Yeats's Love Poetry: From 'Words For Music Perhaps' to 'A Bronze Head', Study notes of Poetry

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is the "principle of structure or myth of the Crazy Jane poems corre-

sponding to the anthropological myth of The Waste Land. This posi-

tion, downward-tending in its images, is close to that of Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover."

Whether or not this new "mythology of earth" is a good thing

has been hotly debated, but the pervasive presence of the sexual

theme in the later poetry has been accepted as axiomatic. In part

Yeats himself is to blame for what I hope to show is a misconception

about his love poetry. The letters of his final decade are generally

addressed to the women in his life-Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy

Wellesley, Ethel Mannin-and in these Yeats frequently refers to his

renewed sexual energy and to his preoccupation with sexual matters. In 1926, for example, he wrote Olivia Shakespear, "My moods fill me with surprise and some alarm. The other day I found at Coole a repro- duction of a drawing of two charming young persons in the full stream of their Saphoistic [sic] enthusiasm, and it got into my dreams at night and made a great racket there." A year later he declared that "only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind-sex

and the dead," and in 1933, when he was correcting the proofs of

The Winding Stair, he explained that "Sexual abstinence" prompted

the new love lyrics: "I was ill and yet full of desire." Dorothy Welles- ley concluded from Yeats's letters and conversations that "Sex, Philos-

ophy and the Occult preoccupy him."

The poems themselves, however, reflect these prose statements

only partially, and one remembers that Yeats was fond of striking

poses even in his letters, essays, and autobiographical writings, and

that the face he presents to his female correspondents is not neces-

sarily his only one. Accordingly, the reader must be wary when Yeats

tells Mrs. Shakespear that the poems in "Words For Music Perhaps"

are "all emotion and all impersonal... all praise of joyous life, though in the best of them it is a dry bone on the shore that sings the praise." What is immediately striking about the later love lyrics is that those

that do celebrate sexual energy, if not quite the "joyous life," are

invariably dramatic monologues: the speaker is Crazy Jane, or the

Woman Young and Old, or the Chambermaid, or the Irish mystic

Ribh, or Solomon, or the Wild Old Wicked Man. Such extensive

use of personae is the exception rather than the rule for Yeats who,

in his greatest poems from "The Wild Swans at Coole" through

2 "The Vigour of Its Blood: Yeats's 'Words For Music Perhaps,'" Kenyon Review, XXI (1959), 379. W. B. YEATS 267

love and who is, of course, Maud Gonne. Yeats's preference of Self

to Soul is thus not a simple matter of preferring the active sexual life

to the contemplation of "that quarter where all thought is done,"

earth to heaven, Swordsman to Saint. Rebirth, it turns out, can take many different forms. The love lyrics of Yeats's later years fall into two classes, which

may be called Will and Mask, or Contemplation and Action, or the

Ideal and the Real. The ballads on Crazy Jane, the lyrics in "A

Woman Young and Old," and the "Three Bushes" sequence fall into

the latter class, which might be called the Love Poetry of the Mask. It is interesting to note that in A Vision Yeats insists that "sexual pas-

sion" is not the Will but the Mask of the Man of Phase 17 (Yeats's

own phase). The realistic love poetry of the Mask is epitomized by

the all-too-often-quoted stanza in "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop": 'A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.'

Much space has been devoted to discussion of this and related

passages; my own concern in this essay is with the other mode, the

Love Poetry of Self. This mode encompasses a fairly large group of

lyrics written between 1919 and 1939, forming what might be called Yeats's Second Maud Gonne Cycle, the first having culminated in the

elegiac love poems found in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), such

as "Broken Dreams" and "The People," and, more specifically, in the

bitter "Owen Aherne and his Dancers," in which the Heart, unable

to bear the "burden" of rejected love, goes "mad." This allegorical

poem, written a few days after Yeats's marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917, marks the poet's final despair at the thought that both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult had rejected his offers of marriage, a

despair punctuated by his wife's discovery that she could perform

automatic writing. For a few years, the "Image from a Past Life" is

absent from Yeats's poems, but by 1919 Maud Gonne reappears in

"A Prayer for My Daughter" as the object of the speaker's love-hate: her opinionated mind and intellectual hatred are rejected in a prayer

for their opposites, custom and ceremony, but the poet is obsessed

by that which he rejects. The same obsession is at the heart of

"Among School Children" (1926). Despite its affirmative last stanza

W. B. YEATS | 269

with its insistence that the body should not be "bruised to pleasure

soul," the speaker's meditation originates in the painful recollection

of the "youthful sympathy" which once blended the natures of him-

self and his beloved into a "sphere," the "yolk and white of the one

shell." The "heart" of the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" is

driven wild by the mere thought of her Quattrocento face, of her

"Ledean body."

In the first two poems of "A Man Young and Old" (1926-27),

Maud Gonne appears in the guise of moon goddess, tempting the

poet-lover ("She walked awhile and blushed awhile/And on my

pathway stood"), and transfiguring him with her smile which turns out to be the same smile she bestows on all men: "Like the moon her

kindness is,/ If kindness I may call/ What has no comprehension

in't,/ But is the same for all." When the lover tries to touch her, he

discovers that her "heart is made of stone," an insight that nearly

drives him wild and ultimately reduces him to a "bit of stone" as well.

In the third poem in this sequence of mythic ballads, Maud Gonne

plays the role of mermaid: A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.

Thomas Parkinson has argued that Yeats's love poetry composes a

complete recension of the concept of La Belle Dame Sans Merci,3 but surely the convention behind this little poem is the Romantic one of

the Belle Dame or vampire. The mermaid demands the love of the

"swimming lad" but cannot return it; she feeds on his body and

ultimately destroys him.

The Second Maud Gonne Cycle thus begins in bitterness and

resentment. But gradually the demon is exorcised and in the 'thirties

Yeats returns to the courtly mode of the Rose and Green Helmet

poems, tempered by forgiveness and understanding. To the end, Maud Gonne is La Belle Dame Sans Merci, but the poet can finally renounce all claims to her mercy or even to her attention; he is satisfied with

contemplation and memory. In Dramatis Personae (1925), his auto-

biography of the period 1896-1902, Yeats insisted that he hated

8 "Yeats and the Love Lyric," James Joyce Quarterly, III (1966), 122. 270 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

land," are experiments in blending the conventions of folk ballad and

mad song. To argue, as does Walter Houghton, that the speaker of

"I Am of Ireland" is Crazy Jane, and that she is being propositioned by Jack the Journeyman, does not seem to be warranted by the text

itself.5 Poems XXI-XXIV introduce a new speaker, Old Tom, but

again I cannot agree with Houghton and Donoghue that Tom is

Jane's counterpart. His concerns, like those of his model, Poor Tom

in King Lear, are philosophical rather than sexual; no particular

woman haunts his dreams. Rather, Old Tom is Yeats's Plotinian, the

"insane" oracle who knows that "All things remain in God," that

"The stallion Eternity/Mounted the mare of Time,/ 'Gat the foal

of the world." Finally, "The Delphic Oracle Upon Plotinus," the last

poem in the so-called Crazy Jane sequence, is less a love poem than a

generalized image of Plotinus' journey to the paradise of his more

venerable predecessors, Plato and Pythagoras, an image perceived by the slightly disenchanted "I," who is none other than Yeats himself.

"Words For Music Perhaps" does not, then, have a single plot,

theme, or speaking voice. If one takes the unifying theme to be what Peter Ure calls "the heroic justification of sexuality in a naked world,"

one must eliminate poems VIII-XIV, the Old Tom poems, "After

Long Silence" and "Mad as the Mist and Snow," which is not a love

poem at all. On the other hand, if one generalizes and takes the theme to be something like the frustrations of old age, one might just as well include "The Tower" or "Sailing to Byzantium." Nor is the unity for- mal: it is often assumed that what Yeats called his "mechanical songs"

are all ballads with refrains, but in fact these poems have a great

variety of stanza forms and many do not have refrains. At best, then,

the sequence of short lyrics and ballads known as "Words For Music

Perhaps" may be regarded as a chronological unit. If this is the case, the four short lyrics that precede the twenty-five-poem sequence can be

seen as complementary poems on related themes. The first one,

"Quarrel in Old Age," epitomizes what I have called Yeats's love

poetry of Self, of the Ideal, and is perhaps the best example of the

kind of poem found in Yeats's Second Maud Gonne Cycle:

Where had her sweetness gone? What fanatics invent 5 "Yeats and Crazy Jane: The Hero in Old Age," The Permanence of Yeats, ed. James Hall and Martin Steinmann (New York, 1961), p. 340. W. B. Yeats (New York, 1963), p. 80. 272 [ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

In this blind bitter town, Fantasy or incident Not worth thinking of, Put her in a rage. I had forgiven enough That had forgiven old age. All lives that has lived; So much is certain; Old sages were not deceived: Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.

The occasion that prompted this autobiographical lyric must

have been one of a series of quarrels that arose between Maud Gonne and Yeats after he was elected to the senatorship of the newly formed

Irish Free State in 1922, thus becoming a charter member of the

Establishment while Maud Gonne persevered in her revolutionary

politics. She herself writes, "We had quarrelled seriously when he

became a Senator of the Free State which voted Flogging Acts against young republican soldiers still seeking to free Ireland from the con- tamination of the British Empire, and for several years we had ceased

to meet."7 On the surface, it is a rather slight poem: the speaker in

old age wonders how his beloved has been so utterly transformed from

sweet young girl to shrewish old woman. The change seems hard to

forgive until the poet remembers that "All lives that has lived," that the idea of beauty remains no matter what happens to the person who embodies that beauty. As such, the poem has been labelled "Platonic"

or "Plotinian" when it has been discussed at all and is generally dis-

missed as a marginal occasional piece. This is unfortunate, for "Quar- rel in Old Age" represents the triumph of style of the later Yeats quite as much as do the more "daring" Crazy Jane poems. It is easy to be misled by the diction of the poem; if one looks at

isolated words and phrases, one is bound to be disappointed, for

almost every line contains phraseology used in Yeats's earlier Maud

Gonne poems and which therefore strikes one superficially as conven-

tional and hackneyed. A few examples will illustrate this point:

7 "Yeats and Ireland," Scattering Branches, Tributes to the Memory of W. B. Yeats, ed. Stephen Gwynn (New York, 1940), p. 25.

W. B. YEATS | 273

With respect to its diction, then, "Quarrel in Old Age" seems to

be no more than a late specimen of the pre-Raphaelite love lyric in

which the young Yeats celebrates his Rose of the World, his Phoenix,

his Goddess who walks on clouds, his Sun whose blaze blinds the eye

and lights up the soul. Here surely is a courtly love lyric that harks back to The Wind Among the Reeds of 1899, the reader surmises and impatiently hurries on to Crazy Jane. But the poem repays study. Its distinguishing feature, as in the case of most of Yeats's later poems, is not its vocabulary or its overt theme but its principle of organization -the poetic structure itself.

The reader is immediately drawn into the dramatic situation of

the poem by the abrupt opening question with its unexpected verb

tense: "Where had her sweetness gone?" The use of had where one

would expect has immediately pushes the quarrel into the past; it indi-

cates that the speaker had asked himself this question at a moment

prior to the present time of the poem-he is asking it no longer. It is as if, after the event, the poet is trying to remember the steps leading up to the quarrel. The casual reference to "her" implicates the reader

in the poet's drama; we feel that we must know all about her, the

poet's intimate.

In lines 2-6, the initial question is answered with an absolute

minimum of words: whatever (the heavily stressed indefinite pronoun

"what" suggests the emptiness of the charge) the fanatic mob of

Dublin can think of by way of slander or petty gossip has been brought

to Maud Gonne's attention and has "Put her in a rage." But she is

not, of course, only raging at the "fanatics"; as the title of the poem suggests, it is the fact that Yeats himself had evidently sided with the "blind bitter town" that precipitated the great quarrel. In this context, the last two lines of the first stanza are puzzling; there is no logical connection between them and what comes before. If it is the woman who has lost her sweetness, why must the speaker be the one to forgive

her, and what does "old age" have to do with it? The condensation

of the passage is marked, but what Yeats means, I think, is that as

former lover, the speaker finds it difficult enough to accept the sheer

fact of Maud Gonne's old age with the concomitant loss of beauty

that "distorting days" have brought, without having to "forgive" as

well the bad temper and rage of an angry old woman.

The drama of the poem is that, against all better judgment, he

does forgive her. The tense shifts abruptly to the present in the second

stanza as the poet announces, "All lives that has lived;/ So much is

certain." The sharp reversal that has taken place is the result of a

W. B. YEATS 275

mental state frequently met with in the Winding Stair poems-the

casting out of remorse-but here the act is only implicit. In a sudden moment of insight, the poet is able not only to forgive Maud Gonne but also to recover the essence of what she once was and the assurance that this essence is permanent. Somewhere behind the wrinkles, gray

hair, and dimmed eyes of the old woman ("beyond the curtain/ Of

distorting days"), her former self survives.

The last three lines of the poem are extremely elliptical. There

is nothing very unusual about the Spring image; in describing his first

meeting with Maud Gonne in The Trembling of the Veil (1922),

Yeats used the same personification: "Today, with her great height

and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she looks the Sybil I

would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day she seemed

a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian commendation

'She walks like a goddess' made for her alone." The inspiration for

this image was most probably Botticelli's "Primavera," a painting

Yeats knew well, in which the goddess Spring has the "Hollow of

cheek as though it drank the wind" which Yeats attributed to Maud

Gonne in "Among School Children."

The difficulty of the passage is caused not by its imagery or

diction but by its very peculiar syntax. Since Yeats omits both con-

nectives and punctuational clues in the last three lines, it is impossi-

ble, in the first place, to determine whether "Targeted" modifies

"lonely thing" or "eyes." In 1935 when Maurice Wollman, who was

editing an anthology of modem poetry, asked Yeats if "Targeted"

meant "protected as with a target, a round shield," Yeats replied,

"Your note on targeted is quite correct," thus suggesting that the par-

ticiple must modify "lonely thing": Maud Gonne's beauty, in other

words, is that of the archetypal love goddess; it is "Targeted" or pro- tected from the frenzy of the common people, the mob. But the syn-

tactic construction of lines 15-16 makes it equally possible to take

"Targeted" as a modifier of "eyes," and in this case one can read the

passage in two ways, depending on whether "before" is read as an

adverb of place or one of time: (1) the poet recalls the time when the

"lonely thing"-Maud Gonne's unique beauty-shone in front of his

"Targeted" eyes, eyes which were, in other words, "hit" by the rays of

her brilliant sunshine;8 or (2) the poet recognizes that the "lonely

thing" shone even before Yeats's own eyes were "Targeted" by it.

8 See Yeats's "The Arrow" (1904), which begins with the lines, "I thought of your beauty, and this arrow,/ Made out of a wild thought is in my marrow."

276 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

in what might be described as two amphimac feet (/ x /) with an

unstressed middle syllable: "Fantas// or/ incideAnt." Since the primary stresses in this line tend to fall on unimportant prefixes or suffixes, the rhythm itself implies the futility of the mob's fantasies.

In the second stanza the rhythm slows down and becomes

emphatic. Three-stress lines continue to be the norm, but there are

fewer unstressed syllables, the stresses accordingly clustering together as in "All lives that hfs lived," "S6 much is c6rtain," and "Lives that 16nely thing." Voiceless stops and spirants give way to voiced ones and to liquid I's. "Quarrel in Old Age" is thus a triumph of the late style quite as much as are the Crazy Jane poems, but it has received no more than

passing comment from critics. "The Results of Thought" has been

similarly slighted, although W. H. Auden cites the entire poem as an

example of Yeats's metrical mastery in his famous essay on Yeats.

"The Results of Thought" is thematically linked to "Quarrel in Old

Age"; again, the poet is able to cast out remorse about the "bitter

glory" which has wrecked the lives of Maud Gonne and of his other women friends by a sheer act of will: But I have straightened out Ruin, wreck and wrack; I toiled long years and at length Came to so deep a thought I can summon back All their wholesome strength.

Again, memory obliterates "time's filthy load" and can "Straighten

aged knees." And again Yeats does astonishing things with the three- stress line. The opening couplet, for example, Acquaintance, companion One dear brilliant woman ... juxtaposes two six-syllable lines, one of which contains only two words

and two primary stresses while the second contains four words and

four primary stresses, the implication being that the "one dear bril-

liant woman" (Maud Gonne) is worth dozens of acquaintances and

companions. A glance at the earlier drafts of this stanza, reproduced by Jon Stallworthy in his study of the manuscript revisions,9 indicates 9 In Between the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making (Oxford, 1963), Stall- worthy gives the first draft of Stanza I: Friends ignorant and blind 278 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

how thoroughly Yeats reworked the basic material for this poem.

The "summoning back" of Maud Gonne is found again within

the "Words For Music Perhaps" sequence itself. In the first stanza of

"Young Man's Song" (IX), the speaker is one who cannot, in the lan-

guage of "Quarrel in Old Age," "forgive" his sweetheart for growing

old. But, as in "The Results of Thought," he manages to straighten

out "Ruin, wreck and wrack." His heart opposes the rational judgment

that "She will change.. into a withered crone" and asserts that all

lives that has lived: Uplift those eyes and throw Those glances unafraid: She would as bravely show Did all the fabric fade; No withered crone I saw Before the world was made. Again, Yeats is less interested in establishing Platonic truths than in insisting that, for the lover, the image of the loved one is eternal. In the third stanza, not only the poet but all men must "bend the knee"

to his "offended heart," for "the heart cannot lie." As in "Quarrel,"

the implication is that feeling, instinct, emotion-the heart-gives

us a truer view of things than can any rational philosophy. We are

not, after all, very far from the Romantics in this poem.

"His Confidence" (XI), for that matter, contains the Shelleyan

image of the fountain. Even though the poet's heart has been hit so

hard that it has broken in two, he rejoices because he knows that "out

of rock,/ Out of a desolate source,/ Love leaps upon its course."

As in Shelley's poetry, the fountain, miraculously rising from "deso-

late rock," is a symbol of generation, rebirth. The speaker of "His

Confidence" does not pity himself; he rejoices in his suffering. And in

the third "Young Man" poem, "His Bargain," the poet insists that,

unlike those crass lovers Dan and Jerry Lout who "change their loves

about" at random in a never-ending circuit, his own love is beyond

such whirling. Yeats, then, was never exclusively the poet of earth and of com-

mitment to the body. The love poetry of his final volume, the Last

Wrecked lives, a woman there Of all wrecks there the worst A dear beloved mind Thinks of its despair There by its youth accurst. (p. 213) W. B. YEATS | 279

or her bodily incarnation-"her form all full/ As though with magna-

nimity of light." Perhaps, the poet decides, "substance can be com-

posite"; perhaps, as the Hegelian philosopher McTaggart thought,

both forms contain her substance so that she is at once "human,

superhuman," mortal and immortal. In the third stanza, that quality of Maud Gonne which Yeats had

formerly called her "intellectual hatred" or her "opinionated mind"

comes to be regarded as simply her fate. Even as a young colt, "all

sleek and new," she had, the poem declares, a "vision of terror" of

what she would have to live through in the future. As for her lover,

"Propinquity had brought/ Imagination to that pitch where it casts

out/ All that is not itself." In memory, in other words, the poet identi- fies completely with the "dark tomb-haunter," and by an act of imagi- nation he makes her fate his own. Such identification can drive a

man mad: "I had grown wild/And wandered murmuring every-

where, 'My child, my child!"' But whereas "Among School Children"

moves in the direction of the "great-rooted blossomer," the chestnut- tree whose leaf, blossom, and bole are one and indivisible, "A Bronze Head" moves toward dualism: Or else I thought her supernatural; As though a sterner eye looked through her eye On this foul world in its decline and fall ....

F. A. C. Wilson writes of these lines, "Maud Gonne is possessed by

an angel, which descants through her lips and with the terrible unsen-

timentality of heaven, on the degradation of spirit in the modern

world."'l But it is not necessary to read the lines quite so allegorically: Yeats says only that it is "As though a sterner eye looked through her eye." Maud Gonne is "supernatural" in the same way that the lady of

the Elizabethan sonneteers is supernatural-a supreme being, a god-

dess, a sublime spirit. In the last stanza, Yeats implies that Maud

Gonne ultimately has the last word. She is beyond criticism, a heroic

figure removed from "this foul world in its decline and fall." Many

of Yeats's earlier Maud Gonne poems celebrated her beauty, her

strength, her pride, her arrogant brilliance. But in "A Bronze Head" Yeats surprisingly calls her "a most gentle woman." The "great tomb- haunter," an image of transcendence, here replaces the "great-rooted blossomer," Yeats's symbol for Unity of Being. Yeats's Iconography (New York, 1960), p. 291.

W. B. YEATS | 281

III

"I must be satisfied with my heart," the poet announces in the

most famous poem of his last years, "The Circus Animals' Desertion." The circus animals, the stilts and ladders of poetic language, the out-

ward shows are stripped away, revealing the disreputable origins of

poetic inspiration: A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

This passionate declaration of the poet's allegiance to what he

calls in "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" "my fanatic heart," might serve as an epigraph to a volume of Yeats's love poetry, for it is the

heart rather than the soul or the body that is at the center of the

poems. The new Yeats Concordance bears out this generalization in

quantitative terms: the word heart is listed as one of the ten most

frequently found words in the Variorum text of Yeats's poems, and

heart occurs at least twice as often as either soul or body not only in

the earlier poetry but in such later volumes as The Winding Stair

as well.

For Yeats the "joyous life"-what Richard Ellmann has called

"secular blessedness"-can never be the domain of the Soul alone;

such poems as "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" and "Vacillation" make

this point emphatic. But the Self in the former poem is by no means

equivalent to the Body; its emblem, the sword, is covered with

"Flowers from I know not what embroidery-/ Heart's purple," and

in Part VII of "Vacillation" the debate is specifically between Soul

and Heart. Again, in "Sailing to Byzantium," he prays to the holy

sages to "Consume my heart away; sick with desire," and Helen of

12A Concordance to the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca, N. Y., 1963), provides the following figures. Heart is the tenth most frequently found word in the Variorum text of the poems; together with its derivates hearts and heart's, it occurs 350 times as compared to 168 instances of soul and 138 of body. This ratio holds true not only for the earlier volumes but also for the two great volumes of Yeats's maturity, The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). The figures for these two volumes are: heart-64;

soul-36; body-37.

282 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE