An Irish Poet Foresees His BIrth
The Modern Poetry of Yeats
Composed for Modern Poetry
Spring 2005
Adam Polgar
D OW N LOA D E D F RO M NAT I V E H U E . C O M
Boston
© 2005. Reproduction without permission is not authorized.
Copyright © 2005 Adam Polgar
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While modern poems resonate with the conflicts of their times, it is nonetheless interesting and helpful to step outside the constraints of a New Critical
reading and consider the historical and contextual catalysts that may have influenced a modern author. The poetic corpus of William Butler Yeats, for example,
was certainly heavily influenced by his. Let us, then, familiarize ourselves with the
dramatis personae of his modern Inferno: as his dark forest, we have the isle of
Éire fighting for independence during times of revolution and war; as his reluctant
Beatrice, the revolutionary Maud Gonne; as his Virgil, poetry – a guide leading him
through the wasteland of the Modern, but still unable to reach heavenly realms,
the hard work required for its creation not saving its architects from accusations of
“idling” in the eyes of the public.
These players are frequent visitors of the stage Yeats presents us with, their
permanence of great use to readers as they refract the changing attitudes of the
struggling poet. Struggling indeed: the sense of loss for Yeats was great in both his
personal and civic life, whether concerning the repeated rejection by Maud Gonne,
or the death of his countrymen in war and rebellion. This is vividly represented in
his poetry; indeed, Yeats is suffering through an internal An Gorta Mor; a famine
of the imagination, with the rapidly narrowing gyres of history erasing the relevance of traditional forms of thought and art. He longs for the coming of a new age
that provides solutions to his intellectual quest in uniting and synthesizing the innumerable dualisms present in his poetry, but he is painfully aware that the
chance is such salvation – a “second coming” – through syncretic fusion will not
arrive during his lifetime. Instead, Yeats finds himself in a world where the conventions of the past no longer work; where they are twisted and skewed. Daedalus
no longer attempts to protect his son; instead ,the father(land) sends Icarus to his
death on metal wings, as seen in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”. His friend
Robert Gregory is by no means the only victim of the Modern. In his exploration of
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the decay of the relevance of the past, Yeats explores the death of old-fashioned
love as well, as seen in “Adam’s Curse” and “No Second Troy”; the death of conventional Christian beliefs, as seen in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”; even the
death and decay of the human body, its impermanence in stark contrast with the
potential monumental persistence of intellect, as seen in “Sailing to Byzantium”.
All the skeptical lamentation referenced above, however, is restrained and
in a more embryonic state in his earlier poems. The tone in his “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree”, for example, is surprisingly pastoral, calming and evocative of a
Thoreau-esque world of peaceful coexistence with nature, unmarred by conflict
and strife. On the surface, at least: closer reading reveals that the escapism of the
work is not enough to take the young Yeats far enough from the emerging doubts
in his psyche. Pretty as the landscape painted may be, with its honey bees and Elysian purple glow, close reading reveals that the rustic plan outlined so lyrically is
all in the future tense, as such in diametric opposition with the world associated
with such carefree symbiosis with nature, which one typically places in the past.
Yeats here reminds us that the world he longs for both no longer exits and does
not exists yet; he is caught between two interglacial epochs, a forlorn wanderer in
an Arnoldian reality where one world is dead, and the other, if not exactly powerless to be born, is a “rough beast”, as he confides to readers in his “The Second
Coming”. These tensions are only reinforced by the realization that the dreamlike
fantasy of the poem is a failed exercise in denial: the speaker is in fact in filthy, industrial London, that polis of innumerable shades of gray, far from the lush verdant isle he longs for but can not claim. In effect, the poem is almost an experiment that showed Yeats that attempts at imitating the lyric, pastoral tradition of
the past no longer works: even if not visible on the surface of the lake, the Loch
Ness monster of the Modern will lurk ominously beneath the surface. Having realized the limits of trying to resurrect the past through poetry, here the Irish poet
already begins to foresee his gradual rebirth into the Modern.
The delight in reading Yeats chronologically is the discovery of the dramatic
change he undergoes over time, as reflected in his work. His self-actualization
brings his poetry in sync with what Hardy calls “the chronic melancholy” and the
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“ache of modernism”; while Yeats still has one foot in the Victorian era at the beginning of his literary career, he comes to realize that its conventions are obsolete.
Unlike with most of his contemporaries, we do not see Yeats merely wash his feet
in the currents of modernist thought and expression – instead, we witness how he
gradually submerges himself fully and is carried by the caustic currents of change
from the calm lake of Innisfree to the stormy Atlantic, where the SS Lusitania is
quickly sinking and warplanes roar in the skies above. His verse gives the reader
the opportunity to see the poet dramatically transform himself through his work,
to some extent “becoming modern” right before our eyes. He presents at first a
Pangaea of fertile Romanticism covered in shrubs of pre-Raphaelite partiality, only
to have it riven into new continents of modernity by the asthenospheric stresses of
the quickly changing world around him.
Having thus left Innisfree behind, we find Yeats in a later poem conversing
with his Beatrice and her sister in “Adam’s Curse”. We note that the emissaries of
both Mars and Venus share their points – the poem thus features multiple perspectives, a technique very definitive of modern poetry. The general shift to the
dramatic, reinforced by the inherent and tactful use of enjambment, signals the
changes Yeats is undergoing. We are also reminded that poetry and beauty both
require intense labor, this obvious separation suggesting that the two cannot coexist, but with the slight hint that perhaps, even in the modern world, poetry has yet
a chance to be beautiful still. Beautiful for whom, however? Bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen certainly do not seem to approve. The question is raised, but
possible answers are only hinted at.
Later still, in “Sailing to Byzantium”, he sees the modern world as “no country for old men”, and longs for a past where “monuments of unageing intellect” are
still held in high regard – a past that he sees so well preserved in the enduring historical image of Byzantium. Yeats is also concerned about being erased by the
quickly shifting sands of the present, and he suggests that poetry is just such a
“monument” to intellect, and hopes to be fossilized in his writing, carried by that
amber vessel into the future where he may endure. This, of course, is at conflict
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with his alternative depiction of poetry as a tool whose use is dubious at best, especially in the critical, unrefined public eye.
While clearly reflective of his own concerns about human mortality and the
impermanence of one’s existence, his poems also evoke a longing for a reconnection with the past. However, one of his prime poetic images, the gyres, constantly
remind him that not only is this past gone, but he is moving further and further
away from it, spiraling into an unknown and portentous future. Like the declarations in “The Second Coming”, the gyres themselves are visionary, offering a furtive
glance at a possible future, and hinting at Yeast’s increasing preoccupation with
the occult, fueled by his healthy appetite for folk mysticism, which was instilled in
him by his mother as an alternative to his father’s more traditional religious views.
The dark omens present – beasts, “indignant desert birds”, anarchy that causes
centres not to hold and things to fall apart – make one afraid of the future. What
brave new world is to come? Skepticism and fear thus often permeate the pages of
his work. In general, his poetry is a boxing match of opposites, constantly recognizing that the opponents can only be balanced momentarily before they strike at
each other again. The conflict between the glove-wearing brutes in the poetry of
Yeats is also present in the dramatic element discussed in “Adam’s Curse”, which
later increased in intensity and invaded other poems as well, as seen in “Crazy Jane
Talks to the Bishop” and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, where the author
and the speakers are not the same person, and a general air of nonchalant disengagement from the emotional implications of the piece is present. One more note
on “Crazy Jane”: again, we see the change in the attitudes of Yeats, as gone are the
murmuring women of “Adam’s Curse”, and Jane, while crazy, speaks loud and
clear.
As hopefully demonstrated in the examples above, Yeats manifests stress
not only on the stage of content, but the stage of technique as well. However, in
spite of these technical strains, Yeats is nonetheless circumscribed by more traditional forms. Frequently, he elects to merely shake the steel frame of a poem rather
than adopt more radical forms. Thus Yeats steers clear of the more dramatic experimental work that later poets would perform: while Stevens floats by in his
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yacht and Stein in her nuclear submarine, Yeats is more comfortable with comparatively minor disharmony within the confines of traditional forms, perhaps
donning rubber flippers and snorkels, but still swimming on his own. Another tension typically employed by Yeats is his recurrent use of titles that hint of ancient
Western heritage (be it the city of Troy, the empire of Byzantium, or the biblical
progenitor of all men), while the pieces themselves belie any possibility of return
to the past announced in the title, and sometimes even question the benefits of
such a return were it possible.
His interests, poetic and otherwise, were quite varied, and Yeats seems of
offer more questions in his works than answers. Is poetry made of more than “polite meaningless words”? How does one cope with accelerating, swift change? If
Yeats is to leave the reader with one ultimate didactive epiphany, it is this: the only
constant is change. This is the gospel of Yeats; this is what allowed him to tolerate
the pressures of the Modern. Thinking about the residents of the historical gyres
before him, and the residents of historical gyres yet to come, Yeats recognized his
enslavement in never-ending cyclicity, and used his time to narrate his frustrations, fears, hopes and dreams in the shape of poetry, writing himself into the
canon of the English language, and finally, after a long journey filled with disappointment and pain, reaching rest in his Byzantium.
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