Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
Asymptotic
Lyrics
Instantaneity
in
W.
B.
Yeats’s
Fin-de-siècle
JASON M. COATS
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899), by the Irish modernist poet W. B. Yeats, has a
fictional timespan of either a moment or an eternity. In its final stanza, the poem’s speaker
mystifies the temporality of the textual event. Dealing with an encounter between Aengus, a figure
out of Irish mythology, and an elusive faerie amour, the poem tracks Aengus through a series of
fairly straightforward, even banal, activities: traveling to a hazel forest, lighting a fire, fishing for
trout and falling into a dreaming sleep. In this dream he glimpses a “glimmering girl” so enticing
that he dedicates his life to her pursuit, never finding her yet never tiring or flagging in his
confidence that he will one day see her again:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And touch her lips and kiss her hands
And walk along long dappled grass
And pluck til time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun. 1
That the speaker is complacent about devoting his existence to chasing after her is perhaps
an effect of the potentially subjunctive mood of the poem (were it to take forever, seeing her
1
1989. “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed.
Finneran. New York: Simon & Schuster: 59-60.
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
again would justify this expense). Since we do not expect him to divest himself of the real world in
favor of a dream, his momentary devotion becomes but an echo of a particularly strong emotion
preserved in the textual timespan of the poem, but lasting only an instant in life. Another way of
interpreting this moment is to take the hint from the poem’s title and think of Aengus from Irish
myth – someone for whom the ephemeralities of mortal existence are less of an issue, and for
whom a dalliance of several centuries might not constitute much of a loss in the face of eternity.
But the speaker’s repetition of “time and times” does not map easily onto either of these
explanations. The first term suggests all of time, or at least of time in the sense that it is
conventionally experienced and represented within fictional texts; the second term seems to refer
to historical cataloguing of time: epochs, eras, centuries, lives. Why conjure up such a distinction
between experiential and remembered time (the end of time as opposed to the end of the way
we currently think about spans of time in reference to other similar spans) at this particular
moment? Why do so within an artistic medium (the lyric poem genre) noted for its ability to
record and sustain instantaneous expression? “Time and times,” in other words, is a strategic
deviation from both the mythic narrative the speaker represents and normal conventions of lyric
temporality, a moment during which the speaker drops out of character and addresses the
anxieties of his audience, who could be assumed to suffer from the same doubled perspective on
time at the end of the nineteenth century.
In the context of Kaleidoscope’s investigation into representations of time, this poem serves
as an interesting and accessible touchstone for how lyric poems normally render even exceedingly
lengthy spans of time into a single instant’s expression. Yeats often employed generic conventions
regarding lyric instantaneity, as in “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” (1922), which narrates the
final moments of a World War One flying ace: “I balanced all, brought all to mind, / The years to
come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind / In balance with this life, this
death.” 2 An entire life passing before one’s eyes is one familiar way of describing lyric
instantaneity, but historically the genre is most commonly devoted to recording powerfully strong
and passionate emotion (most often love). While we might normally meet attestations of undying
devotion to a beloved with skepticism, we regard them differently when housed within lyric
because the genre has taught us to expect such expressions; this is just what lyrics do. 3 However,
the lyric’s generic preoccupation with instantaneity has always been a convention utilized through
common consent of practitioners and readers rather than a hard-and-fast rule. There has usually
2
1989. “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.”In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed.
Finneran. New York: Simon & Schuster: 135.
3
For more on lyric temporality, especially with regards to the many historical attempts to
define the lyric that rely on its instantaneous expression of emotion, see the entry on “Lyric” in
1994. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia or Poetry and
Poetics, 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press: 714.
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
been more to gain by exploiting preconditioned lyric expectations than lost by any restrictions
placed on the artist by the shackles of rote formulae.
But in “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” as in many of Yeats’s poems from the 1890s, the
conventions of lyric temporality have been manipulated in order to play upon the shared concerns
of both producers and consumers of poetry. Again and again during this decade, Yeats collapses
an eternal perspective within an explicitly narrative chronology, conflating the syntagmatic and
paradigmatic axes of figuration. I suggest that the most compelling explanation for what he gains
by doing so is that he speaks to an audience already predisposed to the same temporally-blended
perspective. British and Irish readers in the 1890s were uniquely advantaged to recognize the
mythic dimensions of representation within the quotidian reality they ostensibly inhabited,
primarily because of their shared experience of the Victorian fin de siècle. Eschatological anxieties
within Yeats’s audiences (whether consciously apocalyptic or more subtly trepidatious about the
coming century’s blank slate) assisted him in uncovering teleological subtexts and registering
occult mysteries in his figures, at just the moment when his readers might share a predisposition
for occluded harbingers within poetic works. And the lyric instant proved an ideal vehicle for
representing the exploded normal sequence of time of the century’s end – a nominally arbitrary
designation of chronology, but a very real method of shaping historical and cultural identity, and
so therefore a cause of shared anxiety, and potentially (for a select few) the trigger for millenarian
crisis.
As I theorize the odd temporal effects of Yeats’s awareness of the fin de siècle in his
symbolist poetry of the 1890s, I also wish to suggest that the historical interruption between
centuries is a prime candidate for interdisciplinary study. Hindsight informs us that there was no
radical breach in the historical chronology between New Year’s Eve of 1899 and New Year’s Day of
1900, just as the rumored “Y2K” technological catastrophe of the 1999-2000 transition may have
been terrifying to those who believed it, but then, deflatingly, failed to materialize. Yeats certainly
regarded the fin de siècle of the 1890s as a nexus for political, religious, and aesthetic opportunity
(respectively, his involvement in the Irish nationalist movement, theosophy, and Symbolism). Yet
despite his worldly opportunism, we should posit a hefty degree of credulity to his fascination
with the power of numerological designation on everyday life, since it would eventually lead to
the composition of his bizarre occult treatise A Vision (1925). And by way of his interest in
numbers, I suggest that mathematics can offer a much more powerful analogue to help us
understand Yeats’s poetry than historical chronology, which might offer coincidental evidence of
like-minded persons, without offering a model for how time functioned within their eschatological
anxieties. As I will show, the terrifying moment between centuries can be thought of
asymptotically, as a radical discontinuity only approachable by way of theoretical limits (such as
the origin in a plot of the function y=1/x, at which y becomes both infinity and negative infinity at
once). Asymptotes are helpful in this case because they help explain how cultural observers might
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
have felt themselves to have observed the approach (and eventual trajectory) of phenomena for
some time without knowing how to stop them.
This particular poet’s self-conscious attempt to depict an inherently strange moment in time
is interesting because of its attempt to square the circle, and represent both cultural asymptotes
simultaneously – both the infinite plenitude of continuance and the ultimate vacuity of apocalypse.
The instant between centuries was frightening for exactly the same reason it was intriguing:
despite evidence attesting to a great deal of continuity between a day in December and another
in January, it was impossible to know with complete certainty what would emerge from the new
year and the new century. For Yeats, this semi-delusional, skeptical credulity resulted in a selfconsciously fictive bridge from one century to the next, preserving within an aesthetic frame the
desire for continuance and permanence as well as an urgent call for a radical break with the old.
Such paradoxical thinking is unsustainable, except perhaps within a poetic frame that is already
conventionally understood to house passionate, irrational, and unsustainable emotion.
Fin de Siècle Poetics
Firstly, it will be important to investigate the fin de siècle as a calendrically-based, shared,
tangible phenomenon, especially in terms of its hallmark Janus-faced, doubled perspective. As the
anthropologists Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding have characterized it, the fin de siècle is
fraught with a polarized schism between those who see a radical break with the past taking the
shape of a dystopic or apocalyptic telos and those who prefer a more optimistic or “millenialist”
change for the better, in whatever form “better” might assume for the cultural commentator. 4
Since even the headiest prognosticator would see the shadow of the opposite alternative in their
prediction, the luminal moment of the century’s end would take on heightened energy and some
aspects of the divergent pole. But as Asa Briggs and David Snowman have noted, writing
comprehensively about recurring patterns in historical fins de siècle, another way to explain the
cultural products of this moment is that anticipatory cultural attention cohabits simultaneously
with a nostalgic sense of summation. 5 Just as many of us focus on the century coming to a close
as its successor, and it might be useful to consider the possibility that the same persons are
looking backward and forward simultaneously, rather than discursively selecting for certain groups
who would be more likely to identify with one or the other predisposition.
In her essay “Counting at Dusk,” Elaine Scarry has devoted the most sustained attention to
why poetry holds special attraction for the artist intrigued by the doubled, overlaid consciousness
4
Stewart and Harding. 1999. “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 28: 286.
5
Briggs and Snowman. 2000. “Introduction.” In Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End 1400-
2000, ed. Briggs and Snowman. New Haven: Yale University Press: 1-3.
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
of ends and beginnings at the fin de siècle. Scarry emphasizes the inherently numerological basis
of poetry-writing – that the very act of creating verse texts satisfies a deep need to verify that
numbers, at least, will endure the transition from one century to the next. In fact, Scarry speculates
that numbers (rather than the freighted tradition of centuries of common use and reference) are
the base cause of the shared cultural fascination with the century’s end. Scarry does not suggest
that the century’s events can be distilled into some epistemic identity that everyone recognizes
and assents to, but that everyone sees that the numbers on the calendar are about to reset from
significant 9s to terrifyingly empty 0s, as if everyone were driving cars whose odometers were
synchronized to roll over at exactly the same instant. 6
The anticipatory anxiety of the fin de siècle, unlike that of other historical catastrophes,
stems from an unconscious acknowledgement that the major, steadier numbers that have defined
time for individuals for as far back as their memories can take them are changing for the first and
only time in their lives. As Scarry puts it, “the sequence of units suddenly becomes a lever able to
act on the space adjacent to itself, shifting the location of drama from its own habitually
perturbed territory to its normally undisturbed neighbor.” 7 At the fin de siècle, the normally
personal (and ephemeral) frisson of an advancing odometer becomes a plural cultural event. Every
person viewing the century changeover has, in addition to their own absurdly momentous
portents, the certainty that everyone else using the same calendar is undergoing a simultaneous
and equally momentous revelation, until “the numerical would cease to be a background
calibration but would seem instead the destination toward which everyone had all along been
heading.” 8 Why poetry should be the obvious choice for recording numismatic and/or
numerological fascination is explained by the requisite counting for both rhyme scheme and
meter, as well as the slippage between spatial arrangements of words against a white backdrop (a
visual effect) and the time-elapse chronology of words fictively understood to be spoken as if they
were everyday prose (an aural effect).
What poetry affords at the fin de siècle is an opportunity to map a humanist conception of
time and its significance onto a chronology for which there are no guarantees of larger meaning
or, during eschatological crises, of baseline continuance. Broadly speaking, fictions afford an
apposite aesthetic ground in which to work out anxieties and test the consequences of either
apocalyptic or millenialist outcomes, and can anticipate ways of filling the terrifyingly blank
transition between centuries with familiarly humanist literary structures. Probably the most lucid
and comprehensive investigation into the liminal interstices between a familiar fictive end and an
successive beginning is still Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, which offers a unique way of
understanding how cultures come to terms with their own limitations. Kermode’s essential
6
Scarry. 1995. “Counting at Dusk: Why Poetry Matters at the Fin de Siècle.” In Fins de Siècle,
ed. Scarry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 8.
7
Scarry. 1995: 7.
8
Scarry. 1995: 9.
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
contribution is his paradigmatic analysis of how self-consciously fictive texts (whether prose fiction,
poetry, or drama) can represent two otherwise identical moments within a temporal continuum as
bearing significance not just because they are sequentially arranged, but because they have been
placed within a textual framework that allows each instant to bear significance in its relation to a
promised end. The two moments cease to be similar-sounding ticks of an analogue clock and
become instead tick-tock, a term whose hyphen echoes the text’s entire duration and emplotment,
and whose raison d’etre now becomes dilating the moment between the two sounds as long and
elaborately as possible:
They have to defeat the tendency of the interval between tick and tock to empty itself; to
maintain within that interval following tick a lively expectation of tock, and a sense that
however remote tock may be, all that happens happens as if tock were certainly following. All
such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and
meaning. To put it another way, the interval must be purged of simple chronicity, of the
emptiness of tock-tick, humanly uninteresting suggestiveness. It is required to be a significant
season, kairos poised between beginning and end … Within this organization that which was
conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future: what was chronos
becomes kairos. 9
Here, chronos represents time evacuated of significance, pure chronicity, “one damn thing
after another” that satisfies no one who expects events which were difficult to endure to justify the
pain of their perseverance; kairos, meanwhile, is the special season or holiday that is self-evidently
more special than its adjacent temporalities. 10 Fictions can help audiences convince themselves
that the meaningless chronoi they inhabit resemble the inestimably more interesting kairoi they
wish the world more frequently produced, even if the price of the substitution of interesting times
for insignificant drudgery is apocalypse. The distinction between chronos and kairos, furthermore,
is not simply one of hierarchizing moments into significant and insignificant groups. Kairos affords
the possibility of glimpsing the whole narrative arc of the plot rather than merely being confined
to the time-elements immediately juxtaposed to that instant within the sequence. In that sense,
chronos represents a purely horizontal or syntagmatic axis of concatenated instants related only
by their chronological sequence, while kairos can potentially bundle the overall significance of the
entire sequence into a single moment in time, representing a vertical or paradigmatic axis that
offers an otherwise impossible glimpse into potentially infinite perspectives.
9
Kermode. 1999. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 44-5.
10
Kermode. 1999: 47: “Chronos is ‘passing time’ or waiting time, —that which, according to
Revelation, ‘shall be no more’—and kairos is the season, a point in time filled with significance,
charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end.”
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Kermode calls this glimpse of the immanent totality the pleroma, the improbable vatic sense
of divinity that animates the kairoi that stand in for it. One never gets to the pleroma, but many
fictions have devoted themselves to representing a vector pathway pointing in its direction,
signifying a way of conceiving of the infinite if not signifying the infinite itself. Our lack of the
etiologically infinite is in part what draws us to fictional texts in the first place:
We have to provide [meaning]. We still need the fullness of it, the pleroma; and it is our
insatiable interest in the future (toward which we are biologically orientated) that makes it
necessary for us to relate to the past, and to the moment in the middle, by plots: by which I
mean not only concordant imaginary incidents, but all the other, perhaps subtler, concords that
can be arranged in a narrative. 11
A reader’s growing sense that the text inhabits the interstices between tick and tock leads
to a suspicion that that dilated instant has attracted the paradigmatic representative energies of
kairos, which in turn can become a gateway to the pleroma. Unlike historical events, about which
we can never be sure of providential design, the purposively constructed humanist text always has
a preordained end. We have a reasonable expectation of meaning, and therefore a sustained
encouragement to read the text both horizontally and vertically. Each constituent of the dilated
fictional kairos between tick and tock potentially possesses the heightened significance of the
pleroma, even if that profundity can only ever be totally realized after the sequence has
concluded. Kairos, in other words, derives energy from the promise of the end, and in turn offers
the reader a temporary and anticipatory glimpse of that end.
Fictions, meanwhile, transpire in ways that strategically resemble chronological time, but
they derive their energies from their divergence from the primarily meaningless instants that
constitute our quotidian lives. Literary genres provide their glimpses of the pleroma in different
ways, relying on a combination of rhetorically-recognizable conventions and the inherent
characteristics that distinguish them from the rest. Narrativity and performativity are relatively
stable and recognized terms for prose fiction and drama; Brian McHale has quite recently
proposed the duo of segmentivity and countermeasure as a way of describing the generic eidos
of poetry, but this is merely to account for the huge number of poetic forms that have grown up
around this ancient genre. 12 We might just as easily focus on lyricality for our purposes, with
special attention placed on rhyme schemes that require attention to the formal arrangement of
line endings in space, and multiply the diverse possibilities of the “concords” Kermode posits. And
since lyricality is normally defined by its intimacy and instantaneity, we are back to speaking of the
generic convention that regards even the unwieldiest of long lyrics as transpiring within a
moment’s duration.
11
Kermode. 1999: 52.
12
McHale. 2009. “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry.” Narrative 17.1: 14-6.
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Lyrics at the fin de siècle, however, exhibit traits that capitalize on the generic expectation of
instantaneity and, as Helen Vendler has noted, pack what we would normally consider epic
significance into the fragile frame of a love poem. 13 They oscillate between millennial optimism
and apocalyptic dread. They collapse the frenetic trepidation of the future with the enervated
exhaustion of sustained nostalgia. They purport to bridge the sublime gap between the present
and the future within a relatively safer fictional framework, while simultaneously promising an
outlet for the reader’s desire to inhabit the kairos of the dilated transition for as long as is
comfortable. They require discomfiting perpendicular reading practices: horizontally adhering to
the sequence of the poems’ signs as they appear chronologically in the text, and vertically
suspending closure on the hermeneutics of those signs until all similar iterations of the poems’
figures have been assayed.
But most clearly, the temporality of fin-de-siècle lyrics is asymptotic, and this is where I wish
to extend the theories of Kermode and Scarry to account for Yeats’s fin-de-siècle lyrics. Figures
within such texts are ostensibly apprehendable, because bounded within the obvious fictive
constraints of a relatively short genre, but never quite allow the reader to reach the prophesized
end of the pleroma’s totality. Lyric conventions promise but an instant of our time, but the lyric
itself merely gestures toward the infinitude it stands in for but never fully delivers. But again and
again, as the rest of this essay will demonstrate, Yeats chooses not one or the other of the
conventional ways of reading the century’s end (nostalgia or apocalypse), but both. He seems
keen to have his readers grapple with the paradoxical discontinuity at the fin de siècle, making a
virtue of lyric instantaneity to assist in constructing a fictive bridge from one time to the next. The
cultural thinker could follow either historical asymptote, and indeed most lyrics would concentrate
on evoking solely a retrospective or millenialist emotion. Yeats would have us concentrate,
however jarringly, on both emotions at once, and he trusts in the fictive lyric frame to help his
audiences bridge the rupture between the moments before and after the discontinuity.
Yeats at the Fin de Siècle
Because the end of the century is a purely numerical cultural phenomenon, numerous
eschatologies map themselves onto the transition, whether we are speaking of apocalyptic or
occult millenarianism, nationalist myths of imperial degeneration (in England) or millenialist hopes
for revolution and independence (in Ireland and elsewhere), or literary decadence, which sought to
probe the utmost excesses of aesthetic signification. Yeats was interested in all of them. If the
major hallmark of fin-de-siècle poetics is its oddly syncretic collapse of simultaneous antinomies,
Yeats’s poetics deserves special attention because it never buckled under the weight of so many
13
Vendler. 1997. “Fin de Siècle Lyric.” In Fins de Siècle, ed. Scarry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press: 124.
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contradictory representations. Indeed, as I will shortly demonstrate, Yeats believed his version of
literary Symbolism grew stronger with each conflated contradiction accepted into the symbol.
As Roy Foster’s magisterial recent biography shows, even a cursory glimpse of Yeats’s
activities in the 1890s reveals an individual attempting to cram as many activities into his days as
possible. While publishing poetry and writing scores of reviews and essays, Yeats joined the occult
societies of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophist Society and MacGregor Mathers’s Order of the
Golden Dawn. Each of these occult groups was “very much of its time. London in the 1880s
pulsated with societies and fraternities for self-betterment, moral and spiritual, often with
overlapping memberships,” although each included a loyalty oath to foreswear other
organizations. 14 Yeats also joined the Parnellite Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and edited a
series of nationalist anthologies of young Irish poets. In occult matters, he joined with George
Russell (AE) in predicting the emergence of a nascent Celtic religion. In Fenian politics, he joined
with Maud Gonne in supporting the notion of imminent uprising against England. He collaborated
with Edwin Ellis on a symbolist edition of Blake’s collected works, formed a circle he called the
Rhymers’ Club whose members he would eventually designate the “Tragic Generation” in his
Autobiographies, and with J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory began the Irish Literary Theatre (the
precursor of the Abbey Theatre). He joined with Arthur Symons to promulgate the Symbolist
movement in English by translating and adapting the French Symbolistes.
After the turn of the century the pace and variety of his professional activities slackened.
Yeats did not publish another book of poetry until 1904, and spent most of his time with Synge
and Lady Gregory on the Abbey Theatre. As he remembered later in his introduction to the
Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), “Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth
nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee, nobody went mad, nobody committed suicide,
nobody joined the Catholic church, or if they did I have forgotten.” 15 This memory is at once a
public admission that his fin de siècle pace was unsustainable and a self-congratulatory attempt at
distinguishing his early style from his later-career, stripped-down, modernist aesthetic, as well as
from his compeers who fared more poorly at the task of extricating themselves from the decadent
1890s. Yeats takes a similar tack in “A Coat” (1914), in which he repudiates both the ornate style
and the subject matter of his early symbolist work. With an eye toward both his current audiences
and those who teach themselves to write derivative lyrics by studying only particular, isolated
moments within a wide-reaching oeuvre, Yeats figures his poetry into a coat he tailored himself,
embroidered “out of old mythologies” which his mimickers “caught [and] / wore it in the world’s
eyes / as if they’d wrought it.” 16 The joke is on the fools though, for Yeats has already weighed in
14
Foster. 1997. W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 105.
15
Yeats. 1937. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. New York: Oxford University Press: xiii-xiv.
16
Yeats. 1989. “A Coat.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Finneran. New York:
Simon & Schuster: 127.
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
against his earlier style, with this poem being the primary evidence of his newly spartan taste for
minimal frillery: “Song, let them take it. / For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked.”
Perhaps accepting Yeats’s version of events too credulously, Harold Bloom has argued that
the poet’s success in surviving the fin de siècle and living to mock the actions he took in the
1890s was due to his perfect adherence to Walter Pater’s idealist aestheticism, while his unluckier
contemporaries in the Rhymers’ Club (notably Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Oscar Wilde)
practiced a degraded and decadent devotion to art, which later led to their demise and
dissolution. Because Pater’s most famous artistic dictum also deals with aesthetic temporality as it
blends life and art within a fictional frame, and it bears directly on my disagreement with Bloom, I
will quote the passage from Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance (1868) below. The artist’s
project is the austere enjoyment of beauty as such, in any and every guise imaginable, and the
ultimate quest to embody it in artifice:
[W]e have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in
listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest … in art and song. For our one chance lies in
expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time … Of this
wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art
comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as
they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. 17
Pater’s words were taken as prolegomena by both the French symbolistes and the English
decadents, and were hugely influential. Pater was especially understandably popular among artists
for his valorization of the artist’s role within culture: he or she creates that which makes life
worthwhile and must endeavor to perfect the work to ensure the little time we have to appreciate
art is spent as beneficially as possible.
But it is worth lingering on how difficult studious contemplation of the “expanded interval”
of art must be. Presumably the artist is an artist because he or she is especially adept at enjoying
life and becomes an epicurean connoisseur of instants by prolonged exposure and delight in what
is best in them. However, if every moment of professional existence is devoted to cramming “as
many pulsations as possible into the given time,” one is never actually enjoying the pulsations –
one is hovering suspended over and between them, wondering if this is the “hard, gem-like flame”
one has been seeking, or if that is in store in the next moment, or the moment after that. 18 The
aesthete has an extremely demanding cultural role, and by privileging artistic beauty over the
moral imperatives art has formerly been understood to serve, Pater’s acolytes also laid themselves
bare to the opprobrium of the normative bourgeois sensibilities. Indeed, Bloom blames the artistic
17
Pater. 1980. The Renaissance, ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press:
18
Pater. 1980: 189.
190.
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demise of the “Tragic Generation” on the inherent danger of Pater’s formulation that “you need to
be a poet of genius and a moral titan fully to sustain it. By the high standard of that passage, no
poet of Pater’s time could be judged [as a success].” 19 If true, this judgment is true of any time,
and Yeats should fail it too. Although Pater’s interval is designed to stave off ennui and
meaninglessness by the distinction of worthwhile appreciation (as opposed to less interesting
dross), the injection of Kermode’s pleroma into the chronology of an individual’s existence must
always be an act of humanist volition. As Yeats himself repeatedly attested (in the language of
nakedly opportunistic one-upmanship), his contemporaries failed where he succeeded because
they listlessly waited for the vitiating moment to arrive, whereas he created his own moments by
subscribing to so many political and religious causes. 20
While Yeats certainly considered himself an aesthete, his response to fin-de-siècle
enervation was to diversify his professional portfolio. In his Autobiographies he typified the
dangers of single-minded adherence to one activity rather starkly:
Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day, with hearts that Christianity, as shaped by
history, cannot satisfy. Our love-letters wear out our love, no school of painting outlasts its
founders, every stroke of the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty
years, Impressionism thirty perhaps. 21
Instead, Yeats opted for a much more inclusive strategy which combined his various
interests in ways that were fruitfully generative for his poetry and drama, and yet could not be
typified as an “all-of-the-above” acceptance of the cultural status-quo. In joining with Arthur
Symons to initiate the Symbolist movement in English poetry, Yeats arrayed himself against slavish
scientificity and materialism, both of which he found destructive to the suggestiveness of beauty
and to the pursuit of the mystic and supernatural vectors in and out of language. 22 It was a
movement built to last, and yet neither Symons nor Yeats felt themselves to belong exclusively to
its ranks, and neither subscribed to it for very long.
19
Bloom. 1972. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 24.
20
Foster. 1997: 110. “In middle and old age he would talk endlessly about the Rhymers,
generalizing from the dissolute and tragic fates of Dowson and Symons in order to present them
as a generation doomed through their search for liberation: whereas he had found salvation in the
search for a cause.”
21
Yeats. 1953. The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan: 189.
22
For his part, Symons’s manifesto declared Symbolism to be “an attempt to spiritualise
literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority,” as well as a
“revolt” against “a materialist tradition.” Symons. 1899. The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
London: William Heinemann: 9-10.
25
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
Nevertheless, the symbol in Yeats’s poetics is the profoundest instance of Kermode’s kairos
to emerge from the 1890s, and Yeats considered it his correction for the irreligious shortcomings
of Pater’s austere idealism. In the face of an eschatological crisis which is nevertheless also a
millennial opportunity for radical break, the symbol served as both a nostalgic aggregator for
familiar historical figures as well as a prime opportunity to use the literary historical past to recast
the symbol in new, even subversive ways. Yeats’s belief in the symbol’s capacity to serve as a
heuristic for a large number of sometimes dissonant metaphorical tenors was incredibly robust. He
regarded his practice as simply speeding up the normally glacial pace of change for culturally
accepted connotations for symbols, which after all, at any point in history contains all of the
linguistic associations of its hoary chronological usage dating from ritualistic usage to
contemporary blending and translation. Everything combines to form an evolving but never quite
defined form, since definition would pin the symbol to one meaning when it must contain
multitudes. Symbols also seemed to Yeats ideally expressed in lyric poetry, due to the numerical
nature of metrical feet and rhythm, whose purpose was to “prolong the moment of
contemplation, that moment when we are both asleep and awake, ... by hushing us with an
alluring monotony, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated
from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols.” 23
Within Yeats’s fin-de-siècle lyrics, Pater’s “interval” is sustained through an occultist trance
and evoked by fluxional symbols which, far from static constants, conjure a history of referentiality
evolving before the reader’s eyes. The symbol must serve to alert the reader to a specific reading
praxis that involves specificity without debilitating scrutiny; vertical scanning of the poetic form as
well as attention to the rhythmic regularity of the meter; and above all else, openness to the vatic
registers one might normally block out in order to concentrate on the text. As Clive Scott has
noted, such a praxis has grave consequences for the temporality of the lyric: “The Symbolist poem
is the poem animated, not so much by the voice breathing life into it, as by the mobile eye
wandering restlessly forward and back over the page, ensnared in an ever-recurrent and variously
momentous instant.” 24
The symbol, to use Kermode’s terms again, irrupts out of the chronos of the poem in order
to signal its kairos and thereby invite the reader to open up to the pleroma that must be partially
supplied by the audience’s credulity:
All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of
long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down
among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and
23
Yeats. 1961. “The Symbolism of Poetry.” In Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan:
24
Scott. 1991. “Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism.” In Modernism, ed. Bradbury and
159.
McFarlane. New York: Penguin: 207.
26
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation to one another, they become, as it
were, one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct
evocations and yet is one emotion … the more various and numerous the elements that have
flowed into its perfection, the more powerful will be the emotion, the power, the god it calls
among us. 25
Not only is Yeats’s belief in the symbol’s capacity to signify robust, he regards the symbol as
an extremely potent cultural glyph, with a radiating power made manifest through human
attention and only strengthened through internal contradiction. Moreover, the symbol is not an
end in itself, but could be made to serve a variety of extra-textual and even extra-literary
purposes, since the symbol gains much of its effect via the importation of multiple freighted
associations and the refutation of prior audience expectations that occur along the way. For
example, in The Countess Cathleen (first published 1892, revised and republished in Poems
[1895]), the title character traffics in the established symbolism of Ireland as a woman named
Kathleen ni Houlihan (the Sean-Bhean Bhocht), although she is normally seen as an itinerant
vagrant (the Irish translates to “poor old woman”) rather than as Yeats depicted her, as a wealthy
aristocrat of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency wondering idly how best to care for her tenants during a
famine. Yeats would repeat the symbol far more conventionally and successfully in his play
Kathleen ni Houlihan (co-written with Augusta Gregory) in 1902.
Yeats’s symbolism thus straddles ultimate inclusion, since potentially limitless tenors can be
enfolded into the symbolic vehicle, and purposive transgression, since he sought to use symbols
to advance his diverse aesthetic, religious, and political ends. As a means to those ends, the
symbol may appear quite unsatisfactory – it invites the reader to supply associations, and then
suggests new ways of reading the symbol afterward, in ways that ultimately depend on the
audience beginning the process voluntarily and open-mindedly. As an Anglo-Irish writer whose
formative years were spent on both sides of the Irish Sea, Yeats was also keenly aware that
symbols carry cultural baggage that can select for preconditioned meanings that will not be
sharable by readers from outside that tradition. Symbolism can seem to rely too dangerously on
the reader’s charity and credulity; if one’s reader is a British racist who will only ever regard an
Irish author orientally, as intemperate, weak, inconsistent, irrational, childish, effeminate, backward,
and sick, however he might newly inscribe the symbol, it will implode in the face of such
imperialist antagonism. But the virtue of Yeats’s open poetics is that symbols allow him to speak
differently to multiple audiences at once because of the vagueness of the lyric frame; the symbol
of the rose, as I will shortly suggest, can take on nationalist tenors for Irish readers and exclusively
aesthetic meanings for British eyes.
The example of Yeats’s “Valley of the Black Pig” (1899), his most apocalyptic poem from that
decade, will underscore this last point about imperial double-consciousness:
25
Yeats. 196: 157.
27
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
The dews drop slowly and dreams gather; unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,
And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.
We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you,
Master of the still stars and of the flaming door. 26
This valley appears on no map, though by mythological repute it lies in Ulster; the
apocalyptic impulse can also be abjured, if the reader wishes, by the dream inspiration of the
speaker’s vision. There is evidence (“cromlech”) that the setting is Ireland, and the poem does
describe opposing armies clashing with devastating consequences, but those armies, although
“perishing,” are “unknown”; furthermore, it is possible to read the conflagration as the eternal
struggle between good and evil, heaven (the “still stars”) and hell (“the flaming door”). The British
reader, in other words, can still mine this poem for a particularly apt, if somewhat superstitiously
alarmist, vision of the century’s end. Of course, an Irish reader would be predisposed to be most
weary of the British among “the world’s empires,” would recognize in both “cromlech” and “cairn”
the burial mounds that dot the Irish countryside, would connect the deaths of those buried there
with the perishing armies fighting in the anticipated final revolution, and might just as readily
think of the Troubles as the age-old conflict (by some accounts, the struggle with the English has
continued since the seventh century) as well as impute the moral authority behind the righteous
Irish quest for political autonomy with the “still stars” of heaven.
Yeats’s Roses
The most remarkably malleable symbol Yeats enlists during the fin de siècle is the figure of
the rose, developed first in The Rose (1893) and then in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).
Throughout the former, Yeats suffuses discordant attributes into the aggregate symbol, as is
evidenced by the titles of “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” “The Rose of Battle,” “The Rose
of the World,” and “The Rose of Peace.” In the latter collection he returns to the trope with “The
Secret Rose” to depict the transition between centuries and beg the omnipotent rose for survival.
Roses, of course, are hallmarks of lyrics as props in the proposal speech-act (the illocutionary
context necessary to set up a romantic assignation): beautiful, fragrant, thorny, bloody, and
lachrymose. But there is no “Rose of Love” in The Rose; that is the baggage each of us brings with
26
Yeats. 1989. “The Valley of the Black Pig.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed.
Finneran. New York: Simon & Schuster: 65.
28
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
us to the reading of these lyrics, whose ubiquity apparently obviated the need for Yeats to add
that rose to his collection. The first and last iterations of the rose sequence are formally similar
(“To the Rose upon the Rood of Time” and “The Secret Rose”), and the rose symbol is situated
with different historical allegiances in each. Both poems are apostrophes to the rose in heroic
couplets, with the first and last lines of both poems identically worded. However, while the earlier
poem conjures its symbol as a willing co-conspirator for the task of extending the nineteenth
century, the later poem fends off the rose as an apocalyptic instrument, a timeless inhuman
aggressor, ignorant of and untroubled by the eschatological plight of the speaker.
The title of “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time” refers helpfully to the Rosicrucian secret
society (as well as latter-day organizations that styled themselves after it, such as the Mathers’s
Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was a member). It also places the symbol of the rose in
the crosshairs of the fin de siècle’s inter-century axis. The poem treats the rose much like we
might expect one of Keats’s odes to oscillate between approaching and then seeking distance
from its subject. The speaker first requests proximity to the rose: “Come near me, while I sing the
ancient ways,” then lists figures (Cuchulain, Fergus, and the Druids) out of the Red Branch of Ulster
mythological cycle to root the poem in Irish history as well as forecast the subject matter of the
ensuing poems in The Rose. The poem then proceeds by trading cultural specificity for typological
abstraction:
Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate
I find under the boughs of love and hate
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way. 27
Only via the intercession of an abstract symbol can the speaker stave off the impending
apocalypse long enough to find beauty in “all poor foolish things that live a day,” those mortal
creatures who, unlike the textual rose, will cease to be. But having conjured the rose to provide
kairos for the lacklustre desuetude of what is left of the century, the speaker immediately regrets
his proximity to the rose: he requests “A little space for the rose-breath to fill! / Lest I no more
hear common things that crave,” afraid that too intimate contemplation of sublime abstraction will
result in an inability to observe and represent the actions, desires (“cravings”), and emotions of
mortal life. He remains himself, in awe of the rose as a marker of unbounded and limitless divinity,
and what he surveys seems a bathetic deflation in contrast to the mythological triplet of the first
stanza. Instead of Cuchulain, Fergus, and the druids, he sees “The weak worm hiding down in its
small cave, / The field-mouse running by me in the grass, / And heavy mortal hopes that toil and
27
Yeats. 1989. “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats,
ed. Finneran. New York: Simon & Schuster: 31.
29
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
pass.” Such are the remnants of life at the fin de siècle – although perhaps we might say they are
only really disappointing in contrast to the speaker’s epic expectations.
While exceedingly small in comparison to an overwhelming trope for the Rosicrucian version
of the pleroma, these living things ground the speaker in the language that will afford him an
audience, both by teaching him the lyric’s conventions of desire, vulnerability, and hope, and by
approximating more closely the audiences who will read his work than would a quasi-threatening,
sentient rose. The alternative is to aver the mortal world entirely (both mice and men) and
concentrate only on the divine, the better to “hear the strange things said / By God to the bright
hearts of those long dead, / And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.” He apparently does
not do this, since the poem is legible; nevertheless, he beckons the rose once again in order to
fulfill his cultural obligations: “Come near; I would, before my time to go, / Sing of old Eire and
the ancient ways.”
The song will be human and therefore alien to the divine rose, but the speaker hopes his
song will trigger the rose’s growing investment in humanity’s fate, which will compensate for its
ignorance of mortal frailty and ephemerality. The speaker feels his time drawing to a close, and
the attempt must be made before all time runs out or the rose’s sublimity swallows up his
individuality. Regardless of his fate, the speaker will suffuse the symbol of the rose with Irish
history and subtly alter its makeup: thereafter it will truly resemble the curious triplet of
descriptive adjectives that begin and end this poem: “Red rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my
days.” This uneasy mixture of descriptors is perhaps a sign that the rose is intemperate and
mercurial (heightening the anxious mood of the poem and the sublime fear of the moment), but I
prefer to see it as an indication that the rose is flexibly capacious, and open to absorb whatever
memories and cultural touchstones need to be preserved against the potential ruins of Irish
civilization. The rose will survive the fin de siècle, so singing to the rose means that at least
someone or something will remember the speaker once he is gone. And the poem’s act of
preserving not just the trepidation the speaker feels before singing, but the moment of his
hesitation, forestalls the feared end by dilating that moment of crisis.
The later poem “The Secret Rose” also approximates an ode, but the speaker is in far more
danger of becoming subsumed within the symbol, as might befit an eschatological poem
published later in the decade, when far fewer moments remain. The poem begins similarly to its
predecessor, with another curious adjectival triplet: “Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose /
Enfold me in my hour of hours,” but launches thereafter into an odd listing of the fates of other
rose-conjurers, each of whom desired beauty or some other form of eternal verisimilitude, and
most of whom perished in the attempt. 28 The Rose has become a final resting place for “those
who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre / Or in the wine-vat,” and died regardless of the relative
purity of their motives. The Rose’s acolytes now “dwell beyond the stir / And tumult of defeated
28
Yeats. 1989. “The Secret Rose.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Finneran. New
York: Simon & Schuster: 69-70.
30
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
dreams,” and instead spend their days amidst “beauty.” The majority of the poem regards another
group which has found respite in the capacious arms of the Rose, the “ancient beards” of Irish
mythology, which in this poem are unspecified (but whose names Yeats supplied in an author’s
note: Conchobar, Cuchulain, Caoilte, Fergus, and an unnamed lad from the folk tale “The Red
Pony”). 29 This is a happy ending for a literary Irish author, perhaps, but the poem ends on a
decisively ominous note that hints at the involuntary nature of the Rose’s invitation, and what the
cost of intimacy with the sublime Rose might be:
I, too, await
The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.
When shall the stars be blown out of the sky,
Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,
Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
The speaker of “The Secret Rose” does not question whether or not the end will occur; he
merely asks for an update on when that hour is scheduled to arrive. The end has not only been
fated, but it has evidently already been determined (and the Rose is its agent). Whereas the earlier
instance of the rose symbol existed within an approachable distance from the speaker, in this case,
at the paradigmatic confluence of the eternal and temporal, on the kairos of the “Rood of Time,”
the later Rose is unapproachably extracted and disconnected. It is “far off,” “most secret,” and
“inviolate,” so even if the speaker wished to approach it he could not. The Rose seems not only
distinctly unhelpful to humanity in our millennial plight, but to have taken on malevolent starextinguishing capabilities, and become the aesthetic symbol of apocalyptic destruction. The Rose
may enfold Irish culture and its citizenry within its salvific, preserving memory, but only after
having become the terrifying instrument of that civilization’s destruction.
What fascinates me about the ending of this poem in light of this discussion of the dilated
instant of the fin-de-siècle lyric is the ambiguous “Surely” that opens the penultimate line. If the
speaker were positive that he felt the Rose’s “great wind” blowing, he would have no need to ask
the question, and indeed no recourse to the power of the Rose’s sublimity, since he would be
experiencing the apocalypse. His gesture carries echoes of the world-weary Paterian aesthete,
continuously comparing moments to other quite similar moments, except in this case the tell-tale
signs of the Rose’s great wind might be the speaker’s own weariness with waiting for an
unavoidable end. One senses he has asked this question and written apostrophes to the Rose
many times before. The ambiguity of the line suspends the poem’s tone between a genuinely
wishful thought for the release of apocalyptic conflagration and the deflated assurance that the
29
Yeats. 1989. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Finneran. New York: Simon & Schuster:
456-7.
31
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
Rose’s secrecy has forever sundered it from the speaker’s ken: that he has immersed himself in
study of its language and associations only to butt up against irremediable frustration and esoteric
futility. As if in mockery of the speaker’s powerlessness in the face of cosmic forces, the Rose’s
secrecy dilates his frustration into an agonizingly attenuated span, and the poem itself never
allows him to emerge from his querulous futility.
Yeats’s 1890s oeuvre is replete with poems like these that foreground the poet’s interest in
anti-normative discourses – so much so, in fact, that “To Ireland in the Coming Times” defensively
aligns Yeats with the nationalist poets Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson to stave off bourgeois
criticism of his counterproductive hobbies. But another way of thinking about his cultural output
during this decade is to posit the simultaneous creation of poems in which he sought to encode
the secret language of a “chaunt men do not know,” and much more explicitly popular poetry
written in a language known quite well by his audience. His rose poems cohabit the 1890s with
much more generally accessible lyrics like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “The Song of Wandering
Aengus,” the poem with which I began, and to which I would like now to return. Yeats sacrifices
none of his fin-de-siècle preoccupations by dropping his esoteric pose, as I will show. His
symbolist method allows him to address both the adept and the uninitiated alike, sending distinct
resonances to each audience through the same figure.
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” is a popular poem for Yeats, in the sense that even if the
reader knows nothing of the story of Aengus from Irish mythology, the story is accessible and
relatable, and the regular form and meter of the poem contribute to the exuberance of the
speaker’s confidence. In an early-career essay, Yeats described his own ambitions to use poetry to
locate and inspire a reading public through poetic structures:
I wanted to write ‘popular poetry’ … for I believed all good literatures were popular, and even
cherished the fancy that the Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen, might be good
literature, and I hated what I called the coteries. I thought that one must write without care …
but with a gusty energy that would put all straight if it came out of the right mouth. 30
“Gusty energy” is the product of quality craftsmanship (“good literatures”) but not of the
“coteries,” which prefer hermetic ritual significance over broad appeal. Everyone within the popular
poem’s reading public must be able to interpret it if it is to “set all straight.” And although the
speaker in “The Song of Wandering Aengus” goes through actions that are only dimly relatable to
the common reader (we can visit hazel woods, pick berries, and fish for trout, but not spend
eternity chasing faeries), the motivation for Aengus’s passion can also be ours.
Aengus “went out to the hazel wood / Because a fire was in my head,” and all else follows
from that primary inspiration; he would never have met his faerie amour if not for that initial push.
30
Yeats. 1961. “What is Popular Poetry?” In Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan:
4.
32
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
The poem records that “fire” and bequeaths it to the rest of us, and as the regularity of the rhyme
scheme and meter sweep us through four short stanzas that apparently stand in for several ages
of mythic existence, the eventual goal of finding her again is conflated with the primary “fire.” His
feverish desire to explore the wood gives him confidence more than a match for the impossibility
of his task. Moreover, the instantaneity of the lyric frame not only preserves his consciousness
long enough to acquaint us with what it would feel like to be reunited with a life-long object of
passion against all odds, it collapses cause and effect to assure us, via gusty energy, that the same
volitional triumph over time can belong to us as well.
In the final stanza, Yeats conceals his occult interests within this popular poem, casting quite
a wide net indeed while also imparting a feeling of sacramental permanence to Aengus’s selfassured proceedings:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands
And walk along long dappled grass
And pluck til time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. 31
As with the coming apocalypse in “The Secret Rose,” Aengus’s reconnection with the girl is
not only possible, but unquestionable – the only doubt is how long it will take him to find her, not
whether he can. “Through hollow lands and hilly lands” suggests that even fairly significant
differences in terrain (absolutely empty or overly full) matter little to him, in the same way that he
shrugs off the glyph of “time and times” with which I started. To the determined romantic, what
should it matter if it takes a few moments or an infinity of searching to find her? The fin-de-siècle
lyric, after all, stands ready to retract or dilate as needed for the continuance of Aengus’s fiery
feeling and for the sustenance of his popular gusto. Likewise, the repetition of the last two lines
(“silver … moon / golden … sun”) hints that even such polar opposites as sun and moon can mean
the same to the speaker.
His boasts are not the wistful wishes of an elderly man, but the verities of a mythic hero
fulfilling a quest. Therefore we can also believe he will “pluck til time and times are done,” that the
narrative span of syntagmatic epic and the lyric moment with its paradigmatic transformative
potential will forever coexist for the speaker. Moreover, he gives voice to an actual marriage
ceremony that Yeats had written to be performed in a ritual of his own devising. As Roy Foster
has uncovered, Yeats had formed his own occult organization in 1897. The “Celtic Order” featured
31
Yeats. 1989. “The Song of Wandering Aengus”: 60.
33
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Jason Coats, “W. B. Yeats’s Fin-de-siècle Lyrics”
rites based on Fergus, Maeve, and Aengus, including a ceremony in which apple blossoms are
brought to suppliants by young girls, and was designed to interact with the revolutionary Irish
Republican Brotherhood to promote Irish independence. 32 Contemporary readers would not have
been privy to that knowledge, but the energies of the speech-act for which those words had been
intended still inhabit the symbol. They give rise to the speaking voice’s confidence: that these two
hands, having eventually been brought together, would stay that way, magically suspended in
time.
This last image of permanence, constructed within conventional figures and spoken within
the lyric conventions of instantaneity is where I will conclude. Yeats’s symbols are examples of
kairoi that even their creator acknowledged were out of his ultimate control, dependent as they
were on his readers’ willingness to bring their energies to the text and share in the meaningmaking process. But symbols’ ability to stand in for and provide a fleeting glimpse of divinity
within the lyric frame also meant that different audiences could proceed toward that divinity
through a variety of paths, and perhaps never know exactly how they were assisted in their
sublime realizations. Regardless of how they were able to reconcile the conflation of “time” with
“times” at this especially precarious moment in cultural history, Yeats’s fin-de-siècle readers found
his symbolist lyrics especially refreshing in a milieu of exhaustion and anxiety.
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Foster. 1997: 186.
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Jason Coats
Virginia Commonwealth University
[email protected]
35