two, unity out of diversity, recreate the harmony of existence before the Fall. That is, they try to. If they were to succeed, they would transform the world into a new Eden, at least for themselves, and lmaediately enter the state of the Other World.

ThlB is a rather abstract way to describe something not at all abstract in Itself, but one of Yeats's poems, "Solomon and the Witch," goes into some detail about the subject and is worth considering at some length. It is one of his fullest descriptions of sexual love as a way of transcending the physical world. When the poem begins, Solomon and

Sheba have been out in their garden, possibly for a long time, watching the moon and getting wilder every minute. At the peak of their ecstasy she say s,

I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue Hot his, not mine. (22)

Certainly their experience has transfigured them somehow, but the lines are deliberately anbiguous: did she cry out in a language strange to both of them, or did she say "Not his, not mine"? Perhaps their s o u I b no longer belong to them, or at least had gotten separated from their bodies for an instant; perhaps, if she was speaking in tongues, they became part of a divine world in that instant. Both possibilities amount to much the same thing; that their souls have become a composite 21 being separate from their egos, and have entered Paradise. But the

ju n ctu re was Im perfect. Afterwards Solomon explains th a t when such a

meeting comeB about a l l the imperfections of the world,which he sums

up as the distinction between Choice and Chance, w ill disappear. He

puts the whole issue into one long sentence, the heart of the poem:

For though love has a spider's eye To find out some appro priate pain — Aye, though all passion's in the glance — For every nerve, and tests a lover With cruelties of Choice and Chance; And when at last that murder's over Maybe the brlde-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real linage there; Yet the world ends when these two th in g s, Though se v e ra l, are a sin g le lig h t, When o il and wick, are burned in one; Therefore a blessed moon last night Gave Sheba to her Solomon. (23)

The passion of love, aside from being extremely complicated, is not

entirely pleasant: it is a "murder," an act of violence in which the

souls of the lovers lose themselves in their union. Solomon's language

is like Ribh's in "Ribh at the Torab of Balle and AiUinn" when he

describes the union of souls as a light, but, unlike Ribh, he is not watching a really successful consummation and therefore has to stress'

the violence and risk of the attempt.

Even if there is a union of souls, something has been destroyed:

each soul's solitude, which gives it its individual being. But matters

are much worse if the union is incomplete. If two souls risk themselves

and get only a mutual illu s io n , what w ill become of them? The lovers might, indeed, keep trying (as Sheba, a practical woman, eventually

suggests), but they are not likely to succeed unless each soul has 22 already found its own eternal form. Solomon explains this to Sheba

two ways at once, by another purposeful ambiguity: either each lover brings an imagined (idealized) vision of his lover into their union, and is disenchanted by the reality, or each lover brings an imagined

Image of himself, but, seen differently by the other, Is exposed as a composite soul without Unity of Being because self-deluded. In either case, when each finds "a real image there" and sees that it differs from the imagined image, true union is Impossible.

All this is not quite as remote from experience as it seems, since the lovers are, after all, trying to Improve themselves drastically by love. Yeats, commenting on Solomon and Sheba in his journal, even made their love a pattern for their daily life:

It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline .... In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other and, refusing to believe in the mere dally self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in dally life. (24)

Yeats characteristically perceives "daily life" as a process of reach­ ing toward an ideal state, and love sb a powerful method of attaining it. Solomon and Sheba are such strenuous lovers because they are work­ ing toward an ideal, and are not satisfied with the mundane joys that would satiate poor sublunary lovers. They are looking for Paradise inside each other's bodies and souls, and they nearly find it: Solomon claims that a cock which hadn't crowed since the Fall crowed again, thinking that "All that the brigand apple brought / And this foul world were dead at last." They have almost reached the state of "lncomposite blessedness" that Michael Robartes ascribes to the Dancer in the poem 23

just preceding this one, and which Solomon Identifies as the state of

Eden.

A quest like this Is far removed from ordinary love, but, however

spiritual It may be, It Is s till physical. Natural and supernatural

with the self-same ring are wed: It Is often Impossible to tell them

a p a rt. N onetheless, Solomon and Sheba f a l l in s p ite o f th e ir Id eals

and efforts, and they fall because their bodies are unequal to the task.

They are living after the Fall, and, while they may be able to reach a

vision of Eden, they cannot enter it. The "light" they want to consume

them w ill have to wait until after death, when the world will end for

them. Like death, a perfect consummation or a perfect "murder" would

end the world for them. Solomon may have been exaggerating a little

when he said that the world would end If they succeeded, but, even if

the rest of the world remained fallen, they would be beyond It like the

souls of T:£r na nOg or the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon.

The hermit Ribh, like Solomon a learned man, explains how this

happens and what becomes of the souls involved in "Ribh at the Tonb of

Baile and A illlnn." That poem picks up an Image used in "Solomon and

the Witch" and expands it tremendously. In the earlier poem, sexual

consummation is a light In which "oil and wick are burned In one"; in

"Ribh at the Tomb of Balle and Alllinn" the ancient lovers, dead for

about two thousand years, live on as angelic light:

. . . when such bodies join There Is no touching here, nor touching there Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole; For the Intercourse of angels is a light Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed. (25) 23

This is what Solomon and Sheba were looking for, and what their bodies, which forced them to touch here and there and no more, frustrated. But

even this consummation, spectacular as it is, may not be perfect. It is a lot closer to perfection than Solomon and Sheba get, but still Ribh

(or Yeats speaking through him) is unwilling to call it perfect. The

lovers have been at their love since before the birth of Christ, but

they are s till not entirely fused into one soul. Ribh goes on to say

that they meet once a year, on the anniversary of their death — and wedding -- but, since they meet, they are evidently separate at least part of the time during the rest of the year. Even during their annual reunion, when they are joined most fully and no longer inhibited by

their bodies, they may only seem "lost, consumed." It may be that Ribh is hedging because, being still a living man, he cannot be quite sure whether they are consumed or not, but it is possible that a little indi­ vidual being s till lurks somewhere in their souls and forces them to break apart eventually. And the phrase "for its moment" applies to

their Intercourse as if they were human (as they still are, even without bodies); it is just that the moment is superhumanly long. They are like the angels in Paradise Lost who, though unfallen, could not keep up 26 their intercourse forever because, no doubt, only God could do that.

Balle and Allllnn are certainly in Paradise, but their state is just short of absolute perfection because, of course, only God is per­ fect. The concept of human perfection Yeats's controlling idea for the Other World, acts as a kind of celling for their bliss. They have reached a state that is as perfect as any human soul can hope to attain, but, because they were human in life and remain human after death they 24 cannot, however "purified by tragedy" they may be, rise to God's level or become part of him. Rather, they must go on being human, in their way, and their sexual joy is still a human joy raised in power.

Whether or not they even have knowledge of God, as they certainly would in the Christian eschatology, is an open question. Instead, certain and direct knowledge of God comes to their opposite, the aescetic hermit

Ribh. His own life certainly has nothing to do with sex, since he is a hermit and over ninety, but he is allowed a vision that may exceed even the spiritual fullness that Baile and AlUlnn enjoy:

. . . My soul had found All happiness in its own cause or ground. Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot Those amorous cries that out of quiet come And must the common round of day resume. (27)

This vision is more intense and full of specific content than the in­ sight of "Vacillation," but essentially like it: Rlbh's soul, a full being in itself, is able to see God, who is supremely complete in him­ self, because it has lost its composite nature and no longer contradicts i t s e l f . For a moment. Then a shadow of R lbh's m o rtality f a l l s and blocks out his sight of the Other World. But while his vision lasts it reveals God as a perfect unity because he is perpetually uniting with himself. The Trinity is like an equation with only one side. He is what Solomon and Sheba would really like to be, but in spite of their optimism it is obvious that they have no chance at all of becoming like him. Baile and Aillinn are more like him than any lovers s till caught in their bodies, but they are still two souls who can blend into each other from time to time; God is one soul and three souls all the time. 25

Compared Co h la s ta te o f being, B aile and A illin n are a p ic tu re of

ordinary domesticity. God is not at all like any human lovers, then,

not only because of his perfection but because he is three-in-one

rather than two-in-one; any human atteupt to match that achievement

is hopeless from the start. The human perfection of YeatB's poetry is

only a shadow of absolute perfection.

Human love is different from God's love in kind, and human love in

the body is different from human love out of the body, but only in

degree and not in kind. The paradox that I mentioned before, that the

body is the means of escape from the physical world, is only a surface

paradox: the body is Indeed a way of escape from Itself, but one with

built-in and very severe limitations. It provides a door with a window

in it: souls can see the Other World through the window, but the door

Is locked. And the physical body can give this much comfort only be­

cause it is a copy of the soul's eternal body. That is, the "image" of

"Solomon and the Witch," and of poems like "Before the World Was Made,"

is a body, or rather the spirit's own form, which it must try to recap­

ture. Sexual love is an attenpt to join the spiritual bodies together:

if it succeeds, the lovers might die and be united like Baile and

Aillinn. Or they might go back to Eden, since in getting rid of their

physical bodies, and all the consequences of age and decay, they would escape the consequences of the Fall. Yeats mentions In "Baile and

Aillinn" that that was one of their great accomplishments, and the source of their joy:

Their love was never drowned in care Of this or that thing, nor grew cold Because th e ir bodies had grown old. (28) 26

Sexual love, then, comes (at Its best) from the soul's awareness that this spiritual body exists and that It can be realized with start­ ling results. Even women's vanity cornea from this deep source, and so

Is.more than vanity:

I f I make the lasheB 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. (29)

The spiritual body Is related to the physical body more or less the way Platonic Forms are related to their earthly copies, except that each soul has more than one physical body. It takes on different bodies and passes from one Incarnation to another in its attempt to 30 understand both the world and Itself. Sexual ecstasy Is one way it has to understand the spiritual world (and itself), and that knowledge, part of a perfect union, could allow it to escape from the cycle of re­ birth Into a single life in the Other World. Once it has escaped, it w ill have achieved Unity of Being, at least as much of the unity as a- human soul can. It will be, essentially, in the state of being that

Yeats assigns to the Fifteenth Phase of the Noon, when the soul is too perfect to descend into a body. That state is a form of Paradise, one of the three that I shall discuss later.

One final image of sexual fulfillment that deserves mention is the sphere. This image occurs only a few times in Yeats's poetry, always as a synfcol of completion and wholeness. It is quite traditional. But

Yeats gave it added meaning: in his system, the gyres are contained 27 within the sphere, and their antithetical motions cancel each other out 31 in its stillness. Aside from being a synbol of God, then, it is also

a synbol of the union of opposites (such as male and female), and, in

the poem "Chosen," it symbolizes the union of lovers:

. . . I take That stillness for a theme Where his heart my heart did seem And both adrift on the miraculous stream Where — wrote a learned a stro lo g e r — The Zodiac is changed into a sphere. (32)

The union was not conplete (their hearts only seemed to join, just as

Baile and Aillinn seemed to join), but it was enough to give the woman, like Sheba, a vision of the Other World and the fulness of life that is only copied in this world where the sphere of eternity is only a circle and the stillness of eternity is constant motion. It is this vision, though, that helps to make her so confident of her eventual consummation in the Other World, when, later in A Woman Young and Old ("A Last Con­ fession"), she says that the lover she loved "in misery" w ill come into his own as a spirit.

Sex is a complicated pattern of forces in Yeats' poetry, but at least it centers consistently around one thing. Dancing as a synbol is even more complex because it has a less definite reference; the dance is, at different times, a sort of euphemism for sex (as In "Crazy Jane

Grown Old Looks at the Dancers"), a synbol of ecstatic trance, even, like the Elizabethan Cosmic Dance, a synbol of the order of the world.

It can also be demonic, and so is even more anblvalent than the "murder" of sexual knowledge. Because it is a kind of all-purpose synbol, and because it is so prominent, in its different forms, in Yeats's poetry, I 28

can only give a brief outline of some of the things It means as a sub­ sidiary part of the Other World.

At its broadest, the dance synfcollzes the order of the world, and is almost an encore to the Elizabethan Cosmic Dance. Ecstatic visions

sometimes take the form of a dance to affirm and praise thiB order, as

In the famous last stanza of "Among School Children":

Labour Is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul ... 0 chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole? 0 body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (33)

Here the dance Is equivalent to the nearly static force of the great

tree: * stillness and motion are complementary ways of expressing the underlying order of experience. Further, it is clear that the dance is a pattern of motion that has inherent order. It is no more random than the different parts of the tree, but in both the different parts are so perfectly arranged that they seem to blend into an indivisible u n ity .

In some poems the dancer and the dance are even more ecstatic and the point of the dance is even more overt, for example in "The Dancer at Cruachan and Cro-Patrick":

I, proclaiming that there is Among birds or beasts or men One that is perfect or at peace, Danced on Cruachan's windy plain, Upon C ro -P atrick sang aloud; All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him. (34)

Again, the dance is equivalent to stillness, this time to God's still­ ness. This opposition is nothing unusual; it is, I think, a central 29 part of Yeats's linage. He separates the dance from other kinds of activity by making It, paradoxically, a kind of motion that constantly turns In on itself and transforms itself Into stillness. The most obvious exception to this pattern, the dance of "Sosa Alchemica," is the opposite of stillness because It Is a demonic parody of the cosmic dance.

The dance Is also a motion that resolves the tension between opposites: just as the union of opposites in sexual ecstasy can be an entry to the Other World, so the dance can resolve opposites Into a unity by its patterned motion. In "Byzantium," for example, the spirits dance, or at least whirl, because they are caught between Incarnations and pulled between this world and the Other World. They are "laying into 35 a dance,/An agony of trance" so that they can leave all the com­ plexities and oppositions of human life behind them and be purified.

But the fullest image of the dance as a resolution is "The Double

Vision of Michael Robartes." That genuinely eerie poem presents two dances, one for this world and one for the Other World. The dance of this world Is a sort of twitch more than a dance, since the soul 1b in a body pulled this way and that by the forces around it like a puppet:

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent By those wire-jointed jaws and llnbs of wood, Themselves obedient, Knowing not e v il and good . . . (36)

This is the body in Its pure form under the First Phase of the Moon, the body we are stuck with in this world. But the dance of the Other

World Is not a reaction to opposing forces, rather their transformation into a stasis. In the second part of his vision Robartes sees a Sphinx 37 and a Buddha, the Inward and outward-looking minds in opposition, 30 and between them a much different kind of dancer* "a girl at play"

That* It may be* had danced her life away* For now being dead It seemed That she of dancing dreamed. (38)

This is the soul* dancing under the fifteenth moon; it is caught up in the tension between the subjective and objective minds* and turns as if two hands were pulling it in opposite directions. But the dance brings these contradictory (and complementary) forces together* just as the complementary gyres cancel each other out* so that "Mind moved yet 39 seemed to stop / As 'twere a spinning top."

This ecstatic dance* even though it is not especially sexual in its reference (Yeats does* though* compare the girl to Helen of Troy)* is necessarily like the kind of ecstasy that lovers look for. It is like turning the Zodiac into a sphere* stopping motion in order to be at the center of stillness. Because the dance almost always has this dimen­ sion in Yeats*8 poems* a dancer is often* synfcolically* a presence from the Other World* and o ften a s p i r i t . The dancer i s often a g irl* be­ cause children are* in their innocence* somewhat closer than most people to the Other World (they are like artists and lovers in this respect)* and because women* to Yeats* are closer to the instinctive and passion­ ate life of the Other World than are most men. There is a great deal at stake whenever one of these girls appears: the dancers of poems like

"Sweet Dancer," "Long-Legged Fly" and the play The Land of Heart’s

Desire bring the Other World with them* in a sense* and are poised between the two states of being as they dance. They unite this world with the images of Byzantium and the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon, and give* in the flesh* a version of the image of the mind spinning like a 31 top that Frank Kermode has called the "central icon" of Yeats and the 40 whole Synbolist tradition. Since these girls are so much more important than they seem to be, a closer look at them Is In order.

There are two dancers in The Land of Heart’s Desire, a girl who wants to be a dancer but is prevented by her family and her surround­ ings; and her fairy counterpart, a spirit in the form of a girl. Mary

Bruin, the human child, wants to be "touched" and taken off to fairy­ land, which is a fairly strange ambition for an Irish peasant; her family think she is a little peculiar, but she understands better than they do that peasant life is joyless and soulrdestroying; and, I think, she suspects that all human life is rather unsatisfactory. So she wants to save her soul from the local priest, and reads romances to understand the Other World. This is, she turns to art as an improvement on life because it Is inherently about the Other World, and reads poems about stort.es like How a Princess Edain, A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a Hay Eve like this, And followed, half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the Land of Faery, Where nobody getsold and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and b itter of tongue. And she is still there, busied with a dance Deep in th e dewy shadow o f a wood, Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top. (41)

Her description, although it is put in rather naive terms, perfectly blends the sexual and spiritual elements of Tfr na nOg, where the p h a llic image o f the "dewy shadow of a wood" is balanced by the aus­ terity of stars on a mountain-top (an image which is not entirely free from sexual connotations, but is certainly meant to be a little chilly). 32

Although she's not likely to have thought about It, her later call to the fairies to take her out of the dull world and let her "dance upon 42 the mountains like a flame" Is strikingly like the old man's sum- monlng of spirits* In "Sailing to Byzantium*" to come out of the holy flame and dance; Hary herself w ill be like the spirits of Byzantium dancing In a purifying flame.

Since this Is Hay Eve* a time when the natural and supernatural

i are closer together than usual* it is not surprising that a fairy comes for her. The fairy appears In the shape of a little girl who dances in the cottage* sings* and Is generally charming* but who is actually a

"mighty sp irit.11 Her dance Is the synbol of her power:

I am so mighty that there's none can pass, Unless I w ill it* where ny feet have danced Or where I've whirled ny finger-tips. (43)

Mary* of course* returns with her to the Other World. Her body dies* 44 but her soul, described only as "it may be a white bird," escapes to Paradise. This bird is like the ones that guide Forgael in The

Shadowy Waters. and is a distant relative of the golden bird in "Sail­ ing to Byzantium."

The human child and the fairy child bridge the natural and super­ natural in this play* but it is not necessary to have two dancers.

Yeats later realized that one is enough* since her state of being while her dance lasts is itself a link between the two realms. When she is detached from the world and in her dance* she achieves what Helen

Vendler calls "radical innocence," a state of being in which* as in any 45 sacred trance* "Paradise momentarily exists." The girl of "Sweet

Dancer" seems to be in this state* natural and supernatural at the same 33 time. Yeats presents her as a sort o£ holy fool; she seems crazy, as if she had been touched by the fairies, because of the contact with the

Other World symbolized by her dance:

The girl goes dancing there On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth Grass plot of the garden;

If strange men come from the house To lead her away, do not say That she is happy being crazy; Lead them gently astray; Let her finish her dance ... (46)

The setting in a garden (an echo of the Garden of Eden, perhaps) and th e calm movement of the verse suggest th a t th is is a serene dance;

Yeats' imagination succeeded in reducing Margot Ruddock's hysteria 47 into the stillness of trance. But there is more to the Other World than serenity, and the serenity itself is the overflow of violent passion; it is as if Yeats saw her violence as merely an external feature of her inner serenity.

Violent emotion and serenity are like the contrasting motion and stillness of the dance. Passion, like Innocence, can let the soul enter the Other World, even Chough, in a sense, passion is the opposite of

Innocence. It presupposes an intense involvement with some part of ex­ perience, while Innocence, in Yeats, implies detachment from experience, at least from the normal experience of the world that shuts down the perceptions children and madmen have about the Other World. While the innocents of works like The Land of Heart's Desire generally slip away from this world at the first chance they get, those who are transformed by passion can find that their contact with the Other World makes them fit to lead an Intensely passionate life. Their emotional Intensity 34

makes them greater than other men and women, and closer to perfection

In this life than ordinary mortals. Helen of Troy, for example, was

undoubtedly near perfection In her own way, and Yeats suggests In

"Long-Legged Fly" that her preeminence as a woman came from her rapport with the dance of Paradise:

That the topless towers be burnt And men recall that face, Move most gently If move you must In this lonely place. She thinks, part woman, three parts a child, That nobody looks; her feet Practice a tinker shuffle Picked up on a street. Like _a long-legged fly upon the a tream Her mind moves upon Bilence. (48)

Although she Is s till more a child than a woman, Helen Is becoming a woman as she dances, and the dance, both sensual and ecstatic, defines

the kind of woman she w ill become. She is a figure of both Innocence

and passion.

Girls and spirits disguised as girls are not the only dancers In

Yeats's poetry. The natural and supernatural come together very readily

in his work, exactly as they do in the Irish mythological and folk tra­

dition, so it Is not surprising that spirits sometimes catch up the

souls of men in their dance. The Land of Heart's Desire follows tra­

dition very closely, as I shall show a little later In this chapter,

and at times Yeats used thlB confluence of the two orders of reality

even more explicitly as a way of showing how the supernatural impinges

on experience. Sometimes this kind of dance is part of a vision, and

therefore more direct, less distanced by convention, than the "literary"

construction of The Land of Heart's Desire or even The Celtic Twilight. 35

For example, Yeats recorded a vision that John Synge had on Aran:

He dreamed that he was In one of the stone forts and dancing to strange music. He could not stop dancing and woke very tired. It seemed to me when he told It to me that he believed, or half-believed, that his soul had been out of his body that night. (49)

The strange music is, obviously, what the fairies dance to, and it is in character for them to hang around old ruined buildings and steal so u ls.

The fairies are not especially sinister, although they can be dangerous because of their indifference to human beings, but the spirits of Yeats' story "Rosa Alchemlca" are demonic. There the nar­ rator, having been invited to a dance by the mysterious Michael

Robartes, finds himself in a fin de siecle ballroom decorated with rose-pattems, where

The dance wound in and o u t, tra c in g upon the floor the shapes of petals that copied the petals in the rose overhead, and to the sound of hidden Instruments which were per­ haps of an antique pattern, for I have never heard the like; and every moment the dance was more passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakened under our feet. (50)

Like many other poets, Yeats used the rose as a symbol of perfect order and perfect love; but in this case the rose of the ballroom and of the dance is a parody of God's love. The narrator sees the spirits coming out of the petals of the design and dancing, sees Eros himself among them — but this love is not like God's love in the Paradiso that the story echoes. God's love is unmovlng because of its perfection, but this dance is a frenzy that sweeps the narrator into motion. He joins 36

the ritu alistic dance with "an Immortal august woman" as his partner,

but, shrewd observer that he Is, notices that something Is wrong:

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that her lilies had not dropped a black petal, nor shaken from their places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darknesB passed over me. (51)

Such spirits are passionate, but their passion Is not the kind that

gives life to the Other World, or at least not to Paradise. Their 52 eyes glow with "the brightness of uttermost desire," but their

love, eros, cannot lead to serenity. There is no stillness within

their dance, no center: they cannot reach a state of trance like

Baile and Aillinn or even like the crazy girl dancing In a garden. If

their desire could ever be fulfilled, of course, they would be quite

exemplary as lovers, but it seems that that Is impossible. Spiritual

and sexual love have to come together before the lovers can transcend

their bodies and come into contact with the Other World, and the dance

of the Other World must have a still center of trance within it or it w ill be demonic.

This is not to imply that the dance which symbolizes superhuman

passion or ecstasy is pleasant. It is fatal as far as this world is concerned, and destructive as well as beautiful. The girl who goes

off to the Land of Heart's Desire is also dead, and the peasants who, according to tradition, are "touched" by fairies are reduced to idiocy.

The entry to the Other World is difficult and dangerous in any tradi­

tion, and only the most passionate men and women are able to survive 37

It: their passion has to overflow into another life, and no ordinary everyday emotion can do that. Those who succeed in spite of every­ thing are worth looking at with holy dread, and also worth being envied as Crazy Jane envies the dancers who destroy each other with 53 their love.

Yeats, in his self-appointed office as the last romantic, made vast claims for the power of emotional intensity to transform life, and used the dance and sexual Intercourse as symbols of passion.

But art is also a passionate act, since, for Yeats, the only art that is genuinely creative is art that comes from strong emotion. His sweeping claims for art in poems like "The Tower" and "Under Ben

Bulben" make the creative experience an act of self-transcendence equivalent to the transcendence of love and dancing. In "The Tower"

Yeats seems to make himself, as a poet, almost more of a god than a man, and in "Under Ben Bulben" he defines the artist's role as leading men’s souls to God. In many of his poems, as in these, Yeats made the artist's creative power like the soul's: both are able to dream worlds into being. The artist is a kind of purified soul, less sunk in the physical world, closer in his perceptions to the Other World, and able therefore to see more of reality, than other men, and to create art out of his superior perceptions. If he is persuasive enough, he may lead others to perceptions like his own (that is, lead the souls of men to God), but in any case he is uniquely gifted with in s ig h t. 37 it: their passion has to overflow into another life, and no ordinary everyday emotion can do that. Those who succeed in spite of every­ thing are worth looking at with holy dread, and also worth being envied as Crazy Jane envies the dancers who destroy each other with 53 their love.

Yeats, in his self-appointed office as the last romantic, made vast claims for the power of emotional Intensity to transform life, and used the dance and sexual intercourse as symbols of passion.

But art is also a passionate act, since, for Yeats, the only art that is genuinely creative is art that comes from strong emotion. His sweeping claims for art in poems like "The Tower" and "Under Ben

Bulben" make the creative experience an act of self-transcendence equivalent to the transcendence of love and dancing. In "The Tower"

Yeats seems to make himself, as a poet, almost more of a god than a man, and in "Under Ben Bulben" he defines the artist's role as leading men's souls to God. In many of his poems, as in these, Yeats made the artist's creative power like the soul's: both are able to dream worlds into being. The artist is a kind of purified soul, less sunk in the physical world, closer in his perceptions to the Other World, and able therefore to see more of reality, than other men, and to create art out of his superior perceptions. If he is persuasive enough* he may lead others to perceptions like his own (that is, lead the souls of men to God), but in any case he is uniquely gifted with

In sig h t. 38

Aside from his insight, which is a necessity for anyone who wants

to travel in Fairyland, the artist has two qualities that make him a

fit person to look for the Other World: his willingness to struggle with himself to achieve Unity of Being, and hiB natural yearning for

ideal and absolute things. Yeats was quite consistently "Romantic"

about the ideal as a subject for art: he had little patience, in

theory, for social art or works of art about transitory things. Al­

though he admired Balzac and wrote superb occasional poems, he insisted

that art should be about, and should enhody, "whatever most can bless/ 54 The mind of man or elevate a rhyme." Anything less is unworthy of

the artist's high calling, since it makes him more like ordinary men.

The artist's perpetual struggle with himself to achieve Unity of

Being is, of course, one of Yeats' favorite themes, both publicly and,

in his Journal, privately: "Is not art made out of the struggle in 55 one's soul? Is not beauty a victory over oneself?" Here, as

elsewhere, he saw that the process of art (even If the result is, say,

a poem about serenity) must be a constant struggle, not only against

the difficulties of style and subject-matter, but against one's own weakness of w ill. If an artist lacks Unity of Being, or enough of the

Unity to satisfy a man living in the ordinary world but trying to write about Paradise, he cannot achieve any lasting art. He cannot

draw men's souls to God if he is no closer to God than they are.

Yeats had a habit of dramatizing his difficulties as a poet; he was in the Romantic tradition of seeing oneself as a sick eagle looking

at the sky. He also took a very high line about the worth of poetry, 39 and at times sounded more like a priest than anything else. Besides, he was a very slow and laborious w riter and perhaps liked to complain about his problems as an alternative to envying writers more fluent than he at their craft. The fact that his many complaints tend to sound like self-congratulation whenever he did, against all odds, succeed in writing a poem, also makes the complaints themselves sound • » rather self-serving. Nonetheless, there is a serious point behind his frequent recitals of hardship: he felt that things are against an artist, and that only by strength of w ill and a sense of his high purpose can he overcome his problems. This feeling is also in the

Romantic tradition, and has survived the Romantic movement; Yeats' response to it was to look at the conventional society that makes life hard for artists with disdain and a sort of patronizingirony:

Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in a ll kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world. (56)

But an artist's main problem is not the souls who decline to be led to God. His main problem is himself, his main task is to achieve

Unity of Being in a world that does everything possible to fragment his being. Yeats's "emblem" was the Tower, with himself In it reading and working all night long from youth to old age. He was not up there cut off from life simply because he was looking for the right word, but because he wanted to see the world as a unity. He was almost ob­ sessed by the need to fit all of experience into a unified vision; as 40

57 a young nan he told himself to "Hammer your thoughts into unity,"

and spent the rest of his life trying to follow his own advice. He tried to write so that his poems would all be one poem, and so that

all of his work, poems, plays, fiction and essays, would fit together, each part modifying and adding to the whole. He went beyond mere

formal unity, and tried to fit his whole life into his work: his interest in occultism and philosophy, and his passionate nationalism, as well as his unfortunate love for Maud Gonne and the strange events of his marriage, all fit into the texture of his work. He wanted to speak with his own voice, and felt that to do so he had to, in effect, live his works as well as write them. His first step toward Unity of

Being was to fuse his experience and his art as much as possible, so that life and art would become indistinguishable. It is debatable that he really accomplished what he set out to do, or that anyone

could, but there is no question that his constant search for unity resulted in a body of work that is in fact remarkably cohesive and unified: the different "periods" of his career represent changes in style and attitude, not in ideas, and his concerns in the 1890's were much the same as his concerns in the 1930's.

The search for unity of life and work, a step toward Unity of

Being, is part of his vision of the Other World. The act of artistic creation is itself a step toward achieving Unity of Being, and if, like Yeats, an artist tries to make his life consonant with his art, he is close to Yeats’ ideal of human perfection as far as it is possi­ ble in this life. He will be, in a limited way, living the life of 41 the Other World, and the better he Is as an artist the closer he will be to that Ideal and the less he will be like ordinary men. Because he Is so much unlike others, he will be an object of distrust and dis­ like on the part of "bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen": but, apart from them, locked In his tower, he Is at least free from the nunbing Influence of conventions and received Ideas. He Is alien, In the Homantic tradition, but being free from society Is some consola­ tion for his loneliness, since he has the satisfaction of looking down on the world from his battlements.

After a lifetime of living up to this austere goal as well as he could, Yeats wrote, in his last letter, "It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all Into a phrase I say, 'Man 58 can enbody truth but he cannot know It." ' That Is, men can have an intuitive knowledge of truth and shape their lives and work to enbody it by achieving Unity of Being as well as they can, but cannot have a rational understanding of what they are doing. The artist's way of enbodying truth Is to shape his life and work into a whole: his life

Is an attenpt to articulate the Unity of Being that lovers and certain dancers attain momentarily, and to create thereby a "vision of real- 59 ity." It is not surprising, then^that Yeats's voyagers to Paradise are so often artists, or that the old man of "Sailing to Byzantium," tired of the inadequate singing schools he finds in this world, should want to be transformed into a piece of art in eternity.

Yeats's grand claims for art and the artist are, of course, essen­ tial to his work, just as the sense of his own importance as an artist 42 was crucial to him as a man. Both his own sense of himself and his

conception of art as a transcendent force aref In a sense, personified by the stock figure of the Poet who shows up so often in his plays and

poems, a figure that is both a symbol of the artist as an old man and

Yeats' own version of his anti-type. He is the old man of "The Fish­

erman," Yeats himself in "The Tower" passing on'tips to young anglers,

Ribh, the Stroller In The King of the Great Clock Tower, old Hanrahan hovering between two orders of reality, the statesman on holiday, and

finally Yeats himself again, ordering a self-consciously arrogant

epitaph for his own tonfestone. This figure is everything that Yeats,

in his everyday life, was not: he is Yeats' opposite, perhaps his

double. Yeats wanted to become like him to complement whatever was weakest in himself, and so move closer to Unity of Being. At the same

time, he could move away from the world, since he was in reality

deeply attached to society, and learn to understand his own flamboyant

solitude in the Tower. He would, finally, increase his own dignity as

an artist, since the ideal Poet of his vision is nothing if not dig­ nified, the antithesis of the "knaves" and "clowns" Yeats saw himself

dealing with:

Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara c lo th , Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down-tum of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream; A man who does not exist, A3

A man who Is but a dream; And cried, "Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold 60 And passionate as the dawn."

This man, both "cold" and "passionate," beyond life but full of his own vigor, is the artist Yeats wanted to become. When Yeats came to make a statement about the role of art and the artist's power to transcend his own weakening body, he gave extra weight to the poem by imagining himself as that roan, passing on the image of the ideal to young men s till climbing up to the stream:

1 leave both faith and pride To young upstanding men Cliabing the mountaln-slde, That under bursting dawn They may drop a fly . . . (61)

Although this image of the ideal poet is the most obvious one in

Yeats' work, it Is not the only one, and others will appear in the course of this essay: the child of The Country of the Young. Forgael in The Shadowy Waters, and Oisln in The Wanderings of Oisin. All of them, like the stem old man on the mountain or the tower, are, in different ways, enfcodlments of truth and emblems of the power of art.

Before I go on to examine the uses of tradition in Yeats's poetry in detail, I want to summarize much of this rather abstract discussion about sex, dancing and art by looking at a very late play, The King of the Great Clock Tower. Here, Yeats brought these themes together in a tight symbolic action: although it is only a few pages long and must have a short playing time (most of which is dancing, not dialogue,) this strange play touches on all of these themes and, further, embodies 44 some part of the Irish tradition of T^r na n(5g.

Two attendants set the play's mood and define its subject by sing­ ing about Tlr na nOg. The first line* "They dance all day that dance 62 In Tir-nan-oge," makes it evident that the action will be super­ natural, and foreshadows the Queen's dance. The preliminary speeches also recall the whirling spirits of Byzantium, and like "Byzantium"

Identify their dance with the motion of the gyres:

If I consider deeply, lad and lass, Nerve touching nerve upon that happy ground, Are bobbins where all time Is bound and wound, (p. 398)

In other words, the spirits In their dance are time and motion, while the Great Clock Tower located more or less in this world can only mark off time but not embody it. Time In this spiritual sense becomes a palpable reality in this world only when an artist, the Stroller who has suddenly shown up, dances w ith h is a r t i f a c t , the Queen o f the

Great Clock Tower, in a dance that mimics the lovers of the Other

World. Hie Stroller, by the way, seems to be an otherworld spirit himself, and may be giving a practical demonstration of how life is lived in Tir na n6g — in that case the Queen, both a living being and an artifact, is analogous to the golden bird of Byzantium.

The dance represents the order of time and rhythm in the universe, b u t i t 1 b even more than th a t. I t is in te n se ly sexual. The"bobbins" dancing in Tir na nOg are also "lad and lass, / Nerve touching nerve upon that happy ground": they are, like Baile and Aillinn, but perhaps even more efficiently, engaged in perpetual sexual Intercourse. Later in the play, the Queen kisses the Stroller's severed head to reproduce 45 that intercourse symbolically. As she does, the clock in the Tower t o ll s m idnight; a t th a t moment, she becomes lik e the fig u res Olsi'n saw, who, caught up in themselves, "Hear in L. foam the beating of a bell" (p. 398). The symbolic dance and spiritual intercourse are the same thing, then, and consummation of the intercourse, being reached at midnight, is a climax to time as the dance creates and defines it.

But the sexual part of the dance is rather dangerous, and death is part of it since it reaches consummation only after the Stroller Is dead. The Stroller is dead because he has told the King that the

Queen w ill kiss him on the mouth at midnight, and the King has had him beheaded because of his improper ideas. The consummation which does come in spite of death is part of a murder; this symbolic death bears out what Solomon had sa id in a much e a r lie r poem, th a t love i s murder.

While the Stroller is having his head lopped off, the Queen sings

He longs to k ill My body, until That sudden shudder And limbs lie still.

0, what may come Into my womb, What caterpillar My beauty consume? (p. 401)

In addition to the fusion of sex and death that takes place here, the first stanza seems appropriate to the Stroller, since he is dying, while the second is entirely appropriate to the Queen; the song represents, I think, a union of the'two characters which is afterwards symbolized by their dance. Their personalities are coming together here, and the male and female characters are merging into one being who sings about both death and birth. But this is not an ordinary 46

sexual union, even by supernatural standards. It Is the union of

artist and artifact: the artist, as he dies, becomes part of what he has made, and in that way joins (or rejoins) the dance of Paradise*

The process is like the old man's transformation in "Sailing to

Byzantium," except that in this case the art is something the dying man h as made h im self.

The Bymbols of sexual union and the dance flow, then, from the

Stroller and the Queen, and they in turn are an artist and his crea­

tion. The Queen seems to be a sort of doll: she is incredibly beautiful, so much so that she need not move or speak to get the King of the Great Clock Tower to marry her. But after a year he has gotten tired of her odd behavior, or lack of behavior, and asks her

... Why sit you there Dunb as an image made of wood or metal, A screen between the living and the dead? (p. 399)

His terminology is rather precise: she is an image and no more until her maker gives her life, and she is a "screen" between this world and the unchanging realities of the Other World; she has some of the properties of both worlds, like the passive bodies of Phase One that are acted upon by higher spirits and that exist in a state between human l i f e and e te rn a l death.

But the King's shrewd question has no effect on her. She neither speaks nor moves, nor does she speak o r move u n t il th e moment when the

Stroller is murdered. Until then she is part of his poems, and her beauty, which she feels being destroyed by her entry into life, is the beauty he has given her: 47

A year ago I heard a brawler say That you had married with a woman called Most beautiful of her sex. 1 am a poet. From that day out I put her in my songs, And day by day she grew more b e a u tifu l, (p. 399)

She is passive because she is nothing but the beauty the King had imagined and the Stroller created out of the King's imagination. The

Stroller has given form to an abstraction and produced an archetype.

It is not surprising that such odd things happen in this play, since the main characters are a poet Inspired by Aengus and the Gods, and an Image of pure beauty. Together, they are esfclems of the human perfection that makes up Yeats's conception of the Other World: they are human, at least in form, but so pure that they are above the laws that govern this world. It is because of their perfection, joined together as they are in their dance, that the King finally yields and kneels before them in reverence.

When the severed head sings in ecstasy "Mortal men our abstracts are" (p. 402), he means that he and the Queen are more real than the confused Images of this world, just as the dance in Tir na ndg is more real than the abstract time measured out at the Great Clock Tower.

They are more purely themselves than anyone on earth is himself. Ordi­ nary lovers and dancers, and especially ordinary artists, lack the power of such spirits, but share something of their being because they are lovers, dancers and artists. As they try to realize and enbody beauty in this world, they can grow more and more like these super­ n a tu ra l lovers and dancers, and more and more lik e the superhuman 48 artist who dies into his own work. As they do so, their lives bring them closer to the Other World.

Up to this point I have discussed Yeats's ideas only as they appear in his own work, and with little reference to tradition. How­ ever, one of the essential points about his work is its reliance on the past: Yeats felt that he was writing out of "The book of the 63 people," not that he was creating bizarre new images of his own, and that, as part of a great tradition, he was speaking to whatever

Is universal in the human mind. The importance of tradition would be hard to overstate, since Yeats believed that the human mind, stocked w ith a common memory, creates myths to express th e n atu re of the world; in poems like "The Tower," he suggests that the mLnd has created the world and even the Other World through its imagination. Certainly it has created traditional Images, such as T:£r na nt3g, and Yeats felt that by using these traditional expressions and images he could put himself in contact with the deepest part of the human psyche. In addition, by using specifically Irish and Celtic forms of tradition

(especially in the earlier part of his career, but also in late work like The King of the Great Clock Tower), he felt that he could help give Ireland back its native culture. Re-creating a culture was not a light matter to a man who could talk about "... two e te r n itie s , / 64 That of race and that of soul." It was a matter of re-creating a race; at times his specific plans were as grand as his projected ends, such as the idea of writing a full cycle of mythological and historical works to epitomize all of Ireland's history, each work to stand for a 49

century. The Wanderings of 01sIn was to be the beginning of this vast 65 ------c y cle.

In most of his poetry, and all but the last plays, Yeats was

careful not to rely very much on magic, even though his Interest In

the occult was one of the main strands of his life. The strangeness

of his Imagery and subject-matter comes partly from his habit of

0* brushing against magic, but he rarely lets the real thing Intrude very

much — partly out of rhetorical tact, and partly because most of his

knowledge was secret at the time. The traditional accounts of the

Other World were, for him, not only patterns of thought rooted deep In

the mind but also meaningful expressions of a real spiritual state;

nonetheless, he avoided treating them that way. The fact that they

are powerful as tradition was enough for him: magic was not something he wanted to bring Into his work unless It was clearly necessary. In

a few cases, though, he connected magic with the traditions of the

Other World, and these passages show just how seriously he took such

traditional Images. For example, in the essay "Magic" he records two

visions of Paradise:

I once saw a young Irishwoman. . . cast into a profound tra n c e , though n o t by a method known to any hypnotist. In her waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kind of apple you can buy at the greengrocer's, but In her trance she saw the Tree of Life with ever-sighing souls moving In Its branches in ste a d o f sa p , and among i t s leav es a l l the fowls of the air, and on its highest bough one white fowl wearing a crown .... I once saw a young Church of Ireland man . . . thrown In a like tra n c e .... He saw the tree and heard the souls sighing through its branches, and saw apples with human faces, and laying his ear to an apple heard a sound as of fighting hosts within. Presently he 50

strayed from the tree and came to the edge of Eden, and there he found himself not by the wilderness he had learned of at the Sunday-School, but upon the summit of a great mountain, of a mountain "two miles high." The whole summit, In contradiction to all that would have seemed probable to his waking mind, was a great walled garden. . . . Where did these in tr ic a te synbols come from? (66)

Yeats's question la a good one, and I have quoted his essay at some length to suggest how good. Like Jung, who found sim ilar problems with complex visions and the Imagery of alchemy, Yeats concluded that there must be a collective memory that accounts for them. When he put his ideas into practice, they led him into the (timid) practice of magic, into seances, Theosophism, the Golden Down, and so on. They also led him to use traditional Images with an air of reverence and high seriousness.

This raises the problem of belief that I mentioned at the begin­ ning of this essay, and, I think, supplies a partial answer to it.

Yeats clearly did believe in the Great Memory as an objective reality, and he believed that there is a spiritual world which can be understood,

In part, through the study of traditional Images. (Much of Yeats' interest in magic Itself centered on its images, rather than on rituals or power.) As I have already suggested, he overlaid these images with more "literary" images of his own, and at times used them almost decoratively; but there is no reason to believe that he used tradition simply as a literary tactic. Also, the exact form that his belief took is a mystery, since he was careful not to let himself be pinned down about his "religion." Because this is the case, it would be rash to 51 suggest that his Interest In tradition came entirely out of his Inter­ est and at least tentative belief In magic. S till, there can be no question that magic and the concept of the Great Memory are Important parts of his imagery of the Other World, and that systems even more complex and esoteric than the gyres of Vision stand just outside the walls of Eden and behind the dance of Tlr na nOg. and that these systems of belief give form to what would otherwise be little more than an exercise in literary folklore. Yeats himself supplied a defin- ♦ itlve statement on the relation of the Other World — the real one -- to philosophy, and, I think, to literature that concerns Itself with transcendental states of being;

A book of modern philosophy may prove to our logical capacity that there Is a transcen­ dental portion of our being that is timeless and spaceless, and therefore Immortal, and yet our imagination remain subjected to nature as before .... I t was not so w ith ancient philosophy because the ancient philosopher had something to reinforce his thought, — the Gods* The Sacred Dead, Egyptian Theurgy, the Priestess Diotime. He could assume, perhaps even prove, that every condition of mind discovered by analysis, even that which is timeless, spaceless, is present vivid experience to some being, and that we could in some degree communicate with this being while still alive, and after our death share in the experience .... That we b elieve that all men share the supernatural faculties I would restore to the philosopher his mythology. (67)

He might as well have said, "Restore to the poet his mythology," since that is what he tried to do in his own work. Without going so far aB to suggest that all he wrote about the Other World and its implied id e a l of human p e rfe ctio n comes s tra ig h t out of the Golden Dawn and should be read at midnight by the light of black candles, I think 52

I can safely say that the tradition Yeats Invoked so often was, for him, a living thing with roots In every human consciousness and an analogue In an actual Other World known only through vision, death and poetry.

Magic aside, Yeats's concern for tradition was twofold, and both sides of it are important aspects of the Other World In his writings.

The "two eternities of race and soul" are reflected in the two forms of tradition: he believed that tradition is universal, and that different branches give themselves distinct characters that set them off from those of other races. In an early essay, for example, he pointed to the common root of all folk traditions: "The Irish peasant and most serene of Englishmen are at one. Tradition Is always the same. The earliest poet of India and the Irish peasant in his hovel 68 nod to each other across the ages, and are In perfect agreement." At the same time local traditions are different from each other, though not enough so to be alien to each other, and the differences are the root of nationhood. That is, of nationhood in a cultural sense; but the cultural unity of a nation lies deeper than political unity, and Is a force that shapes political unity: Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology, that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work's sake what I have called 'the applied arts of literature,' the association of literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman 53

and day-labourer would accept a common design? (69)

Here the forces of tradition and the role of the artist combine: the artist, as the Interpreter and re-creator of tradition, Is to give

It more power than It has ever had before. He will take the strength of the peasants and infuse it Into the "educated classes," thereby returning the cultural nation to its original unity* And, on a deeper level, he w ill use the old stories to awaken "The sudden conviction that our little memories are but a part of some great Memory that renews the world and men's thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep, but a little foam upon the 70 deep." The Images out of tradition, Tir na nOg among them, that have such power would affirm the unity of the Irish, and their unity with the past culture of Ireland. They would also, Yeats thought, be

Intelligible to anyone, being part of the s till deeper traditions underlying all cultures. An Indian peasant could understand them intuitively, if he happened to read Yeats's poems.

Whenever Tfr na n6g appears In Yeats's poetry, then, It necessar- ily carries all these wide associations with it, and stands as a symbol of the old, traditional Irish beliefs that Yeats, and so many other Irish intellectuals, wanted to preserve and, if possible, restore entirely as the basis of Irish culture. Of course, T^r na nOg as it appears in his poems derives authority from being part of the tradition: it is never just W. B. Yeats' eccentric version of Heaven, but a concept known to all men and well-known to all Irishmen. It enbodies, like any myth re-told and re-interpreted in a poem, a 54 collaboration between Impersonal tradition and a personal vision.

However Yeats may choose to Interpret TIt na ntig (and some of h is interpretations swerve rather far from the tradition), it is never an arbitrary personal symbol. That is certainly not true of some of his later images for Paradise, such as Byzantium and the Fifteenth

Phase of the Moon, and only partially true of such symbols as the wandering spirits of the later plays, for example Dermot and

Devorgilla In The Dreaming of the Bones. Because they have so much of his personal system of Imagery and symbol in their structure, these later versions of the Other World are essentially different from

Tir na n6g even though they share some of their iconography with it and are, perhaps, ultimately derived from It.

Until now, I have had to talk about "The Other World" In general terms, whether I was referring to the spiritual realm of magic and religion or to the specific kinds of imagery Yeats built up Into highly-developed patterns of symbolism. But now that the more abstract elements of the Other World, the themes of old age, sexual love, the dance and artistic creation, are in order, it is time to consider the different traditional and personal forms that the Other World takes on in Yeats's work. Each of the following chapters will deal with a different version of the Other World: the traditional Isles of the

Blessed that Yeats embroidered into his coat of old mythologies,

Byzantium, and the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon. This order w ill follow the development of Yeats's imagery, since it is roughly chronological, and it will give the work a certain satisfying mythic quality: it will 55 go down in the West with the sun and the souls of dead heroes, rise over the Eastern Paradise of Byzantium (which is near Eden), and, finally, as the moon it will go around and around the whole earth fo rev er. 56

NOTES

1 J.B. Yeats* Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 179. Letter of 5/10/1914. 2 W.B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 234. Hereafter cited as Plays.

3 Loc. c l t .

4 This schema Is the one Yeats used In "The Phases of the Moon." I cannot go Into that phase of his thinking so early In the paper; however, I think there Is no distortion caused by reference to this fairly late work because Its language can be applied to the Ideas he had about Unity of Being at any point In his career.

5 W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1968), p. 518. Hereafter cited as Essays.

6 W.B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier Books, 1956, reissue of 1937 e d .) , p. 273."

7 W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 246. Hereafter cited as CP.

8 Loc. c l t .

9 W.B. Y eats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 190-1 (Journal). Hereafter cited as Memoirs.

10 CP, p. 381.

11 CP, pp. 270-1,

12 CP, p. 269.

13 CP, p. 271. 14 "Young Man's Song," CP, p. 256.

15 "His W ildness," CP, p . 223.

16 CP, p . 255.

17 The King of the Great Clock Tower, Plays, p. 398.

18 "The Results of Thought," CP. p. 249.

19 "The Tower," CP, p. 196.

20 Plays, p. 245.

21 CP, p . 270.

22 CP, p . 174.

23 CP, p . 175.

24 Memoirs, pp. 144-5. Item 16 of the Journal (Jan. 1909).

25 CP, p . 282.

26 Paradise Lost, VIII, 11. 622-29.

27 "Ribh in Ecstasy," CP, pp. 283-84.

28 CP, p. 393.

29 "Before the World Was Made," CP, p. 266.

30 See, for example, "The Phases of the Moon" CP, pp. 160-64. 31 A Vision, pp. 67-70.

32 CP. p. 268.

33 CP, p. 214.

34 CP, p. 263.

35 CP, p. 244.

36 CP, p. 167.

37 See A. Norman J e ffa re s , A Commentary on th e C ollected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 216.

38 CP, p. 168.

39 CP, p . 170.

40 Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 89

41 Plays, pp. 35-36.

42 Plays, p. 39.

43 Plays, p. 44.

44 Plays, p. 46.

45 Helen Hennessey Vendler, Yeats's "Vision" and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 83. 59 47 See Jeffares, pp. 444-45.

48 CP. p . 328.

49 Memoirs, p. 214 (from Item 149 of the Journal).

50 W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Collier Books, 1959), p. 288.

51 Mythologies. p. 290

52 M ythologies. p . 289.

53 See "Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers," CP, p. 255.

54 "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931," CP. p. 240.

55 Memoirs. p. 157 (from Item 44 of the Journal).

56 "Adam's Curse," CP. p. 78.

57 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats — The Man and the Masks (New York: Dutton, 1948), p. 237.

58 A llan Wade, e d ., The L e tte rs o f W.B. Y eats (New York: M acmillan. 1955), p. 922,

59 "Ego Domlnu8 Tuus," CP. p . 159.

60 CP, p. 146 ("The Fisherman").

61 CP, p. 197 ("The Tower").

62 This and other quotations are from the text of Plays, pp. 398-403. Later references in this discussion are cited by page numbers in the text of the paper. 60 63 "Coole Park and Ballylee," CP, p. 240.

64 "Under Ben Bulben," CP. p. 341.

65 See W.B. Yeats, "Estrangement," from The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 335.

66 Essays. pp. 44-5.

67 W.B. Yeats, A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Glraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (London: privately printed, 1925), pp. 251-52.

68 W.B. Yeats, Letters to the New Island (Cambridge, Hass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1934), p. 204.

69 W.B. Yeats, "Four Years: 1887-1891," Autobiography, p. 131.

70 "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry," Essays, p. 79. V. B. YEATS IN PARADISE

Chapter Rro:

Ancient Ireland Knew It All

/ / Unlike Byzantium and the Fifteenth Phase of the Moony Tir na nOg does not depend for its meaning on Yeats' personal system of imagery and Bymbol. It is traditional not only in its form but in its deno- tatlons of eternal youth and joy. Yeats used it, essentially, as he found it: he followed tradition and simply extrapolated from it the things he needed. He did not try to re-create it as part of his system, although in a few late works, such as The King of the Great

Clock Tower, he talked about it in terms appropriate to the system.

As a result, his poems about T^r na nOg fit into the tradition rather well, even with the overlay of Pre-Raphaelite tonality characteristic of much of his early work. Tfr na nOg is quite recognizable: it is not just like the ancient Irish Paradise in his work, it is. the ancient Irish Paradise. It is surrounded on all sides by symbolic patterns that would have baffled an ancient bard, and charged with new significance by the context of Yeats' other work, but in Itself it is unchanged.

Since this is the case, it is impossible to talk about Tir na n6g as It appears in Yeats's work without considering the tradition that it comes from, and Yeats' relationship with the tradition. In this chapter, then, I shall give brief accounts of the sfjdhe, the fairies

61 62

(who live there), the land Itself, and the traditional genre of voyages to the Other World, i.e. the Imrama. There Is no space to go Into much detail about the tradition, especially since It has many branches that could not be treated fairly, or to deal with all of

Yeats's poems, plays and stories that concern the Other World. I

Intend only to establish a pattern of correspondence between tradi­ tional ways of looking at the Earthly Paradise and Yeats's own way of looking at it.

Before I analyze the traditions of Tir na nOg as they exist In

Irish mythology and folklore, I think it is necessary to look briefly at the traditions as they existed in Yeats' mind, in particular at the way he associated them with magic and his occult studies, and at the way he used them to foster his goal of reviving the ancient

Irish culture. It Is difficult, really, to separate these strains

In his experience, since he considered both magic and mythology to be living forces p and since some of the same people who were stirring up the "Celtic Revival" were his colleagues in occult studies. Maud

Gonne, for example, mixed her revolutionary activities with plans to set up an esoteric Order that would study Druid rituals, no doubt hoping that chants would free Ireland if everything else failed.

Yeats, as he points out many times in his autobiographical essays, was attuned to the supernatural from childhood. His early experiences were less spectacular than, say, Blake's, but the strangeness he felt all around him made him receptive to the stories he heard from his mother (who was from Sligo) and from the servants. A little later, he 63 collected tales Informally, and used them for material In his day­ dreams. Finally, after his father moved to London In 1887, Yeats more or less moved Into the British Museum and began to study folklore systematically. His first published work, aside from a few juvenalla, consisted of popular articles that re-told the traditional stories.

His research, of course, coincided with a general revival of interest

In Irish culture; because of this, he was able to use collections of tales like P. W. Joyce's Old Celtic Romances (1879), and, slightly 1 later, Jeremiah Curtin's Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (1890). His own Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) is a rather typical book for the time, as are the later collections of tales and loose translations of sagas by Lady Gregory.

Aside from his involvement In the cultural revival, Yeats's

Interest in folklore arose partly from his conviction that the old stories contain great insight into the nature of reality. Presumably, the remains of the ancient mythology are remnants of the Druid relig­ ion, and the aura of magic and intricate ceremony that has attached itself to Druidism was exactly to his taste, especially since he was beginning to study other forms of occultism at the same time. This

Interest in magic, and in particular what he thought to be Druid magic, strengthened his idea that folk tradition (especially in Ireland) is a i repository of wisdom lost to modem man. He held that idea until the end of his life; he was not being Ironic or hyperbolic when he wrote in "Under Ben Bulben" that "Ancient Ireland knew it all." Consequently, he read folklore and sagas along with The Golden Bough and such works 64 as John Rhys1 Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as 2 Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom. It Is not surprising that a few years later he and Maud Gonne were planning to establish a Castle of

Heroes on an island in Lough Key, and that he was devoting much of his time to writing rituals for the Order to be centered there.

The extent to which magic influenced Yeats's conception of Irish folklore and mythology is debatable, although some critics such as

Virginia Moore (in The Unicom) have argued convincingly that it was 3 a central influence for much of his life* In any case, magic is obviously present in many of the stories and poems that deal with the ancient legends, and is often strongly implied even when it is not explicit. The problem is to determine, in any particular work, whether Yeats was writing about Irish myth for its own sake or whether he had something more esoteric in mind. This problem is especially important in regard to poems like The Wanderings of Oisin. since many of Yeats's friends read them as allegories about magic.

An example, one of many possible ones, may clarify the relation­ ship between Yeats' occultism and the way he used elements of Irish tradition in his writing. There are four well-known talismans, the

"chief treasures," of the Tuatha De Danaan (i.e., the fairies), and

Yeats liked to make them analogous to the Tarot cards. (In this he was following the lead of occultists who make the Tarot analogous to everything imaginable.) The treasures are the Lia Fail (the Stone of Destiny), the cauldron of the Dagda, the sword of Nuada, and the spear of Lug. All had, in tradition, the powers one naturally expects 65

of potent magical objects. Each one used magic to accomplish appro- / / priate things. The Lia Fall shrieked when a rightful king stood on

it; it is analogous to the Stone of Scone, which had the same power

until British monarchs took to sitting on it instead. It also re-

senfcles the cleft stone from which only Arthur could draw a sword.

The Dagda's cauldron, like the soil Itself, was Inexhaustible, no

matter how much food was taken from it; this theme of plenty, along

with the Interminable feasts it implies, Is very common in stories

about T^r na n6g and the palaces under h i l l s . The Sword of Nuada,

once unsheathed, could not be put away unless it had killed its

intended victim, which it generally did quite efficiently. Lug's

spear was selfrdirectlng and at times was so bloodthirsty that it became a menace to its owners. Yeats mentioned the sim ilarity of

these magical objects to the four suits of the Tarot many times in

passing, and Maud Gonne wrote that he had made the connection in

some detail. The Irish talismans, he told her, are "universal sym- 4 bols appearing in debased form on the Tarot," where they take the

form of Swords, Staves, Cups and Coins. The analogy between the coins and the hia Fail is perhaps a little strained, but the other suits

correspond quite well to the Irish legendary objects, and the corres­

pondence is now accepted among occultists widely enough to be listed 5 without comment in a current handbook on the Tarot.

Yeats used the traditional objects several times in his work, notably in "Stories of Red Hanrahan," where young Hanrahan, on his way to be married and live a conventional life, runs into an old man 66

8huffling cards and muttering, "Spades and Diamonds, Courage and Power; 6 Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure." Hanrahan should have

known better than to play cards with him, since it was Samhain night, but he played, and soon found himself chasing the cards, which had

turned into a hare and a pack of hounds. They led him to a "very big

shining house" in Tir na n

marry him, and saw fo u r old women: "And th e one o f them was holding

a great cauldron in her lap; and another a great stone on her knees,

and heavy as it was it seemed light to her; and another of them had

a very long spear that was made of pointed wood; and the last of them 7 had a sword that was without a scabbard."

Although Hanrahan failed to enter the Other World for good, being

too attached to this one, he could not return to the normal life he planned. Having been in Paradise, he naturally had to become a poet,

and he spent the rest of his life as a wandering minstrel, one of the

last of the traditional bards of Ireland. One of his songs, lnciden- 8 tally, is a variation on "The Happy Townland," which, as the unpub-

/ lished play The Country of the Young proves, comes straight from Tir * na nOg. The story of his death is also miraculous. The old women

return to him in a dream, perhaps to take him at last to the Other

World; as he lies in a cottage, he hears the fairies' voices, "Very

faint and joyful, crying from the rafters or out of the flame on the hearth, and other times the whole house was filled with music that 9 went through it like a wind." Like Martin in The Unicorn from the

Stars, and the bank clerk who visited Eden, he hears music that is 10 "the continual clashing of swords." As he goes Into the vision and is about to die* he sees around him a pot, a stone, a rusty knife and a blackthorn stick, and asks, "The Cauldron, the Stone, the Sword, the 11 Spear. What are they? Who do they belong to?"

These are good questions, since the objects exist In two worlds: they are both the fairies' objects of power and the suits of the play­ ing cards that have descended from the Tarot. Hanrahan, being a poet, is the link between the worlds and the only person in the stories, aside from the supernatural beings, who can see them together. Being a poet makes him an outcast, but his knowledge, the reason he Is a poet, allows him to share In the life of both worlds. That Is, he is an outcast in both worlds. It Is very hard to be a poet. Nonetheless, he Is a figure of power as well as of suffering, and, because of his experience in T ir na n6g. he i s more than an ordinary man.

The Hanrahan stories, aside from their valuable evidence about

Yeats' view of the poet as a citizen both of this world and the Other

World, point up the relationship between Irish mythology and the oc­ cult, at least as that relationship existed in Yeats's mind. After all, both mythology and magic are attenpts to explain the irrational part of existence by systematizing it, and Yeats thought that the

Irish beliefs were rather good as such explanations go. Consequently, both his occult knowledge and the existing fragments of Celtic lore contribute to the air of mystery that hangs over all of his writing, partly because they helped to form his unusual world-view and partly because he put them into his work to make its strangeness palpable. 68

This exotic lore may seem rather remote from the main line of the

Irish Renaissance, which was primarily nationalistic, and from Yeats' own Involvement in Irish politics, but that is not the case. Since he felt that there is a great deal of truth in the old legends, or In the beliefs that once lay behind them, he naturally wanted the old culture revived, and, since he also felt that culture is the real basis of nationhood, he supposed that revival of the Irish culture would lead inevitably to a revival of Ireland as a nation. As Maud Gonne put it:

The land of Ireland, we both felt, was powerfully alive and invisibly peopled .... If only we could make contact with the hidden forces of the land it would give us strength for the freeing of Ireland, (12)

Yeats had several ways of approaching the problem. One, as I have already shown, was to slip legendary materials into his work under the cover of more ordinary occult paraphernalia, such as the Tarot. An­ other was to revive the old religion; that was the point of the

Castle of Heroes that he projected, but which was too impractical for anyone, even Yeats and Maud Gonne, to carry out. Another, somewhat more effective tactic, was to revive the myths by writing poems and plays directly about them for a large audience; most of the work that

I shall examine in this chapter was written with that end in mind.

He hoped that by means of this work he could tap the underlying sympathy of the Irish for their own lost culture. Finally, he tried at times to make contact himself, in an even more direct and spectac­ ular way, with the spiritual reality behind the legends, using the symbolism of the legends themselves, and that quest deserves mention, 69 since it shows a good deal about his state of mind whenever he approached this matter.

One example w ill do. In December, 1897, and January, 1898, Yeats and o th er members o f the Hermetic Order, b I x in all, had a series of group visions of the Irish gods. Aengus was the most prominent, appearing in various forms, but Delrdre, Cuchulaln, Conchobar, Fergus 13 and other legendary characters also showed up. After two months of hard work with talismans and signs, Yeats had all the material he needed for a set of initiation rituals into the Irish Mysteries, and no doubt all the proof he needed that there is something to the legends after all. That is not to say that he immediately became an orthodox Druid: he always had a considerable amount of skepticism about visions such as these, and was aware of the possibility of self- deception. Nonetheless, he must have felt very strongly that he had penetrated to a level of reality, or of awareness, where he could see for himself the power of traditional thought, and satisfy himself that he was Indeed Invoking something strange and powerful in his work.

No doubt this, and similar experiences, made him receptive to the most important revelation of his life: the automatic writing that resulted

In A Vision and the symbolic system of his later poetry. In each case, bizarre occurences led him to feel that beliefs he already held and had already articulated had been confirmed by a source outside his own consciousness.

Experiences like this could only reinforce his political goals as well. If this kind of enlightenment were to come to all Irishmen, 70 clearly the first thing to do was to revive a sense of nationhood, and to do that the Irish had to he told, over and over, that they were more than a conquered people who had taken on the culture of their conquerers. It was very urgent that they should regain their sense of cultural Independence, since the small remains of the old culture were vanishing quickly, and would soon be Irretrievable. The

Irish language had taken a heavy blow (probably, it seems now, a fatal one) from the Great Famine, which had killed many of its native speak­ ers. As a result, the oral tradition that had sustained some sense of the past, at least among the country people, was in jeopardy. Further, the Irish were more dependent on the English than ever: they had developed the mentality of a defeated people over the past two hundred years, but now they were depending on the English to feed them as well as exploit them. They could no longer count on anything, even pota­ toes. Another problem was emigration: those Irish who fled their homeland and tried to live in places like Manchester and New York could hardly be expected to carry on the culture of the dying nation they had left behind them. As the Irish were scattered through the world they would naturally become assimilated into other cultures and lose their uniqueness. The leaders of the struggle for independence, men like Parnell, were no longer fighting the British as much as they were fighting their own countrymen, who were more and more Inclined to let Ireland become a colony, or at best a satellite, of England.

In other words, the situation was perfect for an attempt to re­ vive the ancient culture. The state of Ireland was so desperate that 71 desperate means suggested themselves, not only In politics but In more intellectual fields as well. As soon as It was clear that the Irish language and folklore were dying, many Intellectuals were moved to preserve as many of the stories as they could (that is one reason why so many were collected during the 1870's and later), to restore the language by having it taught in the schools, and to inspire Irishmen, through such means as the Gaelic League and the Abbey Theatre, to recover what they could of their own past before it was too late.

Yeats stands in a complicated position here. There is no question that he was one of the leaders of the Irish Renaissance as well as the most .important w rite r to come out of th a t movement. He was a lead er % almost from the beginning of the movement, not only because of his obvious ability as a poet and essayist, but because he was an effec­ tive organizer. Since he found time to chair committees for such organizations as the Irish Republican Brotherhood in addition to writ­ ing and carrying on extensive experiments in the occult, he was an important link between the revolutionary parties and the intellectuals who had milder ideas in mind. Also, his prestige and organizing abilities, not to mention his relationship with Lady Gregory, made him the chief director of the Abbey Theatre. He was in a position to support younger writers and gain them public attention, and did so: he discovered Synge and sent him to the Aran Islands, for example, and in later years even Joyce went to him for advice and support. He was at the center of the movement, and enjoyed being there. But, in many ways, he was outside o f the movement exactly because he was too great 72 a poet to be confined In. It* He could and did write pieces that are little more than propaganda, Cathleen N1 Houlihan for instance, but could not confine himself to such chores. Unlike those writers, such as Lady Gregory, who were willing to subordinate their own voices to the demands of the movement, Yeats wanted to use Irish materials for his own ends. That is, he used the language of ancient Ireland, but he used it to talk about himself.

Yeats was sensitive to charges, which came at him during most of his career, that he was not really a genuine Irish writer but a mere cosmopolitan (horrors!) who used what was at hand solely for his own interests. These charges went along with other, contradictory ones, that he was too burled in his own version of the Heroic Age to care about the modern world. Both fallacies are still popular. In reality, he was deeply interested both in Ireland and its culture, and at the same time equally interested in more universal concerns: he wanted to resurrect the old culture and make it effective again, but he was moved by more than patriotism since he felt that all mythologies have their roots deep in the human mind; he wanted to penetrate to those mysterious levels of consciousness and explore them. The distinction

I outlined in the first chapter between national and universal myth­ ologies was important to him, and was the basis for his rather tor­ tuous thinking about his own ends. He was forced to be a poet with a thousand faces, as it were, and there was always someone around to suspect any one of them of being nothing but a mask. 73

Since a more detailed analysis of his complex situation would

require a full history of the Irish Renaissance and Yeats' own ambiv­

alent relation to it, and since that is impossible in this limited

space, I can only refer a reader to books that deal with the problem at length (see note 14). For my purposes at the moment, it is

sufficient to note that Yeats was in fact in a difficult position, or rather a series of difficult positions, throughout his career, and

that he responded to circumstances by writing poems and plays that dealt with his own interests in the terms dictated by the materials of Irish mythology. Further, he balanced his own subjectivity by 15 keeping himself to those materials. At first he stayed within the boundaries fixed by Irish legends; later, after he had formulated the system of A Vision, he had his own set of terms, but whenever he went back to the Irish materials he was careful not to violate them. He / / did interpret Tir na nOg, for example, in his own way (see The King of the Great Clock Tower), but never did real violence to the concepts behind the myths. After all, he thought that those concepts reflect real truths, and that they are essential to the nature of the human mind.

Yeats' own defense of his attitude, as he summed it up in "To

Ireland in the Coming Times," may make the issues somewhat clearer, and Bhould also serve as an introduction to the rest of this chapter, which has to deal simultaneously with the stuff of Irish legends and the use YeatB made of the legends, with both the specific details of 74 one mythology and the spiritual truths Yeats saw within all mythol­ ogies and tried to express In his own way:

Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Hangan, Ferguson, Because, to him who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming te ll Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body's la id asleep . For the elemental creatures go About my table to and fro, That hurry from unmeasured mind To rant and rage In flood and wind; Yet he who tread s In measured ways Kay surely barter gaze for gaze. (16) 75

Part Two: Hollow Lands and Hilly Lands

Yeats recorded In his Memoirs that ordinary dreams, as well as visions, gave him Insight Into the nature of things that he would not have guessed at in his waking state. Like most people who have revelations when they are asleep, he was unable to remember them later, but some fragments survived:

Sometimes as I awoke marvelous Illuminated pages seemed to be held before me, with symbolic pictures that seemed profound, but when I tried to read the text all would vanish or but a sentence remain. I remember, "The secret of the world Is so simple that It could be written on a blade of grass with the juice of a berry;" and "The riverB of Eden are in the midst of our rivers." (1)

The second of these gnomic sentences Is more startling than the first, and also more Interesting. For Yeats the supernatural world is all around us, and accessible through understanding: he was always skep­ tical about occultism as a way of breaking through to perception of the Other World, but never quit trying to reach such a state of per­ ception through the accumulation of knowledge. Having edited Blake, he knew that reality is Infinite, that only our perception is limited; having studied Irish folklore, he knew that the Irish peasantry had long since come to the same idea, and expressed it in their stories about the spirits who come into this world from nearby, who for that matter would be visible all the time if only we knew how to see them.

When Yeats tried to embody his ideal of human perfection, then, it was entirely natural that he should start with the si!dhe as a model.

Aside from their attractiveness as a kind of practical demonstration 76 of occult Ideas, and their importance in the traditional culture that he wanted to revive, both important points for him, they fit into the symbolic pattern that I set out in the first chapter, and they fit so neatly that it is hard to think they did not Influence Yeats's choice of Imagery and symbol. In this section, then, I shall outline exactly how the old mythology coincides with Yeats's characteristic themes of sexual love, art and the dance, and how he uses those ele­ ments of the tradition that are most in keeping with his own tastes.

Further, I shall give a brief summary of those elements of the tradi­ tion that are most relevant to Yeats's work, partly to illustrate how much of h is personal v ision i s drawn from tra d itio n a l sources, and partly to establish a context for examining Yeats' own work. One of his ploys was to write plays and poems that assume knowledge of folklore and mythology: he wanted to give the impression that his works are, or ought to be, part of a living tradition. That is, he put himself more less in the position of a Classical Greek playwright writing about stories that the audience already knows, but telling the story in his own way to make a point of his own.

One of Yeats's problems was that the sfdhe have undergone many changes, so that there is not really one tradition. There is, or was, an original tradition that may or may not have derived from the Druid religion, but that one is dead. Even Irish speakers of Yeats's time, if they were fully literate in Irish, must have found the language of the sagas (i.e., Old and Middle Irish) impenetrable, and their matter remote from the concerns of the Nineteenth Century. There were plenty 77 of translations into English, but their readership was limited. That left the traditions In the'hands, or mouths, of the peasants, and the peasants had changed it, since the peasants of modem Ireland are neither Iron Age warriors nor Druids. Although Yeats found the living folklore instructive and challenging, and useful on many occasions, he was attracted more to the past than the present by his temperament, and specifically attracted by the heroic ideal of the most ancient form of the mythology.

If his dreams of reviving the sagas as part of a national culture were doomed, then, he s till had plenty of congenial material to work with. The Tuatha De Danaan of these early stories are, in a limited way, a kind of perfect humanity. In the sagas they spent their lives fighting (without Contraries Is no progression), but not over matters like Catholic Emancipation or land tenure: they fought evil spirits and each other because their power was so great and their nature so passionate that any expression of their energy was necessarily violent.

Like the warriors the bank clerk saw in Eden, they enjoyed themselves thoroughly, and no doubt made beautiful music with their swords.

They may have been dangerous, but even more they were noble and awe­ some, and in their own forms seemed to be human beings of unusual stature and beauty. One example may give a general idea of what they were like, both human and more than human; in the Tain Bo CuaillnRe the god Lug ("the shining one") appears to help his son Cuchulain, who is tired from holding off an entire army at a ford:

iHe is ] a tall, broad, fair-seeming man. His close- cropped hair is blond and curled. A green cloak 1b 78

wrapped about him, held at his breast by a bright silver brooch. He waears a knee-length tunic of kingly silk, red-embroidered In red gold, girded against his white skin. There Is a knob of light gold on his black shield. He carries a five- pointed spear In his hand and a forked javelin. His feats and graceful displays are astonishing, yet no one Is taking any notice of him and he heeds no one: It Is as though they couldn't see him. (2)

Of course no one can see him, since he Is Invisible at w ill (as are

the modem fairies). If they could, though* they would be suitably

awed, terrified, and apprehensive. In any case, the tone of this

passage shows something of the way the old story-tellers looked on

the Tuatha : Lug, with his Impressive outfit and graceful displays, was exactly the sort of person that an Irish King might want to be.

For that matter, Yeats must have been rather Impressed with Lug,

Blnce he tried to carry off much the same sort of impression. He was not invisible, though* when he swirled down the streets of Dublin

or London with his hair flying and his cloak ballooning behind him.

There was more to the Tuatha than sheer energy and Impressiveness,

since they were divine. They were gods, not just sublunary spirits,

and carried within themselves all the power of the world. Joseph

Campbell has summed up their role very well:

Inherent In them ... was the old, generally pagan message of the Immanent divinity of a ll things, and of the manifestation of this hidden Being of beings particularly In certain heroic individuals, who thus stand as epiphanies of that "manifest-hidden" which moves and lives within us all and Is the secret of the harmony of nature .... The Celtic myths and legends are full of tales of the singers? and harpers' power to enchant and to move the world: to make men weep, to make men sleep, and to make men laugh. They appear mysteriously from the Land of Eternal Youth, 79

the Land within the Fairy H ills, the Land below Waves; and though taken to be human beings . . . they are not actually so, but open out behind, so to say, toward the universe. (3)

These gods, who open out toward the universe, nonetheless appear, usually, as human beings: they are in a sense predecessors of Blakefs

Giant Forms, who embody infinity in a human shape. They and their homeland, T^r na n6g, were conceived on a human scale, and, while they are unmistakeably Other, they are not entirely alien to mankind. Like the Classical gods, they are extensions of humanity: they are in effect men who are not buried inside bodies, who, because they are powerful and immortal and eternally young, are free from all the im­ perfections of our reality.

But the doors of perception that had been open for the first storytellers closed, slowly, all through the Middle AgeB. The Iron

Age culture that created myths of perpetual warfare and joy in battle died out because of exposure first to Christianity and then to the

English. The old idea that heroes and individualistic gods might em­ body the highest form of reality gave way to ideals that were more fitting for a stable and orderly society. Besides, the Irish them­ selves changed from a nation of loosely-organized tribes to a nation under foreign rule; they beat their swords into sticks to dig potatoes w ith. In ev itab ly , the gods and heroes dwindled in to shadowy fo rces that withdrew further and further from human concerns until they became strange lights flickering over the fields, and tricks of the wind at night. For the most part, the peasants who told their stories to folklore collectors looked on the sidhe as just one more unpleasant 80 force oppressing them: th e ir a ttitu d e was more sim ple fea r than awe.

They were, in their own way, as remote from the Ideals of the revival movement as were the people of Dublin.

There were some countrymen, though, who were fully aware of the real nature of the sldhe, and fortunately one of them was Mary Battle, a servant in Yeats's family. Not only did she know the old stories, she was also in the habit of watching some of the main characters riding around the countryside. Here is her vision of Queen Maeve, as reported by Yeats:

Mary B a ttle , looking out of the window at Rosses Point, saw coming from Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve, according to local folklore, is burled under a great heap of stones, "the finest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountains and straight to here."— I quote a record written at the time.. "... she had no stomach on her but was slight and broad in the shoulders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about thirty." And when I asked if she had seen others like her, she said, "Some of them have their hair down, but they look quite different, more like the sleepy-looking ladles one sees in the papers ..." And when I questioned her, 1 found that they wore \rtiat might well be some kind of buskin. "They are fine and dashlng-looking, like the men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the moun­ tains with their swords swinging. [II There is no such race living now, none so finely proportioned." (A)

This kind of vision, which apparently was routine for Mary Battle, must have appealed to Yeats for several reasons. For one thing, its ' tone is strikingly like that of the sagas and so, in a way, it con­ firm s what they say about the Tuatha. The d e ta il th a t Queen Maeve looks "about thirty" is also important since, later in his life, Yeats suggested that spirits freed from the body appear to be, in their 5 spiritual bodies, about thirty. That, for Yeats, was apparently the perfect age: it combines youth with sufficient age to balance and smooth over the rawness of youth. And, in any case, Mary's re­ marks about the perfectly proportioned bodies recall Yeats' own Ideal of human perfection as I described it in the first chapter.

I t 1b natural that Yeats took such visions seriously, since they gave him evidence to support his own ideas and since they also gave evidence that the folk memory is akin to visionary insight. His comments, comparing Mary B a ttle 's v isio n to th a t of the bank clerk who saw Eden, suggest how seriously he took the matter:

Were they Ithe women] really people of the past, revisiting, perhaps, the places where they lived, or must I explain them, as I explained that vision o f Eden as a mountain garden, by some memory of the race, as distanct from living memory? Certainly these Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed full of personality; were they not capricious, generous, spiteful, angry, and yet did that prove them more than images and symbols? (6)

Even the debased fairies of the countryside had something to offer, then, since they were memories of the old race of the Tuatha and so p a rt of the ra c ia l memory. Even though they have dwindled, they are s till a link between the countrymen of the present and the ancient mythology of the Celts.

Aside from the problems Yeats was bound to have when he wanted to see the old myths embedded in modern folklore, he had to consider the religious implications of the s^dhe. Not only have they grown less awesome since the Heroic Age, they have become evil or at least a little sinister — that, no doubt, is one reason why Irish peasants 82

have been disinclined to be awed by them. The early missionaries who

followed St. Patrick, and later the established Irish Catholic Church,

were willing to acknowledge the existence of the sjCdhe, but not, of

course, their divinity. The Church decided, after some indecision,

that they must be earthbound spirits who have great power in this

world but no souls. Being tied to the world, they w ill be destroyed 7 with it at the last judgement. This is the line the priest takes

In The Land of Heart's Desire, and it was a popular theme for "Celtic

Twilight" poets, who, when they wished to be melancholy, often pic­

tured the fairies weeping over their inevitable doom. Yeats himself

contributed to this tradition in The Island of Statues. This theme is

also important in some Medieval Irish poetry: much of the elegalc

spirit of that poetry comes from the feeling that something has gone

out of life now that the gods have been demoted and replaced by an

abstract, impersonal deity who can inspire no one to heroism.

Some churchmen went further and argued that the s£dhe might well be evil spirits, either demons or spirits of the air (like succubi and

incubi) whose special province is to endanger Irish souls; conse­

quently, the peasants of Yeats's time, and no doiftt of the present, were inclined to be very suspicious of them. But this tinge of evil

attracted Yeats, who was used to magic and its own overtones of evil; * more importantly, it allowed him to play off the sidhe against con­

ventional ideas of good and evil. Since they represent a transcendant

order of reality, they are not evil in his work, but they can seem

evil and therefore highly dangerous: the difference between their 83 own state of being and the limited, fearful perceptions of human beings gave Yeats a convenient way to stress just how far they are removed from normal human standards.

4 ...... Another aspect of the sldhe that must have displeased the Church, but Is central to Yeats' concept of the Other World, Is their sensu­ ality. The passion and energy that expressed Itself In the extreme / violence of the sagas made the sldhe just as prodigious In their sexual feats. Their Idea of love Is as violent and dangerous as that of some of the poems 1 referred to In the first chapter, such as

"Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers": both their battles and their love-affairs led the ancient heroes (and heroines) to a frenzy that would destroy any mortal being, and both passions transfigured them. Battles made them explode (literally) out of wrath, and love made them change their forms quite drastically: Aengus, for example, was willing to spend every other year In the shape of a swan because his beloved already had that peculiar habit.

An equally Important element that is present both in the sagas and In modem folklore Is that the sldhe are essentially feminine in most of their manifestations. This fact seems strange at first glance, since the Irish myths are mainly concerned with the Interminable battles and journeys of the chief heroes, but, in fact, all of these stories are full of female Imagery, and the power that lies behind the warrlor~gods of the Tuatha is clearly feminine. For that matter, aU the powers of the Other World, evil (Foroolre) as well as good, are 8 -- essentially feminine. 84

The myth of the conquest of Ireland by the Milesians (the legendary ancestors of the Celts) has those warriors, led by men, overcoming the Tuatha and forcing them to share the land: the

Milesians took over the surface, while the Tuatha were banished under the ground, where they still live in the midst of every feminine symbol that comes to mind. Their main dwellings are Inside hills, naturally, In womb-like spaces reached by invisible doors In the sides of the hills. They are also associated with plains and lakes. They are ruled mainly by queens, not kings (aside from the few great kings, such as Lug, in the sagas), and appear, usually, in female forms.

They are named after a goddess, apparently a Great Mother figure, Dana 9 (or Danu or Anu), the "mother of the gods." Tuatha De Danaan means

"the people of Danu": the alternative name sldhe is suggestive in its own way, since it means "wind," no doubt with the usual suggestion of

" s p i r i t."

It would not be beside the point to examine this aspect of the sfdhe in d e ta il, sin ce Yeats was w ell aware o f i t and often showed men and gods being manipulated by female powers, for example in The

Only Jealousy of Emer. Yeats was also aware that the s£dhe have all the powers that masculine societies associate with women: aside from their living inside hills and so on, they are quite literally spirits of darkness, who do most of their haunting at night, and in other ways they are clearly associated with the irrational parts of experience.

It would be simplistic to say that they are the unconscious, or the repressed parts of experience, but such a statement would not be 85

entirely false. It is, I think, obvious that at least the sldhes*

feminine nature suggests the traditional mythical nature of women:

they are the darker side of experience, irrational, night-loving,

mysterious and very powerful. ThlB kind of association is quite clear

in the sagas themselves, where the goddesses of the sldhe are elusive

and frightening figures. The Morrlgan, for example, Is in the back­

ground of almost every story: she and her pleasant helpers stir up

wars so that they can take the form of ravens and feed on the corpses

of warriors killed in battle.

Yeats did little to emphasize this side of the sldhe, no doubt

for publlc-relations reasons, but it is certainly present in his poetry,

where the sidhe are frightening because of their power and also because

they are in the habit of destroying men. Red Hanrahan was destroyed as

a man, even though he became a poet, and others, even Oisln, are always

in danger of losing themselves to the sldhe. But Yeats' intention was

not to make them dreadful, rather to make them sensual; he was inter­

ested in their power largely because it made their sensuality more

frightening. Love is like death when it is at its best in his work, * so love among the sidhe is especially gratifying. It is even better when a man, such as Oisin, loves a woman of the sldhe: his experience will necessarily bring him close to death and thereby close to vision.

That is, the power of the sldhe will carry him out of this world so

that he can see the Other World, whether that means the land under the hills (for Hanrahan) or the land over the sea (for Oisin). 86

The women of the Other World, then, have both heightened power and heightened sensuality, the two being the same thing, and are al­ together desirable. They are not mere human beings with all the unfortunate complexities and imperfections that human women have, but beings who are perfectly, archetypally female. That is why Queen

Maeve and her women appeared so perfect to Mary Battle: there is nothing in them to compromise their pure being, nothing like physical existence to disrupt their perfect proportions. Late in his career,

Yeats used highly metaphorical language to describe such beings, but in his earlier poetry contented himself with simple description, hoping to make the point that they are perfect by describing them In terms of conventional adulation. This is one reason why the women of his early poems all have long white fingers and golden hair: they are overwhelming presences who leave the poet speechless except for whatever Pre-Raphaelite formulas he can manage to utter. Niamh, for example, is a complete catalogue of traditional feminine qualities

(or stereotypes, according to your point of view) when she first ap- / pears to Oisin:

A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode On a horse with bridle of flndrinny; And like a sunset were her lips, A stormy sunset on doomed ships; A citron color gloomed in her hair, But down to her feet white vesture flowed, And with the glimmering crimson glowed Of many a figured embroidexy; And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell That wavered like the summer streams, As her soft bosom rose and fell. (10) 87

No wonder St. Patrick snapped, "You are s till wrecked among heathen

dreams" when Oisin told him about this apparition. He was quite

right: Niamh In Yeats' poem represents an entirely pagan goddess,

seen through a Pre-Raphaelite mist, In every detail. The perilous

sensuality that follows In the rest of The Wanderings of Plain, and which makes up the e n tire theme of poems lik e B alle and A lllln n . Is

perfectly In keeping with the attitudes of Irish tradition. The

danger of sensuality Is present In these early poems, but is not

emphasized; later, the violence of such lovers' passions will be

Yeats' main theme, but here physical perfection is more Important.

Richard Ellmann has suggested that Yeats was attracted to this

kind of physical Paradise because anything else would be "alien to

poetry":

YeatB was not required in his verse to side with a heaven attained through love, or a heaven attained through drunkenness, or to decide heaven's exact com­ position. He could admit as many paradises as separate Ideals and longings. Yet the various heavens he describes have certain negative qualities in common: They are never thin, spiritualized, or fleshless. For a heaven that was purely spiritual seemed to him alien to poetry, which, he considered, must satisfy body as well as soul with its Ideals. (11)

Or, In other words, the s^dhe and the sort of heaven they represent

(the state of being of which Tir na n6g Is the traditional symbol)

were exactly what Yeats needed to construct a Paradise that would

meet his specifications. The "heathen dreams" that Oisin wandered

among were the perfect landscape for Eden. Later on, Yeats translated the simple terms of love and drunkenness into sexual ecstasy and ecstatic dance. Both are present in his early work, but there they exist as ends for their own sake: the sfdhe dance forever, not because they are the pillars of the universe (as they are in The King of the Great Clock Tower), but because they are happy, and the lovers of poems like Balle and

Alllinn love forever because they enjoy it, not because they want to be like God. In both the early and the late poems, then, the body

(In an ideal form) and the soul work together, but in the early poems joy is an end in itself rather than a means of attaining visionary insight into the nature of the world. Art, and the artist's quest to Tir na n6g or Byzantium, is metaphysical in both the early and the late poetry. I shall not deal with it here, but later in this chapter, in my analysis of The Shadowy Waters and The Wanderings of Oisin,

I w ill show that' its role as a symbol is consistent throughout Yeats' caree r.

The dance of Tfr na nOg is of course one of the symbols that appears in both the early and late works. Since it is one of the best- known parts of the tradition, a given in any story, there is no need to discuss it here in detail: it is safe to assume that the sfdhe are excellent dancers. I have already mentioned, in the first chapter

(pp. 30-34), that dancing was usually, for Yeats, a symbol for the overflow of passion, sexual or spiritual or both, into a kind of still­ ness at the center of motion. Sometimes it is explicitly sexual, as in the first part of The Wanderings of Oisin, where the immorta] 89 spirits, and Oisin, dance languorously by the sea, hold hands, and nearly pass out from sheer ecstasy, all this under the eyes of Aengus, the Master of Love, More often, the dance of the sfdhe is, as it is in traditional accounts, the overflowing of their passionate joy: the sfdhe have no part of human sadness because they are immortal and eternally young. Or, as Yeats put it in an early story for The Celtic

Twilight. "Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of 12 the stars tire out their dancing feet."

The sensuality that appears in such early work as a naive delight in youth is the same passion that Yeats later elevated to the central motion of the universe:

If I consider deeply, lad and lass, Nerve touching nerve upon that happy ground, Are bobbins where all time is bound and wound. (13)

In the earlier work, though, he was less concerned with constructing a personal myth than he was interested in reproducing something of the pagan spirit in his own writing, so the abstruse vocabulary and concepts o f The King of the Great Clock Tower o r "Ribh a t the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn" are not present. Instead he talks about the sensuality and the dancing of the sfdhe in much simpler terms, and, following tradition, tries to make the Other World as much like this one as possible, different only because it is more full of life. The later poems and plays that translate this simple ideal into a complex machinery of gyres and phases of the moon do not change the nature of life in the Other World, then, but just use a richer vocabulary to describe it and to explain its relationship to life in this world. 90

Such a vast difference In vocabulary, and, certainly, the difference in quality between Yeats' early and later poetry, makes the early, "Celtic Twilight" work look rather simpleminded in compar­ ison to, say, The Tower. Nonetheless, the same themes are present in both kinds of poetry. I have made b r ie f comments about sensual love ✓ and the dance; however, to clarify the role of the sldhe (in this case represented by Aengus), and to give some idea of the continuity of themes from the early to the late poetry, I want to give a more extended example, one that will also define sexual love as the central part of the role of the sidhe.

Yeats wrote two poems about B aile and A lllin n , one in 1901

("Balle and Alllinn"), and one in 1934 ("Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and A lllin n " ). I have already commented on the second poem in my first chapter (pp. 23-4), but not in detail; since both of them concern lovers who, because of their love, were translated from human * existence to the state of being the sidhe enjoy, I want to examine them now to show how this higher existence embodies Yeats' charac­ teristic theme of love as self-transcendence.

The story is a traditional one, taken from the Seel Baili 14 Binnberlaig. and so makes up part of Yeats' attempt to transfer the old mythology in to modem p o etry . Like The WanderinRS of O isin , i t was intended as part of a series of tales: Yeats wrote to Robert

Bridges in 1901 that it was to be part of "... a whole world of little stories, some not indeed very little, ... a romantic region, a 15 sort of enchanted wood." This idea, which surfaced from time to 91

time In Yeats's mind, suggests that "Baile and Alllinn" was, to him,

more than the slight poem It now seems to be. He wanted to do In verse what Lady Gregory and others were doing In prose; that Is, he wanted to reproduce the flavor of the old mythology, but at the same

time he wanted to write poems that would be Independent works of art,

"an enchanted wood" like Spenser's.

The plot of this particular little story is quite simple, and Is best given by Yeats' own "Argument": "Ballle and Alllinn were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to be happy In his own land among the dead, told to each of them a story of the other's 16 death, so that their hearts were broken and they died." Aengus' <• * own land, of course, Is Tir na nOg. as Yeats says Indirectly later In 17 the poem, and directly In his Preface to Cuchulain of Mulrthemne.

The poem's theme is quite straightforward: love is destructive In terms of this world, since It causes the deaths of the two lovers, but It leads them Into a better life In the Other World. Aside from this, Yeats took the opportunity to mention old age by explaining that Baile and Alllinn were spared its horrors, including the waning o f lo v e:

Their love was never drowned in care Of this or that thing, nor grew cold Because their bodies had grown old. (18)

This mild predecessor to the many complaints about old age is not the only way Yeats works in the theme of physical decay. Since Aengus is the embodiment of youth and love, he naturally disguises himself as his own opposite in the usual Yeatsian manner, and becomes a grotesque 92 o ld man:

He had ragged long grass-coloured hair; He had knees that stuck out of his hose; He had puddle-water In his shoes; He had half a cloak to keep him dry, Although he had a squirrel's eye. (p. 394)

Such a disguise, by the way, Is not only YeatBian but quite tradi­ tional: it recalls not only the old man of "The Tower," say, or

"Sailing to Byzantium," but also Manannan's visits to this world as an impoverished harper, and his analogue in Yeats' poetry, the old man of "The Statesman's Holiday" who wanders around in "a ragged 19 bandit cloak" and sings about "grass-green Avalon."

In any case, Aengus appears to be anything but the Master of

Love, since he not only takes on the appearance of age but also per­ forms the function of age by causing the deaths of Baile and Alllinn.

But once they are dead and rid of this world, they perceive him aB he really is: "... his changed body was / Tall, proud and ruddy"

(p. 397). The disguise is an appropriate one for this world, which has less vitality than Aengus1 realm. When he throws off the disguise, going from age to youth like a soul in Byzantium, he throws off every sign of human mortality. When Aengus causes death that turns out not to be death, and when he takes on the appearance of old age and physical decay only to slough it off, he becomes an embodiment not only of love but also of immortality; the poems's strength, such as it Is, comes from its perfect blending of the themes of love and immortality.

The sensuality of the earlier poem is quite straightforward, both in this world and the Other World. It is the same thing in 93

both places. Before her death, Allllnn rides to meet Balle,

accompanied by her waltlng-malds,

Who amid leafy lights and shades Dreamed of the hands th a t would unlace Their bodies in some dim place When they had come to the marriage-bed. (p. 396)

Fate intervenes, but only to establish a change of venue:

... the gods long ago decreed No walting-maid should ever spread Balle and A llllnn's marriage-bed, For they should clip and clip again Where wild bees hive on the Great Plain, (p. 396)

"The Great Plain" is of course one of many names for Tir na nOg; here, as elsewhere, it is simply a greater version of the plains of

this world, or an enormous marriage-bed (this image, by the way,

recalls the Land of Women in Imram Brain, where the landscape con­

sists entirely of women stretched out on beds).

In "Rlbh at the Tomb of Balle and Allllnn" the story is the same,

but the language is more highly charged. "Balle and Allllnn" closes with the surprisingly flat statement that

... never yet lias lover lived, but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive, (p. 398)

In the la te poem, Ribh goes in to somewhat more d e ta il:

The m iracle th a t gave them such a death Transfigured to pure substance what had once Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join There is no touching here, nor touching there, Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole; For the intercourse of angels is a light Where fo r i t s moment both seem l o s t , consumed. (20) 94

As I have alredy pointed out (Chapter One, p. 23), these lines suggest both Paradise Lost and, like Paradise Lost, the Hermetic doctrine of "As above, so below." This allusion gives a great deal of weight and importance to the Image, an Importance that is commented on in the rest of the "Supernatural Songs." Further, the language is heightened by words like "miracle," "transfigured,"

"straining," "consumed"; later in the poem, Rlbh goes on to describe the explosion of light as the end of a tragedy: "Those lovers, purified by tragedy, / Hurry into each other's arms There is no sense of tragedy in the earlier poem, where Balle and Allllnn simply glide Indolently into the Other World In the form of swanB.

Nonetheless, the basic transformation is the same in both poems,

/ and the force that creates it, the power of the sldhe. is exactly the same. These poems i l l u s t r a t e the way Yeats used the sldhe throughout his career, and the patterns of Imagery associated with them: youth and love, like dancing, are prominent both in his early and late work, but, as he grew older, the issues surrounding them grew more complex.

What started as an attempt to re-create the best and pleasantest parts of a dead tradition ended as an intricate symbolism that express­ es both the joy and eternal life of the Other World and the terror of perpetual life that can be reached only through death, a life so intense that its passions would destroy mortal men. 95

* * Part Three: Tir na nOg

Although the sldhe are all around us, no farther away than the other side of a door leading into a h ill, they have their own world.

We cannot know them, unless they choose to be known, but they watch us all the time; they are both part of our world and apart from It.

The journey to Tlr na n6g, the Other World, Is just as paradoxical:

It can take place In an Instant, In a flash of Insight, or It can take the form of a long and demanding quest, like a Grail quest, that carries a hero out of this world after he has prepared himself for years. Since both kinds of visionary experience occur In Yeats's work, I want to look now at the strange state of being that both give access to, and to explain, In the rest of this chapter, how It Is that both kinds of experience are the same thing.

It Is quite clear that life In the Other World Is physical, though In a special sense. There is nothing wispy or attenuated about it: the sfdhe and the blessed dead have bodies, and their bodies are perfect, Immortal, and eternally young. They are a sort of Incarna­ tion of perfect human beauty, a beauty that the mortal bodies of this world can only approximate even at their best:

All souls have a vehicle or body, and when one has said that with More and the Platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek always the power of some Church or institution, and found oneself with great poetry, and super­ stition which is but popular poetry, in a pleasant, dangerous world. Beauty is Indeed but bodily life in some Ideal condition. (1) ’ 96

This Is exactly the human perfection I have already described

In somewhat more abstract terms. It is not the pleasure of a dis-

carnate Heaven, but rather a state In which spiritual perfection

takes the form of unblemished humanity. Aside from its perfection,

life In this state Is what we are used to In this world. Everything

is on a human scale, but In a world where human souls are in harmony with their surroundings. There Is no separation at all between the soul and the life of the world. Yeats once suggested that the idea of Tfr na nOg came, not just from a longing for perpetual life or the fear of death, but from the awe of nature and a desire to become part of its force:

Men who lived In a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing; and among g rea t gods whose passions were in the flam ing sun­ set, and In the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts of weight and measure. They wor­ shipped nature and the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tum­ ultuous dance among the hills or In the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. (2)

Hence the dance is a response to the rhythmic shifting of forms that pervades Irish mythology. The "supreme ritual" that it rep­ resents is not only ecstasy but a symbolic union with the constantly self-transforming power of nature. The sfdhe never grow old because they are, in their dance, part of that force: they are no more subject to age than are mountains or the sea. A human dancer can 97 do no more then gesture toward this state of being, but the gesture itself, as a ritual, brings ecstasy for a moment. The perpetual changing of the Other World is, indeed, one of its most attractive features. In this world everything is fixed and solid, but in Tjtr na n6g, where there is no separation between the perceiver and the thing perceived, both being manifestations of the same energy, everything dances:

To the eyes of those that are in the high heaven "all things laugh, sport, and live," and not merely because they are beautiful things but because they arouse by a minute correspondence of form and emotion the heart's activity, and being founded, as it were, in this changing heart, all things continually change and shimmer. (3)

This particular description of Paradise occurs in Yeats'

Important essay on Swedenborg, which was written as an afterword for lady Gregory's Vision and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. The fact that Yeats associated Swedenborg with the Irish mythology is

Itself suggestive, since it underlines the connection Yeats saw between these myths and the sort of mysticism Swedenborg represents, that is, a tendency to see the Other World as this one perfected.

Yeats put Blake in the same tradition, even though Blake himself had a good deal of scorn for Swedenborg's mechanical system:

Like Swedenborg he [Blake] believed that heaven came from "an Improvement o f sensual enjoym ent," for sight and hearing, taste and touch grow with the angelic years, but unlike him he could convey to others "enlarged and numerous senses," and the mass of men know instinctively they are safer with an abstract and an index. (4) 98

Yeats' use of Blakean terms — "abstract" and "Index" ■— shows,

quite clearly, where his own sympathies lay in such matters as the

nature of the Other World. Even though, like Blake, he found Sweden­

borg's rigid and pedantic system absurd in many details, he was im­

pressed with the basic idea that life in eternity can best be des­

cribed in the same images as life in time. His constant attempts to

prove that the Other World really is like this one have embarrassed many scholars because of his dabblings in spiritualism and Theoso-

phism, but this habit of mind also allowed him to draw from a stock

of images that would not have existed otherwise: because he found

a Paradise that was concrete and open to description, whether in the

terms of Irish mythology or of spiritualism, he was able to use it

as a vital element in his poetry. He did not have to resort to

abstractions like "The s till point of the turning world" when he wanted to write about higher states of being, and this ability to be

concrete no matter what world he was talking about is one of the most Important sources of his great strength as a poet.

One of the paradoxes of any Earthly Paradise is that it is visible only through trance and mystical illumination of one kind or another, but the world that is revealed in such states is much like the one we already know. To some visionaries, this fact must be enormously disappointing (can I never get away from this world?

they ask), but apyone whose interest is centered in the best things

of this world — such as love, dancing, and art — must be delighted

to find out that more of the same goes on in eternity. Yeats 99

Identifies Swedenborg's Heaven as that of "The rath or the faery 5 hill," and so is able to bring Swedenborg into a strange sort of

harmony with one of the least mystical men of the Nineteenth Century,

William Morris. Because he visualized a physical Other World, Yeats'

sympathies with other dreamers ran along the entire scale from

Swedenborg's bureaucratic serenity to Morris' bustling Utopianism.

Yeats approved of Morris because he was like a "primitive" man,

delighting in nature and natural life:

Men like him [Shelley, whom Yeats opposes to Morris] cannot be happy as we understand happiness, for to be happy one must delight like Nature in mere pro­ fusion, in mere abundance, in making and doing things, and if one sets an image of the perfect before one it must be the image that draws her perpetually, the image of a perfect fullness of natural life, of an Earthly Paradise. That is to say, one must not be among those that would have prayed in old times in some chapel of the Star, but among those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green Tree, and on the wet stones of the Well, among the worshippers of natural abundance. (6)

The Green Tree and the Well were two of Morris' favorite images, and they are of course two of the most common objects in the Irish

Other World. But Yeats was less Interested, I think, in Morris' specific images drawn from Northern mythologies than in the sense of overflowing natural life that shapes both his work and the more pleasant of the Irish myths, the natural life that l£r na n6g expresses perfectly.

I have already mentioned that the Church was unhappy about the pagan myths, and punished the old gods by denying them souls. 100

Actually, the gods would never have missed their souls. The pagan mythology was entirely earth-bound In its sympathies, so much so that 7 a medieval English poet, writing In Ireland, used his own version of llv na n6g, the Land of Cockaygne, to satirize the worldliness of monks and nuns in Ireland. While he was at It, he made a fine sum­ mary of the differences between the Christian and pagan concepts of

Heaven, anticipating Yeats and Morris by some five hundred years but taking, so far in advance, much the same line:

Tho3 Paradis be miri and bri3t, Cokaygn is of fairlr si3t. What is ther in Paradis Bot grasse and flure and grene ris? Tho3 ther be ioi and gret dute, Ther nls met bote frute; Ther nls halle, bure, no bench, Bot watir mania thurst to quench. (8)

Cockaygne is "under Heaven," more specifically in the Atlantic (of course), and so its pleasures are all of this world. Still, it is not an ordinary amusement park:

Vnder heuen nls lond, lwisse, Of so mochil ioi and bllsse. Ther is manl swete si3te; A1 is dai, nls ther no nl3te. Ther nls baret nother strlf His ther no deth, ac euer lif. (9)

Although Cockaygne was created for a special purpose, it is inter­ esting in itself because of what it shows about the pagan attitude toward the Other World. The author of The Land of Cockaygne was able to satirize the abbeys by simply putting them into the pagan

Other World, since the Ideals of that world are exactly opposite 101

those of Christianity: Heaven is an escape from this world, t£t na n6g is its center and source of energy.

Medieval legends recognized this fact by creating a set of different Paradises, some spiritual and some physical. J. B. Yeats would have been pleased to find Medieval accounts of a Paradise for every emotion or mood. There is no need to go into detail here, but the general pattern of these myths is suggestive. Medieval legends, with their usual tendency to polarize the order of the world, put

Paradise in the East (Eden) or in the West. The Eastern Paradise was earthly, since it was seen as inferior to Heaven, but it was rather aescetic by Celtic standards (as The Land of Cockaygne suggests): aside from fruit trees, flowers, and birds singing the canonical hours, it had little in the way of sensual delights, and was used mainly by saints as a rest-stop on the way to Heaven. Its physical position, on top of a high mountain, suggested to many writers that it embodied a state between earth and Heaven. But the Western Para­ dise was not only as far away from Eden physically as could be managed — the Paradises are at the farthest ends of the world by

Medieval reckoning — but at its opposite pole spiritually. Some traditions allowed both to be on the earth at the same time, no doubt to illustrate their differences, and some traditions got to be even fancier, putting Paradises in four directions, one for each point of the compass, and assigning enough delightful islands to the West to fill the Atlantic from shore to shore with dry land. 102

Interesting as these traditions are In themselves, they are not essential to this study. Yeats mentioned the tradition of four

Paradises only In passing, In one of his arcane footnotes, and I 10 w ill follow his example.

In any case, the traditional Irish Paradise of T^r na n6g was enough by itself to satisfy any craving for variety. Although the ancient Irish thought of it as being all around us, they generally preferred to localize It in their stories, partly because some locations, such as the bottom of the sea, are suggestive In them­ selves, and partly because the Other World must be hard to get to.

The usual location, as Is the case with many early Aryan Paradises,

Is either In the West, where the sun sets (Eden Is in the East, where the sun rises), or under the ground or the sea. It might also be at the bottom of a lake or a well. But, no matter how or where the Other World manifests itself, whether as a mansion that suddenly appears In a field or as a land at the bottom of the sea, it is 11 always the same thing. There was only one Other World for the Irish.

It has many different names and nicknames because it is so large and varied that the Irish seemed to feel that it needed many names to be properly described. So it is called not only Tlr na n6g but also

T^r nam Bio (the Land of the L iv in g ), T ir T a irn g lri (th e Land of 12 Promise — probably a Christian name ), Mag M

Baile and Aillinn"), Mag Mell ( the Plain of Delights), and so on.

Aside from these common names, many poems like Imram Brain contain 103

a dozen or so extra ones, again no doubt to show how varied Tlr na n6g really la. Also, I imagine that it may have been something of a game for bards to Invent new names for the Other World and so extend its qualities even further.

It had not only many names, but also many different properties, as the names imply. Being a better place than this world, it was not only more pleasant but, in a sense, purer. No quality is mixed with any other. Because these things are themselves and nothing else, the Other World was looked on as a world of absolute qualities, in particular as the source of absolute (i.e., eternal) life, absolute truth and absolute wisdom.

In some s to r ie s , i t 1b possible to gain immortality by visiting the Other World and carrying out a task (drinking from the Hawk's

Well, for example); usually, though, immortality was seen as so much a part of the Other World that returning to this one cancels out whatever one has gained. In any case, to my knowledge no one ever succeeded in carrying out the necessary task. While a man is * * in Tlr na nOg, then, he is part of everything there, and so is immortal, but if he leaves he becomes part of this world again, and immortality is impossible. That is why Olsin grew suddenly old when his feet touched the soil of Ireland, and why one of Bran's crewmen turned to ashes when he touched the shore. It seems that immortality

/ / is the essence of Tir na nOg. and that it would be Impossible to live

/ / forever in this world without turning it into Tir na nOg just as

Solomon and Sheba would have had to turn this world into Eden and 104

reverse the Fall in order to achieve perfect love* It is possible

that even a very determined voyager will turn away from such fright­

ening consequencesv and renounce a quest that must cut him off from

human life; Yeats wrote poems and stories about the failure to

grasp immortality, and I w ill examine some of them in the last sec­

tion of this chapter. Immortality comes at a higher price than truth or wlBdom, since

these are relatively ordinary things. However, they are just as

characteristic of the Other World as eternal life. Immortality is

the essence of T^r na n6g. but It does not exist in moral isolation.

Truth, for example, is embodied in a story about Cormac, a semi- hist or leal High King of Ireland. In the story, Cormac is approached

one day by a warrior who carries the usual token of the Other World, a branch with flowers and apples on it. The warrior, who turns out

to be Manannan, whisks him off to T^r nam Beo. where, among other

things, Cormac is given a marvellous cup. If three lies were said in the cup's hearing, it broke; if three truths, it was whole again.

Cormac took the cup back to Ireland and became, no doubt largely 13 with its help, a great judge. This story is more than an anecdote about truth: it was important to the ancient Irish, as It is to anyone, that the world should have standards of truth somewhere in its makeup, and important that the High King should embody truth as much as any man can. Cormac's visit to the Other World made him more of a king and less of an ordinary man, much in the way Yeats' heroes become archetypes as they approach Tir na nOg or Byzantium. 105

Wisdom was, like truth, part of the Other World, and was seen as e x is tin g , somehow, In a pure form. The Other World was seen sb

the source of all wisdom* Not surprisingly, It was especially 1A associated with occult knowledge, but It was also the source of 15 all knowledge, and of the arts. It Is worth noting, by the way,

that Other World spirits, especially Manannan, the god of the Other

World, often appeared In the form of superlative poets or musicians, who could move any men to any emotion, or to vision, by their super­ human skill as artists. Wisdom and art were for the ancient Irish, as for Yeats, essentially the same thing.

•Although attributes like pure truth and wisdom are less prom­ inent in the legends than the constant theme of sensual pleasure, they are always present, and they define Tir na nOg as more than an ancient Never-Never Land. Because it 1b a place where the dance never ends, and where truth and wisdom are present In pure form, 16 it Is essentially a "world of superlatives," as Rees calls It, a world where nothing that is good (or evil) is qualified, modified, compromised, or mixed with anything else. There is none of the muddle that characterizes this world* Rees describes how Bran, like other voyagers to the Western Paradise, finds a series of islands —

Yeats would have called them "allegorical dreams" — where

.., our world as we know It seems to resolve itself Into its components. The people of the Island of Joy are not enjoying any particular pleasure; they are not laughing at anything. The island symbolizes joy in its elemental isolation. The Island of the Women is likewise the quintessence of femininity and erotic pleasure, separated from everything with which it is Intermingled in normal experience. (17) 106

Bran's experience is nothing unusual, since much the Bame thing happened to Malldun and Oisin, among othersj It Is clear that in

Tlr na n6g no one has to work very hard to hammer his thoughts into a unity, since unity of being is always a condition of life. It is only those people who are unable to leave this world, Yeats for example, who have to work consciously to achieve something like this state, and who have to fight their surroundings and themselves to a tta in i t .

One other point about Tlr na n6g deserves to be mentioned, since it helps to explain why that land is so hard to reach even though it is all around us. Everything in the Other World is the opposite of its counterpart in this world. When there is a famine here, there is plenty (even more than usual) in the Other World; when there is a war here,there is peace in the Other World, and so on. Every physical condition is reversed. This opposition is part of many of the most famous stories and-l:raditlonal poems, for example the b iz a rre meeting of Bran and Manannan in the sea (in Imram B rain), a meeting th a t takes place w hile Bran i s sa ilin g and Manannan is driving a chariot across the water. Bran is naturally startled, but the god explains:

What is a clear sea For the prowed skiff in which Bran is, That is a happy plain with profusion of flowers To me from the chariot of two wheels.

Bran sees The number of waves beating across the clear sea: I myself see the Mag Mon Red-headed flowers without fault. (18) 107

He goes on to explain, at some length, that Bran is actually sailing across the top of a beautiful woods, and that the woods (or sea, depending on your point of view) is full of charioteers, all the rest of them invisible. Bran cannot see the woods or the charioteers only because his human perceptions are limited, unable to deal with the paradox that the sea can be dry land if looked at properly. Bran is already in T^r na n6g -- so is everyone — but had no way of knowing it without being told.

The reversal of values in the Other World, and the ambiguity that such a reversal gives to all of our perceptions, forces voyagers to shake loose from comfortable ideas about reality. Sailing west in the old legends is something like reading Berkeley for the first time, but even more alarming since the gods one meets on the sea are more formidable than books. In any case, the first thing a voyager learns is that all matter 1b in flux, and that certainty about the nature of things is an illusion. At least, human ideas are illusions: the gods are presumably better-informed about the world than we are, and that is possibly why they find human behavior so funny whenever they v isit this world. The paradox whereby Tlr na n6g is across the sea, under the ground, and all around us is not, then, a confusion of motifs or an inconsistency in the mythic framework of the old stories, but an expression of the fundamental lim itations imposed on our perception of reality.

Space is not the only quality that changes in the Other World; time there does not plod along, but expands or contracts according

I 108

19 to differing perceptions, often In bewildering ways, Yeats's play The King of the Great Clock Tower Is, In part, a mocking comment on our attempts to control time, even though time Is part of a great dance that goes on In T^r na n6g beyond our control^ even our knowl­ edge. The legends themselves have many Instances of time's odd behavior: Olsln, for example, thinks that he has spent three years in l|r na n6g, but three hundred years have passed In this world; when he returns to Ireland, he meets St. Patrick and undergoes severe culture shock. « The only thing about time In Tlr na nOg that seems to make sense to ud Is the regular alternation of the seasons. Naturally, they are

Inverted, our summer being winter In Tir na n6g and so on, but at least they do follow each other. This Inversion of seasons is not only part of the ancient mythology, but still lives In modern fairy- lore: Yeats pointed to some evidence of It In Lady Gregory's'collec­ tio n s , and quoted Mary B a ttle to the same e ffe c t, comparing th is belief to Swedenborg's idea that opposition of this kind hides the 20 spiritual world from us. It is possible, by the way, that hazels and apples, both of which have strong associations with Tlr na nOg, were sacred to the ancient Irish because they were the only winter food-supply they had, and so suggested the plenty of the Other World, 21 where It is summer when we are going through winter. In any case, both trees are prominent In all the stories about tIv na n6g, and in any of Yeats's poems an apple or hazel-bough is likely to be a signal that something strange is happening or about to happen. 109

Because of the opposition of seasons, and the paradoxical behavior of space and time In the Other World, it Is a place that ordinary mortals cannot expect to reach. It has to manifest Itself, for example In a vision, before It Is accessible at all. But vision­ ary Insight does not often occur at will; a discipline Is necessary, and In Yeats's poetry this discipline Is often represented meta­ phorically as a sea-voyage, In the traditional way. Sometimes In h is poems a moment o f lu c id In sig h t can occur spontaneously ( lik e the Incident of the coffee-shop In "Vacillation"), but since much of Yeats' life was spent In an attempt to achieve Initiation into occult mysteries, It Is natural that he found illumination most likely to come aB the result of long study and,discipline. Ribh's triumph over his body, or Yeats' own trick on Michael Robartes In

"The Phases of the Moon," comes about only through single-minded discipline: and, for that matter, even Solomon and Sheba carry on an intense discipline of their own In the garden: there is nothing frivolous about trying to bring Eden back into the world, although an observer might not have understood their seriousness.

When he was dealing with specifically Celtic materials, Yeats naturally used the form of the Imrama ("voyages") to describe such discipline. The original Imrama were not concerned with mystical experiences, though they used the language of mystics with startling casualness. They were, for the most part, adventure-stories on roughly the level of Mandeville's Travels. It was the basic idea of a quest that Involved a journey to the Other World that interested 110

and attracted Yeats; there Is no space here to examine the ancient

Imrama. but the general pattern should help to show why Yeats was attracted to this form. Essentially, such stories run something like this: an Other World spirit appears to some great man (e.g.,

Olsin, Cuchulain, the High King) and gives a very attractive descrip** / / tlon of Tlr na nOg, finally inviting the mortal man to see for him­ self. He does, usually by sailing into the Atlantic, where he goes through a barrier of mist and reaches lir na n6g. After a blissful stay there, he either returns enlightened and greater than before

(aB did Cormac when he got the Cup of Truth), or tries to come back but finds that he cannot because the act of entering the Other World has cut him off from this one. That was Bran's experience; he very sensibly went back to Tir na n6g and, presumably, Is s till there.

Olsin, In some folktales, did the same; In the versions of Michael

Comyn and Yeats, he was foolish enough to return to this world, where he became an old man very suddenly and died in misery.

The dual tradition In which Tlr na n6g Is all around us and far off in the sea presented Yeats with a choice of symbols, then, and he generally chose the more easily dramatized image of a distant

Paradise. Of course, he did not limit himself to It: in the

Hanrahan stories, for example, he used the Land-Under-Hill as t£t na n6g. But he usually put T£r na n6g as far away as possible, so that the journey there, a long and hard one, could represent the slow awakening of Insight and creative power. It also gave him a I l l chance to devise^ in the traditional manner, a set of symbolic meet­ ings on the sea in poems like The Shadowy Waters and The Wanderings of Olsin* These are fairly long narrative poems, and a sudden change of consciousness like that of "Vacillation" would have re­ moved a good deal o f t h e i r a c tio n .

There is a paradox here, like the traditional paradox that ✓ / puts Tir na nOg all around us and yet makes it inaccessible, Yeats knew that Tir na n6g is present everywhere, and even suggested that a sense of its nearness was responsible for the power of the Celtic myths and the poetry written out of them:

His [the band's] imagination was always running off to Tir na nOg. to the Land of Promise, which is as near to the country-people of to-day as it was to Cuchulain and his companions. His belief in its nearness cherished in its turn the lyrical temper which cannot be found in its perfection upon earth, or only for a moment. (22)

This is another way of saying that "Paradise is fulness of life," since the perfect "lyrical temper" that he is describing is clearly a kind of creative mystical experience, out of which the bards wrote epic poems about supermen. It is also a claim for the power of art to provide a way of understanding, or at least envisioning, the fulness that ordinary life denies us. Nonetheless, Yeats pre­ ferred to show, in his own poetry, how hard it is actually to share in that fulness of life. The discipline that shapes everything in

/ / his work is necessary to reach Tir na nOg: his heroes, like Dante, must go the long way around to reach what is close at hand, and they can survive the journey only by single-minded determination. Their 112 best chance is to adopt the discipline of art: in the next part of this chapter, then, I shall examine some of the strange journeys that artists make in their attempt to understand what the world is really about* 113

Part Pour: Getting There

Yeats took a very high line about art. For him, art and the

artist were removed from ordinary life by their excellence: art

was a sacred mystery, artists the priests of the mystery. Yeats

Bpent much of his life trying to be Initiated into mysteries that

would set him off from ordinary men, and art fulfilled this role as

well as his occult studies. For that matter, It Is often difficult

to tell the two apart: In, say, The Wind Among the Reeds or the

Michael Robartes stories they come together so that the artist and

the mystic are the same man (i.e., Yeats as he wanted to be), while

illumination and poetic creation are essentially the same act. Prom

the beginning to the end of his career, Yeats found strength and

inspiration in "The abstract joy, / The half-read wisdom of daemonic

Images," and pursued them not only for their own sake but also for

the sake of his art; when he finally succeeded in creating his own

occult system, by his own account with supernatural help, that system

existed mainly to give him metaphors for poetry.

As I have already shown, Irish mythology, or rather Yeats’

favorite images from Irish mythology, is woven Into the fabric of both his occult study and his art. He felt that the old mythology, and the lost religion behind it, was in sympathy with his ideas about the nature of reality, and was pleased to find correspondences between paganism and Swedenborg or Blake. He made a point of equating the four talismans of the Tuatha De Danaan with the four suits of 114 the Tarot, and Induced trances so that he could talk to the Celtic gods. His writing, of course, was even more consistently Involved with the materials of the Irish past: he wrote many poems and plays as part of a concerted attempt to bring the mythology back to life, and for the first twenty years or so of his career as a writer re­ ferred to "heroic" imagery and themes almost as a matter of habit, since he was so steeped In them that he could turn to them as a natural mode of expression. He even put himself into the mythology, disguised as Cuchulaln.

In this section, then, I want to examine three works that treat the theme of art together with images from Irish mythology.

All three, The Country of the Young. "The Song of Wandering Aengus," and The Shadowy Waters. also deal with initiation, since for Yeats initiation into mystery was the beginning of life as an artist as well as the point of the Imrama. on which all three works are modeled. In each one, as in the ancient stories, a man (or, in

Aengus* case, a metaphorical god) has some sudden contact with the

Other World, and, by going to it or attempting to go to it, becomes aware o f th e f a c t th a t i t s l i f e i s human l i f e made p e rfe c t. I t i s natural that Yeats saw such an experience as the beginning of art:

/ / when one has been to Tir na nOg. what else is there to do but sing about i t ? / / Tir na nOg, then is the subject as well as the source of art, since art, in Yeats' High Romantic definition, concerns itself not w ith human im p erfectio n s, b u t w ith human p e rfe c tio n : 115

All art 1b In the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapour of the world an linage of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake .... (1)

This was w ritte n in 1906, in the Preface to Poems 1899-1905. and

can stand as Yeats' credo for his early poetry. Later, of course,

he got o f f h is s t i l t s , or a t le a s t c u t them down a l i t t l e , b u t th is

absolutist point of view is the one that controlled his early poetry,

and the one that shapes the three works to be discussed here. All

of them are about the search for human perfection, and all take the

form of a journey to Tjfr na n6g. since that is where human perfection

can be found. Or, more accurately, all of them describe part of the

journey as it is set out in the Imrama; the call from the Other

World spirit comes in The Country of the Young, the quest for the

elusive sp irit in "The Song of Wandering Aengus," and the oversea

journey Itself, though not the end of it, in The Shadowy Waters.

Since each work gets the hero a little closer to Tlr na n6g, I might

as well begin with the least successful quest.

The Country o f the Young i s , lik e Lady Gregory' a The T ravelling

Han, an enlargement of a folk tale Lady Gregory heard from an old 2 peasant woman. In the old woman's story a young girl, alone and homeless, is helped by the Savior, who happens to meet her on the

road. Many years l a t e r , when she has become ric h (by Western Iris h

standards), he reappears as a poor man and begs for wheat. She gives him potatoes. He performs a miracle to reveal his Identity, and she begs his forgiveness. He gives it, along with a speech on charity, and the story ends with the woman's redemption. Lady Gregory used

essentially the same plot In The Travelling Man. but the play adds a

child (the woman's) and a green branch from a tree In Tlr na nOg.

This branch Is, of course, the traditional mark of an Other Vorld

spirit; Its presence is a first Btep In the transformation of a

pious little tale Into pagan drama reverberating with symbolism. But

Lady Gregory went no further In this direction. This time the

Travelling Man, Christ, reappears to the child and plays with him.

The mother thinks he is a beggar, gives him potatoes when he asks

for food, and chases him away. Later, after he has left by walking

across a river, the child shows her the branch. She laments her

lost chance: "There are fruit and flowers on it. It is a branch

that is not of any earthly tree." [Falls on her knees.] "He is gone,

he i s gone, and I never knew him! He was th a t stra n g e r th a t gave me

all! He is the King of the World!"

I have supplied Lady G regory's v ersio n to show how much i t

differs from Yeats's, and in what ways. In spite of the traditional branch, her play is overtly and didactically Christian, while Yeats' version is entirely pagan. It seems as though Yeats, wanting to

follow tradition as strictly as he could, began with a Christian

folk tale and then re-constructed it so that it would be the sort of

tale the old woman might have told had she been a pagan. Somewhat oddly, he wants to be more Irish than the peasant woman. Further, he wants to combine his own didactic "message" with the traditional framework so thoroughly that his personal vision and the tradition I

117

will seem to fuse* The play Is an effort to make the tradition assert

the power of Imagination, and of art, In much the same terms that

Yeats customarily used.

In The Country of the Young the Stranger is not Christ but a

nameless Other World spirit, and the power of the Imagination finds

a symbol In a black spirit horse that Is Bimllar to the magic horse

of The Wanderings of Olsin. Since this play sees the Imagination as

allied to Innocence and perhaps Inseparable from It, l£r na n6g

becomes an extension of childhood, and the children In the play are

emblematical of unfallen humanity. Even the name of "the country of

the young" Is something of a pun on childhood. Like the g irl dancers

of h is 1 fries, children In the play are already closer to perfection

than are adults, less corrupted by life. So the young girl of the

sto ry is specifically a child, not a young woman, when the Stranger

f i r s t ap lears to her on a Midsummer's Day (of course), and, a little

l a t e r , t ills her in a dream, as she says, "... If I could ever catch

a hold o : that black horse he would put the bridle on him and that 4 I could fide to that good place." The good place is obviously Tlr

na nOg. and the fact that this vision occurs on a Midsummer's Day,

when such things are almost routine In folklore, suggests very strongly

that Yeats was anxious to identify his conception of Innocence and the

Other World with the Images of the ancient mythology* / / Many years later, the Stranger describes Tir na nOg to the

grown woman's own child. It sounds, In part, like Eden; "0 it is

on the top of a high mountain, and there Is a silver wall about it, 118

and there are four gates that open to the four quarters of the

world." But It sounds less and less like an orthodox Eden and more

and more like the Land of Cockaygne as the Stranger continues by

singing a version of "The Happy Townland," which perhaps he had

learn ed from Red Hanrahan:

T h e re 's many a stro n g farm er Whose heart would break In two If he could see the townland That we are riding to; Boughs have their fru it and blossom At all times of the year: Rivers are running over With red beer and brown beer An old man plays the bagpipes In a golden and silver wood, Queens, their eyes blue like fire Are dancing in a crowd. (5)

This is not the "happy townland" with its heroic passions and

sin g in g swordB that Martin sees in The Unicorn from the Stars, nor

entirely the Eden the bank clerk saw with ltB wars inside apples.

It is Paradise as a child imagines it, a world where the best things

about human life are not disturbed by age, death, struggle or suffer'

lng, and where there is constant plenty. A child has something like

Unity of Being because he is not corrupted by experience, and so can imagine such a place without being cynical about it. Not having

suffered the full effects of the Fall, he can imagine a prelapsarlan state as an extension of the life he already has.

As for the black horse on which the Stranger and the child are riding to Paradise, it is clearly an emblem of the imagination.

Imagination is still reasonably intact in a child, at least in terms of the Romantic myth of childhood which Yeats adopted in this play; 119 because of it, he can Imagine Eden quite vividly with the help of a magical trance and without thinking about archetypal symbolism.

The child wants to ride off at once, but the Stranger says, "Only the young can see that horse, and I never knew of anyone young or old that was able to catch It, though I have known many who tried."

That Is, the Imagination can Image Paradise, but It Is not strong enough to break the world's grip on the soul, especially since missing the apparent chance to ride off to Eden means staying In the world and slowly forgetting about the Other World. This has happened to the child's mother, who has been out watching for the Stranger every Midsummer's day since she first met him. She has fallen away so far from her youthful self that she doesn't recognize the Stranger and chases him away. She cannot see the horse as it runs by her cottage, but the child can. When the child tells her that the horse has gone, she realizes that she is too old to do anything but live on In this world without hope of any quick escape, and the play ends.

Although the theme of imagination and Its natural extension Into the theme of art is obvious enough, Yeats chose to make It quite overt. As the Stranger and the child play in the cottage, they build the "good place," Paradise, on the floor using sticks and plates.

The child pretends that they are riding the black horse while the

Stranger sings "The Happy Townland"; by c re atin g of the good place

In his Imagination, the child is to some extent participating in its life. So he is able to understand what the Stranger is telling him, although his mother would not understand. (The bank clerk would 120 understand, having been there himself, but the memory would make him nervous.) Although the child's experience, which Is a sort of creative trance, cannot pull him out of the world altogether, It makes him an artist by giving him rapport with the Other World.

Unless, like the bank clerk, he rejects the life of Imagination for a safe job, he will become an artist or a mystic, or perhaps, to get back what he has lost with the Stranger's passing, a great lover o r dancer.

Lady Gregory missed this point entirely, thinking that a vision o f the O ther World would only make th is one more drab by comparison.

She wrote to Yeats, "I am not Bure about your Idea, for if the

Stranger wanted the child to be content with the strange things near him, why did he make the Image of the Garden of Paradise and ride 6 to it?" Yeats' reply, if he wrote one, Is lost, but the answer is obvious: the Stranger does not want the child to be happy with the world, or to become wholly part of It. He wants the child to know that imagination is the way to Paradise, and that Innocence and im agination, two q u a litie s th a t the world d estro y s, can make I t possible for him to become part of the Other World: by keeping an

Image of human perfection before him, he can work to overcome and transcend the ordinary world. The Stranger plays with him on the floor to make him an artist; if he is lucky, he may grow up to ride over the sea on a spirit horse, like Oisln, or sail into the West to Tir na n6g like Bran or Forgael. 121

"The Song of Wandering A engusvhlch became part of The Wind

Among the Reeds. Is a little more complex. This poem, read In

Isolation, seems to be a charming though rather baffling lyric; read

in the context of Yeats* work, it is a*collection of motifs that

retains Its charm but also carries a huge load of reference.

Basically, the poem Is an attempt to combine the theme of the artist

as quest-hero and the theme of love as a way to transcend the ordi­

nary world. It puts both themes into the language of the old myth­

ology by referring to Aengus (who is here a mortal man rather than

a god), a hazel-wand, and apple-blossoms. While Yeats was at It, he

slipped In a little alchemy by way of his Imagery of gold and silver.

Together, these themes and Images are a formidable knot of arcana; before I comment on the poem itself as a poem, I want to examine its various arcane elements separately.

Aengus, of course, Is the Celtic god of love, and when Yeats gave his character this name and set him In pursuit of a woman of the sfdhe he was clearly referring to the popular story of how Aengus got to be the god of love. Alslinge Aenguso. one of the best-known of the sagas, recounts how he had a vision one night of "The most 7 beautiful maiden in Ireland," who played a harp for him and then disappeared. Aengus got to be quite sick with love, and to cure him the Dagda, his father, set out to find the maiden. After an extensive 4 search she was identified as Caer Ibomeith, a girl who had the dis­ concerting habit of turning into a swan every other year. Aengus found her in that shape, married her (changing into a swan himself to do it), and joined her entourage of 150 Bwans linked in pairs by 122 silver chains. They lived happily ever after. Because of this story,

Aengus was always regarded as a patron of young lovers, a sort of 8 Irish Gandharva as Rees calls him; his token was usually the four birds who were bom out of his kisses and haunted the youths of 9 Erin. As the god of love, he appears several times in Yeats' poetry, most spectacularly in "Baile and Alllinn" where he changes the lovers into swans (the habit may have grown on him), and in The

Wanderings of Plain, where he takes Hanannan's place as the ruler of

Tir na n6g:

A b e a u tifu l young man dreamed w ith in A house of wattles, clay, and skin; One hand upheld his beardless chin, And one a sceptre flashing out Wild flames of red and gold and blue, Like to a merry wandering rout Of dancers leaping in the air; And men and la d ie s k n e lt them th e re And showed their eyes with teardrops dim, And with low murmurs prayed to him, And kissed the sceptre with red lips, And touched it with their finger-tips. (10)

Naturally, he appears most often in the earlier poems, since his story is best suited to the languorous imagery and occult symbolism that Yeats cultivated in books like The Wanderings of Oisin and The

Wind Among the Reeds. His only substantial appearance later on was

T^ie King of the Great Clock Tower. where he gives the Stroller h is r o le :

Then great Aengus spoke — 0 listen, for I speak his very words — 'On stroke of midnight when the old year dies, Upon th a t s tro k e , th e to llin g o f th a t b e l l , The Queen Bhall kiss your mouth, ' — his very words — Your Queen, my mouth, the Queen shall kiss my mouth. (11) 123

Here he is still the god of love, but, like the other Celtic gods

In Yeats' late work, has taken on new and terrifying qualities: It

Is he who sets up the bizarre love-death of the Stroller and the

Queen, as he had set up the deaths of Balle and Alllinn, but this tine there are no swans or silver chains to resolve love and death

Into a pretty little story.

In "The Song of Wandering Aengus" he behaves like a human fisherman; more exactly, he Is human, and mortal, this one time.

This Is not as much of a break with tradition as it might seem, at least not with the spirit of the tradition, since In the old stories the gods behave exactly like men and are often puzzled, understand­ ably, by what is going on around them. In any case, Aengus must have expected something strange to happen when he started fishing with a hazel wand. It seems likely that he was looking for inspira- 12 tion, perhaps as a poet, since the hazel was the tree of poets and the nine hazels of the Land of Promise contain the secrets of poetic 13 style In their nuts. This may be why Aengus hooked a berry to a thread instead of using a worm or a fly; actually, he is a rather unorthodox fisherman by Other World standards, since the fish of 14 wisdom g en erally inhab ited w e lls, not stream s, and was u su ally a 15 salmon, not a trout. But he has the right idea, since a fish caught in a hazel-wood Is likely to be sacred anyway. It is not really surprising, then, that the trout turns into a glimmering girl, since that is what Aengus is looking for. She is a kind of Celtic muse. If there Is any doubt about her identity, the apple-blossoms 124

In her hair remove It: as I have mentioned, apple-bloseoma vere the usual token that Other World spirits used to reveal themselves, and 16 were also a talisman that could lead a mortal man to the Other World.

That Is exactly what happens to Aengus: once the girl appears to him he seems to be translated to the Other World, chasing her through

"hollow lands and hilly lands," I.e., the Land-Under-Hill, and In

The Wanderings of Oisin (also The Shadowy Waters) over the sea as well:

.... now a lady rode like the wind With an apple of gold In her tossing hand; And a b e a u tifu l young man follow ed h er With quenchless gaze and fluttering hair, (17)

Y eats 1b a little coy about this scene in his notes, but admits 18 that the beautiful young man "may be Aengus."

But what exactly is he looking for? There seem to be two objects to his quest, both embodied in the girl and in his own traditional role as the Master of Love: the fulfillment of sexual desire, and poetic inspiration. The sexual side of the poem is obvious, c e rta in ly . Norman J e f f a r e s , as might be ex pected , empha­ sized this part of the complex of symbols by identifying the glim- 19 mering girl as Maud Gonne, who liked apple-blossoms; even without this help, the image of Aengus chasing a girl through "hollow" and

"hilly" lands, the female world of the sidhe. is not hard to under­ stand. But this sexual quest is something more, as It generally is

In Yeats's poems: when Aengus talks about "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun" he is combining the traditional

Other World talisman, the apple, with the alchemical symbol of perfection. The fusion of gold and silver, the solar (male) and 125 lunar (female) principles, was a symbol of completed being that 2° / Yeats used several times, often, of course, to describe Tlr na n6g: there are the silver fish singing about gold mornings or evenings In

"The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland," the sun and moon and golden and s ilv e r woods o f "The Happy Townland," or th e more su b tle linage of

The Wanderings of Olsln:

Men's hearts of old were drops of flame That from the saffron morning came, Or drops of silver joy that fell Out of the moon's pale twisted shell ,.. (21)

What Aengus has in mind, then, is not ordinary love but perfection, the sort of transcendence that Solomon and Sheba try for and that

Baile and Alllinn (with the help of Aengus the god) attain.

But there Is more. Aengus Is not only the Master of Love, but,

In this poem, an artist as well. The theme of art Is closely inter­ twined with the pursuit of love In this strange pattern of Images: the fish of wisdom, as I have mentioned earlier, is the source of poetic inspiration, and that, no doubt, is why Yeats often used fish and fishermen as an emblem for poetry, In, for example, "The Fisher­ man," "The Tower,'" or "Three Movements." The fact that Aengus is fishing is enough to establish him as an artist, or a poet. In this context, it Is Interesting to look at one of Yeats' occult adventures, which perhaps clinched his identification, at least in his own mind, of Aengus as an artist. In 1B98, between the first publication of

"The Song of Wandering Aengus" and its inclusion In The Wind Among the Reeds, he had a s e rie s of v isio n s, along w ith o ther members of 126 the Hermetic Order, and one of them, as reported In Virginia

Moore's The Unicom, was a vision of AenguB:

The nameless one led them through a 'writhing* thicket to a greensward yellow with buttercups, where girls In procession were carrying apple blossoms to a radiant being on a throne .... On his breast was a silver moon, and In his hand a sunflower. The visitors wished to see the heroes. When Yeats cried, "Deirdrel" a woman danced out amid doves and flower odors, her black hair floating. There followed Cuchulaln in a chariot, King Conchubar, the magician Fergus .... But who was he on the throne, with the cut right hand? Understanding that this god could not tell his name till he had marked foreheads with blood, Yeats and "D. D." went forward. Aengus Mac Lir? When they uttered this name, it seemed to be correct. His form brightened. In the end the group realized it was in the "World of Form," meaning the "plane of Art." After further adventures, Yeats 'banished as before,' (22)

Aside from the occult business of the blood, this vision is remarkably similar to the poem in many details, Including the apple blossoms and the joining of gold and silver. I think that it probably is, In fact, a sort of gloss on the poem, since visions of this kind are often Influenced by whatever the visionary has on his mind at the time, and Yeats may well have been thinking about his own version of

Aengus. If so, it underlines his conception of Aengus as an artist.

It is not, however, necessary to a reading of "The Song of

Wandering Aengus" as, in part, a poem about the writing of poetry.

Aengus is clearly going to the hazel-wood to look for Druidlc Inspir­ ation, and, In a way, he gets it when the fish transforms itself into a v isio n of id e a l beauty, Aengus* p u rsu it of th a t beauty, a quest fo r 127 both perfect love and perfect art, was, for Yeats, an emblem of the artist's constant longing for perfection. No self-respecting

Romantic poet Imagined that he could make his art out of the things of this world; rather, he had to transcend himself by writing about, and trying to live, an ideal life. It is fitting that Red Hanrahan wore out his life singing about the Other World that he could not find a second time, and that Aengus should grow old with wandering after the Ideal. Nothing less will do: If either contented himself with ordinary love and ordinary art, he would not be true to Yeats's vision of the artist's role.

I have emphasized the arcane elements In "The Song of Wandering

Aengus" because they are, In their way, a direct statement about the role of art, and because they combine the themes of perfection in art and love so thoroughly. However, it would not be fair to the poem to treat it as simply a collection of occult Images. It is one of Yeats's finest lyric poems, elegant and perfectly restrained, both

In its slow rhythms and precise language, and in Its intricate pattern of Images, which carry so much weight without breaking under

It. Even when a reader doesn't understand what all those Images are about, or exactly why those odd things happen, he can hardly miss the delicate melancholy tone that runs through the poem. It Is a perfect expression of the longing some people, Yeats among them, feel for another kind of life, one better than their own, which they cannot attain. Aengus' longing and the woman's grief in The Country of the Young are the same emotion: they know that a better world 128 exists, but they also know that they will never find it. Yeats borrows the name of a Celtic god for this poem, but the emotion he describes is entirely human, and he embodies that emotion perfectly, for once without the bathos that characterizes so much of The Wind

Among the Reeds.

Bathos Is also the main characteristic of The Shadowy Waters.

This poem (It Is not really a play) was Intended, like The Countess

Cathleen and The Player Queen, to be one of Yeats's major statements about his Ideals and principles, and a kind of centerpiece for his banquet of symbols. But all three works are failures: they are so workfed-over, revised, re-thought and rewritten that they lack any kind of spontaneity and are almost unreadable. They are like palimpsests on which the earlier writing has not been completely erased, and slips into the newer writing just enough to make it

Illegible. Nonetheless, The Shadowy Waters Is significant, unreadable as it Is, because it combines the themes of art and love with the structure of a literal Imram. It is, with the exception of The

Wanderings of Oisin and perhaps a few of the Cuchulaln plays, the most complete synthesis of the old mythology and Yeats' own symbolic vocabulary. It is also the climax of Yeats' early Romanticism, the most complete expression of his urge to escape life altogether by virtue of a purified will. 23 He apparently began The Shadowy Waters as early as 1883, so it Is, in a sense, one of his very first poems. He kept writing it, 129 or trying to write It, throughout the 1880*8 and 1890's, but was

unable, In spite of many efforts, to figure out a way of ending It,

In these early versions, Forgael Is not entirely human but a deml-god, acting In an uneasy alliance with the Fomolre. The action, as In the final version, takes place at sea, because Forgael Is looking for the "ultimate West," I.e ., Tlr na nOg. The action Is complicated by his struggles with the Fomolre. who turn on him, and by the Intrusion of vast patterns of symbols drawn from the occult reading Yeats was doing at the time. Underneath the swirling surface complexities, though, there Is a persistent theme In these early versions, one that continues, muted, In the last form of the poem: Forgael is a solipsist, and Is not altogether happy about It. He Is In league with the Fomolre because they represent the forces of chaos and essential anarchy; like Martin in The Unicorn from the Stars, Forgael wants to destroy all appearances to get at the essential nature of the world, which is hidden under the order and "light" that the

Tuatha De Danaan have, like Blake's Urizen, Imposed on creation. But, like Martin, he Is deluded. He cannot understand the order of the world because he is, like any solipsist, Imprisoned in himself and unable to perceive anything else. Yeats expressed this idea elo­ quently in a prose synopsis of 1896, in which he compares Forgael to a man living in a tower of polished black stones, each reflecting his 24 face. Not surprisingly, Yeats could not think of a suitable end for the poem, and was able to do so only by transforming Forgael Into an artist and a lover, a man who Is still separated from the world, 130 but who does not despair because he is more interested In joining the life of the Other World than rejoining the partial life of this one.

The final version (not counting an "acting" text), which is the one that I shall use, for the most part, in this brief analysis, 25 begins with a prefatory poem (originally a speech) that estab- / * llshes the quest for Tir na nOg as the main action of the poem.

Yeats, addressing the sjfdhe. plays on the tradition that T^r na n6g can be any place at all but still is separate from us, so that it is also, in a sense, very distant:

How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows? I only know that a ll we know comes from you, And that you come from Eden on flying feet. Is Eden f a r away, or do you hide Prom human thought, as hares and mice and coneys That run before the reaping-hook and lie In the last ridge of the barley? Do our woods And winds and ponds cover more quiet woods, More shining winds, more star-glimmering ponds? Is Eden o u t of time and out of space? And do you gather about us when p ale lig h t Shining on water and fallen among leaves, And winds blowing from flowers, and whirr of feathers And the green quiet, have uplifted the heart? (26)

Yeats here, in passing, mentions that all knowledge comes from the

Other World: in particular the knowledge of art, which Forgael, through his harp, has been given by Aengus. No doubt Yeats, in a concession to the universal connotations of "Eden," used it rather than "l£r na nOg" as the name of the Earthly Paradise; that they are the same place is clear enough in the second prefatory poem, 131

"The Harp of Aengus," where the image of the apple, appropriate to both, defines it as a land not of this world (although it sounds quite a bit like Byzantium):

Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs, And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite Awake unsleeping fires ... (27)

This little poem does more: it establishes Aengus1 harp, part of Yeats1 own myth, as a leading symbol for The Shadowy Waters, and / / weaves its strings into the traditional story of Mldhir and Etaln

(which 1 s h a ll discuss in connection w ith The Two K ings). The h arp , which uses seven of Aengus' own hairs for strings, is obviously a symbol of both art and love: art because it was the tool of bards 28 and m usicians, love because i t Is made from Aengus* h a ir. As such, it is more powerful than the sun and the moon, as Yeats says 29 in terms like those of "The Song of Wandering Aengus." It has enough power to keep even Irish sailors in line and to woo a proud woman not kindred of one's soul. Forgael has the harp, and it makes him an artist of remarkable power, a sort of magus among bards.

The harp is not Forgael*s only link with this role of supreme 30 artistry. The Shadowy WaterB is based on no particular legend, so

Forgael is not recognizable as a Celtic hero like Fergus or Cuchulain; however, his name inevitably suggests that of Forgoll, a famous 31 legendary poet, so the name is obviously intended to suggest that he is a bard. Besides, he has all the problems that artists custom­ arily have in Yeats's work, or that of other Romantic poets. No one 132 understands him. The poem opens with the sailors plotting mutiny because they cannot understand his visionary quest for Tir na n6g; they are men of this world, and they want only to return to It so that they can drink up their booty and go whoring. Even Albrlc, the mate, who Is loyal to Forgael, Is puzzled about why he is trying to sail out of the world:

What riches can you find in this waste sea Where no ship s a i l s , where nothing t h a t 's a liv e Has ever come but those man-headed birds, Knowing I t fo r the w orld 's end? (32)

The man-headed birds, of course, are the souls of the dead flying to Tir na n6g. and Forgael uses them to steer by. It Is not entirely surprising that the crew think he is crazy. His quest is evidently not one that ordinary men can share, and, appropriately, the sailors

(and Albrlc) abandon him at the first chance they get. They will return to their ordinary lives, and miss their chance to live In

Tir na n6g If, Indeed, such ordinary men ever really had a chance a t a l l .

In the meantime, Forgael has captured Dectora, a woman who has the same name as Cuchulain's mother. (This is one of several tantal­ izing echoeB of traditional characters that run through the poem.)

Dectora Is, at first, as worldly as the sailors, and tries to bribe them Into killing Forgael, but a dose of his harp drives them away and causes Dectora to fall in love with him. As the poem ends, / / Forgael and Dectora are approaching Tir na nOg, having purified themselves of all worldly desires (symbolized by the sailors) and 4 133 united themselves by perfect love. The last two speeches, crammed full of traditional images of the sldhes' transformations, mark their entry into the Other World (In spirit, at least), a self­ transformation that comes with the consummation of their love as

Dectora crowns him:

Dectora: The mist has covered the heavens, and you and 1 Shall be alone forever. We two — this crown — I half remember. It has been in my dreams. Bend lower, 0 king, that I may crown you with it. 0 flower of the branch, 0 bird among the leaves, 0 silver fish that my two hands have taken Out of the running Btream, 0 morning star, Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn Upon the misty border of the wood, Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair, For we w ill gaze upon this world no longer.

Forgael [gathering Dectora1s hair about him]: Beloved, having dragged the net about us, And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal; And that old harp awakens of itself To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams, That have had dreams for father, live in us. (33)

Except for the language, this might be the sort of thing that lovers in the old sagas say to each other as they turn into swans and fly to

Tir na n6g. It is clear, though, that Yeats was not influenced directly at this point by the old stories, but by Vllllers de l'Isle

Adam's Axel, which had long been one of his "sacred books." It is something of a critical tradition to compare the endings of the two works, in which the lovers (who had just recently nearly killed each other) go off into a quasi-Wagnerian love-death and transcend the world entirely. The works are certainly alike in their glorification of heroic passions and their disdain for ordinary life; they are 134 alike, too, in their occult references and oblique manifestations of the supernatural. However, they are different in a crucial way: it is not at all clear that Axel and Sara are reaching any eternal consummation, in spite of anything that Master Janus might say or hint or suggest, but it is certainly clear that Forgael and Dectora are in the process of becoming immortal spirits, part of the same world as Baile and Aillinn. It would not even be strictly accurate to say that they go through a complete love-death, since (again like

Baile and Aillinn) death for them is only a change of worlds.

The Other World that they are entering is obviously the tradi­ tio n a l T^r na n6g . b u t t h is poem re -d e fin e s th e tr a d itio n to some extent. For Yeats, the most Important thing about the Earthly

Paradise is not that it is earthly but that it Is Paradise. In the

Imrama. Tir na n6g is often (though not always) presented, rather naively, as an eternal amusement park; for Yeats, as for Forgael and Dectora, it is the summation of all earthly life, but earthly life transformed through Intensity of passion into an eternal state.

As I have shown before, the same idea underlies the Imrama themselves, but Yeats is much more insistent about it. He makes sure, by the constant references to and echoes of the old mythology, that no one could mistake his land at the world's end for any Paradise but T^r ✓ na nOg. yet he also makes sure that no one could mistake his version of it for anyone else's. He injects so much of his own thought and his own characteristic imagery that Tir na n6g sounds entirely

Yeatsian, as if he had invented it himself. He manages to do this 4 135 without being In any way false to the tradition; at the same time, he In su res th a t The Shadowy W aters, w hatever I t s o th e r f a u l t s , does not read like a slavish Imitation of the old Imrama.

The passion that unites Forgael and Dectora Is the passion that

Yeats Insisted on as the essential quality of Unity of Being. They are transfigured and "grow Immortal" because of the intensity and singleness of their love, as Solomon and Sheba tried to do, and so answer the question that the prefatory poems ask about the location of Eden: it Is both far away and within every man and woman, since anyone can reach it who can attain Unity of Being. In this case, love created by the power of art (as symbolized by Aengus* harp) transforms Forgael and Dectora Into immortal beings and sends them off the end of the world.

But Yeats did not confine himself to this Image of self-

/ / transformation. Following tradition, he put Tir na nOg in the West, and made the journey there a test that only Forgael and Dectora can pass. Albrlc and the sailors fall the test because they persist in their love of this world. And, as In the traditional accounts,

Tir na nOg is an Island where life is perfect. Dectora describes it

In quite traditional, though abstract, terms:

... some island where the life of the world Leaps upward, as If all the streams o' the world Had run into one fountain. (34)

The fountain, by the way, Is not only an expressive Image but a quite traditional one: the fish of wisdom and the hazels of Inspiration were generally associated with a well or a spring, and this Image 136 recurs In Yeats* work several times, for example in AT the Hawk * a

Well, where Cuchulain (a man basically of this world) falls to achieve immortality by drinking from the sacred spring,

Forgael, much earlier in the poem, uses exactly complementary

Images, fire to her water, to describe ifr na n6g;

Where th e world ends The mind i s made unchanging, fo r i t finds Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope, The flagstone under all, the fire of fires, The roots o f th e w orld. (35)

These lines suggest the "holy fire" of the Byzantium poems, but in

The Shadowy Waters Yeats was thinking more about love than art, since

Forgael has not grown too old to love and, since he is such a success with his harp, he never will. A speech that Yeats gave him in a slightly earlier (1900) version makes the concept of the fire of the Other World a l i t t l e c le a re r:

The love of all under the light of the sun Is but brief longing, and deceiving hope, And bodily tenderness; but love is made Imperishable fire under the boughs Of chrysoberyl and beryl and chrysolite, And chrysoprase and ruby and sardonyx. (36)

This sounds even more like "Sailing to Byzantium" — it lacks only the golden bird to make it a jeweller's dream of heaven — but Forgael has nothing like eternal stasis in mind. The "imperishable fire" he longs for is an eternity of passion. If, as I think, "Sailing to

Byzantium" is a deliberate reversal of this early ideal, it is different only because the old man's wish is to become perfect without being passionate, rather than to reach immortality through a perfect, 137

transfiguring emotion. In both the earlier and the later poems,

the shadows of this world give way to the transforming fire of the

Other World.

The dance, as always,' is part of this transfiguring passion, although Yeats, through Forgael, mentions it only once, Forgael is daydreaming about the woman (who turns out to be Dectora, not a woman of the sfdhe) who w ill dance with him and make him immortal:

I shall find a woman, One of the Ever-living, as I think — One of the Laughing People — and she and I Shall light upon a place in the world's core, Where passion grows to be a changeless thing, Like charmed apples made of chrysoprase, Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysolite; And there, in juggleries of sight and sense, Become one movement, energy, delight, Until the overburthened moon is dead. (37)

In this passage the dance and the inevitable jewels complement each other: both are eternal, both static but in opposing ways since the charmed apples, presumably, stay always where they are and the dance is motionless only because it turns in on itself forever.

The Shadowy Waters does not have much to say about the dance, but It is there, and recognizable as the dance of the later poetry and plays: the "world's core" is evidently a great deal like the "bobbins" on which all time is bound and wound in The King of the Great Clock

Tower.

Art and love complement each other in The Shadowy Waters like the charmed apples and the dance, each of them part pf eternity. The same balance e x is ts in a l l the poems Yeats w rote e a rly in h is career 138 about Tir na nOg; in poems like "The Song of Wandering Aengus,” for example, there is no sign of the split between them that occurs in "Sailing to Byzantium." And, of course, the tradition of the

Earthly Paradise as Yeats found it in Irish mythology is especially / x appropriate to such a vision, since Tir na nOg is both a land of immortal pleasures and the source of all wisdom. Yeats addresses

/ the sidhe in the prefatory poem to The Shadowy Waters as both the source of joy and the source of wisdom:

I only know that a ll we know comes from you, And that you come from Eden on flying feet.

The dance th a t s lip s in to these lin e s does not cancel out th e wisdom of the sidhe. since they have both joy and wisdom, and are equally the ideal of artists and lovers.

The entire complex of themes that Yeats used to describe the

Other World is present in the mythology, and present in his poems as well. I have emphasized sexual love and art in this chapter, but the dance is equally prominent in old stories and comes into its own in late work like The King of the Great Clock Tower. Old age as the main thing lacking in Tir na n6g is always implicit in the images of eternal youth, and is explicit as the main theme, or part of the complex main theme, of The Wanderings of Oisin. Besides, in all of these works Yeats was trying to bring the old mythology back to life by using it as the vehicle for presenting his own major concerns: it was his good luck that made Tir na nOg both a token of the culture he wanted to revive and a perfect symbol for his own deepest interests. 139

So far, I have taken what might be called the old orthodox view / / of Tir na nOg. and discussed some of the works in which Yeats makes

It a place to be desired above everything else. But, in both the mythology and his own work, there is an alternate point of view: sometimes the claims of the Other World and the claims of this world c o n f lic t, and a man o r a woman, forced to choose between them, d is ­ covers that the choice is not as easy as it might seem. For Yeats nothing is really perfect, even perfection, and some of his charac­ ters, most notably Oisln, choose this life with all its problems rather than an eternity of bliss. This is not to imply, of course, that’Yeats ever turned away from his ideal of human perfection: but the works discussed in the next section Bhow how even this ideal was tempered by Yeats' inability to make anything too simple. 140

Fart Five: Paradise Lost

The call of the Other World Is attractive, certainly, but not everyone who hears it goes over the sea, and some who reach the Land of Promise return to earth. The sidhe and their Paradise represent human perfection, but, by an Inescapable paradox, this perfection Is in itself Inhuman because humanity is flawed. Human suffering and the certainty of death define life in this world just as the fulfill­ ment of desire and immortality define life in the Other World; suf­ fering and death may not seem Indispensable, and certainly the Tuatha don't seem to miss them, but losing them means entering a kind of life essentially alien to our normal experience. The ideal of human per*4 fection that Yeats tried to embody in his work is not a simple one, then, since It necessarily Involves some loss, even though the things that are lost are precisely the things that made him eager to trans­ cend human l i f e .

There are a few characters, both in Yeats's poetry and in the tradition, who prefer this world to the Other World because they will not leave anything human behind them, even suffering and death. In traditional stories such people are presented as fools, but Yeats' a ttitu d e i s more complex. The poems and the sto ry which I w ill look at here are all earlier than "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" and, in effect, make up part of that dialogue. There is, as these works make clear, something to be said for this world after all, and The

Two Kings and The Wanderings of Oisln say it: Edain sends Mldhir 141

(or whoever he Is) back to the fairy mound because she can find, she

thinks, a better love from a mortal husband; and Olsln, even In Tir

na n6g. Is unable to shake off his longing to see Finn and the Flanna

again. Their memory Is more important to him than is Nlamh; she Is

beauty personified, a perfect being, but Oisin is human and cannot,

or will not, free himself from his memories. Tir na nOg usually

« wipes out one'8 memories of this world, but Olsln's love for it 1b

too deep to be destroyed, and the things that stir his memories are,

like the spear that floats up to the Island of Dancing, tokens of

s u ffe rin g .

The first of the poems that deal with the loss of Paradise,

The Two Kings, Is a much later work than the poems I have discussed 1 so far in this chapter. It was written In 1912, well after Yeats

had gotten away from the purple breath and long white languorous forms

of the Celtic Twilight. Naturally, his treatment of the mythical lore

Is different: there is almost none of the arcane symbolism of The

Wind Among the Reeds, and none of his sentimental longing for the

Other World as a means of escape from life's problems. If such a word could be applied to a poem about spirits appearing In the form of white stags and battling mythical heroes, It could be called a realistic poem. The relationship of the Other World to ours is treated quite objectively; Edain has to make a choice between them, and she chooses this world. Her reasons foreshadow the Self's arguments In "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" though they are somewhat different, and, like the Self's arguments, they would be out of place 142

in Yeats's early poetry. Nonetheless, as I w ill show, The Two Kings has a great deal of affinity with The Wanderings of Olsln. because

the vague longing Olsln feels for Ireland Is essentially an Inartic­ ulate version of Edaln's and the Self's affirmation of life In this

World.

The Two Kings i s Y eats' r e - te llln g , more o r le s s , o f Tochmarc

Etafne. "The Wooing of Etafne," one of the greatest Irish sagas.

("Edain," by the way, is merely Yeats' eccentric spelling of her name.) In the original story, Midhir, a great king of the s^dhe. fell in love with Edaln in the Other World; Aengus also loved her but she preferred Midhir. (This, of course, Is directly opposite to

Yeats' version in The Shadowy Waters.) Midhir's wife, Fuamach, was jealous of Edaln, so she turned her into a golden fly and blew her away by raising a wind; after wandering for years In this form she was found by Aengus, who cared for her and put her in a fancy glaBs cage (cf Yeats's "tower of glass"). Fuamach called up a wind again and blew her away. Aengus finally killed Fuamach (he had the power to k ill even the immortal sfdhe). but Edaln was blown a ll over

Ireland until she landed In a cup of wine, was drunk by a woman, and so Incarnated as a mortal woman. In time she married Eochald, the

High King. While he was gone from Tara on the High King's circuit,

Midhir, having discovered Edaln's Identity after a long search, possessed Eochald's brother A illill, and while Edain nursed the sick man Midhir appeared to her and wooed her. She agreed to return to

Tfr na nOg, but only if that was all right with Eochald. It wasn't, 143 so Midhir appeared again as a mysterious warrior and challenged

Eochaid to a game of chess* His prize for winning was to put his arms around Edaln. He won (of course), and Eochaid called in his army to surround Midhir and Edaln, just in case Midhir had something embarrassing in mind. But the two changed into the Inevitable swans and flew away, to the great chagrin of Eochaid and his army.

Yeats' version in The Two Kings is strikingly different, and the differences, which he aBBumed would be immediately apparent to

Irish readers, are the point of the poem. One change, made silently, is that Yeats does not identify the Other World spirit, the "man who had unnatural majesty," who comes to this world to woo Edaln. Most commentators (those who do not simply ignore the poem) have assumed that he is Midhir; however, as Lester Conner has pointed out in his

Yeats Dictionary, he could just as well be Aengus, especially since 3 Yeats always associated Aengus and Edain. In any case, the effect of this subtle change is to focus the poem's meaning on Edain: by stripping the Other World spirit of a definite identity, Yeats turns him into a mere voice talking to Edain about the attractions of Tjfr na nOg. Another change from the legend is the first scene of the poem, in which King Eochaid struggles with and overcomes a super- 4 natural white stag. Yeats invented this episode. The stag, of course, is Aengus-Midhir, seeking to loosen Edain's ties to this world by eliminating her mortal husband. (The s£dhe can be quite unpleasant when human beings are in their way.) But Eochaid defeats the spirit: the force of human order, personified by the High King, / momentarily overcomes the force of nature that the sidhe represent, 144 just as Edaln personifies the power of this life to hold onto its own Identity at times against the pressure of the Other World. These victories (If, indeed, Edaln's decision is a victory) are a rare affirmation in Yeats's work of the human ability to overcome the power and allure of the Other World.

The most significant change from the traditional story is Edain's rejection of the spirit and the Immortal love he offers her. In the original story she is happy to go with him; being a good wife she wants to have Eochaid's permission, but when she doesn't get it she leaves this world anyway. The saga assumes that the love present in the Other World is greater than the love of this world, and will override it whenever there is a conflict. Not only do the s£dhe have

Immortality and great power on their side, but also an intensity of passion that mortals cannot attain. Yeats, of course, felt much the same way. But there is a counter-argument for the love of this world, and Yeats, through Edaln, makes it in this poem. Aengus-Mldhlr makes the usual pitch about the splendors of Tir na n6g. in an abbreviated form, using the familiar Yeatsian image of the dance:

What happiness Can lovers have that know their happiness Must end at the dumb stone? But where we build Our sudden palaces in the still air Pleasure Itself can bring no weariness, Nor can time waste the cheek, nor is there foot That has grown weary of the wandering dance ... (5)

Edaln replies with a surprising idea, common enough for other writers but unusual for Yeats: 145

"How should I love," I answered, "Were lc not that when the dawn has lit my bed And shown my husband sleeping there, X have sighed, 'Your strength and nobleness w ill pass away'? Or how should love be worth its pains were It not That when he has fallen asleep within my arms, Being wearied out, I love in man the child? What can they know of love th a t do not know She builds her nest upon a narrow ledge Above a windy p recip ice?" (6)

Edaln loves Eochaid, or, more exactly, loves this life because it

is mortal: the fact of death makes life precious to her in a way

that the sldhe, being immortal, cannot understand. (They fall to

understand Oisin for similar reasons.) It is not just the Other

World spirit she is rejecting,but the whole idea that the Other World

« is superior to this one in every way.

Such a point of view is certainly eccentric in the context of Yeats' work, but it is compelling. The Two Kings is important mainly because Edaln presents this argument: it is the argument that

is compelling, not the poem. For that matter, the argument is weakened, dramatically at least, by its context in the poem, since, as Aengus-Midhlr points out, she w ill return to him anyway when she dies. In a practical sense, she is merely prolonging her life on earth to squeeze the most life possible out of both worlds. But, even though her argument falls a little flat within the poem itself, she does become, for a moment, a spokesman for the claims of this world.

Her argument appears in a slightly different form in "Dhoya," a story that has been even more solidly ignored than The Two Kings. 146

The story's plot is Yeats' own spin-off from the Book of Invasions;

It concerns Dhoya, a more-or-less human giant who lives in a pre­ historic Ireland empty of all other human inhabitants. (This is ✓ before the Milesians came and banished the Tuatha underground.) Since there is no one to talk to, he spends his time brooding and torturing animals. At last a beautiful, shadowy woman appears to him while he

1b holding a hazel-bush (naturally), and moves into his cave with him. They live for some years in great happiness, until a spirit from the Other World comes to take her back. Dhoya stru g g les w ith him, wins, and forces him to disappear: this episode is strikingly like King Eochaid's struggle with the stag in The Two Kings. The spirit returns and plays chess with Dhoya: this episode is borrowed from the original tale of Midhir and Edain. Of course the spirit wins very quickly (Dhoya has not had much practice), and takes the / / / woman of the sidhe back to Tir na nOg. Dhoya goes mad and kills himself, in the best Romantic fashion, by riding a wild black horse into the sea.

The sto ry has l i t t l e to recommend i t as a work of a r t , although it is mildly interesting as an example of Yeats's early fantasy-life.

T. R. Henn even links Dhoya with Oisin and Cuchulain as a "dream- 7 image" of Yeats as a wild passionate man. What really matters is the faery-woman's reason for leaving l£r na n8g, and putting up with

Dhoya;

Suddenly she saw him and with a burst of laughter flung her arms round his neck, crying, "Dhoya, I have left ray world far off. My people — on the floor of the lake they are dancing and singing, 147

and on the islands of the lake; always happy, always young, always without change. I have left them for thee, Dhoya, for they cannot lo v e. Only the changing, and moody, and angry, and weary can love. I am beautiful; love me, Dhoya. Do you hear me? I left the places where they dance, Dhoya, for thee!1' (8)

What she means by saying that the s£dhe cannot love is something

that is hard to describe, since l£r na nOg is the land of perfect

love. But it is clear enough that, to her as to Edain, Tfr na nOg

is static while love needs change and death. She can love only

th in gs th a t w ill vanish , Dhoya fo r example, and needB sorrow to perfect her love.

Since Yeats wrote "Dhoya" at roughly the same time as The

Wanderings of P la in , some of the woman's com plaints should become

c le a re r when I examine th a t poem; in any case, the claim s th a t she and Edaln make for life in this world are an important counter to

the claims of Paradise. Yeats never fully agreed with them since he was unwilling to imagine that this world can contain any state more desirable than the intense passion of the Other World, but he was constantly tom between his longing for human perfection and his fear that such a state might not be fully human after all.

Eventually,by the mechanism of the Phases of the Moon, he reached a compromise: the soul takes on life after life and grows more p e rfe c t, but cannot e n tire ly escape in c a rn a tio n , and so remains human.

But that solution came late in his career. In the early works built out of Celtic mythology he was unable to resolve the conflict between the two orders of reality; Instead of resolving the conflict, 148

he built the most elaborate of his early poems on the story of a man who Is destroyed because he cannot decide which world he belongs to.

The point of The Wanderings of Olsln Is, In spite of all the machinery

that surrounds It, quite simple: to reach a state of human perfection you have to give up human sorrows, and that means giving up a certain

amount of your humanity. Fain, suffering and death are as much a

part of human life as any of Its more pleasant aspects, such as love

and the power to create art. The s£dhe are perfect, but cannot under­

stand human sorrow because they cannot experience it; if a man wants

to become like them, he has to forget sorrow too, and with It he has

to give up the nobility that makes it possible to overcome suffering.

Yeats chose Olsln as the main character for his poem, I think,

because his place in tradition illustrates this concept perfectly.

When the poem begins, Olsln and his father, Finn MacCumhail, have

suffered the loss of everything that mattered to them in life. For many years they and their flanna (militia) had kept Ireland in order,

and, by winning one battle after another and performing all kinds of marvelous deeds, both natural and supernatural, had won greater honor than anyone else in Ireland. Since they were warriors In a

society of warriors, they wanted nothing more than the companionship

of heroes, the joy of victory in'battle, and the music of their bards.

In other words, they were the Irish equivalent of the Welsh Arthur

and his court, the heroes who kept the land in good order and

enjoyed doing it; but, like Arthur, Finn was betrayed, fought a

great battle, won an empty victory, and saw everything he had built 149

up destroyed. Arthur at least got away decently to Avalon (i.e., *■ / Emhaln Abhlach, Tir na nOg), but Finn was left to wear out his life wandering around Ireland with a diminishing band of aging followers,

remembering the past and watching his world decay. It was at this

point that Niamh appeared and added to his sorrows by carrying off * * Olsln to Tir na nOg.

Finn and his men are, in Irish tradition, the ideal type of human nobility, and, in their end, of suffering borne heroically.

But, by going to the Other World, Olsin gave up both sorrow and nobility, reasonably expecting that an eternity of bliss would be compensation for his partial loss of humanity. Of course it would have been if, in fact, he had been willing to give up his part in ✓ K' human suffering. But he asked too much of Tir na nOg; he wanted to be entirely perfect and entirely human as well. He came back to

Ireland to re-visit the battlefields of the Flanna. and, in renewing his contact with this world, lost touch with the Other World. As a punishment for his attempt to straddle both orders of reality, he became an old man, suffering indeed but not heroic, rather "a sport unto children" as he says in Yeats's poem, a man who has lost every­ thing, even human dignity.

Oisin is central to the tradition in another way, and must have appealed to Yeats because of his role as the last representa­ tive of the Heroic Age. When Yeats first began to write poetry, in the 1880's, he was full of the spirit of the Irish Revival, and planned to write a tremendous epic cycle that would include stories 150 9 for every century of Ireland's history. The Wanderings of Plain was to be the first part written of this great cycle; the rest of it t like the series of tales he planned to begin with Balle and

Allllnn, never materialized, but the scope of this plan Indicates how seriously Yeats took himself as a national poet. It also shows how central Oisln's story is to the traditional history of Ireland: when he returned from Tir na nOg he met St. Patrick, and, aside from the polite Gaoilte, was the only man left to argue for the pagan order of the world. The meeting of Olsln and Patrick has long been thought o f as th e d e c isiv e moment in (legendary) h is to ry when the old order dissolved and a new one, a rule of monasteries, began.

Further, Olsln himself can be seen s b a figure of Ireland

Itself, the nation cut off from Its original culture and decaying into a foreign one, losing Its distinctive character. Yeats cer­ tainly presented him this way, and made him stand for the old mythology that bound the Irish to their own land and gave every rock and h ill a unique history. At the same time, thought Yeats was first beginning to write elaborate poems and stories under the influence of Symbolism and his own occult studies, and was beginning, perhaps unconsciously, to form his unique pattern of imagery for human perfection. As a result of all these swirling influences, and Yeats' attempt to work as much into the poem as he possibly could, it is confused and overly elaborate. It is also hard to discuss fully, since its political, symbolic, and personal qualities clash with each other and partly cancel each other out. In this discussion, then, I will concentrate 151

on those characteristic patterns of Imagery concerning sexual love,

the dance, art and old age that continued to embody Yeats's Ideals

and fears through the rest of his life. At the risk of somewhat

misrepresenting the poem, I shall discuss the tradition of Olsln,

and the various occult readings of the poem, only Insofar as they

illuminate what Yeats waB trying to do with the tradition of the

Earthly Paradise.

Olsln as a symbol of the dead Ireland was also a figure of

opposition to Christianity and the abstract life it offers; neces­

sarily, he embodied that warrlor-code which found its supreme joy

in the endless battles and celebrations of Tir na n6g. Such an opposition was important to Yeats, especially when he was young, since he believed that Unity of Being is something that flows from

the perfection of one's own w ill, and that it directly transforms one's life into a perfect life in the terms of this world: he had no use for grace or an abstract Heaven. He must, then, have appre­ ciated Oisin's quarrels with St. Patrick; in some traditional accounts of their meeting, they spit at each other like two aged cats, and Oisin, while not Impressive as a theologian, always gets the better of the argument. He insists, constantly, on heroism as a means of transcending one's human lim itations, and boasts that Finn and the Fianna are, as perfect heroes, stronger than God;

Were my son Oscur and God Hand to hand on Cnoc-na-bh-Fiann, I f I saw my son down, X would say that God was a strong man. (10) 152

No wonder Patrick is upset. Throughout the famous "Dialogue of Olsln

and Patrick" (Agallamh Olsln agus Phatralc). Olsln talks about the

delights of earthly life, even though he can experience them only In

memory. He d escrib es F in n 's fa v o rite th in g s, w hich'are presumably

his own as well:

The warbling of the blackbird of Letter Lee, The wave of Rugbraldhe lashing the shore; The bellowing of the ox of Magh-maoln, And the lowing of the calf of Gleann-da-mhall.

The resounding of the chase of Sllabh c-Crot, The noise of the fawns round Sllabh Cua; The seagulls* scream on Iorrus yonder. Or the screech of the ravens over the battle-field.

The tossing of the hulls of the barks by the wave, The y e ll of th e hounds a t Drumlish; The cry of Bran at Cnoc-an-alr, Or th e murmur of the stream s about Sllabh Mis. (1 1 )

For Olsln, the Other World is simply an extension of such pleasant

aspects of this one, where sensuous delights and heroism (he likes

battles as well as blackbirds).are alive forever. Patrick, of course,

disapproves, and keeps reminding Olsln that Finn and the rest of the

Flanna. for all their victories and noble generosity, are in hell.

He suggests that Olsln pray more and boast less so that he can avoid

the same fate. Olsln is not Impressed, and thinks that Finn would

overthrow God if He had the nerve to put him In hell. He Is also not

Impressed with Patrick and his Church, since the clerics do nothing

but drone miserably all day long; he thinks that such a life is so

inferior to the heroic life that even Patrick would abandon God If Finn were still alive: 153

Hadst thou been In company w ith the Fenians, 0 cleric of the priests and bells; Thou wouldst not give heed to God, Or to the attending on clerics and schools. (12)

It la not surprising that Patrick falls to make much of a dent In

Olsln's self-confident paganism. Had YeatB been listening to them,

Patrick with his advice about repentance, mortification and Hell would have left him equally cold. Like Olsln, he wanted the Other

World to be an extension of this one, and not a place where white- robed spirits sing hosannas and meditate on purity. In a simplistic way, Yeats saw the Christian Heaven as something like that. In his essay on Morris, who had himself written many Interminable romances about the Earthly Paradise, Yeats found the terms he needed to sum up the conflict he saw between the Christian and pagan Ideals of

P aradise;

The early Christians were of the kin of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree, and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he [Morris] was of the kin of the Well and of the Green Tree and he saw an E arthly P aradise. (13)

Morris himself called The Wanderings of Oisin "my kind of poetry," and, according to Yeats, would have said more except that he saw 14 some decorated iron lamp-posts and attacked them in a frenzy.

Whatever else It may be about, The Wanderings of Olsln is about the Green Tree, "The desire of ardent life" as Yeats in another 15 essay calls Olsln's feeling for the Other World, the life of this world made perfect. Yeats makes this point most clearly in his

Preface to Lady Gregory's God and Fighting Men (a re-telling of the 154

Finn cycle), where he compares the mixed heroism and piety o£ the

Arthurian legends to the pure worldly heroism of the Flanna. and

gives what I consider to be a definitive explanation of why Olsln / / and other heroes of the Imrama seek Tir na nOgt

Every now and then some noble knight builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and joyful knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But when Olsln or some kingly forerunner — Bran, son of Febal, or the like — rides or sails In an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but looks for a more delighted companionship, or to be in love with faceB that will never fade. No thought of any life greater than that of love, and the companionship of those that have drawn their swords upon the darkness of the world, ever troubles their delight in one another as it troubles Iseult amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles. (16)

Love, companionship, and immortality, a ll of it without boring questions of sin and repentance: what more could any hero want?

And all of this, though given by the Tuatha. comes ultimately from * ✓ a man's own struggle with himself. No one reaches Tir na nOg by humility; rather, a hero has to pass many tests, endure a long journey, and conquer many temptations to turn aside before he can prove himself worthy of immortal life. Most of all, he has to be in harmony with himself, in the state Yeats called Unity of Being, to enjoy that life; otherwise, his attempts to transcend the normal life of humanity w ill destroy him.

This is what happens to Oisin. He wants not only the highest joys possible, but also a share of human sorrow. They are not compat- * * lble, at least in Tir na nOg. and it is inevitable that he should 155

fall to hold on to his immortality. Because he does not free himself

from this world (In spite of Niamh's earnest efforts to reform him),

he lst for Yeats, a figure of mankind fallen away from perfection,

an Irish Everyman who Is not saved. This attitude Is apparent in

his famous letter to Katherine Tynan (6 Feb 1889):

The Monthly speaks of another review of Olsln. I hope Father Russell [AE] w ill have one — "Olsln" needs an interpreter* There are three Incompatible things which man Is always seeking — Infinite feel­ ing, Infinite battle, infinite repose — hence the three Islands. (17)

Olsln represents "man," this time as an Irish Faust; a little more

specifically, he represents man as he Is In this world when he Is a

part of this world, and, for all his grandiose seeking after perfec­

tion, never understands what human perfection is. That Is, Olsln never achieves Unity of Being,never transcends himself by means of a visionary insight, and so is unable to appreciate the Other World.

He is unlike Baile and Aillinn, Forgael and Dectora, or even Rlbh,

Michael Robartes and the rest of Yeats's mystics, including himself

In the Tower. All of these men and women transform themselves through passion, either sexual love or a more abstract yearning for God: having achieved Unity of Being, they "grow immortal" because they are no longer of this world. Unity of Being Is just as alien to this world as suffering is to the Other World. But Olsln (like Hanrahan) / / does not enter Tir na nOg this way or, so to speak, qualify himself for its life. He is merely carried there. All he has to do is hold on to Niamh (this is not very difficult) while the spirit horse 156 carries him over the sea. He does not earn the life he Is given In

Yeats's version (he does have to fight for It In Comyn's version), and, having reached Tir na n6g so easily, Is never more than a tourist there.

This much of The Wanderings of Olsln Is quite clear, but not much else Is clear at all. As I have mentioned, Yeats over-loaded the poem with arcane symbolism, and gave It an air of vague allegory.

Later, he was In the habit of explaining the symbolism In different ways, according to his concerns of the moment. As a result, the 18 "Interpreter" Yeats wanted has never come forward, though there have, been several critics who have attempted readings. AE, as Yeats had hoped, made such an attem pt, but only managed to make the poem

, 19 seem even more confusing. Richard Ellmann has made I t an auto- 20 biographical poem, and Yeats himself, when he had begun to con­ struct his gyres of history, claimed that the cycle of Islands is 21 analogous to "Vico's circle." In another essay he made the 22 symbols almost entirely visionary, part of the Great Memory. Rather than try to get at exactly what Yeats had in mind with his symbols, aside from their obvious Importance in cultural politics and their relationship to Unity of Being, X want to step back briefly to his source, which was without question Michael Comyn's "Lay of Olsln in 23 the Land of Youth," and compare it to The Wanderings of Olsln.

This procedure, I think, will show how Yeats tampered with the legend , and why he altered it; in turn, this should help to define his sense 157 of the problems that arise when a man tries to achieve Unity of

Being without at the same time trying very hard to transcend ordinary life. Essentially, as I will show, Yeats turned the Imratna inside- out: rather than going through a long journey and struggle with his own weakness, Oisin glorifies his weakness and, in turn, sees the mortality he wanted to embrace destroy him entirely.

Comyn's "Lay11 is a f a ir ly modem (18th Century) Gaelic poem, one of the last major works of the Gaelic tradition. In spite of its late date, it is an integral part of the Osslanic tradition, / / which apparently has always given Oisin a trip to Tir na nOg as a way of explaining how a Second Century hero came to debate with a

Fifth Century bishop. Although the earliest Ossianic poems are simply debates without explanations of how they came about (Oisin makes only vague references to Tir na n&g), Alfred Nutt, a great authority on this literature, believed that Comyn's account was traditional, not 24 invented, and in perfect accord with the traditional spirit. Since it is not, like The Wanderings of Oisin. a personal statement, it follows the pattern of the ancient Imrama very faithfully. Comyn's v ersio n places the c a ll of the Other World s p i r i t (Nlamh) exactly as Yeats does, at the point where Finn and Fianna. broken, are starting to fade. In spite of the circumstances, they, or at least

Oisin, were enjoying the physical sensations of the hunt: We were hunting on a misty morning Nigh the bordering shores of Loch Lein, Where th ro ' frag ran t tre e s of sw eetest blossoms, And the mellow music of birds at all times ... (25) 158

This enjoyment of sensuous life leads to the description of Niamh

and the delights of the Other World* Olsln naturally falls In love with her Immediately, because of her glossy yellow hair, blue eyes,

red cheeks, and perhaps the remarkable amount of gold she wsb wearing. Her description of Tir na n$g Is entirely worldly, as is

always the case In traditional literature:

It is the most delightful country to be found, Of greatest repute under the sun Trees drooping with fruit and blossom And foliage growing on the tops of boughs.

Abundant, there, are honey and wine And everything that eye has beheld, There will not come decline on thee with lapse o f tim e, Death or decay thou w ilt not see.

Thou wilt get feasts, playing, and drink, Thou wilt get melodious music on the harp strings, Thou wilt get silver and gold, Thou wilt get also many jewels.

Thou wilt get, without falsehood, a hundred swords; Thou wilt get a hundred satin garments of precious s i l k , Thou wilt get a hundred horses the swiftest In c o n flic t, And thou w ilt get a hundred with them of keen hounds. (26)

(Yeats* version of this speech, on CP pp. 353-54, also mentions the gifts, but emphasizes dancing and sleeping, and sounds much lesB like a bribe; the original Olsln might have found it impractical.)

As they ride, they see the customary apparitions on the sea; cities and palaces built as if on dry land (this suggests the rever­ sal of values In Imram Brain), and the images so baffling In The

Wanderings of Oisin, which unfortunately are no clearer here: 159

We saw also, by our sides A hornless fawn leaping nimbly, And a red-eared white dog, Urging it boldly in the chase.

We beheld also, without fiction, A young maid on a brown steed, A golden apple in her right hand, And she going on the top of the waves. (27)

The young maid with the golden apple may well be the original inspi­

ration for "The Song of Wandering Aengus"; in any case, Niamh gives

no clues about what the image means, and tells Oisin to keep quiet

and not ask questions.

From this point on, Comyn's version dlfferes greatly from Yeats's.

Comyn has O isin stop on the way to Tin na nOg, a t the Land of V irtues

(although this name seems not to have gotten into all MSS. of the

poem). There he rescues a damsel in distress and, after three days' battle, kills a Fomor (giant) who had kept her Imprisoned. In Yeats'

account, of course, O lsln stru g g les w ith a demon on the Becond isla n d , after he has gotten tired of dancing, and never succeeds in killing h is opponent. The a i r of f u t i l i t y , of "vain b a tt l e ," in The Wander­

ings of Oisin is completely absent from the "Lay," where Oisin is completely successful and rather enjoys his little adventure. Even­

tually he arrives at Tir na n6g. a fine country that is just like earth at its best:

We beheld by our side, A most delightful country under full bloom, And plains, beautiful, smooth and fine, And a royal fortress of surpassing beauty. 160

Not a colour that eye has beheld Of rich blue, green, and white, Of purple, crimson, and of yellow, But was In this royal mansion that I am describing.

There were at the other side of the fortress, Radiant summer-houses and palaces, Hade, all of precious stones, By the hands of skillful men and great artists, (28)

There he meets Nlamh's father, the King of Tir na nOg, who is not named but Is presumably Manannan: making Aengus th e ru le r of t£t na n6g was one of Yeats* thematic changes In the legend. Having been installed as Nlamh*s husband, Olsln has three children by her, two sons and a daughter. (In The Wanderings of Oisin, Yeats leaves any sexual contact between Olsln and Nlamh to the reader's shrewd­ ness; he fills the poem with phallic Imagery and dancing, but gives them no children.) He lives happily for three hundred years, without realizing how long his stay has been (because time la uncertain in the Other World), but eventually grows homesick and wants to see Finn again. This is perfectly natural, and Is not, as In The Wanderings of Oisin, a result of dissatisfaction with Tir na n6g, or at least of very serious dissatisfaction; unfortunately, having discovered that Finn Is long dead and that Ireland Is now a feeble land governed by priests, and having fallen from the spirit horse while showing off his strength, he becomes an old man, and, sometime after explaining all this to Patrick and insulting him at great length, dies.

I have summarized Comyn's version at some length, partly because good texts are difficult to find, but mainly because it gives such a full picture of Tir na n6g and Its relationship to this

world: Its superiority to mortal life Is never in doubt, even

though Oisin falls to become entirely a part of it, being homesick

In spite of everything; there is no sense of futility in any of its

pleasures of battle of of love; and It is like this world even In

the details of Olsln's domestic life with Nlamh* Olsln's being * trapped in this world at the end Is little more than a regrettable

accident: this world pulls him back, but only through the memories

of his father, most of them pleasant memories, which he naturally

wanted to relive. He had no intention of returning for good to

Ireland, whereas Yeats's Olsln, obsessed with human sorrow, comes

back almost in a spirit of suicide. Yeats's Oisin does not really ✓ ^ get anything out of Tir na nOg because he insists on sharing the

suffering that afflicts all men, and ultimately can see nothing but

futility in life, even eternal llfe^or, perhaps, especially eternal

life. Even Yeats' title , by emphasizing his "wanderings," suggests

his inability to become part of any one place or state of being.

Comyn's Olsln, in contrast, is a complete man, at least In the terms

of his warrior's code, and, at peace with himself, can live In Tir

na n6g almost as naturally as the Tuatha themselves. Comyn probably would not have understood Yeats's phrase "Unity of Being," but he presents Olsln as a man who barely misses embodying that ideal; and,

certainly, he would have agreed with Martin In The Unicorn from the

Stars that Paradise is "fullness of life": for Yeats's Oisin, 162

Immortality makes life unbearable because there is no end to the sorrow and futility he perceives in life, but for Comyn's hero, immortality is a natural part of fullness of life.

Even though Oisin fails to appreciate Paradise in The Wanderings of Oisin. all the elements that Yeats used to embody human perfection are in front of him: sexual love, the dance, and art are all present.

Although Yeats did not allow Oisin to marry his lady happily and have children, he made the poem rich in phallic imagery; there 1b no / / doubt that sexual love is part of Oisin's experience in Tir na nog, even the central part of his whole life there. For example, his very first experience of the Other World was hearing the music for the sfdhes' eternal dance even while still riding on the spirit horse.

Yeats's image connects the themes of sexuality and dancing quite explicitly;

The horse towards the music raced, Neighing along the lifeless waste; Like sooty fingerB, many a tree Rose ever out of the warm sea; And they were trembling ceaselessly, As though they all were beating time, Upon the centre of the sun, To that low laughing woodland rhyme. (29)

This passage alone, even without the sighs and murmurs that take up much of the rest of the poem, makes it clear that sex is essential to life in l£r na nOg. It is, after all, the Earthly Paradise.

But Olsln cannot really share in that life, Niamh sings about it on their way to the second island, and includes human lovers with their 163

"rings of Druid gold," but realizes that Oisin is not one of them.

Oisin describes her sad song:

... swaying her bright head And her bright body, sang of faery and man Before God was or my old line began; [!] Wars shadowy, vast, exultant; faeries of old Who wedded men w ith rings of Druid gold; And how those lovers never turn their eyes Upon the life that fades and flickers and dies, Yet love and k is s on dim shores fa r away Rolled round with music of the sighing spray: Yet sang no more as when, like a brown bee That has drunk full, she crossed the misty sea With me in her white arms a hundred years Before this day; for now the fall of tears Troubled her song. (30)

In spite of having Nlamh as his wife, Oisin is dissatisfied,

and leaves. He is, if anything, even less pleased with the dance, which he leaves after a mere hundred years. The dance of Tir na n6g,

though, would be entrancing to anyone else, since it is not only

sexual, but an expression of pure immortal joy:

And in a wild and sudden dance We mocked a t Time and Fate and Chance And swept out of the wattled hall And came to where the dewdrops fall Among the foamdrops of the sea

And to the waves that glimmer by That sloping green De Danaan sod Sang, 'God is jo y and joy i s God, And things th a t have grown sad a re wicked, And things that fear the dawn of the morrow Or the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.' (3 1 )

This childlike joy is similar, even in the language Yeats uses, to that of The Land of Heart's Desire, and the soul transformed into

"it may be a white bird" is matched by the birds of Tir na nOg who 164

hover In the trees and air beating time with their wings; these

birds are quite traditional, and are certainly similar to the golden

bird of "Sailing to Byzantium." The only difference Is that the

Byzantium bird comes out of alchemical fire; even so, these painted

birds (although "painted" may simply mean "colorful") are suggestive.

Just as the golden bird sings near the place where the sages dance

In the holy fire, these birds keep time with the dance: "And as they

[the sldhe] sang, the painted birds / Kept time with their bright 32 wings and feet."

Yeats pointed up the Importance of love and joy In his version

of Tir na n6g by making Aengus its king, not Manannan, and by making

Nlamh the daughter of Aengus and Edaln. In the tradition, Manannan

is the lord of the sea, and consequently of Tir na nOg, since it is

generally more or less In the Atlantic. Aengus lives in a sfd near

the Boyne; Yeats was more In line with the tradition when he had the

Stroller meet him there in The King of the Great Clock Tower. But

In The Wanderings of Olsln Yeats, in effect, lifted Aengus out of

Ireland and dropped him on Tir na n6g, straining tradition to under­ line his point that love and dancing are the most Important part of life In the Other World. His main concession to tradition on this point was to have the palace on the second island built by Manannan

(CP p . 366 ) . O lein * b failure to understand this order of things doomed him to a f u t i l e stru g g le in th e second Isla n d a f t e r he had given up on the first, and finally a pre-Raphaelite stupor before he returned to this world and was punished for leaving It In the first p la c e . 165

The theme of old age, Yeats's particular horror and the anti­ thesis of everything that Aengus and his realm represents, is just as prominent in The Wanderings of Oisin as love and dancing. It comes into the narrative unexpectedly several times, since it is always present in Oisin's mind as part of his obseBBion with sorrow.

It is, for example, otherwise superfluous in his description of a king (perhaps Cormac) on the th ird islan d :

In one [hand] was a branch soft-shining with bells more many than sighs In midst of an old man's bOBom .... (33)

Or, when he returns to Ireland and makes the astounding discovery that other men grow old and die, he says, characteristically, "In 34 old age they ceased." Old age as a symbol of the opposition between this world and the Other World is even part of the Tuatha's

/ / song; as they dance in Tir na nOg they sing:

An old man stirs the fire to a blaze, In the house of a child, of a friend, of a brother. He has over-lingered his welcome; the days, Grown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other; He hears the storm in the chimney above, And bends to the fire and shakes with the cold While his heart still dreams of battle and love And the cry of the hounds on the hills of old. (35) / Surely no one but Yeats would have the sidhe dancing in circles, with the painted birds beating time, and then give them a song like this * to sing! In any case, the sidhe are rather smug (in traditional fashion) about the fact that they will not grow old, but the horror of mortality disturbs even them: when Oisin tries to do his bit for the revelry and sings some happy songs, they run off weeping and 166 later bury his harp, since a mortal man's idea of joy seems infinitely sad to them. And, of course, their song is a foreshadowing of Olsln's own fall, of the time to come when he w ill be

... shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain, Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear; All emptied of purple hours as a ""beggar's cloak in the ra in , As a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir. (36)

The "beggar's cloak in the rain" suggests "Sailing to Byzantium," but th a t image is not necessary to show how c lo sely the two poems are related: both are, In large part, about the sorrow of old age, and both, in different ways, turn on the opposition of mortality In this world and the immortality that is part of the Other World.

Both poems also deal with the theme of art, the last of Yeats's characteristic themes in the pattern I am considering. It is not central to The Wanderings of Oisin. but Yeats was concerned enough with it to bend tradition once more so that he could Introduce it.

In Comyn's "Lay," Nlamh falls in love with Oisin for the usual reasons of the sagas, i.e ., his strong arm and good looks, but in

Yeats' account she loves him because he is a poet:

I loved no man, though kings besought, Until the Danaan poets brought Rhyme that rhymed upon O isin's name, And now I am dizzy with the thought Of all that wisdom and the fame Of battles broken by his hands, Of stories builded by his words That are like coloured Asian birds At evening in their rainless lands. (37) 167

Even aside from Che Aslan birds Chat once again foreshadow "Sailing

Co Byzantium," this Is a strange statement to be coming from a faery woman. She makes Olsln sound like a god, literally, since only Lugh,

the Master of All Arts, was supreme both as a poet and a warrior.

And, after all, art comes from Tir na nOg: the idea of a mortal hero inspiring the Danaan poets would have staggered a traditional bard. (It Is true that Olsln was credited with writing down his

Interminable debates against Patrick as poems: but that was after he had returned from Tir na n6g, and, perhaps, had gained at leaBt enough wisdom to become a poet, as did Hanrahan after his night in the slid.)

Art is the means of Olsln's entrance to the Other World, since

It Is apparently the main cause of Nlamh'a falling in love with him, but he Is not a perfect artist. His songs are not a success in the

Island of Dancing, and they do not save him. He Is, like Hanrahan, not enough of an artist to transcend himself and become like one of the sidhe In spirit; like Hanrahan, he rejects the perfect love that poetry embodies, the love of the sidhe, and suffers; for, as the sidhe say to Hanrahan,

It Is a pity for him that refuses the call of the daughters of the Sidhe, for he will find no comfort In the love of the women of the earth to the end of life and time, and the cold of the grave 1b in his heart for ever. It is death he has chosen; let him die, let him die, let him d ie . (38) 168

Olsln chooses death; that Is, he chooses mortal life. His fall Is

important not only because It gave him a chance to insult Patrick

and so assert the glory of pagan Ireland, but because it Is what

must happen to any ordinary man or woman. Baile and Allllnn, Forgael

and Dectora, all the great lovers (and warriors) of the tradition and / / Yeats' poetry achieve a place in Tlr na nOg because an overwhelming

passion gives them Unity of Being. But Olsln, like almost anyone

else, never achieves Unity of Being, and never really leaves this world: even while Niamh is trying to distract him with the consider­

able delights of T^r na nOg, he is, essentially, still in Ireland.

Bec&use of his inability to find peace, he is not so much like Forgael

or even Comyn's Olsln as he is like the spirits of the later plays,

or, wandering from island to island, like a soul on the Great Wheel

driven from life to life.

OiBln's adventure exemplifies what Phillip L, Marcus calls 39 "the 'choice* dichotomy," the balance between this world and the

Other World. In The Wanderings of Olsln as in Comyn's "Lay," there

is no doubt that the Other World is superior to this one, or that

f the sidhe really do embody human perfection. But Olsln finds himself

pulled back to this world anyway; he lives in Tiv na nOg in a fine balance, a tension between the two orders of reality that is the

subject of many of Yeats' later poems. The dilemma of yearning for human perfection only to find that it is not entirely human after all ties together Yeats's earliest and last works: it is certainly an 169

enduring theme, at times almost an obsession in his work, and poses problems that he never entirely solved. Dy accepting reincarnation as a part of his personal doctrine he took some of the difficulty out of his problem, but still was left with the necessity of defining the Other World more closely than he had done in his early work, and defining this world's relationship to it more exactly. In the next chapter, then, I shall look at the partial resolution of his diffi­ culties In the Byzantium poems and "A Dialogue of Self and Soul." 170

NOTES

Fart One: Introduction

. 1 Yeats Included Joyce In a published H at of the "Best 30 Irish Books" In 1895, and C urtin In a sim ila r l i s t the same y ear. See P h illip L. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance (Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970),p. 286.

2 Robin Skelton and Ann Saddlemyer, eds., The World of W.B. Yeats: Essays In Perspective (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1965),pp. 58-60.

3 Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats1 Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1954). See especially Chapter III, "Irish Lore and Druldlsm as Major Doctrinal Influences."

4 ■ Moore, Unicorn, p. 59.

5 A lfred Douglas, The T aro t: The O rigins, Meaning and Uses of the Cards (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 37.

6 W.B. Yeats, Mythologies, p. 213,

7 Ibid., pp. 220-21.

8 Ibid., p. 229.

9 Ib id . . p. 258.

10 Ibid.. p. 259.

11 Ibid., pp. 259-60.

12 Moore, Unicorn, p. 61,

13 See Moore, Unicorn, pp. 68-73. 172 14 Two of the best sources are Skelton and Saddlemyer, eds., The World of W.B. Yeats, and Phillip L. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, both noted above. For an excellent summary of folktale collections and Yeats' use of them, see Richard M. Dorson's Foreward to Sean O'Sullivan, ed., Folktales of Ireland (London: Rout- ledge & Kegal Paul, 1966).

15 See Marcus, Renaissance, p. 240 ff.

16 CP, p. 50.

Part Two: Hollow Lands and Hilly Lands

1 Memoirs. p. 127.

2 Thomas Klnsella, trans., The Tain [Bo Cuaillnge] (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 142.

3 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: C reative Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 200.

4 Yeats, Autobiography, p. 178.

5 See W.B. Yeats, "Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places," in Lady Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 316.

6 Yeats, Autobiography, p. 179.

7 Yeats mentions this a number of times, for example in "The Island of Statues," in Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, eds., The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 676. Even the dancers of The Wanderings of Olsln are aware of the end coming in time, and refer to it in the last lines of Part I (CP. p. 362).

8 Alwyn and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), p. 40. See also Eleanor Hull, Folklore of the British Isles, pp. 49-54. 173

9 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God; O ccidental Mythology (New York: Viking* 1964)* p. 301ff.

10 The Wanderings of O lsln. CP. p. 393.

11 Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), p. 50.

12 "The Untiring Ones," In Mythologies. p. 77.

13 Plays, p. 398.

Kuno Meyer, Seel Baill Binnberlaig, Revue Celtlque XIII (1892), pp. 220-27 (translation: pp. 224-25).

15 Allan Wade, ed., The Letters of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan. 1955), pp. 353-54.

16 CP, p. 393.

17 Yeats' Preface to Lady Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Mulrthemne (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 14.

18 CP, p. 393. Further references to this poem are given in the text.

19 CP, p. 334.

20 CP, p. 282.

/ / Part Three: Tir na nOg

1 "Per Arnica Silentla Lunae," Mythologies, pp. 348-9.

2 Essays, p. 178. 174

3 Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs In the West of Ireland, p. 316.

4 Ibid.. pp. 320-21.

5 Ibid.. p. 314.

6 Essays. p. 54.

7 J.A.W. Bennett and G.V. Smithers, eds., Early Middle English Verse and Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 138. 8 Ibid., pp. 138-9. Th~ thorn.

9 Ibid.. p. 139.

10 This arcane footnote Is to CP, p. 457n. See also Howard Rollln Patch, The Other World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), p . 37.

11 Thomas F. O'Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1946), p. 481.

12 Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal to the Land of the Living (London: David Nutt, 1895), Vol. I, p. 227.

13 Rees, Celtic Heritage, pp. 310-12. See also Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 106-10.

14 O'Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology, p. 318.

15 Rees, Celtic Heritage, p. 312.

16 Ibid.. p. 343.

17 Ibid.. pp. 322-23. 176

18 Meyer and Nutt, Bran. Vol. I, p. 18.

19 Rees, Celtic Heritage, pp. 343-44.

20 Yeats In Visions and Beliefs, p. 317. For a mention of this para­ dox In a saga, see Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, trans., A Celtic Miscellany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951), p. 190.

21 Eleanor Hull, Folklore of the British Isles (London: Methuen, 1928), p. 23.

22 Preface to Cuchulaln of Muirthemne. p. 14.

Part Four: Getting There

1 A llt and Alspach, Variorum, p. 849.

2 Hazard Adams, "Y eats*s Country of th e Young," PMLA LXXII no. 3 (June, 1957), pp. 511-12.

3 Adams, p. 513.

4 This and the following quotations from the text are from Adams, pp. 514-15.

5 For an expanded version, see CP, pp. 82-84; cf Hanrahan's song, Mythologies, pp. 246-47,

'6 Adams, p. 516.

7 The text is Dorothy M, Hoare, The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1937), p. 166. The following quotations from the text are on pp. 166-71.

8 Rees, Celtic Heritage, p. 278, 177

9 Hull, Folklore, p. 37.

10 CP, p. 358.

11 Plays. pp. 400-01.

12 Hull, Folklore, p. 128.

13 Ibid., p. 129.

14 Ibid.. p. 129.

15 See O’Rahilly, Early Irish History, p. 481, and Hull, Folklore. p. 129.

16 Hull, Folklore, pp. 240-45.

17 CP, p. 355 (The Wanderings of Olsln).

18 Allt and Alspach, Variorum, p. 807.

19 Jeffares, Commentary, pp. 62-63.

20 F.A.C* Wilson, W.B. Yeats and Tradition (London: Victor Gollancz, 1958), p. 219. See also Thomas Parkinson, W.B. Yeats: The Later Poetry, published with W.B. Yeats: Self-Critic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971), pp. 161-66.

21 CP, p. 358.

22 Moore, The Unicom, p. 69.

23 Michael J. Sidnell et al., Druid Craft: The Writing of "The Shadowy Waters" (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1971), p. 4. 24 David Ridgeley Clark and George Mayhew, eds., A Tower of Polished Black Stone: Early Versions of "The Shadowy Waters" (Dolmen Editions IX 1971), p. 44.

25 See Allt and Alspach, Variorum, pp. 762-63.

26 CP, pp. 401-02.

27 CP, p. 403.

28 See Sldnell, Druid Craft, p. 11, for more details about the harp's use in early versions, and its significance. See also S.B. Bushrui, Yeats's Verse-Plays: The Revisions 1900-1910 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 10, and Marcus, Renaissance, p. 255.

29. CP, p. 416.

30 A llt and Alspach, Variorum, p. 817.

31 See Nutt and Meyer, Bran, I, pp. 49-52.

32 CP, p. 408.

33 CP, pp. 426-27.

3.4 CP, p. 425.

35 CP, p. 408.

36 A llt and Alspach, Variorum, p. 765. 179

Part Five: Paradise Lost

1 J e ffa re s , Commentary* p. 536.

2 For the te x t and a d e ta ile d summary, see Hoare, The Works of M orris and Yeats, pp. 149-65,

3 Lester Irvin Conner, A Yeats Dictionary; Names of the Persons and Places In the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (Columbia Univ: unpub. dlss., 1964), pp. 60-61.

4 Hoare, The Works of Morris and Yeats, p. 124,

5 CP. p. 435,

6 CP, p. 436.

7 T.R. Herni, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Y eats, 2d ed (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 337.

8 Richard J. FInneran, ed,, "John Sherman** and "Dhoya” (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 120.

9 Autobiography, p. 335.

10 Transactions of the Ossianlc Society, for the Year 1856. Vol. 4 (Dublin: privately printed, 1859), p. 47,

11 Transactions, p. 17.

12 T ran sactio n s, p. 9.

13 Essays, p. 63.

14 Memoirs. p. 21. 180

15 Essays. p. 309.

16 Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men, p. 15.

17 Wade, Letters, p. 111.

18 Allen R. Grossman, Poetic Knowledge In the Early Yeatsi A Study of “The Wind Among the Reeds” (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 173.

19 For a summary, see Grossman, Poetic Knowledge, pp. 173-76.

20 Richard Ellmann, Yeats -- The Man and the Masks (New York: Dutton. 1948), pp. 51-53.

21 For a summary, see Marcus, Renaissance, p. 244.

22 "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry," Essays, pp. 89-90. See also Wade, Letters, p. 87, for a description of the poem as a vision.

23 Russell K. Alspach explains the problems of source-finding and the evidence for Comyn as primary source in "Some Sources of Yeats's The Wanderings of Plain," PMLA 58 (Sept. 1943), pp. 849-66, See also Variorum, pp. 793 and 844.

24 Nutt, Voyage of Bran, Vol. I, p. 152; see also Nutt, Ossian and the Ossianic Literature (London; D. Nutt, 1899), pp. 31-32.

25 Transactions, p. 235

26 Transactions, p. 243

27 Transactions, p. 249

28 Transactions, p. 259 181

29 CP, pp. 355-56.

30 CP. p. 363.

31 CP, p . 359. 32 CP. p. 362.

33 CP, p. 372. 34 CP, p. 379.

35 CP, p. 362.

36 CP. p. 381.

37 CP, p. 353.

38 Mythologies, p. 233.

39 Marcus, Renaissance, p. 245. W. B. YEATS IN PARADISE

Chapter Three:

Two Ways of Looking at a Golden Bird

/ / Tlr na nOg served Yeats as a way of imaging human perfection because it Is heaven and yet not heaven, divine but built to human proportions. Like Eden or Blake's Beulah, it makes a fine mid-point between the life of this world and the abstract life of higher and less Inviting heavens; and, just as Medieval saints found Eden a natural transition between earth and God's Heaven, Yeats moved easily, through his doctrine of reincarnation, from Tlr na n6g to the Great Wheel. However, it was only the imagery, not the central theme, of his poetry that shifted after he took off his coat of old mythologies; he had been Interested in reincarnation, and strongly attracted to It as a concept of the after-life, from the time when he first began to write poetry. His .interest in Celtic mythology was, in part, like his Interest in reincarnation, an outgrowth of his occult studies. Like AE, T. W. Rolleston, Alfred Nutt, and other Irish intellectuals of the time, he was convinced that the traditional legends are part of an ancient wisdom worth reviving for its own sake as well as for the sake of Irish nationhood. Along with these men, Yeats felt that the Irish myths are analogous to

Greek myths and the system of the Vedas; and, as it. happened, he

182 183 was almost as deeply Interested In early Hindu ideas as in the Irish myths them selves. The two systems were not r e a lly sep arate in h is mind; he had no hesitation in saying that an Indian peasant could understand the Irish myths, and his own poems written out of themt 1 just as well as an Irish peasant could. His fascination with

Indian ideas, then, Increased his respect for Irish mythology, and at the same time his continual and energetic study of the Irish myths helped to keep his Interest in the East alive. And both areas of study were, naturally, linked in his mind to his purely occult study in the Golden Dawn, the Blavatsky circle, the Hermetic Order, spiritist seances, and so on, in all of which he searched for grounds to believe in reincarnation as well as in magic itself.

In Yeats' first collection of poems, Crossways, even in the heavily revised version that begins the Collected Poems, there is, in effect, a dialogue between the Irish and Indian mythologies, with

"The Madness of King Goll" and "The Stolen Child" matched by

"Anashuya and Vijaya," "The Indian upon God," and "The Indian to His

Love." The Indian poems are very bad, l i t t l e more than feeble echoes of the already feeble Orientalism that was popular in the

1880's, and Yeats 60on devoted all of his energy to the Irish myth­ ology. These Indian poems, by the way, are strikingly weak compared to "King G oll" or The Wanderings of O lsin, w ritte n a t much the same time: it seems that however remote from reality the Irish poems may seem to lie, they were Immediate to Yeats' mind. His writing about 184 subjects other than Irish mythology is stiff, labored, conventional, and rather trite, vhile the Irish poems first show an Individual energy and style. But, In any case, It Is one of the early Indian poems, "Kanva on Himself," that first asserts a belief In reincar­ nation, although, since it Is an "exotic" set-plece, It is not necessarily a credo for Yeats:

Is not thy body but the garnered rust Of ancient passions and of ancient fears?

Then wherefore fear the usury of Time, Or Death that cometh with the next life-key? May, rise and flatter her with golden rhyme, For as things were so shall things ever be. (2)

In spite of its artificiality, which makes It sound like an exercise

In decadent syntax, this poem reflects an actual, and important, event in Yeats's life: his first meeting with Mohlnl Chatterjee in 1885. Chatterjee gave Yeats a formula for meditation on the cycle of lives which so impressed him that he wrote not only a bad poem but, long afterwards in 1908, a prose summary of Chatterjee's 3 words and finally, In his full maturity, a great poem, "Mohlnl

Chatterjee" (1929). The original message was simple enough, that the soul lives many times in many different ways, but Yeats' own

"commentary" brings this abstract idea into the inevitable image of the dance, which is, naturally, the dance of lovers in their repitl- tious ecstasy:

Old lo v ers y e t may have All that time denied — Grave is heaped on grave That they be satisfied — 185

Over the blackened earth The old troops parade, Birth is heaped on birth That such cannonade May thunder tine away, Birth-hour and death-hour meet, Or, as great sages say, Men dance on deathless feet. (4)

As John Unterecker has pointed out, this dance is central to the whole cycle of the Wheel, as if it were an axle, until the soul's 5 final escape. Then the "cannonade" (one of Yeats' w ittiest sexual images) finally shuts down, and the soul is free from incarnation: but until then, it has no choice but to dance and, through sexual love, to repeat Itself endlessly.

But Yeats did not have to rely only on an Indian theosophist for the concept of reincarnation. It was part of the ancient Irish system as well. The exact nature of the Celtic doctrine is unknown, since the Druids wrote nothing down and the Christian Church was efficient at suppressing any pagan beliefs that it could not absorb.

Nonetheless, it is clearly not a very big step from an earthly

Paradise where human souls live in human surroundings to the concept that such souls might return to this world time after time. Since

Tir na nOg is in any case much like this world, such an idea must have been more natural to the pagan Irish than to Christians, for whom Heaven is not at all like the life of this world.

Reincarnation, like the life of Tir na nOg. presupposes that the soul is immortal, and there is no doubt that the ancient Irish believed in immortality. Further, there are several kinds of evidence 186 that they had a well-developed concept of reincarnation. Some of the traditional writings, such as the Voyage of Bran, and also some­ what l a t e r , C h ristian ized Imrama ( e .g ., JSt. Brendan’s Voyage), show remnants of pagan imagery that may well reflect the traditional 6 iconography associated with such beliefs. There are also many references to reincarnation as a part of the Druids' religion on the part of Classical observers, including Julius Caesar, Strabo, and 7 Lucan, who compared the Druids to Pythagoras. Finally, several stories containing accounts of reincarnation survived the conversion of Ireland to Christianity. One of the most important is the central action of the Tain Bo Cuailinge. in which two swineherds of the gods quarrel bitterly through several lives in different forms, eventually ending up as the two great bulls of Ireland, who kill each other at 8 the end of the epic. Tuan Mac Cairlll survived many different lives, sometimes as a man and sometimes as an animal, beginning in prehis- 9 torlc times, and was eventually baptized by St. Patrick. Many heroes led at least two lives, for example Finn Mac Cumhail, who was reincarnated as Mdngan and remembered his previous life but kept it 10 secret. Lug, the Sun-god, was reborn as Cuchulaln, and, by a sim­ ilar technique (being swallowed by a woman), Edaln was bom as a human 11 being a f te r Fuamach had changed her in to a f ly . Yeats him self went out of his way in The Two Kings to bring Edaln's memory of Tir na nOg into her reactions when Aengus-Mldhir begged her to go back: 187

X cowered back upon Che wall In terror, But that sweet-sounding voice ran on: "Woman, X was your husband when you rode the air, Danced in the whirling foam and in the dust, Xn days you have not kept in memory. Being betrayed into a cradle, and X come That X may claim you as my wife again.” X was no longer terrified —- his voice Had h a lf awakened some old memory . . . . (12)

Yeats' ideas about reincarnation, then, are not simply part of his life-long studies in occultism and his intermittent studies of

Eastern religions. They are also part of his belief that ancient

Ireland knew it all, and that, in particular, ancient Ireland shared

Its knowledge with the writers of the Vedas. That is part of the argument of a book that deeply Influenced Yeats in the 1890's,

Alfred Nutt's long essay appended to Kuno Meyer's edition of The 13 Voyage of Bran. Nutt, like other scholars in this field, but more thoroughly than most, examined the historical evidence of reincarna­ tion (among other things) as part of Celtic mythology, and its relationship to early Greek and Indian mythologies. His second volume, "The Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth," contains a complex and somewhat tenuous argument to establish his position that the Celtic system is even older (and, by implication, purer) than these others, that it is in fact virtually a pre-historic survival from the earliest phases of Aryan thought. X cannot give his entire argument here without distorting the shape of this chapter, but the final paragraph of the book should give some of its flavor as well as a concise statement of its thesis: 188

The features common to Greek and Irish mythology belong to the earlier known stage of Aryan mythical evolution, and are not the result of influence exercised by the more upon the less advanced race. Survivals in Greece, they represent the high-water mark of Irish pre-Christian development; hence their greater consistency and vividness in Ireland. Fragmentary as may be the form and distorted as it may be by its transmission through Christian hands, we thus own to Ireland the preservation of mythical conceptions and visions more archaic in substance if far later in record than the great mythologies of Greece and Vedlc India. (14)

Yeats must have been delighted to see such a fine example of the

Great Memory at work, molding the Irish race in accordance with an ancient wisdom forgotten everywhere else. It must also have been refreshing to him, as to other intellectuals, to be able to affirm as his own heritage a system of belief that was independent not only of England, but even of Christianity. Further, an argument like

N utt's, by tying the Irish legends to Pythagoras and the Vedas, gives i t an immense d ig n ity : the old assumption th a t S t. P a tric k and h is monks had pulled Ireland out of ancestral darkness and brought the light of civilization to the Irish savages cannot stand up very well, at least from Yeats's point of view, if in fact the monks merely replaced an ancient wisdom with a later, less exciting wisdom. Such a reading of history must be part of the reason for Yeats' confidence in "Under Ben Bulben," where, for the last time, he asserts that

Ireland was at its best in the Heroic Age, and that its religion was, furthermore, analogous to his own system:

Many times man lives and dies Between h is two e te r n itie s , That of race and that of soul, And ancient Irelan d knew i t a l l . 189

Whether nan die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear Is the worst nan has to fear. . Though grave-diggers' to ll Is long, Sharp their spades, their muscles strong, They but thrust their burled men Back.in the human mind again. (15)

This sounds like "Mohlnl Chatterjee," and, I am sure, is meant to sound like that statement of Eastern beliefs. Yeats, who always wanted to tie all experience together into a single thought, found a way to do it, In this Instance, by reconciling East and

West through ancient Ireland. His belief in reincarnation and even the system of A Vision do not represent a tumlng-away from Irish mythology, or a rejection of it as a theme for poetry; rather, when he had matured as a poet, Yeats wanted to combine what he felt were the basic concepts of pagan Ireland with the system of the Vedas and the machinery of occultism. The synthesis of ideas that he evolved through the rest of his life became steadily more abstract

(especially after A Vision), and the images from Irish myths began to drop out of his poetry — but they were not discarded, only re­ worked into a larger pattern. And, for that matter, they were not entirely dropped: Cuchulain, for example, is a character in several late works, Aengus and Tir na n6g are central to The King of the

Great Clock Tower, and "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes" combines Robartes himself, the Sphinx, the First and Fifteenth Phases of the Moon, and a supernatural dance with the Rock of Cashel and

"Cormac's ruined house." The sfdhe become mad g ir ls and w hirling 190

Bplrlts, but they keep dancing, and the themes of Yeats* earliest poetry continue to be his themes until the end, under different names*

Tfr na n6g. Itself, while changed, remains recognizable, and

Its new forms are the heart of this chapter. As he grew older,

Yeats imagined life-after-death In two different ways: as a flux, in which the soul takes on life after life, constantly growing toward the form It had before the world was made, and as a stasis, In which the soul takes on its Inherent form and, like a work of art, becomes eternal In that form. This pair of alternatives arose, I think, out o f Y eats' knowledge of I r is h mythology j u s t as much as i t came from his readings In occult literature and the Vedas: that Is, both alternatives are part of Tj£r na nOg, and Yeats, in poems like nA

Dialogue of Self and Soul," Is essentially working out some of the difficulties that this paradox creates. T^r na n6g Is a world of flux: as I showed in the second chapter, it Is a place where time and space are constantly shifting, where nothing at all is fixed.

Tir na n6g itself is rather elusive, since it can appear Inside a h ill or on the sea or anywhere else, then disappear again. Besides, it is not necessarily a place where every spirit stays forever: Finn, for example, returned to this world as Mongan. Nor does a spirit there have any shape of its own: it can change form at w ill, or be changed against its will (as Edaln was changed into a golden fly).

At the same time, Tir na n6g is unchanging. Its forms change, but 191

✓ the energy within it does not; the sidhe and, perhaps, the spirits of the dead can take any form, but they do not die. It is this unchanging quality of Tlr na nOg that drives a woman of the sidhe to

Dhoya, and that makes Edaln think twice about leaving this world; it is also part of the reason why Olsln is not happy there. * / Yeats had everything he needed in Tir na nOg, but preferred to Isolate these two different conceptions of the Other Vorld rather than allowing himself to get entangled in paradoxes expressed in terms that only his fellow Irish nationalists, and West Irish peasants, would be likely to understand. He never wavered from his belief that the Irish myths express truths known Instinctively to all men, but he wanted to express those truths (as he saw them to be) in universal terms, and so adopted his own symbolic vocabulary of Byzantium and the

Fifteenth Phase of the Moon (to which Byzantium, as an historical cycle, belongs). It is not far, then, from the Paradise of the West to the Paradise of the East in Byzantium, and no distance at all from

Byzantium to the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon.

As he worked out this system Yeats debated with himself, using several poems as forums, about the advantages of reincarnation or stasis in the Other World. Both are possible in Tir na nOg, and

Yeats saw to it that his system of the Phases of the Moon also reconciles them, in somewhat clearer terms than Irish mythology does.

His Bystem combines both conceptallowing for a very long series of lives, through which the soul grows steadily into itself, and also permits an eventual escape from incarnation. Still, Yeats 192 realized that he could not really have It both ways, and explores the alternatives thoroughly In the Byzantium poems and "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," Since this debate between ways of looking at the Other World and the possibility of human perfection takes Its simplest and most direct form In "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," that poem can serve as an Introduction to the much more complex Byzantium poems.

It la a little artificial to use the "Dialogue" in this way, since I t comes between the Byzantium poems in C ollected Poems, and

Is partly a rejection of "Sailing to Byzantium." However, It would be awkward to s p l i t up the Byzantium poems since they depend on each other for meaning, and constantly refer to each other. Rather than explicate the "Dialogue" fully as part of a dramatic structure, then, I will remove it from sequence and simply go over some of the

Images and themes that It presents In their simplest forms.

One reason why the "Dialogue" Is fairly simple (by the standards of The Winding Stair) is that it Is not really a dialogue at all but ' 16 rather a pair of monologues, in which each voice presents its case without worrying about the other's. The Self and the Soul talk over each other's shoulders and never really come face to face, at least not in this world. The Soul begins by invoking the pole star, which Is, from an earthly point of view, the most unmovlng thing anyone can see:

Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all though is done: Who can distinguish darkness from the Soul? (17) 193

That is, the "wandering" of the moon, and even of the other stars as they move in imperceptible circles, is what the Soul wants to escape. The flight into "darkness" is not simply death, but the

Soul's immersion in the impersonal life, the "fullness" of Heaven, and its welcome loss of selfhood in that greater life;

Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For I n te lle c t no longer knows Is from the Ought. or Knower from the Known — That is to say, ascends to Heaven .... (18)

The Phase closest to this state is Phase One, "The final link 19 between the living and more powerful beings," but even that would not really satisfy the Soul: it wants complete extinction, nirvana, and, with that extinction of self, complete freedom and simplicity of being. This is the ideal of the old man in "Sailing to Byzantium," but even more thoroughgoing; the old man wants to lose his identity by taking on the impersonality of a machine, while the Soul, for similar reasons, wants to lose its identity but apparently would not appreciate having to sing to anyone.

The Self's argument is more complex. Under the pressure of the

Soul's rejection of the world, he admits that human life is imperfect, but chooses to go through with it anyway:

I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! (20)

The Self introduces a tricky concept in these lines; he is willing to return to human life, but he is not about to stumble blindly 194

through one incarnation after another. Rather, he wants to live

so that he can "follow to its source" every event of life, and,

cutting through all the complexities and ambiguities of experience,

know himself as he really is, achieve Unity of Being, This idea

is not unusual In Yeats' work; as T. R. Henn has shown, these lines

re-state, in a compressed way, Yeats' doctrine of the soul's 21 "Dreamlng-Back" after death, which is also the doctrine that con­

trols the spirits in Byzantium. Henn describes thla state in sexual

terms that recall the bliss of Balle and Ailllnn:

When the Spirit is freed from pleasure and pain by re-living the experiences which caused them, it now enters upon 'a state of intellect' in which it is also set free from good and evil. It is a state of equilibrium, but in it there is neither emotion nor sensation. But here men and women meet, and seek to supplement, in each other, the defects they experienced in life. Only in death, and in this final state of equilibrium, is unity possible. (22)

This sexual union is not a physical pleasure (after all, the spirits have no bodies to speak of by this time), but, as Yeats describes the union of souls in poems like "Ribh at the Tomb of Balle and Alllinn," it is a kind of rapture that physical experience cannot match. The old man of "Sailing to Byzantium," who is looking forward to such a state of intellect, seems to understand only part of it: he wants to be above pleasure and pain, but does not show any inclination toward union with any other spirits.

This equilibrium, or Unity of Being, is final only for each

Incarnation, not for eternity, since the soul must still go on to another life. But the Self has no objection to that: life, he thinks, 195 is vorth suffering for the sake of the Unity that follovB it* He would agree with the Soul that "Only the dead can be forgiven," but wants to be forgiven again and again, not just once.

The Self's affirmation of life rests in the image of the sword and scabbard:

The consecrated blade upon my knees Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was, Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass Unspotted by the centuries; That flowering, silken, old embroidery, tom From some c o u rt-la d y 's d ress and round The wooden scabbard bound and wound, Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

The remarkable pun on "still" puts the blade, a symbol of generation, in the same unmoved state as the pole star, and makes a fine riposte to the Soul'8 Implied assertion that generation is opposed to still­ ness. The Self rubs in this argument by equating the dress, wound mummy-fashlon around the scabbard, with the shade of Byzantium, who looks much the same though he is undoubtedly less decorative. In any case, the Self's argument implies that the energy which hurls the soul through life after life is itself unmoving and serene, a center of energy that does not, like the pole star, gather life into itself but throws it out and animates the world. Together with the female image of the silken embroidery, the sword becomes a powerful emblem of eternity, but an eternity that expresses itself within this world through reincarnation. The Self is not affirming life in this world because it is nice — he goes on to describe it in terms that are as negative as any the Soul could think of — but because reincarnation allows him to grow towards perfection. 196

There 1b one other point In the Self's affirmation that needs to be stressed, though: he does not look for self-knowledge within physical life, which he calls "The frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch," but rather In the Other World, between liveB, where, dream­ ing back, he can gain self-knowledge from his memories of life, which Indeed, he Is compelled to re-live in detail before he can be set free for his next Incarnation. When he announces that he will

"Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot'" he is referring specifically to the state after death of the Return, where

... the Spirit must live through past events In the order of their occurrence, because it is compelled by the Celestial Body to trace every passionate event to ltB cause until all are related and understood, turned into knowledge, made a part of itself. All that keeps the Spirit from Its freedom may be com­ pared to a knot that has to be untied or to an oscillation or a violence that must end in a return to equilibrium. (23)

This state, by the way, is a little different from the Dreaming Back, which precedes It: there the soul becomes aware of the reasons why his past life has set up a violence that has to be b resolved^ here he works out the problems, tracing them back to their causes, and, by so doing, getting free of them.

The Self yearns for equilibrium and simplicity, but not, like the Soul, out of a desire to escape from life. Instead, he wants to transform life into something like Tir na ndg.:

When such as 1 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. (24) 197

The language here Is almost Identical to that of "Vacillation": the Self wants to achieve, and hold, the ecstasy that Yeats exper­ ienced in a coffee-ahop for a few minutes, to unite himself with the power that drives his life through so many changes, and cut through all the meaningless complexities of human life. Or, in other words, he wants to travel to T^r na nOg, where, as Dectora said,

the life of the world Leaps upward, as if all the streams o' the world Had run into one fountain. (25)

Like The Shadowy Waters, the "Dialogue," or rather the Self's part of the dialogue, combines images of sexual ecstasy and art: th e ‘sword and the fountain a re both emblems of sexual power, w hile the sword and its fancy scabbard, like the harp of The Shadowy Waters, are also powerful objects of art. The "Dialogue" goes further in this union of sex and art than does The Shadowy Waters, since it combines both themes in one image. So does "Sailing to Byzantium," but in a negative way: In the "Dialogue," artistic creation is united with sexual generation, but the point of the old man's sailing to Byzantium 1b to separate art and generation — art and life itself, for that matter — and find, like the Soul, a permanent release from incarnation. The old man carries on the Soul's argument for release and stasis by giving the concept of release a form. The Soul was content to vanish into darkness, but the old man Insists on being a specific thing, a golden bird, and, further, a golden bird in

Byzantium, and by his insistence on a form he shifts the terms of the argument somewhat. Now the Other World has taken on a new form, 198 a land of art rather than a land of youth, and It Is necessary to refine the terms of the debate between self and soul to fit these new conditions.

In a vision, or a dream, at Coole, Yeats himself experienced the same feeling that the narrator of "Sailing to Byzantium" expresses, but his comment in the Memoirs puts it in much simpler terms, so this dream can, for the sake of convenience, be taken as one side of the debate:

Another night I thought I was taken out of my body and into a world of light, and while in this light, which was also complete happiness, I was to ld I would now be shown the passage o f the soul at its incarnation* I saw the mystic elements gather about my soul in a certain order, a whole elaborate process, but the details vanished as I awoke. Little remained but a sentence I seemed to have spoken to myself: "Beauty is becoming beautiful objects, and truth Is becoming truths." (26)

This has, aside from the old man's bitterness, much the same tone as the poem: not only is there a promise of infinite repose and complete resolution into a pure state, but also of ceremony.

"Sailing to Byzantium" sounds almost like a hymn, or an invocation: its elaborate formal structure is an affirmation of the shaping power of art, its ability to give order and form to experience. And, of course, Byzantium itself suggests ceremony and ritual more than any other city could. In the same way, the "certain order," the

"elaborate process" of his dream, which sounds like a meeting of the

Order of the Golden Dawn, suggests a rigid and unbreakable hierarchy 199

of forces, which the soul left at its Incarnation, but will Join

a g ain .

The other side of the argument affirms the human form, all

the human perfection that the old man explicitly rejects but which

Yeats, in a famous passage of A Vision, identifies with Byzantium

and its art:

I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where 1 chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened S t. Sophia and closed th e Academy o f P la to . I th in k I could fin d in some l i t t l e w ine-shop some philosoph­ ical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make what was an instrument of power to princes and clerics, a murderous madness in the mob, show as a lovely flexible presence like that of a p e rfe c t human body. (27)

This was not a casual idea, since, in Yeats' system of history,

Byzantium under the Emperor Justinian embodied the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon. It was then, Yeats says, that "Byzantine a*t was 28 perfected," and, since the perfection of art as the highest state of being is the point of the Byzantium poems, it is not sur­ prising that Yeats should have wanted to live there. But Phase

Fifteen is not only the phase where art is perfect, but where human life, taken out of the physical body, is also perfect, where the spirit gets a foretaste of eternity:

Its own body possesses the greatest possible beauty, being indeed that body which the soul will permanently inhabit, when all its phases 200

have been repeated according to the number allotted: that which we call the clarified or Celestial Body. (29)

In other words, Byzantium, through the Fifteenth Phase of the Moon,

represents human perfection, and, like Tlr na nOg. It necessarily

removes such perfection from the physical world — although, like

Tlr na n6g. this Phase represents perfection in human terms and does

not, except in "Sailing to Byzantium," have anything to do with

golden birds. Or, to put it another way, the heroes of the Imrama

sail West to find perfect bodies, and the spirits of "Byzantium" ride

East on dolphins to peme in gyres, taking on a spiritual form free

from all physical imperfections.

But the old man of "Sailing to Byzantium" has a different ideal

because he is too embittered by old age to believe that the human

form can embody perfection, even if its form is spiritual rather

than physical. By taking on the form of a miraculous bird, he wants

to escape any further human life: Yeats always represented the

unembodied soul as a bird, so the old man, by choosing to remain in

that shape forever, is rejecting the ideal of human perfection by

declining ever to leave the discarnate state. The Soul would approve

this as the second-best way to spend eternity. But Yeats, I think,

does not approve of this — the old man wants a short-cut out of the

VIheel —- and neither do the spirits of "Byzantium," who, no less dis­

embodied, stay constantly in motion.

The one thing that determines the old man's wish to escape human life is, of course, his bitterness at old age, which he, being a 201 thorough man( expands Into a bitterness at life Itself, even sexual love and birth, since conception and birth are, for him, essentially preludes to decay and death. His bitterness at the "dying genera­ tio n s" of th is world condemns a l l phases of l i f e . Therefore he Is

/ ✓ going East Instead of West, since even Tlr na nOg Is far too human for his taste, and has altogether too many of the young In one a n o th e r's arms to make I t p a la ta b le .

Besides, he Is under the Illusion that perfect art Is possible without human content, and that he can be made Into such a work by the Grecian goldsmiths of Byzantium.

In the early drafts of "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats had him reject Tjfr na n6g by describing Ireland as the Land of Youth, In a spirit of ferocious sarcasm:

Here all Is young; the chapel walls display An Infant sleeping on His Mother's knees Weary w ith t o i l Telg sleeps t i l l break of day That other wearied with night's gallantries Sleeps the morning and the noon away I have tolled and loved until I slept like these A glistening labyrinth of leaves; a snail Scrawls upon the mirror of the soul. (30)

This Is quite disjointed and obscure, as is natural for a first draft, but the old man's bitterness 1 b unmlstakeable: Images like "A snail /

Scrawls upon the mirror of the soul" show a complete disdain for physical life, and even a revulsion from it. By transforming Ireland

Into Tlr na n6g In these first drafts, Yeats showed the old man rejecting human life on any terms, even the be6t possible ones, in favor of a non-human life. This rejection of the West balanced the journey to the East that the old man takes in the middle of the poem, 202

and makes Che irony of his choice more explicit* In the final

version, Yeats, presumably for the sake of economy and a quick open­

ing in to the poem, put a sid e any s p e c ific referen ces to T ir na nO«.

and did not mention in any detail the reverse life of souls after

death, a common theme in his prose at this time and a tentative idea

for the first stanza. (One draft begins, "Here all is young, and 31 grows young day by day,") nonetheless, the opening lines convey

the old man's bitterness at life quite powerfully, and without

reference (for once) to anything but observed experience* The long

recital of things that die sets the tone of the poem:

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birdB in the trees — Those dying generations — at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend a ll summer long Whatever is begotten, bom, and dies. (32)

Because he no longer has any part in this sensual life, except for

the death that seems close, and which he refers to twice while he

is talking about the young, he must reject it, and the next lines

show the counter-ideal he has created in opposition to physical life:

Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing in te lle c t.

In other words, he envisions Byzantium as a place of pure intellect,

* + opposite in every way to Tir na nOg and to his version of Ireland.

Most of a l l , i t s people c e rta in ly do not re je c t monuments of unageing

intellect. Because he, in favor of this limited goal, rejects the

ideal of human perfection, he must take part of human life, the mind, and re-make it as the whole. But, of course, that makes Unity of 203

Being, which Yeats envisioned as a perfect human body, Impossible,

The old man's Ideal of art- as a way of perfecting life is more

limited than the ideal of art as Yeats presents it in other poems, because the old man lim its art by excluding from it anything that has to do with "that sensual music" which animates this world. His own vision o£ a counter-music, to be sung by the golden bird, is in opposition to the music of this world, not a perfection of it.

Because his ideal of art is limited, he lacks any conception of art as a means to gain fullness of life, and, because he misunderstands

Byzantium, taking it only as a stasis, a strange thing happens to him: instead of living in Phase Fifteen, the Phase of Byzantium * itself, he finds himself in its opposite, Phase One. This is not a human Phase; it is like Phase Fifteen in that the soul is not bom into a physical body of definite shape, but here the body it takes

Is not necessarily human at all, and is determined entirely by other forces. The soul, having given up all personality (as the Soul in the "Dialogue" wants to do), is entirely passive:

Mind has become indifferent to good and evil, to truth and falsehood; body has become undifferen­ tiated, dough-like; the more perfect be the soul, the more indifferent the mind, the more dough-like the body; mind and body take whatever shape, accept whatever image is imprinted upon them, transact whatever purpose is imposed upon them, are indeed the Instruments of supernatural manifestation, the final link between the living and more powerful beings. (33)

Yeats described these passive bodies in less abstract terms in

"The Double Vision of Michael Robartes": 204

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood, Themselves obedient, Knowing n o t e v il and good;

Obedient to some hidden magical breath. They do not even feel, so abstract are they, So dead beyond our death, Triumph that we obey. (34)

The golden bird is essentially like this, although prettier: it

is a machine, an artifice made by the goldsmiths of Byzantium, and

so has no will of its own. The old man's soul can find its peace

in this shape by giving up its will and personality, becoming a voice through which the forces of history sing of what is paBt or passing or to come. In other words, the old man wants to take on the impersonality of Creek art to save his soul from being bom again; what is strange about this is simply that he removes the joy of art from the artist to the artifact. He is more passive than

the speaker of any other poem by Yeats; he is, in fact, too passive

to live in this world, since his Self has disappeared and with it any desire for personality.

Human perfection, as the "Dialogue of Self and Soul" shows, depends on selfhood: Yeats embraced first heroic self-sufficiency and then reincarnation as themes in his poetry largely because both concepts give the Self great stature. His concept of the artist is, in the Romantic tradition, that of the perfected Self, alone and self-sufficient, creating art in his tower without needing any help from lesser men. In "The Tower," which immediately follows "Sailing 205 to Byzantium" In the Collected Poems, he answers the old man1s passivity, his longing to become an artifact rather than an artist, with an expression of his own pride in being a poet ("And I myself created even expanding his role to the power of mankind In general, which In his system creates reality as an artist creates h is a r t :

Death and life were not T ill man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul, Aye, sun and moon and star, all, And further add to that That, being dead, we rise, Dream and so create Translunar Paradise. (35)

The artist and the perfected man of Phase Plfteen are alike In their power to shape reality, the artist by his art and the per­ fected man by his unity with the power behind the world, which Is common to all men but at its fullest in this Phase. They are most alike at Chose moments of myBtical Insight in which artists (and saints like Ribh) come close to sharing the sensations of souls in

Paradise: Yeats recorded such experiences of his own in several poems, such as "Vacillation," "Stream and Sun at Glendalough," and

"A Meditation in Time of War." It is the same ecstasy that lovers experience when they merge themselves into a new composite being, and that dancers act out through their dance.

It is also, presumably, the state of the sages standing in

God's holy fire. The old man wants them to come out and dance, but, considering the imagery of "Byzantium," it is likely that they 206

are already dancing, after a fashion, In gyres. The old nan,

correctly, takes the holy fire for the goldsmiths' fire, perhaps

also the philosophers' fire that transmutes mercury into gold

(or a soul Into a golden artifact in this case); there spirits may

not be In the process of becoming golden birds, but certainly they

are being cleansed of mortality as the old man wants to be. The

dance Is very limited in "Sailing to Byzantium," which Is certainly

natural since it Is a poem about stasis, but It is present as a

reminder of the historical gyres that the old man wants to become

subject to: once he has become an artifact, a golden bird, he will

become part of the historical process, singing about change without

changing himself, gloating over the dying generations without any

fear of death for himself - even though, in Michael Robartes' terms,

he Is already dead beyond our death. This Is exactly what he does

In his new form In "Byzantium" as the golden bird "scorns aloud" all living things, having exchanged life for a kind of perfection.

The golden bird and Its scorn for life 1 b the central problem

of "Sailing to Byzantium," the Image that has perplexed readers for nearly fifty years. The rest of the poem, although colored by the bitterness of the persona, is reasonably straightforward: hatred of age, bitterness directed at the young, the desire to purify a

sick and perhaps revolting body, various kinds of dancing and sing­

ing, and so on. Even the subtle irony of an Eastern Paradise to balance Tir na nOg. and the journey away from the Land of Youth, 207

Is not hard to appreciate if the poem is read in the context of the rest of Yeats's poems. But the golden bird is a problem no matter how you read the poem. It is not even simple to decide why it is a problem: the image is bizarre, certainly, but not unusually so for Yeats; it is perfectly fitting for Byzantium (and seems to be 36 based on an actual golden bird near the Emperor's throne); and it serves perfectly to express the old man's rejection of a living body. Nonetheless, it seems odd that anyone, even this persona. would really want to spend eternity as a mechanical bird, and I feel that Yeats wanted the oddity of this idea, which is completely baffling if you assume that Yeats himself was more than momentarily in sympathy with it, to point up the absurdity of the old man's urge to escape from the Wheel.

The fundamental irony of the poem, then, is that the old man's ideal of perfection, which he thinks w ill lead to an escape from the Wheel, is exactly what can bind him to it forever. I call his urge to escape "absurd" because he is really heading into Phase One, the period of complete passivity and lack of freedom. Even though he is under the Impression that he is escaping from life, he is not: the forces of history w ill flow through his song, he will be subjected to everything past or passing or to come. He must experience all the life of the world, even though.vicariously, rather than just the life of one aged man. And, should he get tired of this, he can do nothing about it: he is trapped in an incarnation that will not die 208 and set him free. He can never flee into another life, or out of the Wheel entirely. Any other soul has that chance for escape if it should, like the Soul of the "Dialogue," want to take It; that of the golden bird has given up its chance.

The old man's choice of a body does not work very well within

Yeats's system, and that, I think, suggests that Yeats was not entirely sympathetic to his ideas about reincarnation. But there is a more direct sign that Yeats rejects the old man'B point of view: in "The Tower," which immediately follows "Sailing to

Byzantium" in all editions of The Tower and is clearly an answer to it, Yeats, speaking in his own person, "makes" his soul into the image of a swan, a natural bird as well as the usual Celtic emblem for the disembodied soul:

Now sh a ll I make my so u l, Compelling it to study In a learned school T ill the wreck of body, Slow decay of blood, Testy delirium Or d u ll decrepitude, Or what worse evil come — The death of friends, or death Of every b r i ll i a n t eye That made a catch in the breath — Seem but the clouds of the sky When the horizon fades, Or a b ir d 's sleepy cry Among the deepening shades. (37)

The "bird" is the traditional image of the dying swan:

Pride, like that of the mom,

Or th a t of th e hour When the swan must f ix h is eye Upon a fading gleam, 209

Float out upon a long Last reach of glittering stream And there sing hla last song. (38)

In other words, the dying generations are answering the golden bird.

Throughout "The Tower," Yeats answers the old man by calling up all

the images the old man deplores, uniting art with physical life

(and physical love) rather than separating them:

Some few remembered s till when I was young A peasant girl commended by a song, Who'd liv e d somewhere upon th a t rocky p lace, And praised the colour of her face, And had the greater joy in praising her, Remembering th a t, i f walked she th e re , Farmers jostled at the fair So great a glory did the song confer. (39)

That is, he does everything in exact opposition to what the old

man says and does: instead of turning away from this life in scorn

because of his decaying body, he meditates on things that are

already past. Instead of separating life and art, he makes a point

of stressing their unity. Instead of being created, he will be a

creator after death. Finally, by taking the form of a living bird

(in the best Irish tradition), he takes on himself not the immor­

tality of a perfect machine but rather the immortality of the wild

swans at Coole and the purity of the swan in "Coole Park and Bally-

lee." Both are attributes that the old man would deny to any living bird, symbolic or not.

The elaborate counterpoint of these two poems is Yeats1 direct

answer to the old rna^s passivity, and^ obliquely, it affirms the 210 ideal of human perfection: not only does it make man (in the aggregate) God, but gives an answer to the problem of age and decay that does not include any kind of despair of human existence.

Indeed, he makes the entire universe an extension of human exis­ tence, especially human love and art:

X have prepared my peace With learned Italian things And the proud stones of Greece, Poet's imaginings And memories of love, Memories of the words of women, All those things whereof Man makes a superhuman .. Mirror-resembling dream. (40)

Yeats goes to some trouble here to make an ideal of art that is opposite to the old man's in every possible way: who could imagine the old man leaving Byzantium out of a list of classical periods of a rt, making art out of the memories of love (of all things), or envisioning the spiritual world as a mirror in which one sees, inevitably, the human form? Rather, this poem prepares for the

Self's affirmation of human life, which will follow in The Winding

Stair: it is hard to imagine that the Self would object to anything

Yeats says in this poem, although the old man would object to everything. Yeats speaking with his own voice argues for the Self, and against the Soul and the old man.

Although the old man's ideal is undercut in "The Tower," and the Soul's very similar Ideals are shouted down in "A Dialogue of

Self and Soul," the old man, the Soul and the goldeii bird are not 211 contemptible. Yeats In "The Tower" is just as bitter about his decaying body as the old man is about his, and the old man is correct in wanting to live on a spiritual rather than physical plane — even the Self is at its best between bodies* The problem with the old man's vision is simply that it is one-sided, overly passive and static. It is one-sided also in that he rejects all parts of human life except the life of intellect: his idea of art is without passion or joy, and so Inhuman. Nonetheless, he is more aware of art and its transforming power than are the young in one another's arms who do not go to Byzantium, his austere ideal is worthy in its limited way, and he getB his wish. In "Byzantium" he is a golden bird, and a miraculous one:

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common-blrd or p e ta l And all complexities or mire or blood. (41)

He has, perhaps, gotten more than he wanted: he is not so much an artifice, as he had envisioned, as a miracle, a spirit in the shape of an eccentric bird, and an integral part of the supernatural machinery of Byzantium. He is now a prophet, like the cocks of 42 Hades, and, though no longer human, an emblem of the purified state to those souls entering Byzantium.

Aside from the golden bird itself, the second stanza is mainly concerned with the difference between moonlight and starlight. In 212

Che "Dialogue," much of the debate turned on the Soul's passion

for the pole star; the golden bird, still taking that line, Is now "Planted on the star-lit golden bough"; the bough is carefully marked off from the dome of St, Sophia, which may be either starlit or moonlit. The difference is crucial, In two ways. First, it Is part of Yeats' response to Sturge Moore's criticism that the golden bird of "Sailing to Byzantium" Is not sufficiently unlike 43 natural birds; second, it extends to poem's range of meaning by bringing back the old debate between Self and Soul, finally making them agree. In response to Moore's criticism , Yeats made the-golden bird even more remote from nature than it had been in

"Sailing to Byzantium"; now it is not just another Byzantine trin­ ket, but a miracle, and, living in the starlight, it is completely free from change. It can prophesy, as In "Sailing,"

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood.

This sounds familiar: miracle or not, the golden bird still has something of the old man's disdainful character. But he is wrong if he assumes (as the Soul also assumes) that only those beyond change can scorn the complexities of mire and blood. In the first stanza, Yeats makes the great dome of St, Sophia equally remote from change, but does not put it entirely in starlight:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human v ein s. 213

I t makes no d ifferen ce whether the dome, o r the s p i r i ts being purified In front of It, are finished with change or not: the

Self detests physical life even though he chooses to return to It, and it is clear that a moonlit dome can be just as disdainful as as starlit one.

But the dome does not look down on the souls who come before

It, only their bodies. One of Yeats' most frequent themes, the Idea behind his hatred of old age, is that the body Itself gets between the soul and its perfection; the dome, then "disdains" the physical life of mankind, not the changing soul, and the purpose of Byzantium is to bum off this physical husk. The old man thinks that getting

"out of nature" by passing through the fire will free him from the human form, but that is because he mistakes the form of the spiritual body, which is capable of perfection, for his physical body, which of course is not. Further, Byzantium is not a place where

(ordinarily at least) the soul takes on anything new: rather it is, like Spenser's Garden of Adonis, the place from which the soul comes at birth and to which it returns at death, a storehouse of immortal images. The images are what come out of the fire, which changes the physical body the soul endures into a higher, spiritual body, or, in the terms of Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, changes earth and water into fire and the fifth element:

From tradition and perception, one thought of one's own life as symbolised by earth, the place of heter­ ogenous things, the images as mirrored in water, and the images themselves one could divine but as air; and beyond it all there were, I felt confident, 214

certain alms and governing loves, the fire that makes all simple. Yet the Images themselves were fourfold, and one judged their meaning in part from the predom­ inance of one out of the four elements, or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding another four, a bird bora out of the fire. (44)

The bird born out of the fire is of course the purified soul,

whether mechanical In form or not, whether gold or white.

Although It is dangerous to push analogies very far, this

‘ passage contains an unusually promising one that suggests freedom

for the soul at this point in Its journey, or at least the possi­

bility of freedom. Yeats is using the language of alchemy, as he

often does both in his poetry and prose; in this case he is com­

paring the soul to the Philosophers' Stone, which has no form but

can take on any form at all, being the fifth element or the First

Matter Itself. The fire of the Byzantium poems is, clearly, the

fire of the athanor out of which the Stone emerges. Having come

through the holy fire, the Soul, like the Stone, is free of any

earthly dross and can take any form or, no doubt, transmute any

physical object into gold because of its purity (thiB may be how the

golden bird got its body). It is free, because it has left causa­

tion behind it along with its physical body, and entered the Con­

dition of Fire, which to Yeats was the ultimate end of every soul:

When a ll sequence comes to an end, time comes to an end, and the soul puts on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eter­ nal possession of itself in one single moment. That condition alone is animate, all the rest is fantasy, and from thence come all the passions and, some have held, the very heat of the body. (45) 215

The soul Is now, perhaps, unified with God, the One who Is animate

(CP. p. 180); in any case, having emerged from the fourfold

reality of this world Into a state like Blake's "pulsation of an

artery," it has certainly gained its eternal freedom. It is not, however, free to make choices, since choice is possible only In a 46 composite state, that is, a state In which evil Is possible.

Even Paradise has its restrictions, since (as Oisin discovered),

It does not allow for suffering, other than the "agony" of the cleansing fire.

Freedom for the soul, then, is not freedom In the sense of

this world, the possibility of choice; rather, it Is freedom from

its past choices, freedom both from its body and the life it lived

In the body. It must shake off its memories before it can either change Into an eternal being, i.e ., escape from the Wheel, or move on to another life in the Sixteenth Phase. This is what the Self has In mind when he proclaims that he will "Measure the lot; /

Forgive myself the lot," and it is what the souls of Byzantium are doing in their dance;

The toll of the living is to free themselves from an endless sequence of objects, and that of the dead to free themselves from an endless sequence of thoughts* One sequence begets another, and these have power because of all those things we do, not for their own sake but for an Imagined good. (47)

The "Images that yet / Fresh Images beget" are the memories of the

"furies of complexities" of human life , which in Byzantium are 216

broken down in the refining flee so that the soul can enter the

Condition of Fire, Since Byzantium is In the Fifteenth Phase,

where souls have their eternal bodies for a while, their freedom Is

absolute while it lasts. Being in Byzantium, then, is equivalent

to being at the end of one's incarnations, living in a perfect

spiritual body. The only problem, one that 1 will explore In the next chapter, is that the soul must eventually "remember its lone­

liness" and come back to the world; the Self is willing to do this, but the Soul would prefer not to.

The re fin in g f i r e , and th e dance w ithin i t , does two th in g s: it frees the souls from causation, and makes them eternal, like art. Because they are loosed -from the memories of life, they are not doomed to go on repeating their past lives endlessly, as are the ghosts of Purgatory or The Dreaming of the Bones. They can go on to something else, and this new state that they go to is human perfection. However, it is possible to describe their perfection only in the abstract terms of Yeats' system, since "Byzantium" does not take the reader beyond the process of becoming perfect, except in the case of the golden bird. At that, it goes further than

"Sailing to Byzantium," which serves only as an introduction to the heavenly city; a third Byzantium poem, if it existed, would logically be about how it is to be a spirit in the Fifteenth Phase,

But Yeats did not write such a poem, and it is hard to blame him for not trying to, since a state of perfection cannot be described except in abstract terms or in metaphors (such as the metaphor of 217

ulr na nOg), and Yeats perhaps felt that bringing back his imagery once more would btrain it too much, since the actual poems gain much of their effect from the contrast between human and superhuman life, while a poem about being disembodied would be more than the metaphor of the city could handle.

The c lo se st Yeats a c tu a lly comes to such a poem is the image of the dance in the fourth stanza. This image is itself an expan­ sion on a supernatural element of the poem: the shade, "Hades' bob­ bin," that appears in the second stanza. The "bobbin" is wound in windlng-cloths, but may, as Yeats says, "unwind the winding path": the image, in less exotic terms^ is that of a spirit winding its own cerements about Itself, then reversing Itself and causing them to fall off, straight now and no longer binding in any way* The souls of Byzantium re-live their lives backwards, so that finally, passing birth, they are free of the past and ready to be bom again, or, if they are finished with birth altogether, to be at rest. A similar image in a simpler poem may make the process clearer: the

"Fool" of "The Hero, the Girl and the Fool," despairing of love in this world after watching two conceited lovers in action, re­ marks:

When a ll works that have From cradle run to grave From grave to cradle run in stead ; When thoughts that a fool Has wound upon a spool Are but loose thread, are but loose thread; 218

When cradle and spool are past And I mere shade at last Coagulate of stuff Transparent like the wind, 1 think that I may find A faithful love, a faithful love. (48)

It Is worth noting that the lovers' problem Is the conflict between their appearances and their real being, or between their temporary and eternal forms. Their love is doomed now that they are part of the dying generations, but it may be fulfilled In the Fifteenth

Phase, when appearance and reality are the same thing. At least the Fool, who Is a good deal gentler and more optimistic than the old man of "Sailing to Byzantium," thinks that love Is possible there.

The point of the dance, and of the unwinding cerements, Is the ecstasy Yeats almost always associated with dancing, but In "Byzan­ tium" it is raised to an unusually high metaphorical power. The dancers of poems like "Long-legged Fly" or "A Crazed Girl" are re­ moved from the world because they are caught up in themselves (as are the spirits of Byzantium), but dancers in this world must inevitably slow down and return to normal life. In Byzantium, the dance is a process of sloughing off a past life; so, as a spirit dances, it loses everything it had picked up in its most recent life, and, as it drops these mere complexities, it becomes further and further removed from this world, more and more itself as it is in eternity. What it loses is the experience of this world, not its own identity; it exchanges becoming for pure being. Because

Byzantium is in the Fifteenth Phase, this dance is the climax of the 219

49 soul's "seeking Itself." It can achieve Its true self, and live

as a coherent, unified being; or, as Frank Kermode puts It In a

famous comment In Romatic Image, " ... the strategy of the poem is,

c le a rly , to e s ta b lis h the Immense paradoxical v i t a l i t y o f the dead,

more alive than the living; still, but richer In movement than the 50 endless agitation of becoming."

The dance here, as anywhere else in Yeats, may be called "pure"

motion, without the meaningless complexities, confusions, and cross­

purposes of any other action possible in this world; it is, indeed,

a way of cutting through all the difficulties created by other kinds

of action. That is why the sfdhe do almost nothing but dance in

tir na nOg, why the ancient pagans of Ireland performed ritual dances

to unite themselves with the power of nature, and why "Among School

Children" (to give the most obvious example) ends with the image of

the dance. Accordingly, Kermode follows up the remark I quoted

above with a s till more famous (and debated) one that puts the dance at the center of Yeats1 imagery and that of the whole Romantic movement:

And this is precisely the concept of the dead face and the dancer, the mind moving like a top, which I am calling the central icon of Yeats and of the whole tradition. Byzantium is where this is the normal condition, where all is image and there are no contrasts and no costs, inevitable concomitants of the apparition of absolute being in the sphere of becoming. (51)

The combination of becoming and absolute being in one image is,

I think, what gives Yeats's dancers their power. As I have suggested 220 before, Yeats may have avoided writing a poem about what happens to the purified spirits because such a state of being Is Impossible to describe; In any case, there Is something uniquely awesome about seeing the divine world manifest Itself In things that had seemed perfectly ordinary. The Byzantium poems create such a reaction by transforming a real (If somewhat exotic) city Into Paradise: the opening lines of "Byzantium" mention soldiers, nightwalkers, and a cathedral gong, but then the poem moves quickly Into the Other World with whirling shades on the solid marble, and a machine that is ac­ tually a spirit. This is the same kind of supernatural life within nature that shapes IrlBh mythology, with Its spirits concealed Inside h ills and the wind, whose homeland in Tlr na n6g Is both like and' unlike this world. All of Yeats's dancers, even those In Byzantium, are in both worlds at once; the spirits in the fire are, like the sjfdhe, su p e rn atu ral beings who en&ody human p e rfe c tio n . F u rth e r, the dance of "Byzantium" ties the supernatural life of the Fifteenth Phase to the cycle of the Wheel: because they are in motion, contrasting violently to the imagined bird of "Sailing to Byzantium," who Is out of nature, it Is clear that these spirits are still within the cycle of Incarnation. They are not at rest, and, unlike the golden bird, they do not sing about what Is past or passing, or to come; like any souls within bodies in the other Phases, they are themselves part of what is past or passing or to come.

Nonetheless, their current incarnation is a supernatural one.

They are not merely going from one life to another, like souls moving 221

from, say, Phase Six to Phase Seven; rather, they are being re-made

Into beings complete In themselves by a process like the creation

o£ a r t . As they move away from human l i f e , they become sim pler,

and resolve themselves into images; in other words, they become like a r t . In p a rtic u la r, they become lik e Byzantine a r t , a union between

the natural and divine orders, which Yeats saw as a perpetual vision embodied In art:

The ascetic, called in Alexandria "God's athlete," has taken the place of those Greek athletes whose statues have been melted or broken up or stand deserted in the midst of cornfields, but all about him is an incredible splendour like that which we see pass under our closed eyelids as we lie between sleep and waking, no representation of a living world but the dream of a somnambulist .... Gould any visionary of those days, passing through the church named with so un- theologlcal grace "The Holy Wisdom," can even a visionary of today wandering among the mosaics at Ravenne or in Sicily, fall to recognise some one image seen under his closed eyelids? To me it seems that He, who among the first Christian communities was little but a ghostly exorcist, had in His assent to a full Divinity made possible this sinking-in upon a supernatural splendour, these walls with their little glimmering cubes of blue and green and gold. (52)

The ascetic man does not, in this case, represent a tuming-away from physical life in the same way that the old man of "Sailing to

Byzantium" does; rather, he re-enacts Christ's death, which, like the deaths of those souls who have come to Byzantium, exchanges physical perfection (or the possibility of it) for a Blakean opening of the senses: 222

When revelation cones athlete and sage are merged; the earliest sculptured Image of Christ Is copied from that of the Apotheosis of Alexander the Great; the tradition Is founded which declares even to our own day that Christ alone was exactly six feet high, perfect physical man. Yet as perfect physical man He must die, for only so can primary power reach antithetical mankind shut within the circle of Its senses, touching outward things alone In that which seems most personal and physical. (53)

The achievement of physical perfection, as embodied by Christ In

Yeats' system, Is one step toward human perfection, though ordinary

men can only approximate such perfection in this world; the next

step is death and the power of vision Yeats attributes to the dead;

the next is the attainment of the soul's eternal form, after the

purgation of the fire. The "clarified body" of the Fifteenth Phase, which is also the body that Is waiting for the soul at the end of

Its incarnations, Is the work of art that the golden smithies are

creating. Art, for Yeats, was a way of refining Images and taking

them out of common life so that they would become complete In them­

selves, and, being complete, unchanging. Yeats Imagined that In

Byzantium (the historical city) he could have found "Some philoso­ phical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the super- 54 natural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even," and, In his spiritual city of Byzantium, he expanded the role of this superb anonymous a r t i s t to th a t o f the golden sm ithies who make s e lf - sufficient because perfect images out of the "mire and blood" of human life. These perfect Images, like the dancer of "Among School

Children" or the statues of "The Statues," exist In eternity, but, 223

being human, serve as a link between time and eternity, between

this world and the Other World. Art Itself is a link between time'

and eternity, as Yeats said in his notes for A Vision;

At first we are subject to Destiny ... but the point in the Zodiac where the whirl becomes a sphere once reached, we may escape from the constraint of our nature and from that of external things, enter­ ing upon a state where all fuel has become flame, where there is nothing but the state Itself, nothing to constrain it or end it. We attain it always in the creation of enjoyment of a work of art, but that moment though e te rn a l in th e Dalmon p asses from us because it is not an attainment of our whole being. (55)

In the case of art, as in the case of any kind of ecstasy, the Other

World is open to us, but we cannot enter because of our bodies; but

in Byzantium physical impediments are burned away, art becomes perfect, and the soul becomes perfect as well.

Art and dance are, aside from the problem of old age in

"Sailing to Byzantium," the dominant themes of the Byzantium poems; what is slightly unusual about the form they take is that they appear . without any references (other than slighting ones) to sexual ecstasy.

Art, in these poems, is an alternative to sex. It seems as if there are two ways to unwind the winding path; by perfect sexual union, as performed by Baile and Aillinn, or by becoming a pure work of art, either a human soul divested of everything unnecessary for its image, or, perhaps, a golden bird. Unless a soul escapes from the Wheel altogether, though, or finds stasis in some non-human form, its body will be that of the Fifteenth Phase, which seems to be the bodily form of the most perfect lovers, such as Baile and Aillinn: 224

The miracle that gave them such a death Transfigured to pure substance what had once Been bone and sinew . . . . (56)

For that matter, the hermit Ribh Is strikingly like the ascetics

of Alexandria, or the narrative voice of "Byzantium": someone whose

clarified sight allows him to see the spiritual world within the

physical world. In Byzantium, such an observer sees the dance and

the smithies at work; in Ireland, the spiritual bodies of dead

lovers. Both amount to much the same thing, especially since in

other poems Yeats does not separate art and sexual love, but rather

combines them in one image. In "The Statues," for example^those masterful images cause living boys and girls to respond to them

dramatically:

But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of s o lita r y beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough, And pressed at midnight in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face. (57)

There are different ways to attain perfection, and different

images of Paradise and human perfection for each one; as his father

had told him, an artist must know how to present different Paradises

for the different emotions. Byzantium is the Way of Art as Tir na

* nOg is the Way of Ecstasy; they have in common the dance and the

fact that each is a solution, a drastic one, to the problem of old

age and all the problems of this world. They are more than wishful

thinking, though; they are different and complementary ways of

describing human life made perfect or becoming perfect. In addition, 225 they both prepare, in the context of Yeats1 work, for a more abstract and difficult concept, that of the Phases of the Moon and the perfect state, both human and superhuman, of the Fifteenth Phase, NOTES

1 Letters to the New Island, p. 204.

2 Allt and Alspach, Variorum, p. 724.

3 John Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York Noonday P ress, 1959), p. 216.

4 CP, p. 243.

5 Unterecker, Reader’s Guide, p. 217.

6 See Rees' comment In Celtic Heritage, p. 324.

7 For a summary of th e evidence, see Nutt In Voyage of Bran, v o l. 2, pp. 107-14.

8 See N utt, Bran, v o l. 2, p . 65.

9 Nutt, Bran, vol. 2, pp. 77-79.

10 Nutt, Bran, vol. 1, pp. 49-52.

11 Nutt demonstrates the parallel structure In Bran, Vol. 2, p. 55.

12 CP, p. 435.

13 For Yeats' high opinion of this book see Marcus, Renaissance. pp. 250-51.

14 Nutt, Bran, vol. 2, pp. 280-81. 16 Harold Bloom Is witty about this In Yeats (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 373.

17 CP, p . 230. 18 CP, p. 231.

19 A V ision, p. 183.

20 CP, p. 232.

21 See A Vision, pp. 224-31.

22 Henn, The Lonely Tower, pp. 217-18,

23 A Vision, p. 226,

24 CP, p. 232.

25 CP, p . 425.

26 Memoirs, pp. 127-28,

27 A Vision, p. 279.

28 A Vision, p. 281.

29 A Vision, p. 136,

30 John Unterecker, ed., Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays (Engle­ wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 104. (From Curtis Bradford, "Yeats's Byzantium Poems: A Study of Their Development.") 33 A Vision, p. 183.

34 CP. pp. 167-68.

35 CP, p. 196,

36 A. Norman Jeffares, "The Byzantium PoemB of William Butler Yeats," Review of English Studies. XXII (January, 1946), pp. 44-52. See p. 48. 37 CP, p. 197.

38 CP, p. 196.

39 CP, p . 193.

40 CP. pp. 196-97.

41 CP. p. 243.

42 Alison White, "YeatsT Byzantium. 20, and Sailing to Byzantium. 30- 32," Explicator. XIII no. 1 (October, 1954), Item 8 . 43 See Jeffares, Commentary, pp. 353-54.

44 Mythologies, pp. 346-47.

45 Mythologies, p. 357,

46 Mythologies. pp. 356-57.

47 Mythologies, pp. 353-54. 229

48 CP, p. 217.

49 See Aherne's speeches In "The Phaseb o f the Moon," CP, p, 163.

50 Kermode, Romantic Image, pp. 88-89.

51 Ibid.. p. 89.

52 A Vision, pp. 280-81.

53 A Vision, p. 273,

54 A Vision, p. 279.

55 Ellmann, Identity, p. 221.

56 CP, p . 282.

57 CP. p. 322. W. B, YEATS IN PARADISE

Chapter Four:

The Fifteenth Phase' of the Moon and the Clarified Body

Yesterday when I saw the dry and leafless vineyards at the very edge of the motionless sea, or lifting their brown stems from almost inaccessible patches of earth high upon the cliff-side, or met at the turn of the path the orange and lemon trees in full fruit, or the crimson cactus flower, or felt the warm sunlight falling between blue and blue, I murmured, "I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the roots of the grass." But mur­ mured it without terror, In exultation almost. — W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1925) (1)

Yeats may well have had moods in which he agreed with the old man of "Sailing to Byzantium" that the best way to end life is to

pass out of it altogether, becoming some form that cannot feel the

pain of life because it has no life of its own. Undoubtedly, he

also agreed at times with Sophocles, whom he translates in his grim­ mest sequence of poems, "A Man Young and Old":

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away, (2 )

But he could not choose to be unborn, and did not, like Keats or

Synge, turn quickly away from this world. Instead, stuck with an

aging body and the possibility that he would have to endure an

230 231

endless succession of aging bodies, he chose to affirm life In this world as the model of perfection, and, as he grew older, Identified

the life of the Other World more and more clearly as this life

raised Into perfection, not an escape from life but Its logical

fulfillment. The Soul of the "Dialogue11 and the old man of "Sailing

to Byzantium" are not wrong because they want to stay In the Other

World, but because they want to free themselves from any state re­ sembling human life, Even Tlr na n 6 g, In Yeats1 laBt work, Is not human enough: it certainly resembles this world, but Its essential energy Is drawn from sources that human beings have no access to, and so It Is always alien to those travellers, like Oisln, who hope to find a perfect life there. Instead, the last form of Paradise that Yeats constructed is built up from human experience, and Is

In effect the summation of all the lives a soul goes through.

Yeats himself was torn between his longing for a transcendent, perfect life, which can exist only out of incarnation, and his love for this world. The passage from the first edition of A Vision that I have used as an epigraph for this chapter shows him attached to this world, "exulting" In being trapped In it. This exultation is, I think, the Impulse that caused him to portray the Earthly

Paradise of Tlr na n6 g so often: the world of Tlr na n6 g i s ex actly the kind of landscape Yeats presents here, except that in Tlr na nOg the vineyards would be constantly green, with ripe clusters of grapes.

It is a supernatural realm, but still, for all its strangeness, a 232 world that: would he a perfect home for perfected human beings

If only they could share in Its supernatural life.

But Yeats never presented any concept without qualification.

Oisin does leave Tlr na nOR. Edaln is reluctant to go there at all, and there Is a certain hollowness to this early Paradise exactly because of its supernatural perfection. In the same way, Byzantium

Is an ambivalent place, this time because souls must undergo agony before they can be purified. Nothing comes free, and even when

Yeats Is looking out over the Mediterranean, he Is unwilling to allow himself an unbroken serenity in the idea that escape from life is not necessary for the soul's fulfillment after all. He murmurs, "there is maybe no escape" [my emphasis], because there may be one that he is not aware of, in which case too single-minded an attachment to the beauty of this world might prevent his soul from finding itself.

The system of A Vision works itself out in a delicate balance between the soul's attraction to this world, as Yeats describes it above, and its constant wish to transcend physical life. That is, this last system does not really replace the older Imagery of T^r na n 6 g, or even Byzantium; rather, it translates Yeats's ambivalence about the Other World into more abstract terms in an attempt to find a symbolic language that can reduce the soul's ambivalence, and Yeats's own, into a single unified symbol of life in this world and the Other

World. At the risk of being somewhat repetitious, I want to summa­ rize some of the paradoxes and ambiguities implicit in Yeats's handling 233

of Tlr na nOg and Byzantium, since these paradoxes are no longer

just implicit In Yeats' new conception of the Other World, but now

are problems to be dealt with openly.

The basic assumption that underlies the system is that the soul

must try to find Itself; like it or not, it is compelled to seek

Itself through many bodies. That seems to be what It Is created

for. But It cannot simply die into the physical world, because it

Is different from the world, and approaches complete passivity only

in Phase One; nor can It simply break the sequence of lives and

fling Itself out into the dark, as the Soul of the "Dialogue"

suggests. Instead, It muBt seek the world first, then Itself, until,

having lived every possible life, it has exhausted the complexities

of experience and can be set free from births. Until that time

comes ( If I t comes a t a l l ) , the soul cannot be sa id to have reached

Paradise, since Paradise is an eternal state and the soul is still

in flu x ; even in the b e st moments of a man's o r woman's l i f e , the mystical trance that Yeats imagined for Rlbh or Solomon and Sheba,

there is no absolute perfection. Solomon and Sheba must fail to bring back Eden, no matter how hard they try, and even Ribh must

return to "the common round of day." That is why, in A Vision,

Yeats is careful to say that no state in life or death is really

P aradise:

Neither between death and birth nor between birth and death can the soul find more than momentary happiness; its object is to pass 234

rapidly round its circle and find freedom from that circle. (3)

Although he did not actually vrlte this until the last years of his life, the idea is, as I have shown, implicit in even his earliest poems: every Paradise that he created in his work is, in a sense, provisional. There is always, at least for human beings, something

✓ ^ wrong with the Other World. So Tlr na nOg, while perfect for the sldhe, is Impossible for Olsin: after wandering from island to is­ land like a soul from life to life, he flees from Paradise because he feels that he cannot fu lfill his human destiny without suffering.

It would be anachronistic to say that he must move on to Phase

Sixteen, but his return to this world is closely analogous to that act. In an opposite approach to the same problem the old man of

"Sailing to Byzantium," who wants more than anything else to avoid suffering, is willing to become an artifact rather than undergo the agony of the flames and more earthly life beyond them, no matter what transcendent state might be the final end of all that discipline.

The same paradox is at work, then, both in the early poems and in A Vision and the poems written out of it: Paradise is simple and pure, unlike human beings, but, since it is human in form, it is both familiar and alien to human belngB, Teats relished this ambiguity,

/ / knowing that the force of Tir na nOg. Byzantium, and the Fifteenth

Phase rested on this combination of disturbing alienness and disconcerting fam iliarity. But the Other World does,not come into his work only to make it strange: early and late, it serves as a 235

place where a man la brought face to face with his own imperfection,

and at the same time confronted with an absolute simplicity that

he desires but cannot attain. Olsin gives up after 300 years, since

he cannot possibly become part of Tlr na n6 g, or even be sure that

he has really found the place at all; the souls of Byzantium, wrapped up In alchemical fire, are closer to simplicity, but, caught

in a dance, they are not yet free. The Fifteenth Phase is not

freedom either, but It is closer to freedom and simplicity than any

other version of the Other World that Yeats described, since there

the soul achieves Its Clarified Body, which Is the.divine human body

It will have when all its lives are finished.

The Clarified Body Is, in a way, half the system of A Vision.

It Is the half that represents stasis, while the more elaborate

Imagery of th e Phases of the Moon rep resen ts flu x . The two concepts

rely on each other for meaning: the Phases would be almost meaning­

less, at least for Yeats, If they led to nothing but endless repeti­

tion, while the Clarified Body would be no more than a literary

device, somewhat like Blake’s Giant Albion but less monolithic,

If It were not linked to a process that has the resolution of com­

plexities, embodied In the Clarified Body, for Its goal. The

Clarified Body is a shadowy state of being in any case, since Yeats did not, or could not, give much information about It. It may be

that he could find no way to describe perfection once he had finally

found a name for it, or it may be that there is nothing much that 236

can be described about this state anyway, just as there is really

very little to be said about nirvana. Therefore, my approach to

this final Paradise, if it can be called that, must be the same

approach that Yeats himself used: to describe the system of the

Phases of the Moon, especially Phase Fifteen, and to show how the

soul, accepting life after life, eventually purges itself of its

need for physical existence and re-unites itself with the body that

it had before the world was made.

Since this world is a good deal easier to describe than the

Other World, it is natural that Yeats spent most of A Vision

describing the process that leads to perfection, not the end of the

process; besides, he was not, like the old man of "Sailing to

Byzantium," constantly sick with desire to escape the world. Harold 4 Bloom has commented that he "triumphs over his own system" by not

being entirely preoccupied with the end of the cycle. ThlB is quite

true, but there is-more to the fact that Yeats puts so much emphasis

on life in this world in A Vision and his later poetry: the system

depends on a balance of opposite impulses, love of this world and

love of the Other World. Escape from this world is not just a matter of slipping off into the dark, which might be a simple way

out for the soul, but rather of exhausting the soul's love for this world, a process that takes many lives and an intricate system of

experience that plays the "primary" and "antithetical" impulses,

love of the world and of the self, against each other until they 237 merge In to a u n ity . Bloom, lik e many read ers, seems to assume th a t the system Is essentially an elaborate mechanism for getting the soul to Byzantium and safely out of life, but In fact It Is an attempt to resolve every aspect of life In both the natural and supernatural worlds Into one Intricate symbol.

The "Completed Symbol" of A Vision has far too many ramifica­ tions to be analyzed here In detail, but YeatB reduced most of the important aspects of the Wheel to the Imagery of one poem, "The

Phases of the Moon," which might equally well have been titled

Vision Made Simple," so It is possible to outline most of the system, at least In regard to Individual souls, by examining this poem. After that I w ill show how the Fifteen Phase and the Clarified Body form the last and most abstract, but also the most definitive, model of

Yeats's vision of the Other World as the state of human perfection.

"The Phases of the Moon" begins, in a sense, in another poem,

"Ego Dominus Tuus," which precedes i t in The Wild Swans a t Coole,

There "Ille," who clearly represents Yeats himself, or at least part of Yeats's personality, wants to find a style, or an image, that w ill make him a p o e t. His method is somewhat odd:

I call to the mysterious one who yet Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream And look most like me, being indeed my double, And prove of all imaginable things The most u n lik e , being my a n ti- s e lf , And, standing by these characters, disclose All that I seek; and whisper it as though He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud Their momentary cries before it is dawn, Would carry i t away to blasphemous men. (5) 238

These famouB lines Identify Yeats' anti-self, or double, as Michael

Robartes, a mysterious figure indeed, who serves in several of

Yeats's stories as an initiator into the occult, a spiritual teacher who 1b disturbingly like a spirit himself. In "Rosa Alchemlca," for example, he shows up one night at Yeats's door, and Yeats de­ scribes him as a sort of Byronic madman:

I found before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough c lo th e s, made him look now, J u s t as they used to do fifteen years before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. (6 )

It is doubtful that such a person ever looked more like Yeats than anyone else in the world, but in "Rosa Alchemlca" and the other

Robartes stories and poems there is no doubt that he is everything

Yeats is not: a visionary who achieves almost by instinct what

Yeats attempts through learning and ritual, a man of action who wanders in the Sahara while Yeats sits in the Tower. This is the figure whom "Ille" summons with the diagrams in the sand, mystical signs that balance the patterns Robartes found in the Sahara. (That discovery was part of the machinery of the first edition of A Vision. but was dropped in the second, thereby lessen in g the impact of "Ego

Dominus Tuus.") This balance of a n ti-s e lv e s , which tog ether make up one complete personality, is parallel to the balance of "primary" and "antithetical" tincture in the system of the Wheel: the primary self longs to merge itself with the physical world, the antithetical self with the spiritual world. Each achieves its pure form in only 239

one Fhase. The First Phase is purely primary, the Fifteenth purely

antithetical; human life, which exists only in the other Twenty-

six Phases, is Inevitably a mixture of both, and so complex and unstable. The "complexities of mire and blood" that are purged in

Byzantium are, at least in part, caused by this mixture of impulses;

the mixture itself, then, makes human beings ineligible for any kind of Paradise until a succession of lives has worn their souls out

into simplicity.

By way of a further complication, Robartes is supplied with another anti-self, Owen Aherne, who is, like Robartes, an adept, but who>18 nonetheless a practical man (as magicians go). Together, these two mysterious wanderers make up a composite image of a perfect magician, and, I think, a perfect artist: in their complementary ways they envision reality as a whole, as Yeats always longed to do, and grasp every mystery of the soul, its lives, and its fulfillment.

Besides, they are old, and, like Yeats's fisherman, they wear Conne­ mara c lo th : they are emblems of completed wisdom, a t the same time men of great learning and peasants in simplicity. They are both a lot like Ribh, who also attains, even in his body, a vision of the

Other World. It is clear that they are to be taken seriously, and that they embody both wisdom and a symbolic presentation of the con­ flicting Impulses that animate the soul: both primary and antitheti­ cal in their natures, thereby echoing the system they explain to

YeatB without meaning to, they have achieved a balance between the impulses, and so are able to see the whole pattern in a way that Yeatsj a man of Phase Seventeen and so mainly antithetical, could not. 240

As dramatic and carefully prepared as this balance between them

Is, the cycle of incarnations that Robartes presents, with prompt­ ings by Aheme, is chilling enough to make a reader almost forget about the speakers of the poem. It is rigidly deterministic, like early forms of astrology, and constantly subordinates the individual soul (which has no freedom at all) to the overall pattern. This pattern is one form of the struggle of contraries; while not derived,

I think, directly from Blake, it is similar to the struggle of the

Zoas, who cannot get along either with or without each other.

During PhaseB Two and Fourteen, the soul, with greater and greater difficulty, edges away from the physical world, and grows more and more like Itself:

From the first crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast; But while the moon is rounding towards the full He follows whatever whim's most difficult Among whims not impossible, and though scarred, As with the cat-o'-nine-tails of the mind, His body moulded from within his body Grows com elier. (7)

In other words, the soul (and with it the body) approaches a state of human perfection, but the world, in opposition, creates a struggle within the soul that prevents it from achieving simplicity.

The soul does, however, break loose from the physical world as the moon comes to the full:

The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war In its own being, and when that war's begun There is no muscle in the arm; and after, 241

Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon, The soul begins to tremble Into stillness, To die Into the labyrinth of Itself] (8)

The stillness It Is about to reach Is the resolution of the

Fifteenth Phase, where the body Is most perfect and least physical.

But since this Phase Is not eternal, the soul must return to the

world, and not only return but grow more and more a part of the

w orld:

And after that the crumbling of the moon. The soul remembering Its loneliness Shudders In many c ra d le s; a l l I s changed, It would be the world's servant, and as It serves, Choosing whatever tasks most difficult Among tasks not Impossible, It takes Upon the body and upon the soul The coarseness of the drudge. (9)

The soul "remenfcers Its loneliness" because without such a conscious­

ness of Its relationship with the world there would be no conflict

and the Fifteenth Phase would be Paradise. Such a complete resolu­

tion of all antimonies is not yet possible, so the soul must come

back, and begin Its trek toward the form of shapeless matter In

Phase One, after which, the cycle still Incomplete, it begins to

rise again in the scale of being. Robartes* summary of this whole

process is dreary, suggesting that there is no escape:

Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man, Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn, Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all Deformed because there is no deformity But saves us from a dream. CIO)

The "deformity" of life is what Yeats complained about all through his career, but eventually accepted, in this poem and in "A Dialogue 242

of Self and Soul," as the only way for the soul to know Itself.

It saves us from flattering dreams.

The Fifteenth Phase Is the most Important one, since it Is

closest to the Clarified Body In its purest state, but it cannot

be understood except In the context of the human Phases, and, even more, Phase One, which Aherne calls "the last servile crescent."

It is servile because It 1 b entirely unfree, being entirely material.

Robartes describes it In completely negative terms:

Because all dark, like those that are all light, They are cast beyond the verge, and In a cloud, Crying to one another like the bats; And having no desire they cannot te ll What's good or bad, or what it is to triumph At the perfection of one's own obedience; And yet they speak what's blown Into the mind; Deformed beyond deformity, unformed, Insipid as the dough before it is baked, They change their bodies at a word. (11)

What is most important here is the way the souls change their bodies;

they have no Inherent form, and are not like human beings so much as dark amoebae. If human perfection involves a perfect body, it is natural that the state most removed from perfection should be prac­

tically bodiless, the body only a "dough" manipulated by outside forces and having no essential relationship to the soul. The body of

Phase Fifteen, the Clarified Body, is exactly the opposite of this dough. It is so refined as to be hardly material at all, and so closely tied to the soul that Yeats writes "body and soul" almost automatically, since they are now inseparable: 243

All thought: becomes an linage and the soul Becomes a body: th a t body and th a t so u l Too perfect at the full to lie In a cradle, Too lonely for the traffic of the world: Body and soul cast out and cast away Beyond th e v is ib le w orld. (12)

This is the cure for the deformity of life, and at the same time

the culmination of being constantly bom into the frog-spawn of

a blind man's ditch: escape from the physical pains of growth and

decay without escape from "Images that once were thought," the

experiences of life in this world and the knowledge derived from them:

... body and soul Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves, Caught up in contemplation, the mind's eye Fixed upon images that once were thought; For separate, perfect, and Immovable Images can break the solitude Of lovely, satisfied, Indifferent eyes. (13)

These spirits are like the Buddha of "The Double Vision of Michael

Robartes," whose "eyes are fixed on all things loved, all things 14 unloved" in a perpetual trance; all these figures are "caught

up" in themselves, cut off from this world, and, being freed from

action, they are serene. Yeats' unusual clusters of adjectives make that point: the images are separate, perfect and Immovable,

i.e ., eternal and unchanging, pure Forms divorced from matter, while the spirits' "eyes" are lovely, satisfied and Indifferent —

that is, at peace, for a time if not forever. These spirits have

found the rest that eluded Oisln in the third island, and achieved

the visionary power that the old man of "Sailing to Byzantium" 244 hopes for, but have done it without losing their wills to any outside force, and without losing human form. This state would finally be human perfection and a form of the Other World that would satisfy

Yeats in all his moods, except that it is not eternal. The images that the spirits perceive are eternal Forms, but the spirits them­ selves have not been completely purged of their longing for this world (just as Olsin was not so purged). The images that they see were "once thought": they are called up by memories of life, and after memory must come, In Yeats' system, a desire for more life, IS and the soul must, as Aheme says, "seek the w orld." The Wheel goes on turning, and the soul descends into incarnation, its cycle of births incomplete.

This pattern of incarnations is a context for the Fifteenth

Phase that shows it to be human however exotic. But the state itself, and its relation to absolute perfection In eternity, needs to be examined more closely, through A Vision. There, Yeats makes it clear that the Fifteenth Phase represents not only physical per­ fection, but also the perfection of art and love. The reverie that turns thought into images he calls "musical" and "sensuous," and goes on to make the dreaming of the soul an art-form in Itself:

Thought has been pursued, not as a means but as an end — th e poem, the p a in tin g , the re v e rie has been sufficient of Itself .... The being has selected, moulded and remoulded, narrowed its c ir c le of liv in g , been more and more the a r t i s t , grown more and more "distingu ished" in a l l preference, (16) 245

This is the opposite of the process in "Sailing to Byzantium."

In that poem, the old man is essentially "primary"; that is, he

allows himself to be defined in material terms, and acts as a locus

for historical forces outside his own being. In A Vision, the

soul in the Fifteenth Phase "narrows" its being, excludes everything

that is not itself, becomes almost perfectly "antithetical," and,

in a sense, creates its own perfect body, or rather gains a vision of what that body is like in eternity, but its intense concentration

is on Itself. This, for Yeats, is the culmination of art: the artist and his creation become the same thing, there is no longer any sepa­ ration between the images of the mind and the man who creates them.

This consummation is exactly like that of the vision I have already referred to (Chapter Three, p. 198) in which Yeats, seeing himself

taken out of his body, knew that "Beauty is becoming beautiful 17 objects, and truth is becoming truths."

The Fifteenth Phase carries out one function of the Other World by representing the perfection of art, and another by representing thd perfection of love:

Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every beloved image has a bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knows nothing of desire, for deBire implies effort, and though there is still sepa­ ration from the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its own existence Chance and Choice have become Interchangeable without losing their identity. (18) 246

Complete serenity is Implicit in the perfect bodies of souls in

this phase, bodies that Blake would have called "the lineaments

of gratified desire." Desire Is its own fulfillment and meets no

obstacles. This is, essentially, only an abstract way of describing

such lovers as Baile and Aillinn, who, as Rlbh sees them, have appar­

ently been apart for a year but have not felt desire. Nonetheless,

when they meet

There Is no touching here, nor touching there, Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole; For the Intercourse of angels is a light Where fo r i t s moment both seem lo s t, consumed. (19)

As I have mentioned before, this love is quite Imperfect compared

to God's state of being (Chapter One, but still it is' cer­

tainly the most anyone can hope for in human form, however ethereal

or perfect that form may become. And, though this blinding light is

only fo r a "moment," Y e ats's comments in A V ision, above, suggest

that separation is only a different mode, not a lessening, of their joy.

One o th er phrase in th a t passage deserves comment. Y eats, when he'says that Choice and Chance w ill be combined, echoes Solomon's

speech In "Solomon and the Witch";

A cockerel Crew from a blossoming apple bough Three hundred years before the Fall, And never crew again till now, And would not now but that he thought, Chance being at one with Choice at last, All that the brigand apple brought And this foul world were dead at last. (20) 247

The union of Chance and Choice la Solomon' b metaphor for the

perfection of love, and through It the transformation of this world to Paradise; so, In A Vision, Yeats uses the same terms

to express the end of all the Imperfections that spoil love in

this world, and the attainment of perfect love, within human lim­

itations, In the Other World.

Since love and art are both brought to their highest state in

the Fifteenth Phase, it is natural that the dance, also perfected, should be a prominent image for that state, since Yeats used It many times as an Image of both love and art. It Is also natural that Michael Robartes should be the man who has a vision of this dance, partly because he has knowledge of all the Phases, and partly because such a vision balances the demonic dance he sponsored

In "Rosa Alcemlca." In "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes," he sees Images of both the First and Fifteenth Phases, both the physical and spiritual worlds, and, by putting them Into one Image, Is able, as he did in "The Phases of the Moon," to sum up all of reality. He begins with the first, servile Phase:

Under blank eyes and fingers never s till The particular Is pounded till it Is man. When had I my own w ill? 0 not since life began. ( 2 1 )

The shapeless, powerless, completely passive state of the First

Phase serves here as a measure of the perfection of the Fifteenth

Phase: Yeats dramatically emphasizes the perfection of the full moon by putting it next to the "blank eyes and fingers never still" 248

of the Impersonal forces that shape puppet-llke bodies In the physical world. It also-fits the pattern of Yeats' visionary poem that this state should call to its opposite, that a vision of complete physlcality should lead immediately to a vision of com- lete spirituality:

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand l i f t e d up th a t b le s t;

And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away, For now being dead it seemed That she of dancing dreamed. (22)

The g i r l i s an image both o f human p e rfe c tio n and of a r t . Ellmann has identified the Sphinx and the Buddha as the intellect and the 23 heart, "aspects or powers of the mind raised to a superhuman degree"; he goes on to suggest that the dancing girl is an image of art because she balances and combines these forces. That is true, of course; however, as I have suggested before, the dance was for

Yeats not only an image of art, but also of the order of the universe, which art at its highest can only mirror and express. The dancing girl is at the heart of all things, like the lovers in Tir na n 6 g as they are described in The King of the Great Clock Tower. She is at precisely what Eliot called "the still center of the turning world," and combines both stillness and motion in herself. Although this image of stillness-within-motion is usually, as in Eliot, an abstract paradox, Yeats in his image of the dead g irl's dance gives it a reasonably concrete form. In the first edition of A Vision, he 249

goes into more detail about it, saying that spirits in the state

of "Beatitude," which is precisely analogous to the Fifteenth

Phase, can communicate with the living in visions like Robartes',

These spirits combine motion and stillness:

In the Beatitude communication with the living is through that state of soul, where an extreme activity is indistinguishable from an equal p a s s iv ity .

"Hind moved but seemed to stop As 'twere a spinning top." (24)

This poem, then, is the apotheosis -- literally — of the dance as

a metaphor of cosmic order, and one of Yeats' most explicit state­ ments that the soul has a real part in the order of things. The dancer Is not only a girl in a trance, but also a being who embodies

the extreme activity and passivity, motion and stillness, which animate the entire Great Wheel In their opposition.

She is an abstract image of the cosmic order, and of art, and also a kind of Platonic model for all the dancing girls in

Yeats's poetry; but, just as much, she is an image of purely human perfection, possessing the Clarified Body of the Fifteenth

Phase:

So she had outdanced thought. Body perfection brought,

For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind? (25)

She is impersonal, certainly, caught up in trance and not even physically alive, but it would be an error to imagine her as a 250

mere wraith. Because she is more perfect than living men or

women, she i s more human: she has no body to "silen c e" her own

humanity, and so she can achieve the grace and beauty living

women can only approximate. For this reason she becomes Robartes*

Image of perfect love. Even though she can feel no desire herself,

being in a state beyond desire, Robartes is not so perfect, and,

like Olsin, and Aengus and Hanrahan, he perceives her spiritual beauty as both ideal and sensual:

I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unrememberlng nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye,

And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat As though I had been undone By Homer's Paragon .... (26)

She is the ideal embodiment of human perfection, and also of

the Fifteenth Phase, by her combination of several of Yeats' most powerful Images; nowhere else, except in the abstract language of

A Vision, does he so completely fuse the Images of perfect art, perfect love, and the dance. Such a powerful composite image is,

Indeed, a full justification for the whole system of A Vision, since without it he could not have crammed so much reference into one poem. It is also the culmination of Robartes' long and rigorous search, a metaphor for Yeats' own search, into the soul's nature and destiny. Once he has had this vision, and understood the whole cycle of the Phases of the Moon, Robartes (and through him Yeats) 251 knows essentially all .there is to know about the relationship o£ the

soul to this world and to the Other World. It seems that he must be, in the terms of A Vision, very close to the end of his own cycle, almost ready to leave this world altogether. But, even though suc­ cessful visionaries like Robartes and Rlbh are apparently near their release from Incarnation, the persona Yeats presents as him­ s e lf in h is poems i s not anywhere near such a re le a se : he knows about the Phases of the Moon, but is still, especially in Last

Poems, greatly attracted to this world, and ready to accept the possibility set out in the epigraph to this chapter, that he may never escape at all.

Robartes, then, stands at the end, or near the end, of one process that can lead to human perfection. He is the model in

Yeats's work of what might be called the Way of the Self: full knowledge of the soul's progress, perfect sympathy with every aspect of its life. This, by the way, was also, for Yeats, the Way of ancient Ireland: when he said that "ancient Ireland knew it all," he meant that the pagan Irish, like Robartes, understood that "Many 27 times man lives and dies / Between his two eternities" of race and soul, and traced its progress in their religion. It is not accidental that Robartes has his vision, not in the Sahara where he first pursued the mysterious doctrines outlined in the sand, but at the Rock of Cashel in Central Ireland. This poem, more than almost any others in Yeats's canon, is a poem about unity, and Robartes 252 unifies even pagan Ireland and Christianity by seeing the girl dancing at "Cormac's ruined house," on the rock that was both a center of the pagan world and the seat of a diocese. The "ruined house" is a cathedral, and Connac Mac Carthy, though possibly not 28 a bishop like others of his line, becomes, by the building of this church, a symbol, like the Sphinx and the Buddha, of exactly complementary forces joined together.

This poem, then, Is an affirmation of experience, knowledge

(especially visionary knowledge), and tradition, all the things that shape the soul In this world and make It capable of finding the essential unity of all things. It affirms everything that the

Self argued for In Its dialogue with the Soul, but It also suggests a final reconciliation of the Self and the Soul, In which each will have Its desires gratified. The dancing girl Is not In Paradise, she will return to the world, but she Is an image of the human per­ fection that the soul will eventually attain In the Other World.

If the Great Wheel, which Robartes has studied so diligently, Is the Way of the Self, then the end of the Cycle is the stillness that the Soul longs for. Both get their way: In the system of A

Vision there are no short-cuts, no leaps into the dark, but there is, at the end of the soul's discipline, a final release Into the Clari** fled Body, which, however long in coming, is what the Soul wants a f t e r a l l . 253

The only way Che soul can reach an understanding of this

state, other than by visionary knowledge like Robartes’, is

through physical love. The soul can learn about itself, slowly and with many failures, either by meditation or by ecstasy. Of

course, Yeats knew quite well that the two kinds of experience are much the same thing, and, as I have shown, he often treats

them as if they were exactly the same thing: Solomon and Sheba discuss the return of Eden and the woman of "A Woman Young and Old" mentions the nature of the Zodiac as a metaphor for sexual ful­ fillm ent, while Robartes watches a g irl who reminds him of Helen of Troy and Rlbh has a vision of Balle and Aillinn’s angelic

Intercourse. At times Yeats wanted to be shocking, to play his role as the Wild Old Wicked Man, but more often he wanted to point up the fact that passion can take the soul out of its ordinary range of perceptions and allow it to understand something of its d e stin y .

Usually, the visionaries in Yeats's poems are men, though a few like the dancer of "A Crazed Girl" are women. Instead of by learning and vision, the women of his poetry attain their knowledge directly by physical ecstasy, This is not a short-cut to perfection, since even the most spectacular visions, of any sort, cannot do more than give a foretaste of what will come. Rather, vision or sexual ecstasy increases the soul's knowledge of its eternal form, the Clarified Body, Sexual passion, in Yeats's work, is involved 254 with actual physical bodies only out of necessity: Its end Is knowledge of the eternal body, or else It Is empty. Generally, for

Yeats, women understand this point but men do not — this Is one reason why sexual love so rarely leads to any transcendence. His men, or some of them, are likely to obey Intellect rather than

Instinct — Robartes tracing figures In the sand, Rlbh reading a book while Baile and Allllnn perform In front of him, Yeats himself in the Tower — while his women never seem to care about the Phases of the Moon, yet come to the same end by a different, simpler route.

They are much better at sex than Yeats's men ever are, and so come to the vision of the Clarified Body by passion alone; perhaps, but not certainly, they can sometimes pull men along with them.

Yeats has, no doubt, irritated several generations of women, even as he praised them^by writing things like Michael Robartes' speech to the Dancer:

It follows from this Latin text That blest souls are not composite, And th a t a l l b e a u tifu l women may Live in uncomposite blessedness, And lead us to the like — if they Will banish every thought, unless The lineaments that please their view When the long looking-glass is full, Even from the fo o t-so le th in k i t to o . (29)

It is typical of Robartes that he refers to a Latin text (and declines to quote it), and typical of a woman that she is "perplexed," being able to say only "They say such different things at school," which is certainly a feeble rejoinder. Nonetheless, Yeats is getting 255

at a‘ serious Idea here, one that is critical to his system: he

suggests that vision is possible by an emptying of the mind through

passion, a concentration on things more elemental than thought. In

other words, women can perform magic ■— literally ~ by a deep

perception of their own. bodies, and gain through that perception an

understanding of the Clarified Body and the end of the soul's wanderings.

Even women'8 traditional vanity can lead to this end, which

is logical since feminine vanity is supposed to be sexual rather

than purely aesthetic in purpose. Yeats often expressed the old-

fashioned idea that women are intrinsically more beautiful than men, and that, therefore, a woman’s body is the source of sexual desire.

Since that is the case, her search for perfection, though just as rigorous and difficult as Robartes', begins somewhat Incongruously at the dressing-table:

I f I make the lash es dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From m irror a fte r m irror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made. (30)

comic expansion of her motives, one of the fanciest excuses for make-up ever recorded, but it also shows her instinctive grasp of fundamental Issues, issues that elude all of her lovers.

Her "vanity," which she insists is not vanity at all,, is also a defense against the false Images that the world, represented perhaps 256

by her lovers, will try to Impose on her. Love Is dangerous not

only because It can lead to a complete absorption In the physical

world, but also because the fantasies lovers have about each other

can create false images, masks, that lead them away from self-

knowledge. These false masks can be exactly opposed to the lovers1

real natures, and so destructive. They do not seem to work as doubles.

The girl of "The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool" is aware of this dan­

ger even while she looks In her mirror:

I rage at my own image in the glass That's so unlike myself that when you praise it I t i s sb though you praised another, or even Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite; And when I wake towards morn I dread myself, For the heart cries that what deception wins Cruelty must keep; therefore be warned and go If you have seen that image and not the woman. (31)

The image in the mirror, her exact double, may be, she fears, the world's trick to keep her from fulfilling herself through passion: it may be the image that brings "despair" in "Solomon and the

Witch," the image that makes the lovers' true natures invisible to them. The Fool by the Roadside thinks so too, and, after listening to her discuss metaphysics with her boyfriend, comments:

When cradle and spool are past And I mere shade at last Coagulate of stuff Transparent like the wind, I think that I may find A faithful love, a faithful love, (32)

The Fool is willing to defer "faithful love" to the end of the cycle because he mistrusts this would entirely, but Solomon is 257 less patient or more hopeful, and speaks for the rest of Yeats' eager lovers when he says that

Haybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there; Yet the world ends when these two things, Though several, are a single light, When oil and wick are burned in one ... (33)

He thinks, or hopes, that the world's false images of the soul can be overcome, swept aside by passion until, like even the lovers' physical bodies, they become almost Irrelevant in the "single light" of perfect union. The destruction of these Images would destroy the world's power, and the world with it; when Sheba points out that all their efforts haven't led to this, he can only suggest th a t:

Maybe an image is too strong Or maybe it is not strong enough. (34)

The world's destructive images are a problem for women, but entirely fatal to men. Men come off poorly as lovers in most of

Yeats's poetry; this is especially true of "A Man Young and Old," in which the speaker is hopelessly embittered by his constant pursuit of false Images and self-created illusions. His life is

Yeats's fullest description of false and destructive love, full of images that suggest the world's power to make the soul part of itself and so destroy it, at least during one of its lives. In this sequence the moon, for example, becomes a stone heart and eventually a stone baby; "Peter that had great affairs" becomes 258

King of the Peacocks out of pride, evidently sexual pride; love Is cruelty, a game like the hunting of hares; the speaker himself, 34 like the Old Pensioner of a much earlier poem, Is like an old 35 twisted tree, or, even worse, "a bit of stone" under a broken tree.

The po in t of these bleak poems Is th a t physical love Is empty and bitter unless It leads to some kind of Illumination. That Is, love must be physical to start with, but everything physical leads to a dead end; If love is nothing but physical passion, It will remain part of the experience of this world and no more, and so come to nothing. Or, rather, it comes to worse than nothing, since the memory of failure makes old age more bitter than It needs to be:

0 bid me mount and sail up there Amid the cloudy wrack, For Peg and Meg and Paris' love That had so straight a back, Are gone away, and some that stay Have changed th e ir s ilk fo r sack.

Here I but there and none to hear I'd have a peacock cry, Por that is natural to a man That liv e s in memory, Being all alone I'd nurse a stone And sing it lullaby. (36)

Here the theme of old age comes In again, making i t s old point: this is what the body comes to, therefore real life must be somewhere else, In the Other World, In the artist's imagination

("The Tower"), or In the Incorruptible body that survives all the

Phases of the Moon. The old man who sits nursing a stone haB failed to understand this point, and lives only in memories that old age 259 makes bitter. Because he had always thought o£ love as nothing but a cruel physical passion, he had no answer to the problem

of old age. He Is unlike the wiser young nan whose heart tells him not to worry about such things;

"She will change," I cried, "Into a withered crone," The heart in my side, That so still had lain, In noble rage replied And beat upon the bone:

"Uplift those eyes and throw Those glances unafraid: She would as bravely show Did all the fabric fade; No withered crone I saw Before the world was made."

Abashed by that report, For the heart cannot lie, I knelt In the dirt. And all shall bend the knee To my offended heart Until it pardon me. (37)

The young man, In his own way, has learned what Rlbh and Hlchael

Robartes know, and, more ex actly , what the woman knows In "A Woman

Young and Old." I have not looked at "A Man Young and Old" In detail because Its negative point is quite simple, but "A Woman Young and Old," a far more complex and Important sequence, deserves a closer reading, especially since It is Yeats' most explicit statement about how physical love can lead the soul to knowledge of itself.

The woman who speaks these poems is, like Crazy Jane, something of a mystic in effect, but certainly not a drawingroom spiritist.

Her life seems, essentially, a long attempt to find spiritual 260

fulfillment through sexual ecstasy. However, since she is after more than physical pleasure, she makes a sharp distinction between

the body and the soul, exactly the sort of distinction that eluded 0

the speaker of "A Kan Young and Old." The woman's "Last Confession" sums up her life in metaphysical terms:

What lively lad most pleasured me Of all that with me lay? I answer that I gave my soul And loved in misery, But had great pleasure with a lad That I loved bodily.

Flinging from his arms I laughed To think his passion such He fancied that I gave a soul Did but our bodies touch, And laughed upon his breast to think Beast gave beast as much,

I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes, But when this soul, its body off, Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows,

And give his own and take his own And rule in his own right; And though it loved in misery Close and cling so tight, There's not a bird of day that dare Extinguish that delight. (38)

This is one of Yeats' most complete rejections of the body as an end in itself, and a useful corrective to poems like "Politics" in which, speaking through a temporary mask, he celebrates sex for its own sake. Here, he has the woman make three important points: "great pleasure" in a physical way is not necessarily 261

the same thing as s p ir itu a l ecstasy , Indeed the two can even be

opposed; the body is no more than the soul's clothing; and,

finally, love in the Other World as the woman anticipates it will

not be temporary, but will last forever, like the love of Balle

and Aillinn.

The "g reat pleasu re" she had w ith some anonymous "lad" is

as inadequate as the "straining joy" that Ribh contemptuously

dismisses from comparison with Baile and A lllinn's angelic inter­

course. The woman's phrasing Is a good deal more subtle than Rlbh's,

but the idea is the same: the clumsy attempts that lovers make to

unify themselves or to escape from the world through ecstasy are

meaningless (and a little funny) unless these physical acts go along

with spiritual ones. Spiritual love is carnal in its own way, of

course, as Baile and Allllnn demonstrate; it is certainly "delight,"

yet it is also a way to achieve great insight into the nature of the

Other World. The woman makes this point clear in "Chosen":

I f questioned on My utmost pleasure with a man By some new-married bride, I take That stillness for a theme Where h is h e art my h eart did seem And both adrift on the miraculous stream Where — wrote a learned a stro lo g e r — The Zodiac is changed into a sphere. (39)

In contrast to the "great pleasure" of purely carnal love, the

"utmost pleasure" of love turns out to be stillness, perhaps the

same stillness that is always, for Yeats, at the center of the dance. There, for a moment, the woman (also, perhaps, her lover, 262 though she does not say much about him) is like the dancing girl of the "Double Vision," beyond change and decay. She Is also like 40 Ribh, who for a moment found "all happiness" in his own soul. In that stillness, she seems, at least, to be at one with God, the

"ultimate reality" of A Vision, always symbolized as a sphere be~ cause his being is outside the realm of change symbolized by the gyres;

The ultimate reality because neither one nor many, concord nor discord, Is symbolised as a phaseless sphere .... All things are present as an e te rn a l In sta n t to our Dalmon (or Ghostly Self as It Is called, when it inhabits the sphere), but that instant is of necessity unintelligible to all bound to the antimonies. (41)

Her knowledge of the "utmost pleasure" has led her to share for a moment in her own eternal state: her union with God, or with her own Ghostly Self (this Is one of several names for the Clarified

Body), makes her, in a sense, Immune from old age because she knows what i s beyond I t . Of course th is moment o f in sig h t Is b r ie f , as it is for Ribh and all other classical mystics: she is bound by the antimonies of life in this world, and must return to a normal state of being. Nonetheless, she has achieved through sexual union what the holy men of Yeats' poetry achieve through study and meditation; her union with a man is a symbol of the resolution of opposites into one thing, a union that calls up a vision of the higher union of all things in God,

Because she remains in her body she is still subject to the physical ravages of old age, but, unlike the old man of "A Han 263

Young and Old," she can look forward to something beyond physical decay. She suffers greatly because of old age in "Her Vision In the Wood" and "Meeting," but she does not despair. For her, physical love has served its purpose, and she does not feel compelled to live In bitterness among old memories, nursing a stone. Besides, even though she is agonized by the changes In her body as she grows old, she never loses her vitality. The man of "A Man Young and Old" seems to subside Into a coma by the end of his sequence, but the woman Is almost as energetic as Yeats's most famous old woman, Crazy

Jane, who is as passionate and noisy as a Medieval saint.

Crazy Jane is not as esoteric in her choice of images as the woman of "A Woman Young and O ld," but she says alm ost th e same things. She insists, for example, that love must be both physical and spiritual, saying

Love is all Unsatisfied That cannot take the whole Body and soul. (42)

If love is entirely physical, it leads to despair in old age; if it is entirely spiritual, it has no basis in human life and becomes the empty piety of Crazy Jane's nemesis, the Bishop. Yeats created one of the greatest ironies in his poetry when he had the Bishop meet Crazy Jane on the road and lecture her about the Other World, of which he knows nothing. He says, no doubt steepling his hands, raising his eyes toward Heaven and speaking most earnestly, 264

"Those breasts are flat and fallen now, Those veins must soon be dry; Live In a heavenly mansion, Not In some foul sty." (43)

Of course living In a heavenly mansion Is exactly what she has In mind, but she knows that mere piety has nothing to do with getting there, and answers with a famous paradox:

"A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion In The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent." (44)

Only a woman, I t seems can approach heaven th is way, sin c e only a woman is likely to be "rent" by sexual love. Crazy Jane Is not exactly an ascetic, but at times she does not seem to appreciate

"th e utm ost p le a su re " as much as does th e woman of "A Woman Young and Old"; her emphasis, like that of "A Han Young and Old*" 1 b on the passionate cruelty of sexual love. The dance she describes is almost as violent at the beheading in The King of the Great

Clock Tower:

I found that ivory image there Dancing with her chosen youth, But when he wound h er c o a l-b la c k h a ir As though to strangle her, no scream Or bodily movement did I dare, Eyes under eyelids did so gleam .... (45)

This is one more way of expressing the paradox of the dance: such violence^opposed entirely to the "stillness" of "Chosen," is not really different from it at all. Extreme violence and perfect still­ ness are different ways of reaching the same goal; just as a 265 woman' 8 body must be "rent" before It can achieve wholeness, so lovers must destroy each other violently before they can become serene In their union.

But all these acrobatics would come to nothing If love (or anything else) were entirely physical. Yeats' Imagery, like his whole metaphysical system, depends on the constant presence of the Other World, and Crazy Jane, like his other passionate lovers, expects to find the fulfillment of her passion after death. Her affair with Jack the Journeyman, which Irritated the Bishop so much, Is for her only a shadow of the Other World:

A lonely ghost the ghost Is That to God shall come; I — love's skein upon the ground, My body In th e tomb - - Shall leap Into the light lost Zn my m o th er's womb. (46)

This Is the same Image as the "loose thread" of "The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool"; the Fool expects to find a faithful love when cradle and spool are past, and Crazy Jane expects her love for Jack the

Journeyman to exist In the Other World, She follows up the tradi­ tional Image of God's light by elaborating on the Image of the

"skein" that ties her and Jack together In the Other World:

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, (47)

Crazy Jane does not, it seems, really agree entirely with the Fool; like other men in Yeats' poetry, he looks most of all for peace and 266 an end to desire, while Crazy Jane, the anonymous woman of "A

Woman Young and Old," and other women look for a continuation of their life In the form of knowledge of God. Both look forward to such a divine knowledge, and eternal life in an Incorruptible body, but their conceptions of life In the Other World differ as much as their means of getting there.

The Ideals of Yeats1s lovers and his visionary old men may seem to be considerably removed from his imagery of the Phases of the Moon, but in fact they reduce themselves to the same idea, the heart of all Yeats1 thinking about the Other World. In his poetry and occult theories the point of the Other World is always its unity and permanence: it is unity within diversity, the un­ changing source of energy that underlies the Impermanence of this world. In his early "Celtic Twilight" poetry the Other World takes th e form of Tjfr na n6 g. a world that does not change or decay, the place where love and the dance are present in their most ideal forms, where old age is Impossible. Later, though it did not stop appear­ ing as T^r na n6 g. it also became Byzantium, the city of Art, where physical bodies are re-molded by the alchemists 1 fire into their eternal forms. Finally it became the rarefied but still recogniz­ ably human world of the Fifteenth Phase, where the Clarified Body, / like the perfect forms of the sidhe. lives forever. In all of these forms, the Other World is both distant, removed from normal exper­ ience because it is perfect, and, nonetheless, immanent,' Tir na n6 g Is not far from where we live, and the Clarified Body is part of our bodies all the time.' The Phases of the Moon are no more than a.system of gathering experience during many lives so that the soul will be able to see through all the illusions of the physical world and come to know itself as it really is. That state of knowledge is the Fifteenth Phase, when the soul takes on the form of the Clari­ fied Body in a foretaste of eternity. In the same way, the state of passion Yeats symbolized through physical love and the dance is a way for the soul to transcend the body even while using the body as a means for transcendence. Physical love, in Yeats* poetry,

1b a foretaste of the perpetual ecstasy of the liberated soul; it is like the Fifteenth Phase both in this quality and in the fact that it is by itself not a final liberation.

Because everything that lives lives forever, and because it is possible for human beings to understand something of their future, it is Inevitable that the result of such foreknowledge should be indifference to this world. Crazy Jane, for example, is not upset about her old age or her various lovers (past lovers, no doubt), because she understands that her soul lives in God even while her body Is abused by life and the passing of timet

I had wild Jack for a lover; Though like a road That men pass over My body makes no moan But sings on; All things remain in God. (48) 268

She has cone to this knowledge by way of sexual ecstasy; but the

same Idea is part of a song of Tom the Lunatic, one of Yeats's holy fools, who puts It even more forcefully:

"Whatever stands In field or flood, Bird, beast, fish or man, Mare or stallion, cock or hen, Stands In God's unchanging eye In all the vigour of its blood; In that faith I live or die." (49)

Tom lists living things in much the same way that the old man does

In "Sailing to Byzantium," and, by asserting the perpetual existence of their natural forms, finally refutes the despair that the old man

feels: It is not necessary, he Implies, to retreat from the world of natural forms to find an eternal form, since eternal being is every­ where. But there is an even more Important idea in these lines, that the Other World is not a whlspering-gallery of vague ghosts, but a place where every living thing exists "in all the vigour of its blood." It is, in other words, Tir na nOg again.

When the soul has cut through a ll appearances and come to

this state, it finds that it has taken on the face it had before

the world was made, and lives in a perfect human body for the first tim e. Because th is s ta te i s human, i t Is not new to the soul or beyond its understanding; it is only a recognition of what the soul might have known all along but has had to endure all of human ex­ perience to learn. Its passage through this world, guided by the

Phases of the Moon, and its transcendence of the world, through secret knowledge or through ecstasy, is ultimately a process of 269

learning to see^just as, In the Irish traditions that Yeats first

drew on for his metaphors, a voyage to Tlr na n6 g Is essentially

a matter of learning to see the Other World within this world.

Even in the Byzantium poems, which stand a little to one side of

Yeats’ other poems about the Other World, this process Is the heart of the dance: the golden smithies are refining away physical dross so the discarnate souls can learn that they are part of the eternal dance. This refining process, like art itself, works to strip away the Illusions and ambiguities of experience.

The knowledge of unity In all things is not only the point of the Other World, but also, In a sense, the point of Yeats’ entire career as an artist: he started out by trying to mold his thoughts Into a unity, to achieve Unity of Being and the "fullness of life" that goes with it, then went on to borrow and finally create an intricate series of images that embody the unity of the soul and the world. Most of the images are suggestive of change, as are for example the gyres and the Phases of the Moon, but all are subordinate to the image that contains them all, the Sphere, 50 which, he said in A Vision, "can be symbolised but cannot be known."

In the end, in the last letter he wrote before his death, he affirmed that "man," perhaps especially the individual human soul, can find the unity it had always been looking for, the truth underlying all appearances:

It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." I must embody it in the completion of my life. (51) 270

This difficult passage suggests that he had found, to his own satisfaction at least, that his life as an artist had brought him all the Unity of Being that physical life can bring anyone, and that, leaving it, he would be ready to achieve a fuller knowledge of tr u th .

I doubt that Yeats was using a metaphor when he said that man can embody truth; he was aware that there is always a dif­ ference, in this world, between the knover and the known, and expected that in another state of being such distinctions are impossible. In some moods, he was willing to envision an endless sequence of physical lives, since the soul is part of the under­ lying unity of things in any case, and cannot be violated by any physical existence; this is the mood of a few passages like the

Introduction to A Vision that I used as the epigraph for this chapter. But, far more often, he looked at this world as a place for the soul to get out of, with its learning intact, since the life of the Other Vorld is "more completely human and actual" than any life this world can offer:

Nor can I consider the Beatitude as any state beyond man's comprehension, but as the presence before the soul in some settled order, which has arisen out of the soul's past, of all those events or works of men which have expressed some quality of wisdom or of beauty or of power within the compass of that soul, and as more completely human and actual than any life lived in a partic­ ular body. It is the momentary union of the Spirit and the Celestial Body with the Ghostly 271

Self and fades into or is preceded by what Is called the Vision of the Clarified Body, which is indeed a Vision of our own Celestial Body as that body w ill be when all cycles end. (52)

The Beatitude is one of the many states which reconcile the soul's past with its future when all cycles are over, and so part of the mechanism of escape from the physical world. It is, I think, the state of souls in Byzantium; certainly it is the state of the

Fifteenth Phase. It exists to remind the soul, in case it should sink too much into Primary being, that "its object is to pass rapidly 53 round its circle and find freedom from that circle."

Once th e so u l has escaped, i t w ill embody th e u n ity man cannot know, but which Yeats worked all his life to express in metaphors: the entirely free and self-regarding life of the Other World. This

* • / is the state of Aengus in Tir na nOg as he sits in his house of wattles and clay, dreaming; it is the trance of the spirits dancing around him in Tir na nOg and the souls whirling in gyres in Byzan­ tium; it is also the trance of Balle and Ailllnn and of Rlbh in his vision, and of the dancing girl under the full moon. It is the state that Yeats's women understand because of the inBight that they gain from sexual ecstasy. It is the state that Oisin, being restless inside his body, cannot understand, and that Solomon and

Sheba try to attain but cannot because of their bodies. It is

Yeats's way of affirming a truth that, he thought, the ancient

Irish culture knew but the modem world has forgotten, and finally 272

it is his answer to old age and death, both of which, in his system, are merely part of the soul's long escape.

The final image of the soul's journey to fulfillment in the

Other World is the sun. The Phases of the Moon, as I have said, a re emblems of change. Unity of Being i s not q u ite p o ssib le under

the moon because it never stops changing, but eternity is the sun: at the end, the soul leaves even the Fifteenth Phase behind. That

PhaBe was nearest perfection because, I think, the full moon reflects all of the sun's light that it can; but it Is still part of the changing world, and the soul, ultimately, belongs to the

Other World. A Vision, like the rest of Yeats's work, is a de­ scription of the soul's journey, but its epilogue, "All Souls'

Night," goes further and describes

How it is whirled about, Whereever the orbit of the moon can reach, Until it plunge into the sun; And there, free and yet fast, Being both Chance and Choice, Forget its broken toys And sink into Its own delight at last. (54)

This is the inevitable conclusion to Yeats's Imagery of the

Other World, the end of his entire system. The system Itself grew out of his lifelong occult study, and out of his own poetry, which gave him the images of perfection he needed to give form to the

Other World. Having achieved a system of metaphors for the Other

World, he found in himself, or said he had found, the Unity of

Being that he had always been looking for. At the end of A Vision 273 he put himself into the dance of "Byzantium" because he had shaped the spirits' knowledge into art and become, as an artist, one of them:

Such thought such thought have I that hold it tight Till meditation master all its parts, Nothing can stay my glance Until that glance run in the world's despite To where th e damned have howled away th e ir h e a rts , And where the blessed dance; Such thought, that in it bound I need no other thing, Wound in mind's wandering As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound. (55) 274

NOTES

X A Vision (1925 edition), p. x iii (dedication),

2 CP, p. 223 ("From 'Oedipus at Colonus'"),

3 A Vision, p. 236. (In this chapter* "AV" without qualification will always refer to the Second Edition of 1937.)

4 Bloom, Yeats, p. 275.

5 CP, p. 159.

6 Mythologies, p. 271.

7 CP, p. 161.

8 CP, p . 162.

9 CP, p . 163. 10 CP. p. 163.

11 CP, p. 163.

12 CP, p. 162.

13 CP, p. 162.

14 CP, p. 168.

15 CP, p. 163.

16 AV, pp. 135-36. 275

17 Memoirs. p. 128.

18 AV, p. 136.

19 CP, p. 282.

20 CP, p. 175.

21 CP, p. 167.

22 CP, p. 168.

23 Ellmann, Identity, p. 255.

24 AV (1925), p. 238.

25 CP, p. 168.

26 CP, p. 169.

27 CP, p. 341 ("Under Ben Bulben").

28 Francis John Byrne, Irish Kings and Hlgh-Klngs. (London: B.F. Batsford, 1973), p. 213.

29 CP, p. 174 ("Michael Robartes and the Dancer").

30 CP, p. 266 ("Before the World Was Made").

31 CP, p. 216.

32 CP, p. 217. 276

33 CP. p. 175.

34 CP. pp. 45-46 ("The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner"). 35 CP, p. 219 ("Human D ignity"). 36 CP, pp. 222-23 ("His Wildness).

37 CP. pp. 256-57 ("Young Man's Song"). 38 CP, pp. 270-71.

39 CP, p. 268.

40 CP, p. 283 ("Ribh in Ecstasy").

41 AV, p. 193.

42 CP, p. 252 ("Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment"). t 43 CP, p. 254 ("Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"). 44 CP, p. 255.

45 CP, p. 255 ("Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers"). 46 CP, p. 253 ("Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman"). 47 CP, p. 253.

48 CP. p. 254 ("Crazy Jane on God").

49 CP, p. 264 ("Tom the Lunatic"). 277

50 AV, p. 193.

51 Wade, L e tte rs , p. 922.

52 AV (1925), p. 235.

53 AV, p. 236.

54 AV, p. 304.

55 AV, p. 305.

« 278

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