“That is no country for old men.”: Happy Birthday, William Butler Yeats

“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born today in 1865. Yeats is a great poet and all that, but I grew up pretty much “over” him because he was omnipresent in our household. We were made to memorize his epitaph in order to receive 25 cents for our allowance:

Cast a cold eye
On life on death
Horseman pass by.

There was a framed copy of the epitaph on our dining room wall. You feel me? Like, that’s the level we’re talking about.

More below the jump. Yeats is so woven into my family it’s never been easy to separate him out. He was always there, so much so he seems like a member of the family, or at least a revered ancestor.

 
 

We knew his “Host of the Air” by heart, but only because it was on the Clancy Brothers at Carnegie Hall album, a staple in our home. Yeats was everywhere. Maud Gonne was everywhere. It’s not that we had a reverence for him. It was just the opposite. I knew what he looked like, in the same way I knew what George Washington looked like, because Washington was on our currency. Yeats? Oh, HIM again? Cast a cold eye … yeah, I know, I know.

My parents had Clancy Brothers at Carnegie Hall on vinyl, and we listened to it constantly. It was the background of my childhood. I memorized “O’Driscoll Host of the Air” (having no idea it was by William Butler Yeats) probably by the time I was 4. “Host of the Air” is not one of his great poems (like “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Second Coming,” or “Among Schoolchildren”) but it is one of his most beloved.

THE HOST OF THE AIR

O’Driscoll drove with a song
The wild duck and the drake
From the tall and the tufted reeds
Of the drear Heart Lake.

And he saw how the reeds grew dark
At the coming of night-tide,
And dreamed of the long dim hair
Of Bridget his bride.

He heard while he sang and dreamed
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.

And he saw young men and young girls
Who danced on a level place,
And Bridget his bride among them,
With a sad and a gay face.

The dancers crowded about him
And many a sweet thing said,
And a young man brought him red wine
And a young girl white bread.

But Bridget drew him by the sleeve
Away from the merry bands,
To old men playing at cards
With a twinkling of ancient hands.

The bread and the wine had a doom,
For these were the host of the air;
He sat and played in a dream
Of her long dim hair.

He played with the merry old men
And thought not of evil chance,
Until one bore Bridget his bride
Away from the merry dance.

He bore her away in his arms,
The handsomest young man there,
And his neck and his breast and his arms
Were drowned in her long dim hair.

O’Driscoll scattered the cards
And out of his dream awoke:
Old men and young men and young girls
Were gone like a drifting smoke;

But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.

Yeats is woven into my family life, and my connection with Yeats, through my father, was the subject of my first published piece, in 2006, in The Sewanee Review. It was called “Two Birds.” Which had to do with Flann O’Brien’s book, of course, but also had to do with Yeats’ “Wild Swans at Coole”, and how I put those references together in my mind, age 7, 8. Birds seemed to be everywhere in these Irish references from my Dad, and I tried to make sense of it.


The back cover of The Sewanee Review, where my essay was excerpted. It was a moment where I actually shared space – equal space – with William Trevor. A major moment.

When we visited Yeats’ grave in Ireland, as kids, we all felt amazed that it was REAL. The epitaph we had been rattling off since we were toddlers actually existed out in the world, and had some meaning beyond the desire to get 25 cents in our pockets.

Some years back I read his complete works in chronological order. I know many of his big poems by heart, the famous ones, but it’s quite illuminating to read his work in its entirety from beginning to end. There’s some pretty silly stuff in the beginning. Sentimental, lilting Irish pipes and all that … How many times do I have to hear about “cloud-pale eyelids”, Willie?). But still. The advantage of this project is to see the genius eventually explode. Nothing in those early poems, beautiful as some of them are, can really prepare you for the poet who would eventually write “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among Schoolchildren”. Where the hell did HE come from?

Another thing that inspires me is his work in Irish theatre, and the creation of the Abbey. His Nobel lecture was on the Irish Dramatic Movement. Yeats took it upon himself to nurture John Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World. Synge, as a young man, was a floundering bohemian, looking towards France for his inspiration (as most artists did at the time), until Yeats got a hold of him, and told him to go to the Aran Islands for a while, to discover the real Irish people. (Or, the real Irish people, according to Yeats.) The result? A revolution in Irish theatre. Not to mention actual riots.

“The Second Coming” is quoted (and mis-understood, more often than not) and quoted again (too much) by people who want to use it for their own ends, perhaps not understanding what the poem truly means. (Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is another poem often mis-used by people who seem to forget what the whole thing is about. Stan on Mad Men (i.e. my Ideal Man) made a joke about that: “I think you need to read the rest of that poem, Ginzo.” ). “Second Coming” is an ominous crystal ball. The best “use” of it, to my mind, was in The Sopranos, and also in the deleted scene in Nixon, with Sam Waterston as Dick Helms, director of the CIA, reciting it as he stared at his precious orchids.

It is one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Written in 1919, it predicts all.

The Second Coming

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

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

Seamus Heaney wrote a marvelous essay on Yeats a while back (the link no longer works, but I have the hard copy) in which he says:

Conquest, difficulty, labour: these terms indicate the nature of Yeats’s creative disposition. From the start, he was enamoured of Blake’s conviction that energy is eternal delight, yet the development of his own thought brought him more and more to the conclusion that conflict was the inescapable condition of being human. So, as his art matured and the articulation of his beliefs became more clarified and forceful, Yeats’s poems typically conveyed a sensation of certitude achieved by great effort and of contradictions quelled. Poems in which the defiant self is pitted against hostile or disabling conditions – “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”, “September 1913”, “Meditations in Time of Civil War”- are complemented by poems that read like discharges of pure, self-possessed energy, poems from which the accidental circumstances have been excluded so that all that remains is the melody and stamina of resurgent spirit – “The Cold Heaven”, “Byzantium”, “Long-legged Fly”.

We must also discuss the Maud Gonne Factor (sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel). I have written about her quite a bit as well, since she too – and all of the books written about her, and her autobiography, and her correspondence with Yeats, filled shelves in my father’s library. (I will take a wild guess that Maud Gonne had “cloud-pale eyelids”.)

Poor Yeats. But at least he got hundreds of poems out of his unrequited love for her.

Never give all the heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

Heaney writes, in that same essay:

And all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, “high and solitary and most stern” according to one of the poems about her, “foremost among those I would hear praised” according to another, and “the troubling of my life” according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired – and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need – made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats’s poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.

Yeats was not a solitary creature, writing in isolation. He wanted to start a “movement”, and he did. He helped a young James Joyce in the beginning of HIS career. He advised Synge. He headed up the Abbey Theatre. He really looked at his own country – an insular priest-ridden culture at that time – and tried to create something different, tried to open up new ground (or ground that had been squashed by centuries of colonialism and oppression). It’s hard to look with clear eyes on your own home. Joyce did it, but that’s only because he LEFT. Yeats, at first, went back into the Irish past in his work, trying to re-claiming that which had been destroyed. He was Protestant, Anglo-Irish, and in the coming years a more angry Catholic voice would emerge in Irish literature (ie: Patrick Kavanagh), bucking against the dominance of the elite -represented by Yeats).

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

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

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

Yeats called out to his fellow artists:

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

Yeats’ feelings were that Irish-ness was a cultural thing, not a religious thing, and that the Irish could be united, regardless of religion, through writing, myths, poetry. He was a true nationalist.

I love his translation of the epitaph of fellow Irishman Jonathan Swift:

Swift’s Epitaph

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

And lastly, a poem that has great personal meaning for me, looping me back to my childhood, and the entire trajectory of my life. It keeps popping up. Its meaning continues to develop, deepen, it seems different every time I re-visit it.

The wild swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

SOME QUOTES

Yeats:

“My poetry is generally written out of despair. Like Balzac, I see increasing commonness everywhere, and like Balzac I know no one who shares the premises from which I work.”

Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s description of Yeats trying to handle the riots in response to Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World”:

“On the third night Yeats addressed the audience before the curtain rose. If anyone had anything to say against the piece they would be welcomed at a debate which he would be glad to arrange in the theatre at some other time. He was interrupted several times. He asked the interrupters to at least listen to the play so that they would know what it was they were objecting to.”

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

The Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats probably was the major poet in English of the twentieth century, surpassing even Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. ne might have to turn to William Wordsworth to find a more eminent poet.

Rebecca West:

“[Yeats] wasn’t a bit impressive and he wasn’t my sort of person at all. He boomed at you like a foghorn. He was there one time when Philip Guedalla and two or three of us were all very young, and were talking nonsense about murderers in Shakespeare and whether a third murderer ever became a first murderer by working hard or were they, sort of, hereditary slots? Were they like Japanese specialists and one did one kind of murder, another did another? It was really awfully funny. Philip was very funny to be with. Then we started talking about something on the Western Isles but Yeats wouldn’t join in, until we fussed around and were nice to him. But we were all wrong; what he liked was solemnity and, if you were big enough, heavy enough, and strong enough, he loved you. He loved great big women. He would have been mad about Vanessa Redgrave.”

T.S. Eliot:

“Then there was Yeats, but it was the early Yeats. It was too much Celtic twilight for me.”

Yeats on Nietzsche

“…that strong enchanter”

Yeats on Swinburne:

“King of the Cats.”

Yeats, on hearing of Swinburne’s death:

I am king of the cats.

Yeats, from Per Amica Silentia Lunae:

He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling, unforeseen, wing-footed wanderer. We could not find him if he were not in some sense of our being, and yet of our own being but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not impossible the most difficult, for that which comes easily can never be a portion of our being; soon got, soon gone, as the proverb says. I shall find the dark grown luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed by the hymen of the soul a passing bell.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

He is a literary traditionalist, working within such inherited genres as love poetry, the elegy, the self-elegy, the sonnet, and the occasional poem on public themes. But he is also a restless innovator who disrupts generic conventions, breaking up the coherence of the sonnet, de-idealizing the dead mourned in elegies, and bringing into public poems an intense personal ambivalence. In matters of form, too, he rhymes but often in off-rhyme, uses standard meters but bunches or scatters their stresses, employs an elegant syntax that nevertheless has the passionate urgency of colloquial speech: his diction, tone, enjambments, and stanzas intermix ceremony with contortion, controlled artifice with wayward unpredictability.

T.S. Eliot, letter to Groucho Marx, 26th April, 1961

Dear Groucho Marx,

This is to let you know that your portrait has arrived and has given me great joy and will soon appear in its frame on my wall with other famous friends such as W.B. Yeats and Paul Valery.

Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”:

“In 1875 Yeats entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and visited Ireland during the longer school vacations, when he stayed with the Pollexfens in County Sligo. An early poetic impulse was to change the name of his toy yacht from Sunbeam to Moonbeam. It was a decisive act.”

W.B. Yeats:

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Yeats’s poetry asks to what extent art conquers nature, is conquered by nature, and is itself nature, and the degree to which nature is itself art. The lake isle of Innisfree is a real island, but in Yeats’s famous poem, it is also an image of that island perfected by the imagination. Byzantium is a real, historical city, but for Yeats it is also an image of art and eternity, conjured out of nothing by the passions of a living poet.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language, on “The Second Coming”:

In January 1919, Yeats began to write an apocalyptic poem that initially he titled “The Second Birth.” Politically a partisan of the extreme Right, Yeats was horrified by the Russian Revolution, and his first draft celebrated the coming of the proto-Fascist German Freikorps to Russia, as part of the attempt to end the Revolution. But “The Second Coming,” as Yeats came to call it, was purged in revision of most of its merely political elements.

Why is the poem called “The Second Coming”? Yeats, fiercely not a Christian, did not believe in the first coming of Christ. This extraordinary chant celebrates the Second Birth (ironically, the Second Coming) of the Egyptian Sphinx of Memphis, one-eyed God of the Sun. This Sphinx is male, and for Yeats represents the spirit of counterrevolutionary violence. Shelley’s “Oxymandias” and Blake’s The Book of Urizen are alluded to by Yeats, but he seeks to turn their radical vision into a fable for the Right.

Clive James, Commentary, October 1973:

It is a common opinion among the English literati that Auden’s later work is a collapse. I am so far from taking this view that I think an appreciation of Auden’s later work is the only sure test for an appreciation of Auden, just as an appreciation of Yeats’s earlier work is the only sure test for an appreciation of Yeats. You must know and admire the austerity which Auden achieved before you can take the full force of his early longing for that austerity–before you can measure the portent of his early brilliance.

Michael Schmidt:

This is not the huge competence of Auden, at play in the toy shop of poetic form, but mastery, the possession of a unique rhetoric for use on a real but limited range of themes. It is a mastery so complete that it can occlude the genuinely problematic, ride over the potholes of nonsense without even sensing them. Late in life he recognizes the evasiveness of his symbols, the tendency of his verse to turn away or inward, and in the concentrated intensity of the late poems he tries to remedy this. But he has an imperfect sense of generality; he is willing to plump out a truism as truth. As his mastery increases, his art becomes less truthful. But his main concern is not – until the later poems, and even there in an attenuated spirit – truth, but the house of myth and legend, where he can become a principal tenant, where it is his voice we hear casting the spell, and where real men are reduced – or, in his mind, enlarged – to masks, figures and types useful to myth, regardless of the human reality they had.

Yeats:

“All literature created out of a conscious political aim in the long run crates weakness by creating a habit of unthinking obedience. Literature created for its own sake, for some eternal spiritual need, can be used for politics. Dante is said to have unified Italy. The more unconscious the creation, the more powerful.”

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Throughout Auden’s career, Yeats and Eliot persisted as shaping figures of attraction and repulsion….Auden admired [Yeats’s] ability to write “serious reflective” poems that were of both “personal and public interest” (“Yeats as an Example”). His elegy for Yeats, modeled on the personally ambivalent yet public style of poems such as “Easter, 1916”, rescues the dead man’s linguistic power from his right-wing politics and occult beliefs. But Auden became increasingly disenchanted with Yeats’s “false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities” (1964 letter quoted in Edward Mendelson, Early Auden).

W.B. Yeats:

“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.”

Richard Ellmann:

His mastery seems almost excessive.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

The interest in a small, predominantly rural area, the use of ballad meters, the sense of the world’s unsatisfactoriness, and the reiterated theme of unrequited love are aspects that Housman shared with the early Yeats in particular. The two poets also shared an intense admiration for William Blake, whom Housman put second only to Shakespeare. But Housman admired Blake’s subordination of idea to lyrical intensity, whereas Yeats was more occupied with Blake’s mythical system. Housman minimizes and disparages the intellect in poetry, whereas Yeats, like other poets of larger scope, recognizes the necessity of incorporating it. Housman, when he can, excludes; Yeats includes.

Camille Paglia, “Love Poetry”:

Love poetry of the twentieth century is the most varied and sexually explicit since classical antiquity…For Yeats, woman’s haunting beauty is the heart of life’s mystery; in “Leda and the Swan,” rape is the metaphor for cataclysmic historical change.

T.S. Eliot:

“Of course I had met Yeats many times. Yeats was always very gracious when one met him and had the art of treating younger writers as if they were his equals and contemporaries.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, after reading some of Yeats’ first published verses:

“… a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on; people think such criticisms very prosaic, but common-sense is never out of place anywhere …) but still containing fine lines and vivid imagery.”

Ted Hughes:

Then I met Yeats. I was still preoccupied by Kipling when I met Yeats via the third part of his poem “The Wandering of Oisin,” which was in the kind of meter I was looking for. Yeats sucked me in through Irish folklore and myth and the occult business. Yeats under the canopy of Shakespeare and Blake. By the time I got to university, at twenty-one, my sacred canon was fixed: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, May 20, 1955:

I have just finished the Yeats Letters–900 & something pages–although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated. Imagine being able to say you’d always finished everything you’d started, from the age of 17. And he is much more kind, and more right about everything than I’d ever thought–right, until the age of 65, say. And it’s too bad he discovered s-e-x so late, I feel. A lot of it would be more enjoyable coming from a younger man. And then why do so many famous men have to write hundreds of letters about after-lunch-I-lie-down-for-an-hour, and now–I’m eating fruit-& vegetables… Well, he has magnificence, even so. I have a theory that all this business of psalteries and chanting, etc., was because he was completely tone-deaf and even the normal music of spoken verse wasn’t too apparent to him, so he felt something was missing. This is based on an imitation Pound once gave me (I don’t know whether it was the time I went to see him with you or later) of Yeats’ singing, to show how tone-deaf he was. The imitation was so strange & bad, too, that I decided they were both tone-deaf.”

Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems:

“Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ has gained in prophetic power with each decade of the twentieth and now twenty-first century, from the rise of fascism and nuclear warfare to the proliferation of international terrorism. It expresses the melancholy realizatino that man, yearningly drawn to the divine, will never fully escape his bestial ancestry. The poem is modernistically unrhymed, though the first stanza plays with shadowy off-rhymes: ‘gyre’ / ‘falconer’ / ‘everywhere’; ‘hold’ / ‘world’ / ‘drowned’. It is structured instead by dramatic visuals and emblematic choreography. There are two main movements: a huge, expanding circle (the ascending falcon) and an arrowlike, linear track (the beast bound for Bethlehem). Then two smaller ones: a pendulum arc (the rocking cradle) and an exploding pinwheel (the reeling desert birds). Ideas have become design, starkly juxtaposed with the murky turbulence of elemental forces – storm, flood, drought. Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future.”

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Half-consciously at least, Yeats prepared himself for the role of a major literary figure by plunging himself in the Western cultural tradition and then, as no important poet in English had before him, the Eastern tradition. His range of allusion comprehends Homer’s “unchristened heart,” a prophecy from Virgil’s Sixth Eclogue, Dante’s “multifoliate rose,” a line from Hafiz or Rabindranath Tagore or a Noah play or–as he was greatly interested in the occult–a theosophist text. Yeats did not neglect the tradition of English verse. An editor of William Blake, he had fresh theories about writers from Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare to the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites. He pursued the Irish tradition to the earliest saga literature and followed it to his own day. He complied anthologies of Irish poems as well as fairy and folk tales. He drew into creative activity the Irish playwrights Lady Augusta Gregory and John Synge, and to some extent James Joyce.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language, on “The Second Coming”:

In this great poem of antithetical influx, Yeats brilliantly suggests both intellectual welcome and emotional revulsion toward the “rough beast” who is coming. “The ceremony of innocence” for Yeats is necessarily an aristocratic matter; elsewhere he asks, rhetorically, “How but in custom and in cerermony / Are innocence and beauty born?”

I cannot think of any other modern poem with this overt rhetorical power. The falcon, emblem of royal sport, breaks loose, and things fall apart. In the poem’s draft, Yeats had complained: “And there’s no Burke to cry aloud, no Pitt,” referring to Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Younger, fiercely eloquent denouncers of the French Revolution.

W.B. Yeats on Edmund Spenser:

The first poet struck with remorse, the first poet who gave his heart to the State.

Saul Bellow:

“I have a special interest in Joyce; I have a special interest in Lawrence. I read certain poets over and over again. I can’t say where they belong in my theoretical scheme; I only know that I have an attachment to them. Yeats is one such poet. Hart Crane is another. Hardy and Walter de la Mare. I don’t know what these have in common – probably nothing. I know that I am drawn repeatedly to these men.”

W.B. Yeats, “A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for Having Soured the Dispositions of Their Ghosts and Faeries”:

In Ireland warlike mortals have gone amongst them, and helped them in their battles, and they in turn have taught men great skill with herbs, and permitted some few to hear their tunes. Carolan slept upon a faery rath. Even after their tunes ran in his head, and made him the great musician he was … You — you will make no terms with the spirits of fire and earth and air and water. You have made the Darkness your enemy. We — we exchange civilities with the world beyond.

Edward Thomas, 1909

“The heavy voluptuous splendour of much of his work has yet a ghostliness as of the palace made magically of leaves. Even his heroes and beautiful women are aware of this … He never leaves us, any more than Crashaw, content with the glory alone. It calls our attention to a spirit behind and beyond, heaping high lovely, invisible things that it may show the greater beauty that can survive their crumbling into dust.”

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Yeats found unexpected company in a young American, Ezra Pound. Pound arrived in London in 1908, at twenty-three, convinced that Yeats was the best poet then writing in English and determined to learn from him. Yeats also discovered how much this young man could tell him of new ideas and techniques, and from 1913 to 1916, they spent three winters together in a stone cottage south of London. Pound’s generosity and gregariousness, his propagandizing for the avant-garde, made his apartment in Kensington for a time the headquarters of innovative verse for both England and America.

Chinua Achebe:

I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. It had the same kind of magic about it that I mentioned the wizard had for me. I used to make up lines with anything that came into my head, anything that sounded interesting. So Yeats was that kind of person for me. It was only later I discovered his theory of circles or cycles of civilization. I wasn’t thinking of that at all when it came time to find a title. That phrase “things fell apart” seemed to me just right and appropriate.

Michael Schmidt:

Another poet produces this effect of compelling intimacy, so that as we experience pleasure we do not feel an urgent need to question meaning: Emily Dickinson. By contrast, within the magic of Yeats’s Byzantium poems we stop, construe, interpret, ask: What is the golden bird, what are the mosiacs, what has tangled the syntax here? In Four Quartets we allow the poet himself to ask us to pause and “make sense.”

Yeats:

“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”

Rebecca West:

“I thought that book on Yeats’s postbag was so good, letters that people wrote to Yeats. Did you read that? It’s absolutely delightful. It’s got delightful things like a very nicely phrased letter from a farmer, saying that he understands Yeats writes about supernatural matters and can he recommend a reliable witch?”

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

At the pinnacle of Yeats’s own early symbolism was the rose of beauty, which in certain circumstances might flower from the cross of suffering. The meaning of rose and cross varies according to the context, but in general, as in “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time,” the rose is at once a muse (with a special affection for Irish poets and subjects), an epitome of eternal beauty, and an image of completeness, timelessness, and super-humanity; the cross not only is the emblem of Jesus’s Passion, which is mimicked by every lover’s suffering, but also represents discord, incompleteness, opposition, mortality, temporality. Yeats invokes the rose, but warns it not to come too close because he does not wish to give up entirely the painful but familiar ingredients of the temporal world. Yet he heralds the juncture of the two, as he searches for ways to bind the worlds of matter and spirit together.

Ella Young, Flowering Dusk:

I see [Maud Gonne] standing with W.B. Yeats, the poet, in front of Whistler’s Miss Alexander in the Dublin gallery where some pictures by Whistler are astonishing a select few. These two people delight the bystanders more than the pictures. Everyone stops looking at canvas and manoeuvres himself or herself into a position to watch these two. They are almost of equal height. Yeats has a dark, romantic cloak about him; Maud Gonne has a dress that changes colour as she moves. They pay no attention to the stir they are creating; they stand there discussing the picture.

I catch sight of them again in the reading room of the National Library. They have a pile of books between them and are consulting the books and each other. No one else is consulting a book. Everyone is conscious of those two as the denizens of a woodland lake might be conscious of a flamingo, or of a Japanese heron, if it suddenly descended among them.

Later, in the narrow curve of Grafton Street, I notice people are stopping and turning their heads. It is Maud Gonne and the poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-coloured Great Dane – Maud Gonne’s dog, Dagda.

Hugh Kenner, ‘Thomas Kinsella: An Anecdote and Some Reflections’, The Genres of Irish Literary Revival:

Nightmare, glowing, fading, glowing, amid the equable pace of metered discourse, that is the effect to which the reader of Kinsella must accustom himself. Ghosts throng in these poems, shapes half-seen, our personal past, Ireland’s past, less assignable portents…One needs to read enough of these poems to see how normal is this irruption of unsettling vision into recognisable experience…One can’t ignore such a predecessor [as Yeats], neither does one want to be listed among his supernumeraries. By good luck, Yeats lent himself to the ministrations of the learned “shadow-eaters”, who in dismembering and reconstructing him according to his own instructions turn him into an instance of his own System, the wholeness systematic, the remoteness algebraic. For this we may thank his central limitation: he had no knowledge whatever of Catholic Ireland, and was forced to substitute for its traditions, its theology and its night-sweats the famous apparatus of spooks and gyres, to lend the visions some accreditation: “Where got I that truth? One of a medium’s mouth …”. But a people who wake their dead and pray for them (see Kinsella’s “Office of the Dead”) have no need of mediums…Knowing these people, Kinsella has discovered the freedom to derive from Yeats without being derivative, and to invoke Joyce like a tutelary spirit…The poetry of a haunted literature that has learned to rehearse and ironise the nightmare from which it cannot awake.

Michael Schmidt:

“In London he was active in literature and politics. One particular event in 1889 proved crucial: he met and fell in love with the fiery Republican who haunted him for the rest of his days, Maud Gonne. His biography, from 1889 until Maud Gonne’s marriage, is punctuated by the statement, ‘Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne.'”

Donald Davie:

The chief advantage of looking at modern poetry from the point of view of the Imaginary Museum is that only from this standpoint do poetic styles as various as those of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, of Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats, appear as so many different (yet related) answers to one and the same problem – the problem of a radically changed relationship to the poetic past, a relationship which must be different from Tennyson’s or Pope’s.

Yeats:

“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

He came to see his early symbolism and poetry as too wistful, too aspiring, too respectful of spirit, and too little respectful of body. He was no longer content with the dreamy, languorous style of his early work, with its anapestic and lulling rhythms, its tapestrylike texture. Yeats determined that mortal conditions did not need to be transcended; they might be accepted with such intensity that they would no longer hamper him. Corporeal love might achieve “profane perfection.” With this resolution Yeats came “into his force.”

Louis MacNeice:

Yeats proposed to turn his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other peoples’ emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity … The whole poetry, on the other hand, of Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis implies that they have desires and hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things ought to be desired and others hated … My own prejudice … is in favour of poets whose worlds are not too esoteric. I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.

W.B. Yeats, letter to Lady Gregory:

We must accept the baptism of the gutter.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

In [Philip Larkin’s] oeuvre, as selected and arranged by himself, there is a dialogue going on, a balancing of forces between perfection of the life and of the work–a classic conflict for which Larkin offers us a resolution second in its richness only to the later poems of Yeats.

Camille Paglia:

” ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’: these famous lines are Yeats’s anguished formulation of what seems to be an eternal principle of politics (7-8). When ‘the center cannot hold,’ neither consensus nor compromise is possible. Public debate shifts to the extremes or is overtaken by violence, which blocks incremental movement toward reciprocity and conciliation. Moderate views are ‘drowned’ out (as by the bloody tide) in strident partisanship or fanaticism. The phrase ‘passionate intensity’ suggests that, for the late Romantic Yeats, eros diverted from the personal to the political turns into a distorted lust for power. The second stanza opens in doubt and confusion: ‘Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!” (9-11). We are hearing either one voice echoing its own shocked phrases or many voices in public tumult.The book of Revelation lists the dreadful omens heralding doomsday, when Jesus will return and unlock the secrets of history. But in Yeats’s poem, Christ’s promised glory is overshadowed by a monstrous apparition from antiquity. The poet is seized by an electrifying vision: ‘a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight’. It’s a collective memory, crystallizing from the repository of world myths (12-13). (“Spiritus Mundi” is Yeats’s mystical term for “soul of the universe”.) We witness the resurrection of the pagan era, whose barbarism mirrors that of the war-torn twentieth century. Yeats sees no evidence of moral evolution over two millennia of Christianity.” –

Lady Dorothy Wellesley:

“I once got Yeats down to bed-rock on these subjects and we talked for hours. He had been talking rather wildly about the after life. Finally I asked him: ‘What do you believe happens to us immediately after death?’ He replied, ‘After a person dies, he does not realize that he is dead.’ I: ‘In what state is he?’ W.B.Y.: ‘In some half-conscious state.’ I said: ‘Like the period between waking and sleeping?’ W.B.Y.: ‘Yes.’ I: ‘How long does this state last?’ W.B.Y.: ‘Perhaps some twenty years.’ ‘And after that,’ I asked, ‘what happens next?’ He replied, ‘Again a period which is Purgaotry. The length of that period depends upon the sins of the man when he was upon this earth.’ And then again I asked: ‘And after that?’ I do not remember his actual words, but he spoke of the return of the soul to God. I said, ‘Well, it seems to me that you are hurrying us back into the great arms of the Roman Catholic Church.’ He was of course an Irish Protestant. I was bold to ask him, but his only retort was his splendid laugh.”

Mike Scott, lead singer of The Waterboys, on his album An Appointment With Mr Yeats

“There’s a depth and a weightiness to his work that combines with his wonderful ear for the sound and colour of words. Fortunately, he put a lot of his poems into meter and rhyme, and that’s what suggests the music to me. Most of the ones I’ve done are the ones that scan, and most of the tunes came quickly. I think putting Yeats to rock’n’roll and doing it for 20 songs is radical.”

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

His new symbolism took an intermediate form in poems and prose writings that dwelt on the battle within each individual mind, between what one is and what one would like to be, the real and the image of its opposite. It is as if everyone put on a mask that expressed the antiself and struggled to make it fuse with the face. But after his marriage in 1917, Yeats greatly expanded this imagery. He now conceived of all consciousness as a conflict of opposites or antinomies, which he represented by two interpenetrating cones, or gyres, the apex of one in the base of the other. These were, like his earlier use of the cross, an emblem of earthly pain. Beyond the gyres is a sphere that represents a totality that they merely subdivide, comparable to the emblematic rose of his early poetry. This symbolism Yeats put into his book A Vision, one of the strangest works of the century. It can profitably be read in connection with his poems, but it also has an intrinsic fascination as the most complete symbolic system since Blake’s, written in a style that at moments leans toward philosophy and at other moments toward poetry.

W.B. Yeats’ “gyres”:

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “Leda and the Swan”:

Yeats portrays Western culture as inseminated with treachery and violence from the start. The rape of Leda begins a chain of disasters that will continue to his own day …The poem roots the constructions of civilization in the convulsive “loins,” the gut or viscera from which surge driving, irrational ambitions and great achievements.

W.B. Yeats on “gyres”:

The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction.

Yeats on Ulysses:

“It is an entirely new thing — neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.”

Philip Larkin:

“After [Hardy], Yeats came to seem so artificial – all that crap about masks and Crazy Jane and all the rest. It all rang so completely unreal.”

Jeanette Winterson:

The Victorian denial of art as art (separate, Other, self-contained) was unsustainable, and like many a Victorian neurosis began to collapse under its own image. That art should not be art but a version of everyday life was absurd and men like Wilde, Swinburne and Yeats were proving it. The Muse was fighting back, cross-dressed as a pretty young man or dressed in robes of Celtic Twilight. It began to look as though dowdy Realism was dead.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

Personal mythmaking, as in William Blake and William Butler Yeats, at first can seem obscure, but the coherence of Blakean and Yeatsian myth yields to familiarity.

Seamus Heaney, 1990:

“For Yeats, there was something both enviable and exemplary about the enlargement of vision and the consequent histrionic equanimity which Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines attain at the moment of their death, ‘carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice.’ He wanted people in real life to emulate or at least to internalize the fortitude and defiance thus manifested in tragic art.”

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “Leda and the Swan”:

Because of its vast historical vision and agonizing pantomime of passion and conflict, “Leda and the Swan’ can justifiably be considered the greatest poem of the twentieth century. It reflects the disillusion of European and North American artists and intellectuals with the West, whose buoyant confidence in its own moral superiority and technological progress had been shattered by the Great War, as it was then called. The “sudden blow” that opens the poem reproduces the shock of events, numbing and destabilizing.

Clive James, Times Literary Supplement, July 13, 1973:

…with Yeats the symmetry and asymmetry are the same thing–that there is no distance between the surface form and the organic form, the thing being both all art and all virtuosity at the same time. Why, we must wonder, is [Donald] Davie so reluctant to see Yeats as the formal master beside whom [Thomas] Hardy is simply an unusually interesting craftsman? But really this is a rephrasing of the same question everybody has been asking for years: the one about what Davie actually means when he praises Ezra Pound as a prodigious technician. Is it written in the stars that that Donald Davie, clever in so many other ways, will go to his grave being obtuse in this? Why can’t he see that the large, argued Yeatsian strophe is a technical achievement thoroughly dwarfing not only Pound’s imagism but also Hardy’s tricky stanzas?

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, he was attracted to right-wing politics, and in the 1930s, he was briefly drawn to fascism. His later interest in authoritarian politics arose in part from his desire for a feudal, aristocratic society that, unlike middle-class culture, might allow the imagination to flourish, and in part from his anticolonialism, since he thought a fascist Spain, among other states, would “weaken the British Empire.” Even so, all governments eventually appalled him, and the grim prophecy in his poem “The Second Coming” seemed to him more and more apt. He died in southern France, just before World War II began.

Yeats to John Millington Synge:

“Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”

In Memory of W.B. Yeats
by W.H. Auden

I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Yeats’s epitaph

Cast a cold eye
On life on death
Horseman pass by


Dad at Yeats’ grave

 
 
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15 Responses to “That is no country for old men.”: Happy Birthday, William Butler Yeats

  1. sheila says:

    and yes – that pic of my dad. Love it. I’m looking at it right now.

  2. Dg says:

    The Second Coming always reminds in weird way of the Leonard Cohen song First We Take Manhattan . Written in the late eighties about terrorists assimilating, helping you with your grocery bags, then blowing everything up.
    In the late nineties my favorite DJ from my younger days , Vin Scelsa, was doing a weekly Sunday night free form show on one of the rock stations. Besides playing great music he’d have a lot of authors come in. Occasionally he would just read long passages from a book he was into. Imagine that. Anyway one week he had the Great Leonard Cohen on. In the midst of a rambling conversation the aforementioned song came up. Scelsa asked Cohen did he really believe this could happen . Cohen said it is happening. Scelsa asked well what can we do to prevent it? Cohen and I quote “it’s too late. the excrement has already hit the ventilator .

    • sheila says:

      Dg – wow, I hadn’t thought of that. I love that song. I have Jennifer Warnes’ version of it too.

      // Occasionally he would just read long passages from a book he was into. //

      I love this man.

      I love Leonard Cohen, too. Thanks for the comparison – I think it’s quite apt. The song is very eerie.

  3. Dg says:

    Yes I seem to remember long readings of Motherless Brooklyn.
    Hey this is neither here nor there but I’ve come across a crazy, beautiful, and free app via The Irish Times simply called James Joyce’s The Dead. Looks like it was put together by some college folks in Dublin. So good.

  4. Maureen says:

    I cry every time I see the picture of your dad at Yeat’s grave. He looks so much like my own dad, although my dad would be at Charles Lindbergh’s gravesite. Flying is my father’s passion, but that picture-such a similarity.

    I want to take a moment to say how much I appreciate your site, Sheila-where we can find Yeats, West, Elvis, Cary Grant, Supernatural, Joan Crawford, and so much more. As someone who has lots of enthusiasms, it was a wonder for me to find someone so like minded!

    • sheila says:

      Maureen – awww, thank you so much! It means a lot. Going from Supernatural to, oh, George Orwell, is strangely pleasing to me as well. Life is big, there’s so much to be enthusiastic about.

      Where is Lindbergh’s grave? Hawaii?

      Today is Father’s Day – missing my Dad a lot.

  5. Helena says:

    I just came across this: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/poetry_modern/2nd_coming/2dcoming.htm

    I think it is fantastic (so creative and also amusing) and thought I’d share. It really is a good example of how different phrases from this poem have permeated our culture (although this collection is just a glimpse).

    • sheila says:

      Oh HELENA. That is AWESOME.

      I wish I could show it to my Dad!

      I love the random Michael Jordan book in the middle of it. So creative!!

  6. Helena G says:

    Yes, I thought it was brilliantly done. And I had to laugh when I recognized some of the “nature” books that were on my bookshelf as a kid “The Desert” from one of the Time-Life series, “Desert Birds” and “The Sun” (I did a project in Grade 1 using that book!).

    I am commenting for the first time on your blog (although I enjoy my daily lurk here). Would you mind if sent you a more personal note via e-mail?

    • sheila says:

      Helena – I thought you were another Helena who comments here regularly. I don’t check the emails attached to the names. :) Maybe you could put the first letter of your last name or something, so I can distinguish you two?

      I loved those Time-Life books too! Thank you so much for sending the piece on – I have forwarded it to one of my friends who is a Yeats fanatic and she loves it!

      Sure, feel free to email me – my email is up above in the banner somewhere.

      Thanks again!! And thanks for lurking! :)

  7. Michael says:

    I always enjoy your poetry posts and this one is a corker. My mother used to play that same Clancy Brothers LP when I was growing up, so I know The Host of the Air by heart, as well. These days there is a bit too much widening and slouching going on the world so a Yeats poems with dancing is a welcome respite. Thanks for reminding me. On a similar theme, I also love the Fiddler of Dooney. It’s not one of his Important Poems, but it is charming.

    When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
    Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
    My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
    My brother in Moharabuiee.

    I passed my brother and cousin:
    They read in their books of prayer;
    I read in my book of songs
    I bought at the Sligo fair.

    When we come at the end of time,
    To Peter sitting in state,
    He will smile on the three old spirits,
    But call me first through the gate;

    For the good are always the merry,
    Save by an evil chance,
    And the merry love the fiddle
    And the merry love to dance:

    And when the folk there spy me,
    They will all come up to me,
    With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
    And dance like a wave of the sea.

  8. I love rereading this post about one of my very favorite poets. I found you years ago searching Yeats and Joyce. Thank you for posting this again.

  9. Biff Dorsey says:

    It seems like the widening gyre makes a cameo or two in the recent film “Saint Maud”.

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