LOST IN RECOLLECTION--A HISTORICIST MISREADING OF YEATS’ THE LAKE ISLE OF INNIS
FREE
by
Wu Shiqiong
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Sun Li
Shanghai International Studies University
April, 2009
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Ms. Sun Li, for the
mentorship and guidance that she has given me during my M. A. program. Her profound
insights on modern British and American literature have greatly influenced me and guided
me into the realm of academic research. Her advice and critiques are most patient,
generous and enthusiastic. And this work could not be completed without her intellectual
encouragement.
I must also thank other teachers in the Graduate School, who have given inspiring and
insightful lectures during the past two and half years.
I am also grateful to my friends in SISU, who have made my graduate study very
delightful and rewarding. They encouraged me to have a life (and a fun one) along with my
interest in literature.
Last but not least, I am strongly indebted to my parents, for their perpetual support,
for their endless optimism, and for always sharing my joys and sorrows. I must thank them
for always being there.
I
Abstract
William Butler Yeats ranks among the most widely admired and intensively studied
writers of the twentieth century. He attracts such avid interest because, as T. S. Eliot
famously suggested, his history is also the history of his time. Beginning as a late-Victorian
aesthete and ending as an influential contemporary of Eliot and other modernists, Yeats set
the pace for two generations of important writers. Along the way he responded with
passion and eloquence to the political and cultural upheavals associated with Ireland’s
struggle for independence and with the decline of traditional beliefs about art, religion,
empire, social class, gender and sex. But the same things that make Yeats captivating also
make him difficult to study and to read: few fist-time readers know enough about his life
and times to do justice to his poems, plays, and other writings. Consequently, the historicist
reading, particularly a new historicist one, is left over to quite a blankness. To analyze, or
even look into Yeats’ through a historicist point of view, is a task too extensive and too
pervasive to undergo, not to mention the branches and sub-branches of this methodology.
In light of this, this thesis selects one little poem of Yeats’ early stage to represent the great
poet as a fledgling. For, not only this piece the lake isle of Innisfree is among the most
beautiful writings of his and enjoys high reputation, but also it is a remarkably
controversial one, which has since its first production seduced thousands of versions of
reading, and of course, misreading. And as a matter of fact, this thesis largely aims to
misread, for, as Harold Bloom has laid, to dig out influences on the part of the reader is to
misread, and the influence itself proffers anxiety to original writers. In this thesis, however,
Bloom’s view is confronted by new historicism in that the very act of unmasking, critique
and opposition uses the tool it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes.
Here misreading is conducted though the philosophy of history and the anxiety is induced
by H. D. Thoreau, the leading American transcendentalist who is best noted for his book
Walden. Thoreau’s images can be easily spotted from this little poem of Yeats’, so it is no
exaggeration to say that he is one of the “influences”, although to refer to him in this thesis
is to introduce the power and process of imagination and memory on the part of new
historicism.
II
According to the theory of new historicism, every expressive act is embedded in a
network of material practices, and that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably.
The question is whether imagination and memories, as a frequent part of expressive acts,
serve as literary texts or non-literary texts. But whatever classification is, it is said that no
discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses
inalterable human nature. What we are going to discuss here is not to make one’s story
sound plausible, nor dare we attempt to grasp the titanic mindset of Yeats and his
complication of art, using an ever-too-late tool of literary criticism. The ultimate goal is
perpetual: to read better. That’s all. The analyzing only provides a different angle to read
Yeats not only by understanding his beliefs, by seeing how his views were shaped by his
life and times and how they in turn shaped his works, but also, more fundamentally and
more excitingly, by opening oneself up imaginatively, by experiencing for oneself the
powerful currents of thought and the desperately sweet memories.
Keywords: Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, new historicism, imagination, recollection,
literary/non-literary text, misreading
III
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Contents
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………….I
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..II
………………………………………………………………………….….…..III
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….…1
Chapter1 Locating Thoreau with Yeats: the Intolerable Anxiety of Sharing
Memories…………………………………………………………………………………..5
1.1 The ethics of perception…………………………………….…………………………..5
1.2 Locating Thoreau………………………………...……………………………………11
1.3 Nineteenth Century Aesthetics of Nature……………………………………………..12
1.4 Yeats: Exploring the Labyrinth of the Self……………………………………………14
Chapter 2
History: an Organic Machine Dealing with Logical Games of Sense and
Sensibility…………………………………………………………………………………18
2.1 Universal or historical human nature?............................................................................19
2.2 Does history possess directionality?...............................................................................20
2.3 Historical objectivity…………………………………………………………….…….24
Chapter 3 Imagination and Recollection: Literary or Non-literary?............................27
3.1 The Power of Historical Materials…………………………………………………….27
3.2 The Process of Poetic Effects………………………………………………………….32
VI
3.3 Literary Texts or Non-literary Texts?..............................................................................38
Conclusion…………………………………...……………………………………..…….44
Bibliography……...………………………………………………………………………46
VII
Introduction
The Lake Isle of Innisfree(1888)
By William Butler Yeats
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I WILL arise and go now, and go to
Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay
and wattles made:
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‡õ
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Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive
for the honey-bee,
õŽ¦‘ ’z“”
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for
peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning
[0•–—˜­™“š›œ!
„XwáEžÉŸŸ­ to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and
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noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night
and day
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I hear lake water lapping with low
sounds by the shore;
„XȂr…a./„™E
While I stand on the roadway, or on the
pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
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8
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"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," published in Yeats's second book of poems, 1893's
The Rose, is one of his first great poems, and one of his most enduring. The tranquil,
hypnotic hexameters recreate the rhythmic pulse of the tide. The simple imagery of
the quiet life the speaker longs to lead, as he enumerates each of its qualities, lulls the
reader into his idyllic fantasy, until the penultimate line jolts the speaker--and the
reader--back into the reality of his drab urban existence: "While I stand on the
roadway, or on the pavements grey." The final line--"I hear it in the deep heart's
core"--is a crucial statement for Yeats, not only in this poem but also in his career as a
whole. The implication that the truths of the "deep heart's core" are essential to life is
one that would preoccupy Yeats for the rest of his career as a poet; the struggle toÂ
remain true to the deep heart's core( the fury and the mire of human veins) may be
thought of as Yeats's primary undertaking as a poet.
The poet declares that he will arise and go to Innisfree, where he will build a small
cabin "of clay and wattles made." There, he will have nine bean-rows and a beehive,
and live alone in the glade loud with the sound of bees ("the bee-loud glade"). He
says that he will have peace there, for peace drops from "the veils of morning to
where the cricket sings." Midnight there is a glimmer, and noon is a purple glow, and
evening is full of linnet's wings. He declares again that he will arise and go, for
always, night and day, he hears the lake water lapping "with low sounds by the shore."
While he stands in the city, "on the roadway, or on the pavements grey," he hears the
sound within himself, "in the deep heart's core."
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is written mostly in hexameter, with six stresses in
each line, in a loosely iambic pattern. The last line of each four-line stanza shortens
the line to tetrameter, with only four stresses: "And live alone in the bee-loud glade."
Each of the three stanzas has the same ABAB rhyme scheme. Formally, this poem is
somewhat unusual for Yeats: he rarely worked with hexameter, and every rhyme in
9
the poem is a full rhyme; there is no sign of the half-rhymes Yeats often prefers in his
later work.
While this poem’s popularity no doubt has much to do with its apparent lack of
forbidding symbols, on examination one finds that it creates the same delicate
layering of implication characteristic of the poems in which the Rose symbol is
invoked, and that, read in the context of “The Rose” as a whole, it reflects the same
occult cosmology. Most clearly, it hymns an ode to nature in the time-honored
Romantic fashion of such city-weary writers as Thoreau (who partly inspired its
vision of a cabined retreat among bean-rows and beehives). In fact, H.D. Thoreau had
exerted considerable influences on Yeats’ ideologies, among many varied others, and
particularly shows his presence in this poem, as Yeats wrote in his Autobiographies1:
“I planned to live some day on a little island called Innisfree …I should live, as Thoreau lived,
seeking wisdom. There was a story in the country history of a tree that had once grown upon that
island guarded by some terrible monster and borne the food of gods. A young girl pined for the
fruit and told her lover to kill the monster and carry the fruit away. He did as he had been told,
but tasted the fruit; and when he reached the mainland where she had waited for him, was dying
of its powerful virtue. And from sorrow and from remorse she too ate of it and died. I do not
remember whether I chose the island [as the proposed place for retreat] because of its beauty or
for the story’s sake, but I was twenty-two or three before I gave up this dream.”
Why the god-cursed twenty-two or three at which point whether a man’s life will be
in turbulence or in peace for the lifetime is usually determined? We may refer to
Yeats’ life events in order to dig out something absolute yet subtle: The family
returned to London in 1887. In 1890, Yeats co-founded the Rhymers' Club(ÃÄ
Å) with Ernest Rhys, a group of London based poets who met regularly in a Fleet
Street tavern to recite their verse. And that was the exact year when this poem was
produced. According to his Autobiography, one day he passed by the Fleet Street with
a strong nostalgia, a trickling of water led him to a fountain miniature, and the water
1
William Butler Yeats. Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955, p71-72
10
flow conjured up vivid memories of Lake Innisfree. It was his early stage of
poetry-writing, and although his early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund
Spenser, and on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon turned to
Irish myth and folklore and the writings of William Blake. And according to the
above-mentioned, by then Yeats had already given up the Thoreau ideal and had
turned to the life-long pursuit of mysticism, spiritualism, occultism, and astrology. As
early as 1892, he wrote: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have
written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have
come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all
that I write." Consequently, this small piece couldn’t have been a tribute to Thoreau’s
transcendental ideas. The reason may be laid as below: 1) it didn’t stress the power of
intuition, or believe that people could learn things both from the outside world by
means of the five senses and from the inner world by intuition. The repeating use of
auxiliaries WILL and SHALL obviously shows strong sense of subjective initiative
and not a bit of intuitiveness can be spotted from all the constructing and sowing. 2)
Romantic idealism tends to place spirit first and matter second. It took nature as
symbolic of spirit of God. All things in nature were symbols of the spiritual, of God’s
presence. Yet in this poem, the poet’s sole longing seems to be “some peace” from the
outside and an expressing of his “deep heart’s core”, not some transcendental
“oversoul”, as was vehemently worshiped by the transcendentalists. 3) According to
transcendentalist ideas, since the Oversoul was a single essence, and since all people
derived beings from the same source, the seeming diversity and clash of human
interests was only superficial, and all people were in reality striving toward the same
ends by different but converging paths. Thus was affirmed the universal brotherhood
of humanity, and the ultimate resolution of all social problems. But this poem was
never political, and as above mentioned, was apparently lack of forbidding symbols.
In other words, this poem is no more than a tiny grievance aired by a fledgling Irish
poet who had longed to make a fuss in London but was for the moment frustrated by
reality. A vent, we can well say, but a mild and pastoral one. At the same time, his
obsession for occultism and astrology had already taken its shape in this small piece,
11
from “the midnight’s glimmer” to “the noon’s purple glow”, which demonstrates his
hope for the ultimate solution as some mystical magical power, never a communion
between God and human-beings, let alone the individualism featured by Thoreau.
But why the differences? To make things clear enough, here we may refer to the
monotonous routine of historical study.
Chapter 1
Locating Thoreau with Yeats: the Intolerable
Anxiety of Sharing Memories
1.1. The Ethics of Perception
If one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau's philosophy, it would be
hard to identify a better candidate than awareness. He attests to the importance of
“being forever on the alert,” and of “the discipline of looking always at what is to be
seen”.2 This exercise may enable one to create remarkably minute descriptions of a
sunset, a battle between red and black ants, or the shapes taken by thawing clay on a
sand bank: but its primary value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience.
“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to
make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very
atmosphere and medium through which we look”3. Awareness cannot be classified as
exclusively a moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably
practical and evaluative activity. Thoreau has been interpreted as offering an original
response to the major problem of modern philosophy, since he recognizes that
knowledge is “dependent on the individual's ability to see,” and that “the world as
known is thus radically dependent on character”4.
2
Henry David Thoreau. Walden; or, Life in the Woods, ed. Jeffrey Cramer, New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004. part IV,p109
3
Ibid, part II, P25-26
4
Philip Cafaro, 2004, Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue, Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press,p 37
12
One of the common tenets of ancient philosophy which was abandoned in the
period beginning with Descartes is that a person “could not have access to the truth”
without undertaking a process of self-purification that would render him “susceptible
to knowing the truth”5. For Thoreau, it was the work of a lifetime to cultivate one's
receptivity to the beauty of the universe. Believing that “the perception of beauty is a
moral test”6, Thoreau frequently chastises himself or humanity in general for failing
in this respect. “How much of beauty—of color, as well as form—on which our eyes
daily rest goes unperceived by us,” he laments7; and he worries that “Nature has no
human inhabitant who appreciates her”8. Noticing that his sensory awareness has
grown less acute since the time of his youth, he speculates that “the child plucks its
first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent
botanist never retains”9. In order to attain a clear and truthful view of things, we must
refine all the perceptual faculties of our embodied consciousness, and become
emotionally attuned to all the concrete features of the place in which we are located.
We fully know only those facts that are “warm, moist, incarnated,” and palpably felt:
“A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it”.
Since our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so easily dulled, it
requires a certain discipline in order to become and remain a reliable knower of the
world. Like Aristotle, Thoreau believes that the perception of truth “produces a
pleasurable sensation”; and he adds that a “healthy and refined nature would always
5
Michel Foucault, 1997, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: The New Press, p278-279.
6
Henry David Thoreau. Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840-1841),
ed. Perry Miller, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.p52
7
8
Ibid, p66
Henry David Thoreau. Walden; or, Life in the Woods, ed. Jeffrey Cramer, New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004. part IV,p109
9
Henry David Thoreau. Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840-1841),
ed. Perry Miller, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.p87-88
13
derive pleasure from the landscape”. Nature will reward the most careful attention
paid by a person who is appropriately disposed, but there is only “as much beauty
visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The
actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different
from those which another will see as the persons are different”10. One who is in the
right state to be capable of giving a “poetic and lively description” of things will find
himself “in a living and beautiful world”11. Beauty, like color, does not lie only in the
eye of the beholder: flowers, for example, are indeed beautiful and brightly colored.
Nevertheless, beauty—and color, for that matter—can exist only where there is a
beholder to perceive it12. From his experience in the field making observations of
natural phenomena, Thoreau gained the insight “that he, the supposedly neutral
observer, was always and unavoidably in the center of the observation”13. Because all
perception of objects has a subjective aspect, the world can be defined as a sphere
centered around each conscious perceiver: wherever we are located, “the universe is
built around us, and we are central still”14. This does not mean that we are trapped
inside of our own consciousness; the point is that it is only through the lens of our
own subjectivity that we have access to the external world.
What we are able to perceive, then, depends not only upon where we are
physically situated: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how
our attention is focused. “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because
they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and
eyes to bear on them…. A man sees only what concerns him” (“Autumnal Tints”). In
other words, there is “no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation,
10
Henry David Thoreau. Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840-1841),
ed. Perry Miller, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.p52
11
12
13
14
Ibid, p56
Ibid, p99
Ibid, p101
J. Baird Callicott, 1999, Beyond the Land Ethic, Albany: SUNY Press. P674.
14
to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective”. Subjectivity is not an
obstacle to truth, according to Thoreau. After all, he says, “the truest description, and
that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the
unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires”. A true account of the
world must do justice to all the familiar properties of objects that the human mind is
capable of perceiving. Whether this could be done by a scientific description is a
vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he shows considerable
ambivalence. One of his concerns is that the scientist “discovers no world for the
mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit”; by contrast, there is “more humanity” in
“the unscientific man's knowledge,” since the latter can explain how certain facts
pertain to life. He accuses the naturalist of failing to understand color, much less
beauty, and asks: “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but
robs the imagination?”
Thoreau sometimes characterizes science as an ideal discipline that will enrich our
knowledge and experience: “The true man of science will know nature better by his
finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will
be a deeper and finer experience” (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Yet he also
gives voice to the fear that by weighing and measuring things and collecting
quantitative data he may actually be narrowing his vision. The scientist “studies
nature as a dead language,” and would rather study a dead fish preserved in a jar than
a living one in its native element. In these same journal entries, Thoreau claims that
he seeks to experience the significance of nature, and that “the beauty of the fish” is
what is most worthy of being measured. On the other hand, when he finds a dead fish
in the water, he brings it home to weigh and measure, covering several pages with his
statistical findings
This is only one of many examples of Thoreau's fascination with
data-gathering, and yet he repeatedly questions its value, as if he does not know what
to make of his own penchant for naturalistic research. At the very least, scientific
investigations run the risk of being “trivial and petty,” so perhaps what one should do
is “learn science and then forget it”. But Thoreau is more deeply troubled by the
15