For the Harmony of the Race, Each Individual Should Be

Home , A Prayer for My Daughter, The Second Coming (poem), Under Ben Bulben

http://www.englishworld2011.info/

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS / 2019

For the harmony of the race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments—free of stress Woman must become more responsible for the child than man— Women must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved—

The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his attentions from her to another woman The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element, honour, grief, sentimentality, pride & consequently jealousy must be detached from it. Woman for her happiness must retain her deceptive fragility of appearance, combined with indomitable will, irreducible courage, & abundant health the outcome of sound nerves— Another great illusion that woman must use all her introspective clear-sightedness & unbiassed bravery to destroy—for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it—will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.

1914 1982

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 1865-1939

William Butler Yeats was born to an Anglo-Irish family in Dublin. His father, J. B. Yeats, had abandoned law to take up painting, at which he made a somewhat precar- ious living. His mother came from the Pollexfen family that lived near Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where Yeats spent much of his childhood. The Yeatses moved to London in 1874, then returned to Dublin in 1880. Yeats attended first high school and then art school, which he soon left to concentrate on poetry. Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the "religion of art." Yeats, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life to compensate for his lost religion. This search led him to various kinds of mys- ticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and neoplatonism. He said he "made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition." http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2020 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Yeats's childhood and young manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo, and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day, founded the Irish Literary Society, and acquired late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite ideas of poetry: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he gained a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin, where he founded the National Literary Society, he was influenced by Irish nationalism and, although often disagreeing with those who wished to use literature for political ends, he nevertheless came to see his poetry as contributing to the rejuvenation of Irish culture. Yeats's poetry began in the tradition of self-conscious Romanticism, strongly influenced by the English poets Edmund Spenser, Percy Shelley, and, a little later, William Blake, whose works he edited. About the same time he was writing poems (e.g., "The Stolen Child") deriving from his Sligo experience, with quietly precise nature imagery, Irish place-names, and themes from Irish folklore. A little later he drew on the great stories of the heroic age of Irish history and translations of Gaelic poetry into "that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary." The heroic legends of ancient Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside helped brace his early dreamlike imagery. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"— "my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music," said Yeats—is both a Romantic evocation of escape into dream, art, and the imagination, and a specifically Irish reverie on freedom and self-reliance. Yeats vigorously hybridizes Irish and English traditions, and eventually draws into this potent intercultural mix East and South Asian cultural resources, including Jap- anese Noh theater and Indian meditative practices. Resolutely Irish, he imaginatively reclaims a land colonized by the British; imposes Irish rhythms, images, genres, and syntax on English-language poetry; and revives native myths, place-names, and consciousness. Yet he is also cosmopolitan, insisting on the transnationalism of the collective storehouse of images he calls "Spiritus Mundi" or "Anima Mundi," spending much of his life in England, and cross-pollinating forms, ideas, and images from Ireland and England, Europe and Asia. Irish nationalism first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more pop- ular style, to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image, as did translations from Gaelic folk songs, in which "nothing . . . was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading the passive love-poet to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books intensified his search for a more active stance, a more vigorous style. At the start of the twentieth century, Yeats wearied of his early languid aesthetic, declaring his intentions, in a 1901 letter, to make "everything hard and clear" and, in another of 1904, to leave behind "sentiment and sentimental sadness." He wished for poems not of disembodied beauty but that could "carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." In poems of his middle period, such as "Adam's Curse" and "A Coat," Yeats combines the colloquial with the formal, enacting in his more austere diction, casual rhythms, and passionate syntax his will to leave behind the poetic "embroideries" of his youth and walk "naked." The American poet Ezra Pound, who spent winters from 1913 to 1916 with Yeats in a stone cottage in Sussex, strengthened Yeats's resolve to develop a less mannered, more stripped down style. In 1889 Yeats had met the beautiful actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. She became the subject of many of his early love poems, and in later poems, such as "No Second Troy" and "A Prayer for My Daughter," he expresses anger over her self-sacrifice to political activism. He had also met Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and Yeats spent many http://www.englishworld2011.info/

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS / 2021 holidays at her aristocratic country house, Coole Park. Disliking the moneygrubbing and prudery of the middle classes, as indicated in "September 1913," he looked for his ideal characters either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them. Under Lady Gregory's influence Yeats began to organize the Irish dramatic movement in 1899 and, with her help, founded the Abbey Theater in 1904. His active partici- pation in theatrical production—confronting political censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and actors, and other aspects of "theatre business, management of men"—also helped toughen his style, as he demonstrates in "The Fascination of What's Difficult." Yeats's long-cherished hope had been to "bring the halves together"—Protestant and Catholic—through a literature infused with Ireland's ancient myths and cultural riches before the divisions between rival Christianities. But in a string of national controversies, he ran afoul of both the Boman Catholic middle class and the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland, moved to England. Then came the Easter Bising of 1916, led by men and women he had long known, some of whom were executed or imprisoned by the British. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the executed leaders) that "tragic dignity had returned to Ireland," Yeats returned. His culturally nationalist work had helped inspire the poet revolutionaries, and so he asked himself, as he put it in the late poem "Man and the Echo," did his work "send out / Certain men the English shot?" Yeats's nationalism and antinationalism, his divided loyalties to Ireland and to England, find powerfully ambivalent expression in "Easter, 1916" and other poems. Throughout his poetry he brilliantly mediates between contending aspects of himself—late-Bomantic visionary and astringent modern skeptic, Irish patriot and irreverent antinationalist, shrewd man of action and esoteric dreamer. As he said: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Conceiving consciousness as conflict, he fashioned a kind of poetry that could embody the contra- dictory feelings and ideas of his endless inner debate. To mark his recommitment to Ireland, Yeats refurbished and renamed Thoor (Cas- tle) Ballylee, the Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land, in which he lived off and on, and which became, along with its inner winding stair, a central symbol in his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently established Irish Free State, and he served until 1928, playing an active part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political affairs, in which he supported the views of the minority Protestant landed class. At the same time he was continuing his esoteric studies. He married Georgie (changed by Yeats to George) Hyde Lees in 1917, when he was fifty- two, and she proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing she produced for several years (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937). The system was a theory of the movements of history and of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related to a different phase of the moon. At the center of the symbolic system were the interpenetrating cones, or "gyres," that represented the movement through major cycles of history and across antitheses of human personality. He compressed and embodied his personal mythology in visionary poems of great scope, linguistic force, and incantatory power, such as "The Second Coming" and "Leda and the Swan." In poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols, serving as a means of resolv- ing some of the contraries that had arrested him from the beginning—paradoxes of time and eternity, change and continuity, spirit and the body, life and art. If his earliest poetry was sometimes static, a beautifully stitched tapestry laden with symbols of inner states, his late poetry became more dynamic, its propulsive syntax and mus- cular rhythms more suited to his themes of lust, rage, and the body. He had once screened these out of his verse as unpoetic, along with war, violence, "the mire of http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2022 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS human veins." Now he embraced the mortal world intensely. In "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," the self defies the soul's injunction to leave the world behind: "I am content to live it all again / And yet again, if it be life to pitch / Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch." Yeats no longer sought transcendence of the human, but instead aimed for the active interpenetration of the corporeal and the visionary. In his Nietzsche- inspired poems of "tragic joy," such as "Lapis Lazuli," he affirmed ruin and destruction as necessary to imaginative creation. One key to Yeats's greatness is that there are many different Yeatses: a hard-nosed skeptic and an esoteric idealist, a nativist and a cosmopolitan, an Irish nationalist and an ironic antinationalist, a Romantic brooding on loss and unrequited desire and a modernist mocking idealism, nostalgia, and contemporary society. Similarly, in his poetic innovations and consolidations, he is both a conservative and a radical. That is, he is a literary traditionalist, working within such inherited genres as love poetry, the elegy, the self-elegy, the sonnet, and the occasional poem on public themes. But he is also a restless innovator who disrupts generic conventions, breaking up the coherence of the sonnet, de-idealizing the dead mourned in elegies, and bringing into public poems an intense personal ambivalence. In matters of form, too, he rhymes but often in off-rhyme, uses standard meters but bunches or scatters their stresses, employs an elegant syntax that nevertheless has the passionate urgency of colloquial speech; his diction, tone, enjambments, and stanzas intermix ceremony with contor- tion, controlled artifice with wayward unpredictability. A difficulty in reading Yeats— but also one of the great rewards—is comprehending his manysidedness. Like Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Windham Lewis, Yeats was attracted to right-wing politics, and in the 1930s he was briefly drawn to fascism. His late interest in author- itarian politics arose in part from his desire for a feudal, aristocratic society that, unlike middle-class culture, in his view, might allow the imagination to flourish, and in part from his anticolonialism, since he thought a fascist Spain, for example, would "weaken the British Empire." But eventually he was appalled by all political ideologies, and the grim prophecy of "The Second Coming" seemed to him increasingly apt. Written in a rugged, colloquial, and concrete language, Yeats's last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. His return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. In one of his last letters he wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." He died in southern France just before the beginning of World War II. His grave is, as his poem directed, near Sligo, "under Ben Bulben." He left behind a body of verse that, in variety and power, has been an enduring influence for English-language poets around the globe, from W. H. Auden and Seamus Heaney to Derek Walcott and A. K. Ramanujan.

The Stolen Child1

Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood2 in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake 5 The drowsy water-rats; There we've hid our faery vats,

1. I.e., a child stolen by fairies to be their com- are in County Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where panion, as in Irish folklore. Yeats spent much of his childhood. 2. This and other places mentioned in the poem http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2036 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might. 70 Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, And yet he had the intensity To have published all to be a world's delight. 10 What other could so well have counselled us In all lovely intricacies of a house 75 As he that practised or that understood All work in metal or in wood, In moulded plaster or in carven stone? Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, And all he did done perfectly so As though he had but that one trade alone.

11 Some burn damp faggots,4 others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room As though dried straw, and if we turn about The bare chimney is gone black out 85 Because the work had finished in that flare. Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, As 'twere all life's epitome, What made us dream that he could comb grey hair? 12 I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind 90 That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved Or boyish intellect approved, With some appropriate commentary on each; Until imagination brought 95 A fitter welcome; but a thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

June 1918 1918

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre1 The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 5 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.2

4. Bundles of sticks. of the character of the next age, is represented by 1. Yeats's term (pronounced with a hard g) for a the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest spiraling motion in the shape of a cone. He envi- expansion and of the other to that of its greatest sions the two-thousand-year cycle of the Christian contraction" [Yeats's note]. age as spiraling toward its end and the next histor- 2. The poem was written in January 1919, in the ical cycle as beginning after a violent reversal: "the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revo- end of an age, which always receives the revelation lution and on the eve of the Anglo-Irish War. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER / 2037

Surely some revelation is at hand; 10 Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!3 Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi4 Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 15 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep 20 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem5 to be born?

Jan. 1919 1920, 1921

A Prayer for My Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.' There is no obstacle But Gregory's wood2 and one bare hill 5 Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour 10 And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, 15 Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such, 20 Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.

3. Christ's second coming is heralded by the com- 5. Jesus' birthplace. ing of the Beast of the Apocalypse, or Antichrist (1 1. Yeats's daughter and first child, Anne Butler John 2.18). Yeats, was born on February 26, 1919, in Dublin 4. The spirit of the universe (Latin); i.e., Yeats and brought home to Yeats's refitted Norman said, "a general storehouse of images," a collective tower of Thoor Ballylee in Galway. unconscious or memory, in which the human race 2. Lady Gregory's wood at Coole, only a few miles preserves its past memories. from Thoor Ballylee. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2040 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Sailing to Byzantium1

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, 5 Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. 2 An aged man is but a paltry thing, 10 A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing,2 and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; is And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

3 ; O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall,3 Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,4 20 And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

4 25 Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;5 30 Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Sept. 1926 1927

1. Yeats wrote in A Vision: "I think that if I could of individual design, absorbed in their subject- be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend matter and that the vision of a whole people." it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium 2. The poet William Blake (1757-1827) saw the [now Istanbul] a little before Justinian opened St. soul of his dead brother rising to heaven, "clapping Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato [in the his hands for joy." 6th century c.e.]. ... I think that in early Byzan- 3. The mosaics in San Apollinaire Nuovo, in tium, maybe never before or since in recorded his- Ravenna, Italy, depict rows of Christian saints on tory, religious, aesthetic and practical life were a gold background; Yeats saw them in 1907. one, that architect and artificers . . . spoke to 4. I.e., whirl in a spiral. the multitude and the few alike. The painter, the 5. I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and illuminator of sacred books, were almost imper- silver, and artificial birds that sang [Yeats's note]. sonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE CIRCUS ANIMALS' DESERTION / 2051

Man. That were to shirk 20 The spiritual intellect's great work And shirk it in vain. There is no release In a bodkin4 or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate. 25 While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has body and its stupidity, But body gone he sleeps no more 30 And till his intellect grows sure That all's arranged in one clear view Pursues the thoughts that I pursue, Then stands in judgment on his soul, And, all work done, dismisses all 35 Out of intellect and sight And sinks at last into the night.

Echo. Into the night.

Man. O rocky voice Shall we in that great night rejoice? What do we know but that we face 40 One another in this place? But hush, for I have lost the theme Its joy or night seem but a dream; Up there some hawk or owl has struck Dropping out of sky or rock, 45 A stricken rabbit is crying out And its cry distracts my thought.

1938 1939

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although 5 Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.'

4. Dagger. Cf. Hamlet 3.1.77—78: "When he him- riage of his play The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), self might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin." and the lion in several of his poems, including"The 1. Yeats refers to the ancient Irish heroes of his Second Coming." early work ("Those stilted boys"), the gilded car- http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2052 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

What can I but enumerate old themes, io First that sea-rider Oisin2 led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; is But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play, "The Countess Cathleen"3 was the name I gave it, She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, 20 But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. 1 thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love.

25 And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;4 Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed 30 To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were emblems of.

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind but out of what began? 35 A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone I must lie down where all the ladders start 40 In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

1939

2. In the long title-poem of Yeats's first successful who sells her soul to the devil to buy food for the book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems starving Irish poor but is taken up to heaven (for (1889), the legendary poet warrior Oisin (pro- God "Looks always on the motive, not the deed"). nounced Usheen) is enchanted by the beautiful 4. In Yeats's play On Baile's Strand (1904), the fair}' woman Niamh (pronounced Neeve), who legendary warrior Cuchulain (pronounced Cu- leads him to the Islands of Delight, of Many Fears, HOOlin by Yeats, KooHULLin in Irish), crazed by and of Forgetfulness. his discovery that he has killed his son, fights with 3. A play (published in 1892) about an Irish the sea. countess (an idealized version of Maud Gonne)