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W.B. Yeats's love poetry, focusing on the poems in 'Words For Music Perhaps' and the 'Second Maud Gonne Cycle.' The analysis contrasts Yeats's love experience with Donne's and discusses the poet's allegorical poems, the concept of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and the role of Maud Gonne in his work. The document also touches upon Yeats's later poems and his perception of love in old age.
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is the "principle of structure or myth of the Crazy Jane poems corre-
tion, downward-tending in its images, is close to that of Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover."
Yeats himself is to blame for what I hope to show is a misconception
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
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-
sarily his only one. Accordingly, the reader must be wary when Yeats
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
use of personae is the exception rather than the rule for Yeats who,
2 "The Vigour of Its Blood: Yeats's 'Words For Music Perhaps,'" Kenyon Review, XXI (1959), 379. W. B. YEATS 267
to Soul is thus not a simple matter of preferring the active sexual life
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
Ideal and the Real. The ballads on Crazy Jane, the lyrics in "A
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-
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.'
lyrics written between 1919 and 1939, forming what might be called Yeats's Second Maud Gonne Cycle, the first having culminated in the
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
"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
of the "youthful sympathy" which once blended the natures of him-
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
in't,/ But is the same for all." When the lover tries to touch her, he
drives him wild and ultimately reduces him to a "bit of stone" as well.
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.
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
ultimately destroys him.
resentment. But gradually the demon is exorcised and in the 'thirties
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
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
"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
poem in the so-called Crazy Jane sequence, is less a love poem than a
venerable predecessors, Plato and Pythagoras, an image perceived by the slightly disenchanted "I," who is none other than Yeats himself.
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,"
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"
variety of stanza forms and many do not have refrains. At best, then,
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
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.
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
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
old age wonders how his beloved has been so utterly transformed from
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"
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
Gonne poems and which therefore strikes one superficially as conven-
7 "Yeats and Ireland," Scattering Branches, Tributes to the Memory of W. B. Yeats, ed. Stephen Gwynn (New York, 1940), p. 25.
With respect to its diction, then, "Quarrel in Old Age" seems to
which the young Yeats celebrates his Rose of the World, his Phoenix,
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.
would expect has immediately pushes the quarrel into the past; it indi-
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
poet's intimate.
minimum of words: whatever (the heavily stressed indefinite pronoun
Dublin can think of by way of slander or petty gossip has been brought
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
former lover, the speaker finds it difficult enough to accept the sheer
well the bad temper and rage of an angry old woman.
does forgive her. The tense shifts abruptly to the present in the second
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
distorting days"), her former self survives.
is nothing very unusual about the Spring image; in describing his first
would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day she seemed
nectives and punctuational clues in the last three lines, it is impossi-
"Your note on targeted is quite correct," thus suggesting that the par-
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-
"Targeted" as a modifier of "eyes," and in this case one can read the
adverb of place or one of time: (1) the poet recalls the time when the
"Targeted" eyes, eyes which were, in other words, "hit" by the rays of
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."
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.
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
similarly slighted, although W. H. Auden cites the entire poem as an
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.
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
four primary stresses, the implication being that the "one dear bril-
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 "Words For Music Perhaps" sequence itself. In the first stanza of
guage of "Quarrel in Old Age," "forgive" his sweetheart for growing
out "Ruin, wreck and wrack." His heart opposes the rational judgment
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"
not, after all, very far from the Romantics in this poem.
hard that it has broken in two, he rejoices because he knows that "out
As in Shelley's poetry, the fountain, miraculously rising from "deso-
Confidence" does not pity himself; he rejoices in his suffering. And in
unlike those crass lovers Dan and Jerry Lout who "change their loves
such whirling. Yeats, then, was never exclusively the poet of earth and of com-
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-
superhuman," mortal and immortal. In the third stanza, that quality of Maud Gonne which Yeats had
what she would have to live through in the future. As for her lover,
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
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 ....
an angel, which descants through her lips and with the terrible unsen-
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
Gonne ultimately has the last word. She is beyond criticism, a heroic
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.
III
most famous poem of his last years, "The Circus Animals' Desertion." The circus animals, the stilts and ladders of poetic language, the out-
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.
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 occurs at least twice as often as either soul or body not only in
as well.
this point emphatic. But the Self in the former poem is by no means
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;