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ABSTRACT

W.B. YEATS
THE DIMENSIONS OF POETIC VISION

by Frederic Stewart Colwell

This study traces the emergence of a crucial dualism in Yeats's
thought and art, his efforts to clarify and portray these terms of
conflict, and his struggle to yoke them in the central paradox of his
poetic vision.

Yeats recognized in Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition the classic
articulation of the impulse to create unity and pattern, the vocabulary
of Being which he characterized as Primary experience. In its quest
for a transcendence beyond multiform reality, Yeats's earliest work
suggests a theocentric or primary orientation, and the metaphor of the
journey dramatizes the transition from the world of Becoming to a trans-
figured life beyond the cycles of generation.

Yeats defined an aspect of his personal and creative life in terms
of the vocabulary provided by Platonic tradition, but to isolate this
aspect of his art is to ignore the fact that Yeats was ever of two minds.
Primary experience represents but one half of the Yeatsian coin;to treat
it in isolation is to reduce Yeats's role as post to that of a fabricator
of inert Platonic allegory. The manuscript and published versions of
Egg Shggogy Eaters witness Yeats's predisposition to divide his world into
antinomies, and chronicles his efforts to define their implications and
come to terms with Primary and Antithetical experience as elements of a
viable aesthetic.

It is the dilemma of the poet who serves the demands of organic form

and the integrity of his personal vision to affirm as well the irreducible

 

ABSTRACT
Frederic S. Colwell
page 2

nature of the existential. As poet, Yeats was committed to the
immediacy of things through the very fabric of his art. He was aware of the
threat Platonism held for the poet, that it tolerated his art as no more

than a Shelleyan rite g; a a , a flight from the Antaean qualities of

 

experience as well as the stubborn substantive grain of language itself.
The dialectic of the Mask served the Yeatsian dualism as an account

of the individual psychomachia, and by the pars Egg toto process which is

 

fundamental to the exercise of the mythopoeic imagination, the personal
integration which is effected through Unity of Being is projected in terms
of the play of world history. To satisfy Yeats's desire for an integrated
poetic vision, the Mask and Unity of Being must achieve final expression
as a cosmic principle. Only when Yeats achieved an emotional affirmation
of temporality and impermanence, Becoming as well as Being, was he able to
project his dualism in temporal terms, whereby it emerges as process, the
cyclic process recounted in‘g Eigign.

The phasal progressions by which Yeats's Great Wheel charts the
circular passage from Primary through Antithetical experience enacts the
same process by which Timaeug and the zodiac dramatize the life of the
universe as split into opposing yet complementary phases which effect ulti-
mate resolution. Yeats's figure of the daimon functions as mediator
between primary and antithetical experience; his persona, the hero, saint,
fool, and artist dramatize various aSpects of the myth of integration.

Yeats's awareness of the cyclic myth of integration was rooted in
his insight into the course of his own career as post and public man. Hav-
ing confronted the antithetical crisis, his sympathies came full circle
and realigned themselves with theocentric or objective Being. Yeats's
final phase represents his final struggle for integration. The condition

anticipating the achievement of unified consciousness must in terms of the

 

 

ABSTiACT
Frederic S. Colwell

page 3

growth of the mythopoeic imagination presuppose the cleavage of
dualism. Yeats's achievement involved, however, no reversion to a
poetically untenable position, but a deepened awareness of the two
halves of his "round dance of life," and wrung from it the toughened

knowledge won in the embattled arena of experience.

 

W. B. YEATS

THE DIMENSIONS OF POETIC VISION

 

 

W. B. YEATS

THE DIEENSICKS OF POETIC VISION

By
Frederic Stewart Colwell

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1966

 

 

 

Cepyright by

/ X
\_ \j

FREDERIC STEJART COLHELL

1966

—

 

II

III

VI

VII

Introduction

The Shadogy Waters: The Clarification
of Conflict

Plato and Heraclitus: Two Sides of
one Coin

The Daimon: The Failure of Neoplatonism
Unity of Being: Integration
The Hero: The Chameleon Path

Artist, Saint, and Fool: The Paths of
the Chameleon and the Arrow

The Dimensions of §,Vi§ign
Fbotnotes
Bibliography! Primary

Secondary

CONTENTS

10

63
92
109

168
191
216

217

INTRODUCTION
Man shares with a few others of the higher mammals the
curious privilege of citizenship in two worlds. He
enjoys in daily alternation two distinct kinds of
experiencen‘dnapand due“) as the Greeks called them-
-each of which has its own logic and its own limit-
ations; and he has no obvious reason for thinking one
of them more significant than the other. For normal
men the dream world is the sole experience in which
they escape the offensive and incomprehensible bon-
dage of time and space.

The perennial conflict of dream and reality, or of the emotions
and the intellect, finds its expression in that tradition of episte-
mological dualism which is inseparable from the course and character
of western thought. Its imprint is to be found in the Platonic
distinction between the One and the hany and, in philosophy and
theology, between Being and Becoming. In the seventeenth century
it took on the character of the Cartesian dualism, when the Eflile
sopheg methodically divided the tide of experience into the mutually
exclusive categories of idealism and mechanism. Whitehead called
this particular division of experience the fggs at ggigg malorum
of all subsequent reflection and philosophical speculation.2 But,
in effect, the need to divide and categorize experience existed in
human nature long before Descartes, before Plato, and before the
earliest of the Ionian thinkers. Anthropology tells us that this
impulse arises from the needs of the primitive consciousness to
derive its orientation from the baffling chaos of experience. Psy-

chology attributes it to that bifurcation of the conscious and un-

3

 

conscious world which is the first stirring of self-consciousness

within the ego, and myth and religion, in their own peculiar
languages, recount the same tale of human alienation resulting from
man's first perception of otherness.

Those who found themselves uneasy heirs to these fragment-
ations of experience gave their support variously to the dreanyor
to the testimony of their five senses. Often they redefined the
terms entirely, and sought to embrace the world of dream as more
real and more substantial than an illusory world of the senses.
There were those as well who chose to avoid such commitments and
dwell in a twilight world somewhere between the two extremes. But
given the world in pieces, the more enterprising sought to rediscover
its primal integration. This thirst for unity and coherence, which
A.O.Lovejoy has called the "metaphysical pathos," appears to be as
unexpungable an impulse as that which first led to its fragmentation.

Lovejoy describes man's "two-fold belief that he is on the one
hand in the midst of realities which are not himself nor mere obse-
quious shadows of himself, a world which transcends the narrow con-
fines of his own transient being; and, on the other hand, that he
can himself somehow reach beyond those confines and bring these
external existences within the compass of his own life, yet without
annulment of their transcendence."3 Man has ever been torn between
a desire to explore his instinctive awareness for a possible ubiquity
of things in time and space, and at the same time, to essay a
practical knowledge of concrete, irreducible fact.

Hence the traditional rationalist, with his hgrggr gaggi, seeks

to stabilize the sensuous flux, and curtly dismisses as irrational

 

that which fails to fit his static world of Being, while the fees

of rationalism dismissed reason as an aery fabrication which has
lost its Antaean touch with the often terrible testimony of experi-
ence. The commitment of the traditional philosopher appears to have
been to the integrity of his system. This is no less true of the
poet, but in the case of the post there is a further commitment
whose demands are equally if not more pressing. If the dilemma of
man is to recognize and respect the irrational and apparently
irreducible aspects of his experience, and at the same time to
struggle to wield it into a viable system, it is no less that of the
poet who must serve the demands of a unified form, and who, yet, is
contracted to the immediacy of "thingness" through the very fabric
of his craft, his personal experience of things.

It is in the light, or shadow, of this conflict that I propose
this study of Yeats, who was himself aware of its relevance not only
to his personal life and growth, but to his understanding of human
history, to the exercise of the mythopoeic imagination, and to his

art.

ii

Nothing retains its own forms; but Nature the great
renewer, ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure
there's nothing perishes in the whole universe; it
does but vary and renew its form.

Metamo h se VII

The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song,

Should know what issue is at stake,
It is myself that I remake.

Yeats, untitled poem

 

 

 

 

 

In the first chapter, a study of the revisions of the play
1h§_Shadggy Waters, I have attempted to deal with the earliest
signs of dualism in the young Yeats. In its earliest manifestations,
this conflict appears as little more than an antipathy between a
revulsion against the practical world and a desire for the seductions
of the dream. In the course of Yeats's encounters with this play,
there is evident a struggle to clarify the terms of conflict. What
began as personal predisposition struggled to find realization in
art and within the stringent demands of dramatic expression. The
recasting of this play as well as the later revisions of Yeats's
poetry suggests more than a growing awareness of the demands of a
direct and vigorous poetic statement, but a changing attitude toward
art and life. Perhaps this gradual awareness of the necessity of
change is one of the most important aspects of Yeats's mature
thought, and his revisions of plays and poetry suggest the impossi-
bility of recapturing a sensibility which has already slipped into
the past.

Chapter two examines two of the traditional sources which
Yeats pursued: Heraclitus and Plate. It is clear that he did not
discover what he was to recognize as "primary experience" in
Platonism, but he did rediscover or realize an aspect of himself in
the impulse represented by Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition, and
these served to provide and articulate the vocabulary with which
this sensibility found its expression. Thus Yeats's heady plunges
into philosophical, historical, and esoteric tradition witness an
attempt to widen and deepen a conceptual awareness of what began

as a purely personal orientation. They provided it with the

 

resonance of what tradition has preserved as generic human

experience, and enabled Yeats to wield a personal and cultural
synthesis by discovering a personality and an art which was at

one with the pulse of human experience. It is clear, however,

that as Yeats's inquiry into Neoplatonism deepened, so did his
awareness of its failure to account for the purely experiential.
The labours which lay behind the fashioning of Ihg Shadogz Hgtggg
had already proven as much, that one aspect of experience could not
exist or find expression without the other. Characteristically,
Yeats's instincts led him to opposing traditions in order to affirm
what he recognized as countertruth, the experiential or antithetical
nature of man.

Chapter three traces a specific departure from Platonic
tradition: Yeats's permutations on the figure of the daimon. The
Yeatsian daimon functions as a principle of integration, and is
crucial to the creative rapport between antithetical and primary
experience. I have attempted to trace the genesis of the daimon
as a compound of traditional sources and the demands of Yeats's
own system, as well as in the psychological process by which the
individual is both drawn to and repelled by the "total demand" of
primary Being.

Yeats's struggle to provide an integrated account of cultural
history echoes the same struggle through which he sought to account
for and integrate the facets of his personal life; The subject of
chapter four, Unity of Being, describes a personal as well as a
cultural synthesis, and traces its final projection in the figure

of the sphere which affirms Unity of Being as the principle of

 

cosmic synthesis comprehending the apparent oppositions of Being
and Becoming, primary and antithetical experience.

Chapters five and six define the roles of the hero, the artist,
saint, and feel, which served Yeats as example or dramatizations
of various manifestations of primary and antithetical experience.
These, titans and grotesques, struggle to integrate the terms of
conflict, to realize in themselves, in their actions, or in their
art, the creative synthesis.

The concluding chapter examines the lineaments of the
Yeatsian myth as it unfolds from an operative dualism to paradoxical
resolution.

I have already suggested the importance of Yeats's personal
acceptance of the necessity of change and growth to his thought
and art. Throughout this study I have attempted to emphasize the
consequences which accrued when what had once been no more than
a static dualism or play of opposition was projected into a temporal
dimension. Under such circumstances, dualism becomes process,
specifically, cyclical process, the process of Becoming whose
expression lies solely within the language of myth. Yeats was faced
with the necessity of evolving a mythic cosmos in those spatial and
temporal terms which are peculiar to the dimensions of the mythopoeic
mind. In spite of its often gelling esoteric aspects, the Yeatsian
mythology served its author well in realizing that integration of
those opposing terms which are essential to the poetry maker's art,
the marriage of the personal with the universal.

I wish to record my thanks to the librarians of Michigan

State University, The National Library of Ireland, Trinity College

 

Dublin, and Queen's University, whose courtesies smoothed the

course of research for this essay. I owe a personal debt of
gratitude to my advisor, Hazard Adams, for his patient encourage-
ment and the stimulation of his conversation, and to his family,

whose hospitality warmed a long Dublin winter.

 

CHAPTER I

Egg Shadogy Waters: The Clarification of Conflict

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Shadowy waters and its many revisions occupied Yeats

 

for over twenty-three years from its earliest drafts until the
completion of the final acting version in 1907.1 This period saw
much of his development as a poet and dramatist. It spans his
early "dramatic" poems, Hggggg and The Island gf Statues, The
Handeringg pf Oi in, and the years of his greatest success with
the Abbey Theatre. A study of the play with its published and
manuscript revisions throws considerable light on the progress of
the young Yeats, his assimilation of influences, and his early
stages of development as a playwright. These aspects of the play's
evolution have been examined by a number of Yeats's critics who
have drawn on the successive published versions in order to docu-
ment the poet's stylistic development, the remarkable transition
from a vague, dream—like PreRaphaelitism to the tensile strength
of his mature poetic statement.

Perhaps the most succinct index of the trend toward the play's
simplification in language and in detail is that which is demon-
strated by the changes in the stage directions in the successive
versions from 1900 to 1907. No less bewildering than the language
was the detailed stage picture itself. The stage directions for
1900 describe a cumbersome array of symbolic detail: '"3 rows of
hounds, the first dark, the second red, and then white with red
ears, make a conventional pattern on the sail. Forgael. . . has
a silver lily worked on the breast of his garment, Dectora a

11

 

l2

rose."2 The evolution of Yeats's sail throughout the revisions
illustrates a gradual simplification as strikingly as the pruning
of the dialogue. In 1905 Dectora and Forgael relinquish their
heraldic devices, but Yeats, reluctant to forego all his imagery,
replaces his hounds with a "blue pattern on a dark green sail."3
By 1907 the cutting is drastic, and Yeats contents himself with
a terse description of a simple sail "of a dull copper colour."4
The relation of Yeats's occult heraldry to the action is
tenuous and certainly dramatically irrelevant. Its context was
1h; Egg; gggpg 3h; flggdg and gigig, where the hound and deer, as
Yeats explained, are images of the desire of man for woman, woman
for man.5 The red—cared hounds of Thg Shgdogy Eggggg wound their
way through an overripe dialogue burgeoning with symbolic detail.
The sailors describe them as running from the silver arrow of the
eternal pursuit, and Dectora, in an interminable revery, seals her
surrender to Eorgael with the somewhat superfluous observation:
". . .silver arrows/ Ah they have pierced his heart."6
None of Yeats's critics, however, have suggested that the
transformation effected by the successive and improved dramatiz-
ations indicates any more than the poet's growing awareness of
the exigencies of dramatic form, and a recognition of the poetic
potentialities inherent in common speech as opposed to a highly
mannered poetic diction. In a writer of Yeats's integrity it
is reasonable to assume that a marked change in style would reflect
as well a change or clarification of the conceptual basis which
first sustained the early style. It is unlikely that Yeats laboured

over seemingly endless revisions merely for the sake of practising

 

 

13

his talents as a fledgling dramatist, or from a nostalgic

loyalty for his early work. Yeats was at the same time occupied
with other plays and other revisions which furnished a more re-
warding schooling as dramatic poet. Yet, repeatedly, he returned
to The Shadowy Waters, apparently anxious to preserve something

of value which he felt was as valid in his maturity as it had been

in his youth.

ii

The changes wrought in Yeats's reworkings of his play in
manuscript before its first publication in 1900 are no less
revealing than those which marked the succeeding published editions.
As Yeats himself had boasted to his father, he had written for the
narrative version of 1900 what was almost an entirely new play. The
early manuscript versions have neither been published nor received
any critical attention, although they repay careful examination by
furnishing a valuable guide to Yeats's early preoccupations and
method. The National Library of Ireland preserves twenty-four
portfolios of fragments, drafts, and nearly completed texts written
over the years previous to the date of the first published version.
None of these are dated, and in those cases where the drafts are
only fragmentary, they defy any attempt to establish a precise
chronology. Their sequence, however, is relatively simple to
determine.

In order to indicate the contrast between the early efforts
and the published version, I quote Yeats's own synopsis which

appeared in a program note for the Abbey production of 1906. The

 

 

 

14

plot itself (apart from its treatment) remains substantially

the same in all the published versions.
Once upon a time, when herons built their nests in old
men's beards, Forgael, a sea-king of ancient Ireland, was
promised by certain human-headed birds, love of a super~
natural intensity and happiness. The birds were the souls
of the dead, and he followed them over seas toward the
sunset where their final rest is. By means of a magic
harp, he could call them about him when he would, and
listen to their speech. His friend, Aibric, and the
sailors of his ship thought him mad, or that he and they
were being lured to destruction. Presently, they captured
a ship, and found a beautiful woman upon it, and Forgael
subdued her and his own rebellious sailors by the sound
of his harp. The sailors fled upon the other ship, and
Forgael and the woman drifted on alone fellowing the birds,
awaiting death and what comes after, or some mysterious
transformation of the flesh, an embodiment of every lover's
dream.

Considering the pains which Yeats took in the successive
published versions to render his characters dramatically credible,
one is surprised to find the Forgael of the earliest drafts more
firmly and vividly drawn than his successors. Descended from sea-
gods, a "man of great stature," a brigand, and even a remorseless
murderer, he provides a more virile and arresting figure than that
of the emasculated dreamer who emerged in 1900. Yeats's subse-
quent efforts to recast his characters seem largely to have been
a struggle to retrieve them from a PreRaphaelite cast which lessened
their effectiveness in the narrative version of 1900.

The Forgael and his companions of the manuscript versions
contrast forcibly with the somewhat pastoral figures of 1900. The
Seabar and his eagle-headed followers who haunt the ship (and who
anticipate the bird-like creatures of the later Playg fig; Dancers)

subsist on human sacrifice, and Forgael, acting as their surrogate,

plunders and harries passing ships, strewing the ocean with corpses

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

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!

   

 

15

for their gratification. The eagle-headed men are referred
to as the progeny of Tethra, father of the acquiline race who
were deposed by the Tuath de Danaan. In subsequent drafts they
are referred to simply as "Fomors."

Yeats sketched the background of the Fomorah in his notes to
The Wanderings gf_9i§ig, although they appear to have been modified
somewhat in his play. Their origins derive from the earliest of
the Irish mythic parables. Balor, the leader of the hosts of
darkness, led his people, the Fomorah,to defeat in a decisive
battle with the Tribes of Danu, the children of light. The Fomorah
of myth were monstrous, goat or bull-headed creatures with one leg
and one arm growing from their chests, and were the ancestors of
all the misshapen. The Eggk,_§ th§_2gg relates that the Fomorah
among other monstrous creatures were the descendants of Ham and
the heirs to his father Noah's drunken curse. They were, then,
associated with the progeny of Cain, accursed, and condemned to
walk in darkness. Rhys euhemerized the conflict of the Fomorah
and the Tuath de Danaan into an important historical struggle, but
MacCulloch affirms that the Fomorah, who ruled Ireland for a time
from their glass stronghold on Tory Island, were gods of darkness.8
They are certainly contrasted with the Tuath de Danaan whom legends
described as arriving from Heaven. The Tuath reached Ireland on
Beltane and are associated with the rebirth of the season celebrated
in the spring festival, while the Fomorah exacted their tribute on
Samhain, which ushers in the winter night. "The strife of Fomorians
and Tuath de Danaan," MacCulloch writes, "suggests the dualism of

all nature religions," and in particular the Zoroastrian dualism

 

 

 

16

of Ahriman and his daevas set against Ahura thzda and his angels,
the conflict of light and darkness which formed the basis for
an ethical dualism of good and evil.9

The sinister Fomorah with their long grey robes and iron
talons in Yeats's play, bring with them from their mythic context,
impressions of a dark world of primitive cruelty and terror, which
Forgael's barbarous murder of Dectora's lover, Aleel the poet, does
nothing to mitigate. These Fomorah were obviously the source of

Lady Gregory's dismay when, as she recounts in 9g; Irish Theatre,

 

she had been startled on first meeting Yeats by his curious des-
cription of a play in which half the characters bore the faces
of eagles.10
Forgael, however, does bear the discontent of his successors.
Dissatisfied with his macabre role as breadwinner for the Fomorah
and overcome by "a breath of Danaan roses," he is enchanted by a
vision of the island of the children of Dana.
. . . hid
Among the sighing foam, and roses hang
Above the foam, like little dropping flames.
And he who gathers them about his heart
Endures the wisdom, day after day
Until the sun ind moon are dead
And heaped up. 1
Forgael is distracted from his obligations to the Fomorah, and is
directed in his quest by mysterious voices which pervade the night,
describing the delights of the Danaan land. In the earliest manu-
script drafts, the voices sing of a country which is prized "be-

cause there is no desire there." In succeeding versions we are

told "A song comes over the waters, praising the islands of the

 

l7

gods, because there is no battle there. The song cries out for
protection against the dark multitudes who toss upon the sea in
dream and rapine."l2

Yeats's clarification of the goal of Forgael's quest provides
perhaps the most revealing insight offered by a study of these
early plays. It is, in effect, a clarification of Yeats's own
concept of reality.

A prose scenario in manuscript marks the abrupt transition
to the "new play" which Yeats prepared for publication in 1900.
The Fomorah disappear along with the figure of the poet Aleel,
Dectora's lover and counsellor. Aibric is introduced as Forgael's
interlocutor, and the crew, no longer cowed by their captain, are
openly mutinous. Forgael has lost much of his heroic stature and
has been sapped of his primitive energy. He remains a hollow,
listless wanderer committed to a pale dream of unfulfilled desire.
The ship, however, takes on considerable ballast when the mysterious
voices which pressed Forgael on give way to a motley convoy drawn
from Yeats's personal symbolic preoccupations of the moment. The
hornless deer, the multicoloured hounds, the fool and the fool's
harp, the silver arrow, the figures of Aengus and Edain, the
grey birds or winged souls, and a puzzling apparition "half a lamb
and half a goat" who "walked on the waters" all serve to launch
Forgael or pilot him on his venture.13 The ether is as well
trafficked as that of Prospero's enchanted isle.

In this version of the play (1900), the island of the Danaans
loses its explicit mythic context; no longer the home of Danaan

deities, it becomes a vague expression of the poet's aspirations,

 

 

18

a land of heart's desire where "time and the world and all things
dwindle out."l4 Having forfeited the Irishry associated with its
Danaan title, the island goal has become more suggestive of a
reality transcending mere geographic location, and recalls a wider
range of European and Indo-European tradition, as a vision of the
eternal Eden beyond the western twilight. Yeats was undoubtedly
aware of the affinity of the Celtic land of enchanted streams with
the Land of Cockayne and the Hebrew paradise, with their rivers
of oil, milk, wine and honey, or the beautiful and transparent
rivers rolling down to the otherworld sea in Lucian's True History.
His efforts to widen the mythic reference, however, only serve
to blur the goal as well as the voyager's aspirations. The play
of 1900 and all successive narrative versions are prefaced with
the poem "Walking at Coole" in which Yeats describes a fleeting
vision of his hero and heroine.

How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?

I only know that all we know comes from.you,

Ahd that you come from Eden on flying feet.

. . .Is Eden out of time and out of space?15
It is within this Eden that Forgael seeks to consummate an eternity
0f love.

And yet there is a love that the gods give. . .

That shall burn time when times have ebbed away.

The fool foretold me I would find this love

Among those streams, or on their cloudy edges

All dies among the streams where the world ends.

. . .here. . .the undying send their eagles

To snatch alive out of the streams all lovers

That have gone there to look for the loud streams

Folding their heart's desire to their glad hearts.16

It is at this stage that The Shadowy waters assumes its most

characteristic fig Qg siecle pose. Forgael's indefinite yearnings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

19

for a mysterious transcendence, his disdain for the world and
his self-conscious withdrawal are characteristic of the protest
against nineteenth century materialism and religion which Edmund
Wilson has diagnosed as the prevailing fig‘dg siecle malaise.
Fundamentally, it was a revulsion against transience, the
impermanence of things and emotions in the sensible world, and
it offered a retreat to an ideal existence bounded by the world
of the imagination. Forgael is clearly identifiable with a number
of his fictional contemporaries, Axel, Marius, Des Essientes, and
perhaps at this time with Yeats himself. All chose the anti-
realistic faith, the subjective rather than the objective life,
My isolation from ordinary men and women was increased by
an asceticism destructive of mind and body, combined with
an adoration of physical beauty that made it meaningless.
Sometimes the barrier between myself and other people
filled me with terror; an unfinished poem and the first
and never finished versiqn of The Shadowy Wategg had this
terror for their theme.

If Forgael's speech "all could be well/Could we but give us
wholly to our dream" supplied in itself any satisfying definition
of purpose in the nineties, it meant little to the poet of 1905.
As early as 1889, however, Yeats appears to have diagnosed the
disease, but his recovery was a slow and laboured one. He had
then written Katherine Tynan:

I have noticed some things about my poetry I did not know
before, in this process of correction; for instance, that
it is almost always a flight into fairyland from the world,
and summons to that flight. The chorus to "The Stolen
Child" sums it up-that is not the poetry of insight and
knowledge, but of longing8and complaint-the cry of the
heart against necessity.

By 1904 Yeats had attained the luxury of perspective, and wrote

A.E.:

 

20

I cannot possibly be quite Just to any poetry that speaks
to me with the sweet insinuating voice of the dwellers in
that country of the shadows and hollow nights. I have
dwelg there too long not to dread all that comes out of
it.

iii
Before publishing the first version of Th2 Shadogy Waters,

Yeats admitted attempting "to get into this play a grave kind of
ecstasy."20 The ecstasy which he sought perhaps floundered in the
poet's own indecision as to the object of Forgael's quest for
transcendence in that somewhat impalpable region "where the world
dwindles out." But as Yeats clarified his own aims and consolidated
his characters, he inserted a new speech in which his voyager's
goal becomes a sort of supernal ecstasy. "The play is now upon a
single idea," he wrote Florence Farr in July, 1905, "which is in
these lines:

When the world ends

Pfiracle, ecstasy, the impossible joy

The flagstone under all the fire of fire

The root of the world."él
The importance Yeats attaches to these lines suggests that they
have become crucial to an understanding of the play, or at least
to his new conception of the play's meaning. Before considering
their significance it is necessary to reconsider the nature of the
goal and the flight, Yeats's dialectic of reality and the dream
as embodied in the dramatic action.

The typewritten manuscript draft for the version which Yeats

quotes in his earlier letter to Miss Farr witnesses the new course

which Yeats had set. The additions, which are for the most part

 

 

21

merely interpolations, are pasted on the pages of an earlier
version. They are few, but all serve to buttress a new inter-
pretation. Very little of consequence has been eliminated from
the old copy. This would indicate that Yeats found no real
discrepancy between the two versions, that the additional passages
served to clarify the imperfectly articulated ideas already latent
in his play. The course Yeats set for The Shadowy Waters, in
spite of its numerous modifications, had been a true one; his
struggle lay chiefly in bringing into focus its destination.

Until this point, the play had never entirely freed itself
from the implication that the land of heart's desire, the home-
land of Forgael's aspirations, was any more than a world of dreams
as contrasted with the waking world of common life. One of the few
images in the play which survives from the earliest manuscript
drafts to the final published version, gradually derives from its
changing context an entirely new weight of meaning.

Forgael: I hear a music heavy with the dreams
The children of Dana make with purple breath
Upon the mirrors of’the world 22
Then smooth out with busy hands and sigh.
In 1900 the speech is given to Aibric.
. . .and he who longs
For happier love but finds unhappiness
And falls among the dreams the drowsy gods
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.23
There is something deceptive and misleading about these will 0'
the wisp dreams which are a god's caprice and which promise no

more of real permanence than life itself. When the words are

given to Aibric, who is unable to fathom Forgael's intimations,

 

 

22

they are used to dismiss his captain's vision of reality as
insubstantial, hallucinatory, the stuff of Druid dreams.

In 1906 the speech reverts to Forgael, and Yeats turns the
argument upon itself. Forgael condemns the world:

. . .that old promise breaker,
The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering,
'You will have all you have wished for when you have earned
Land for your children or money in a pot'.
And when we have it we are no happier,
Because of that old draught under the door,
0r creaky shoes.
. . .We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world. . . .24

In spite of the new element of earthiness which salts Yeats's
dialogue, it is clear that the world, its possessions, and its
premises have finally emerged as the dream. Reality lies now only
with the distant goal; all else is illusory. But Forgael, his own
way clear, is unable to clarify matters for Aibric. He falters

in his attempted explanation, and it falls on deaf ears:

Forgael: It's not a dream
But the reality that makes our passion
As lamps shadow-~no-no lamp, the sun.
What the world's million lips are thirsting for
Lust be substantial somewhere.25

With this in mind, the following passage can only serve to compound
Aibric's confusion:

All would be well

Could we but give us wholly to the dreams
And get into their world that to the sense
Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly

Among substantial things; for it is dreams
That lift us to the flowing, changing world
That the heart longs for.

. . .Could we but mix ourself into a dream
Not its image on the mirror!

. . .And yet I cannot think they're leading me
To death.26

The Shadogy Waterg was from the beginning founded upon a

 

23

tension, or at least an imputed tension between two realities,

the dream and the world, the spiritual and ia‘erial orders. hten
these two are viewed separately by their respective proponents,
Aibric and Forgael, the one is incapable of recognizing the

opposing claims of the other. Consequentlr, Aibric will uphold

L
the reality of the sensible world against the promises of ror'
dreams. Forgael, on the other hand, whose commitment lies with

the spiritual order, seas Aibric's reality as itself no here than
a deceptive dream. When Forgael, in his efforts to explain his
vision to Aibric, attenpts to bridge the gap between their dis-
crepant modes of thought, he arrives at a dialectical impasse,

and adopting the terms of both camps, his excursus becomes a
baffling series of equivocations.

The single word "substantial" appears within these contrasting
contexts within Forgael's speech, and it is apparent that in his
equivocal use of the term, the voyager has placed himself in the
heart of a characteristically Platonic dilemma. ban customarily
regards abstractions as having been drawn from things, but the
Platonist sees things as if proceeding from abstractions. He
whose thou;ht and loyalties have been shaped by the experiences
of the sensible world cannot comprehend the bestowal of objective
existence on what he considers to be no more than subjective
abstraction or fancies. Forgael has cast his lot with that of the
Platonist, and looks upon the rest of mankind as imprisoned within
its cave, habitually mistaking shadows for reality.

In Yeats's final acting version, the poet inserts a speech

 

 

24

in which Forgael is forced to admit his pedagogical failure.
His inability to explain his position to Aibric is, in effect,
the failure of discursive language to delineate the paradoxical
nature of a visionary experience which transcends expression.
Forgael: I cannot answer.
I can see nothing plain; all's mystery.
Yet sometimes there's a torch inside my head
That makes all clear, but when the light is gone
I have but images, analogies,
The mystic bread, the sacramental wine,
The red rose where the two shafts of the cross,
Body and soul, waking and sleep, death, life,
Whatever meaning ancient allegorists
Have settled on, are mixed into one joy.
For what's the rose but that? miraculous cries,
Impossible truths? But when the torch is lit
All that is impossible is certain. . . 27
The vision, as personally experienced, alone provides the momentary
flare which illumines reality with certainty and conviction. The
poetic mind, however, finds its only recourse in the uncertainty
provided by analogical expression. The poet is committed to the
"impure" experiential materials of the sensible world, while
Forgael's vision subsists in the unfaltering conviction of unimpaired
spiritual apprehension. Having clarified the final implications
of Forgael's argument, Yeats could no longer ally himself with
Forgael's position, in which the office of the poet was that of
a fabricator of the "beautiful lie" of Platonist fable.
The Shadowy haters is, above all, Forgael's play, and it
is Forgael's vision of reality which commands our attention. The
common dichotomies of the dream and tie world, illusion and reality,
life and death, have been inverted, and the vision lies solely

with the visionary hero who will, because of this, always be mis-

understood by his fellows. These antithetical modes of being

 

 

25

which threatened dialectical chaos are bridged first by Dectora
whose surrender (abetted by supernatural promptings) permits her
to share Forgael's vision. Dectora has died the death of the
visionary into reality. Her memories of her previous life and
attachments fade for what they now are, dreams.

But in the passage interpolated in the 1906 version, it would
seem that the two discrete orders have themselves been wed in a
central metaphysical paradox.

Forgael: Where the world ends

The mind is made unchanging, for it finds

Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,

'he flagstone under allé the fire of fires,

The roots of the world.
"Ecstasy. . .the flagstone under all" no longer belongs solely to
a remote realm at the close of the journey, but is brought into
juxtaposition with "the roots" of the sensible world. Reluctant
to forego entirely his dream of a transfigured existence, Yeats
has nevertheless intimated his loyalties to the here and now of
experience. It required but a further step for the poet to enter-
tain the concept of an incarnate reality inseparable from its
physical expression in the sensible world. Yet, Forgael, dedicated
Platonist that he is, persists in his refusal to content himself
with the imperfections of a substantial world which he regards as
no better than a flawed image of transcendent reality.

At this point in his play's evolution, Yeats dissociated
himself from Forgael and the ideals of his quest. Forgael, with
his enchanter's arts and his captivating song, had long served as
an idealization of the poet's role, and in particular, as a pro-

'1

jection of Yeats's own poetic Odyssey. The disappearance of Aleel

 

 

 

26

from the published versions leaves Forgael as the sole exponent
of the poetic role. Aleel, with his professed loyalties to hone,
hearth, and the consolations of this world had supplied a dramatic
foil for Forgael's unswerving dedication to his transcendent goal.
As pallid a creation as Forgael himself, Aleel proved a singularly
ineffectual advocate. In the published versions, Aleel's role is
usurped by the commonsensical Aibric and the somewhat strained
bawdry of the crew. The conflict is now more forcibly realized,
but the implications in terms of Yeats's own ambivalence as a poet
wemamore clearly suggested in the earlier antagonism of the rival
poets Aleel and Forgael. The lines which Yeats interpolated in
1906 point the direction toward the final resolution of his dilemma.
Yeats's passage with Forgael had long threatened to lead him
into the troubled waters plied by his archromantic idol, Shelley.
If the poet chooses to cast his lot with the Platonist, his art

becomes a mere rite d assess a struggle to overcome the world

 

of things in order to create awareness of a reality which lies

beyond predication and the limits of finite expression. But in
refusing the substantial world, he denies, in effect, the fabric of
his own art, experience and language. Should the poet turn to
affirm the world of immediate eXperience as reality or incarnate
reali y, the metaphor of the voyage towards a transfigured goal
becomes superfluous, and the poet's role becomes that of an artificer

Of reality.

iv

Potentially, at least, Yeats was a poet of conflict. From the

 

 

 

 

11. IIII‘III|I|1||\|
[I‘ll
ll’l

 

27

beginning he saw the world as an encounter of opposing values,
and as this view was embodied in his earliest trials with The
§hadowy Haters, it too, was in this respect germinal drama. The
revisions continued to develop a latent tension between two
realities, but it is clear that Yeats only gradually became aware
of their implications and acquired the craftsmanship to embody
them in dramatic terms. The action in the earliest published
versions was limited to a single shuffle: Aibric moved toward his
homeland and Dectora from it. Forgael maintained his unwavering
conviction throughout. The movement was simple and fluid, with
no palpable resistance created between the antagonists who, all
speaking with the same tongue, could offer no resistance to one
another or convincing contrast.

By 1905 Yeats had rewritten the sailors‘ dialogue until they
spoke in the rhythmic prose of the comedies in which Lady Gregory
collaborated. They begin to speak colloquially, and to think like
ordinary seamen. The uniformity of texture gives way to a playing
off of prose and poetry) which sets the crew apart from Forgael
and reinforces their essential differences.

An unswerving dedication to an ideal marks as well as mars
the character of Forgael by 1900. Ebthing exists for the dreamer
but the dream, an overwhelming longing for what he as yet, can
neither name nor comprehend. Dramatically, the play's charact-
erization fails because one can not discriminate between the
dreamer, his shipmates, and Dectora herself. Yeats was faced with
the practical necessity of making his poem dramatic, and it in-

volved, principally, delineating two contrasting types of humanity,

 

28

those who give their allegiance to the world, and those who

would move beyond the world to a higher reality. The char cterization
required is rudimentary; what COlfliCt there is derives frcm the
friction created between these two types. As early as 1399 Yeats
had seen the necessity for evolving two distinct orders within

.is . He 0 ri Le . . is ' 9: rue new onad

h” lay tad w t‘ n AB at th tim "Th °‘ 0

, , 1 . , . "29 ,
haters could be acted on two tables in a drawing room. Yeats 3
letter referred to the play of 1900, but it is clear that the
finished play failed to fulfil Yeats's designs. The 1900 Shadowy

Waters' ineffectual characters might just have well been ,layed

 

upon a single table.
To reconstruct his play as a dramatic vehicle, Yeats was
forced to portray two distinct ways of knowing, the intuitive and
the discursive, in order to draxatize his fundamental duality, and
in spite of the fact that he would give his own support to but one
of these. Forgael changes little, he remains the solitarv dreamer,
but he is now thrown into some relief by the more plausible
characterizations of Aibric, Dectora, and the seamen. Their varyi.;
allegiances are nefie clear in the text of 1906 when a sailor is
made to boast: "The ale cup is my fathe and mother," and when, in
the closing scene, Forgael tells Dectora: "we grow immortal/. . .
and dreams,/That have had dreams for father live in us."30
Forgael's speeches never fully recover from monologue, and
suffer from the impasse created by his solitary commitment to an

ideal which is entirely alien to that of the other chiractgrs.

the remaining characters are uncomprehending, and Forgael must, in

 

 

29

effect, address his words to the winds. Dectora herself, until
her previous existence has slipped away into a dream, can only
see her captor as a madman.

Aibric has extended a hand of perplexed friendship to his
master, but in spite of his willingness to share Forgael's destiny,
he cannot share his vision, and must return to land with the others.
The lot of the visionary hero is a solitary one, and demands total
alienation from the processes and activities of the world. Socrates,
in describing to Adeimantus the plight of the true philosopher in
his relationship to the state, portrayed the sane dilemma. "How
in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are
mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be
called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?"31

If Socrates' description appears to have been tailored for
Forgael, it applies equally well to Seanchan and Martin, the heroes
of Ih§.Kind'§ Threshold and 2bg_Unicorn from the Stars. In these
plays, however, Yeats has rescued his heroes from the image-crowded
sea, only to emphasize their isolation by drawing them in open
conflict with an indifferent social order. Seanchan, the chief
poet, must Openly oppose society, and impose upon it his own vision
of order. He must reform it or die.

Martin's predicament is more fully developed. He has, for a
time, mistakenly allowed himself to be trapped within an alien,
destructive social order. His inability to meet Father John on
common terms anticipates his chronic inability to impart his vision

to his followers, which precipitates genera disaster. iartin

 

' ,, q 1 ' .- .LL 'A L a 1" '10 r ‘
inaubuietes h-: #1 .i01 h at e ntzi a 3 tzlctio. o- °-ir, '-
V - 3 L J _ I. , :14 «LY »« ., L ,,,,, r _
52V: ( his 'KUSL 1'3 3le ll'l lie: 3 "oil ‘3 " .101”) v _,

the folien coach. Johiiy

 

uh follow him c;r€ist:ntly misinterpret ;a:tin's wor : in t'a li;“t
of i:"eir own ,erroral pr- ilectiour. iartin's app;:l to icztroy
the law beconcr for t::fi a cialle::a to defiy 3“;lls' law. Similarly,

the destruction cf th: church is undarstooj h; them as Luther's
church and "the hump-backed discour e of tc:;n;w Crlvin's E ble."32
But Kart in, as his trothar Andrew r::l zes, "is a ”earns like
”yself," a solitar" whose home lies b:'o1d° social Grier, ail w 033

33

entiie reSpoaclhility lies with wholly subjective commitments.

as
5‘
'1
('1‘
H.
:3
.3—
£13
an

*0
r:
(n
m
o
’1"

led tie destquction of selfhood, the bonds which
hindered his vision of t‘ 3full re l‘7n tloi of t‘3 soul. 7e finally

recognizes his true role, but it is too late, and the social chaos

which he inadvertantly unle ed turns ujon ‘im with redoublei fury.
Incapable of 1nde rstan<in3 t? ir leaGer's motives, his followers can

onl‘r scent b’trays , and fall upon T:W “s ttiir scapegoat.

Prou: in the certainty of his conviction, and alo7f because

bacais e his is a total unwavering co? it wit to what fins: lie be"oni
human experience, tn} earlr Yeatsian hzro e acts a cold, u rym4a-
thetic role, one whicl is, T believe, €unfa:e;t“lly sterile as a
dramatic conceAtion. Aware of the inadequacies in t“: c‘a;uct r-

iz ation of Egg Shadow* fiat 315, Yeats a:.cere to have mtd3 an effort
to restore to Torgael a measure sf his ori inal heroic stature. The
effort is useless, and only serves t3 heighten the disparity between

Forgael's lot and that of those mhrciled in the commitrant: of

 

31

human experience. As Yeats "deepens" the characterization of
Aibric and the sailors by allowing them the more vivid rhythms
and imagery of common speech, he can only heighten the other-
worldliness in his characterization of Forgael. Locked within a
common dramatic structure, they become mutnally dependent concepts,
defining and delineating one another, achieving mere contrast
rather than conflict. The properties they exhibit are centripetal,
each tending to evade rather than collide with or overpower the
other.. And yet the antagonists are yoked in a process of affirming
their separate identities. The lesson Yeats drew from Ihg Shadowy
Waters was an important one in the development of his own poetic
vision. In spite of his loyalties to one order of reality, he was
faced with the necessity of accepting,even affirming the other.
v

_hg Sha‘ Waters proposes a dramatic sequence which
explores a resonant area of mythic experience. The sea journey
invites inevitable parallels with similar tales in the Celtic
tradition. Ihg Voyafle g: figag, the §g_ _;a Condla, and what has
been recognized as a prevalent and distinct genre, the imrama,
the numerous accounts of the overseas voyage which followed in the

wake of the immensely popular ngare of Saint Brendan, all furnish

 

a formidable precedent. Alfred Hutt, in his studies of The Vovaqe

 

Q£ Bran established the prevalence of this recurrent theme in Greek
as well as Celtic literature.34 The object of the voyage in either
case is a happy land, Plutarch's fortunate isles, or the Isles of

the Blest of Hesiod and ”indar. Celt and Greek originally placed

 

32

it in the western ocean, a place inhabiigd by 3072 :1d elect
heroes who tram la ted from the turmoil of the worli en owed in
3 ,

s

the flesh their reward of eternal felicity. Homeric tra"tion
ced the Elysian Plain at the end of the worlm by the mouth of
the river Okeanos. jlseuhe :73, as in the Be byl.on‘an accnunt o;
Eiasi"atra, or in the Tebrew telling of Enoch, both were trans—
latnd into immortality, to heaven, or to the "end of the rivers."35
_ o

The west was, for Yeats who, with inin Ellis, had care ully mappe‘

the ouarters of Blake's compass, the traiitional home "of death

J-

t‘

and of darknesa." But it was, as well, the ~.ront'g‘w: of the Country
the Young, the home of the immortals and their chosen.
The ship ofr taie , the boat of love, the vessel of the church
r of the soul, es, ta blisheo themselves firmly in the reservoir of
medieval and r2na r ance metaphor. The sea, as W. Y. Auden has
pointed out, with its sugjestioxs of a boundless and formless
potency, sugjes ed to the rationally minded Greek an alien and

three er in; environment which necessity bade him cross, but on which

he had little do.sire to inger.36 His only thou ht was in find
promised haven at the end of th: harrowing voya'e. For the romantic
imagination, however, a curious reversal took place. it is now the
sea which provides the true condition of life, ané the voya
the quest becomes the fulfillin; of man's appoiniod role. Tie
voyage effects an decade from the necesvities imposed by life on
land, a r lease of the sni it from finite nature. The rom.:ntic
artist with his voyane or Shelleyanflight bacon s tn; hero of his

own epic journey, and it provid sfor him direction, nurpose, and

the promise of discove-y which .ies beyond the cycle: of generation.

 

33

Yeats's fragile craft €r7n, its passage in a Pvthic meditar~vnean
well traf¢ickel by hath romantic and lre:k i F:l“‘t o“

The point of ewtarkation f*r t‘; iyttic 99? joigne" i“
western tr: itlon agpegr: to have Fain ?qr“‘r“~€ ?' t“: riHEKinj
precedent provided by }latonic metap‘or. It i” not w" irteition
to SQJJGEt that Yeats covsnihuelj sot ont to F?¢“ir“ a Platonic

parable. Like the Christian tradition, aid often throng” iir

.1

medium, Platonic anfi Itoplatonic soeculation hzve so swollen tte
coffers of convehtlonul poetic metaphor that it is unlikel“ that

anything mi5ht be written withont b317; accuse? of usurping t‘o‘r

materials. One might ilo:s with very little ifigfififllfij and tie

full canon of Teoplatonic‘authorfltf any nunlir oi so ;: in whicfi a

jaded amor~use blco s for a consgmratio: of bar unPJlfilled or

unful?illghle desires. It might be conjectured that if a "’“'

cold
such as "Somewhere over the Rainbow" Had first mo=ceref as o

ll- A

fragment of a Homeric th2, it Would have bu is? fcr

g _ In;
g,i*1l die
the school of Alcxaqcrian evegefer, {oi FV‘?tTfijly fo no file x:y

into t'e liturgy of the Ctristiau church.

."n_ 0 1'1. WA”? «q.
Axe goueris of 119 vultocl

 

mrcbobl” rootei in

A. U

t‘e young leais’s perfoial liie 341 he relatis in the notes to
Playg for £3 Trish £Leatre ttat it ”was woven to 0 var;

extent out of cert'in vi:iona;; ex . Y31t: continually

fed his 0M1 poroo‘al prem15y0:fti0is with tte m<iqrials of
literayy, persoial an” Vieioio'; exierienco. "is earlu onir:tion

w

for Lhallcj, PortiFie' t; the ;crvaslv~ t"; o of co temgorary

\

 

Sahnsucht, finds it: 07:10: ion in tho i::r Po'fgd a“. v: ugly

 

34

articulated longing for an ideal con sumnation evice t in the

1900 version of The Shadowy Waters, The Land of Heart's E3sire,

 

and the poems "The Hostin5 of the Sidho" and "The Stolen Child."
Although these poems all suggest the nostalgia as well as a desire
M

to escape whic h characterizes "ihe lake Isle of Inni3-ro3," they

never entirely free themselves from an ambiguity of attitui -3 which

inhibits the call to promised eichantrent.
It has b3:: suggested in the Introdiotion to this study that

the impulse to esca ape the world, to Wismisc the heterogsneous

,‘

concept of reality as a haven :rom th; conflict and

1

for a unified
contradiction of irasc1ble exper _1ce would s;e1 to h; an unex—
pungible impulse in hum mn t‘wu'ht and hi: ory. Arthur 0. Lovejoy
has characterized it as a sort of "metaphysical pathos" which
finds its archet gpal express ion in Platonic thought, the Platonic
temper which dramatizes he thirst for the 0:e of the imprisoned
soul bound to its mundane existence.

I hope to su;3ost thnt one important facet of Yeats's
experience was crystalfized and articulatei t'13wuvh his Platonist
readings, and that the un Mi ic im mpulse or sensibility which
charactsrizes this aspect of Yeats's aesthetic was frequently
couched in the traditional 3 :ms of Platonist m"th, in e? 3C1, in
the language of Platonism. It is necessary, hovever, to ezghaoize
that Yeats never accepted uncritically a octrznaire Platonism
as the sole basis for his poetic vision. Consid red as a whole,

his art is r; alized in the p13 r betwc 3n the

and his verr unplatonic lorilti3s to the mire of human exl>czience

 

 

35

His vision of reality affirms neither one nor the other, but a
synthesis which comprehends the two. 1y principal objection to
the often ingenious exegeses proposed by F.A.C. Wilson lies with
. . . . x . . 33
his implied acceptance of but one Side of the [eat51an c01n.
Mr. Wilson's resourceful glossing of the poems with the authority
of the Neoplatonic canon threatens to reduce Yeats's art to an
inert sort of Platonic allegory which fails to generate its own
individual values. Perhaps the most damning criticism to be made
of The Shadowy Waters is that it lends itself to an interpretation
of this sort. The course of the play's revisions lay in the
direction of cLarification, and at this point in Yeats’s develop-
ment, the dramatist's ideas of clarification were influenced by
his awareness and preoccupation with the Platonic temper and its
mythic implications.
Plotinus had charted the course of the wandering soul and
cast it in terms highly suggestive of the metaphoric sea-voyage:
If the soul returns to this sphere it finds itself under
the same spirit or a new, according to the life it is to
live. With this spirit it embarks in the skiff of the un-
iverse: the 'spindle of necessity' then takes control and
appoints the seat for the voyage, the seat of the lot in
life. . . .The universal circuit is like a breeze, and
the voyager, still or stirring, is carried forward by it.
He has a hundred varied experiences, all sorts of events.
The vessel itself furnishes incident, tossing as it drives
on. And the voyager also acts of himself in virtue of that
individuality which he retains because he is on the vessel
in his own person and character.3
The Neoplatonists, and earlier, Heraclitus, recognized in
water the archetypal signature of generation and diversity. "A

dry soul," Heraclitus claimed in his fragments, "is wisest and

best. . . .It is delight to souls to become moist." Water became

 

36

for the Ikoplatonirt a common figure of ihe soul frapped in
generaficn; air or Crfne9fi, as contrastefl with mfiiSLlle, Laract—
erized its r313 89 and a.: cent to the Owe. Porphyry, following in
the steps of Plotinus, claimed that th: ancieits connectei min 3
with sculs procee di:1g into SBxeration, and agein C yarating the n-
T39 juxlzpdsition 0? wind and rate: led in-
evitably to the fiaoplatonic {323?lcs o? the significant 5; 5 voyage.
The goal of Forguul's voyage hai bgcn Vixlcasl; feécribed in

the early published eviticjs as the "emf: of tho rivers," ”tae

loud streafs," but in 1906 Lectora speaks of it_as

he parallels with the Greek conce; tinis of the Tales of the Blest

have alreadv bvzn notad; it vac tnese same mythical riv erg which
w3rc lat9r a: imilated ihto the metgjhor of the Platiniud fountains.

T99 poet of The Slciowy Haters ev9it1: lly c2.3 to recméwize

 

in the contcars of his own sezscape a world ord9 3:;‘165
of Platonic myth. "we J:13douzl.at erg b-ecomls by gjohic

p4-

nterlude dzpl ctin; the scul wahTQrin; across the seas of 3~23r2tion
of Tower hzl ufirfv vellcd lrecircly tho time seq;;9c3 at tPc heart
of the wanderin r of Cdyv.els, wk”
1313159 from {he bOfidagc of the ”leg 21, uni Tcllc N«i“3 he same
hamebound course.

The cumbersowe mrth¢1031cal a, gig us under which 2;: Shadow"
Hateg9 had labnwred in its early crnfts, andt h3 alley ex—

cr3scences which characterized the first published Vurr on were

 

37

dispensed with soon after lQCO. In 1314 Yeats had written his

father: "doing nothing 3rcept the p11; The CF; on" ‘c+<cr r‘ich

will, I think, be good. It is, howev;:, givinv me a d 7:1 r? a

”lo nCarg detail th/t it will F3 Ur;it for t ical
performa“ce.' " The plafl Lad hoax overloaded, an? althoW'h “eel“
res qlizeu \hflt was n~3c3:s:.'r in or or to ach’ave ef?ectiv grz'atic

Sin quzlfty of ”concretwneésfl he lsvished it on

detail, on setting, an; in geogling his play with a horde F? be-
Sidiar; mythical figures, vhen whit was n 0303 w:: 1 clcrlficst,:

of the central stguggle and its relevafit :ythic -m; lica tions. Yeats

had provided 'in1 for his ship hut failed to ran

it Vltl a conget 3 t cr3w.
divally he fasni oned his Ul‘” into a generic m;t thic $3?”C nce,
sort of Platonic Ur—myth shorn of such r” ‘We particularity "3 its

once specifically Irish context. The sea passage no longer lies,

north-M, t of the ‘ tub id3s , nor in "thu :s;:” of 1933, the " 35‘:

Be as” of 1905, but i: the "waste flaC3C r3 thc frC‘t s>a." The
sta;3 directic s for this Abbey p3r°o:rsace 031906 call for only
a s 5_>stion of sea and Sky, r ”a dark abyss."43 Lwtzrt krggfiiy's
settin; and a os;e?ull; contrived monotoby of colour ant rcvement

I

served to wed the action with a timelers ritual in the hgcrt of a
great myth. Ye;ts “c3 t:ansl7t:d his homeland of the soul from
its terrestrial locale, as had Plato, to an insatst s;_tial sgiritual

dimension.

 

 

vi

The earliest fragments of The Shadowy Haters suggest that

 

Yeats had originally intended to draw his action against abac‘:-
grounf of one of the oldest expresrions of vythical dualism, the

battle of the sons of li3ht and the sons or da:kness. Cf the

his

countless nytholo,ic al and literary versions of t
has frequently been observed that the sons of li3ht, in spite

0: their epic victory rave, as imaginativ: creations, ever fallen
short of the vivid portrayals acc01deed their antagonists. Fan's
perennial fascination with the diableries of the middle ages, those
of then ste eri as and the Annlo Saxon accounts of the Yexanera,

and with Hilton's infernal com;:any has 00101r ed tie los3rs' camp

in toe cosmic agon more arrestingly, if mo: e 11 iriily, than their

Blake's claim that the forces of goodness have been tradition-
ally, and erroneously, associated wi 1 na551ve obedience to reason,
serves to account for much of the comparat iv seller or the
hiltonic hero. Althon3h Yeats had already read his Plake, he had
not yet aclieved the same insight into the nature of the conflict

“e wisned to dramatize. But with the later crystallization of é

.:

ision he Izould align himself with Blake's chpatoic by character-

 

izin the extreme objectivity of primary or theocentric experience
by the curiously ineffectue 1 pa 551 ivitv of his saints, fools and
mandarins.

The Fomorah who appear in the early drafts of Yeats's play

provide a more compelling rematic conception than that of the

 

hollow voices chanting across the waves of the homeland of

. ' 1. °-,IJ. n 1 .- , ,0 ‘,- .
tLe children of 1: Qt, free Lrom cesire, free or longing, and

O

'1 o

for the most part, free from any conviction. Ve have no indication
as to how the early manuscript versions might have ended. Yeats
was unable to furnish his play with a conclusion until he re-

mapped his passage as a Jo urney to an earthlr paraois in the

'1

<9

manner of Villiam.tbrris and his contemporaries of the Pre-

Raphaelite brotherhood. In 1900 the outlines of a dualistic

u
0‘
:3
0
Pa
O
.3

conception were barely discernable; the poet turned hi»
the sensible world and eschewed an 1y dualistic implications bv

focus ind his atte11tion wholly on the mists whicns hrouded Forge el's

‘LQ

"“4
{D
(D
{L
}_J
T)
(.1
C1“
93
c‘.“
U)
(I)
\o I
(D
{‘3
H
(D

indeterminate goal. Forgael's ship is in
provided with no bear ngs o, neither a convincing statement of what
he is escaping from, nor what he is fleeing to.

The proviice of the soul has always proven not01iously in-
hospitable to the poet. To achieve expression as poetic statement
it demands actualization, either by being subsumed in symbol or
symbolic act, or by contrast with what it is not, by negative
definition. The demands imp osed by dramatic representation are
even more stringent. Dramatic expression belongs to the animate
world, the arena of conflict, desires, thwarted aspirations, and
brief triumphs. Its initial appeal must be engaginglv and
immediately substantive.

Yeats's play reaches its attenuated climax when For
severs the re pe wh ic1 binds the lovers to the captive snip, and

the crew who will return to their own homeland. Dectora speaks:

 

 

40

The sword is in the rope--

he rcpe 's in two--it falls into the sea,
It whirls into the foam. 0 ancient worn,
Dra3on that loved the world and held us to it,

You are broken, you ar ebroken. The world dr fts away

And I am lefta lone with my beloved. . . .

Forgael has severed more than his ship's hawser. He has shrugged
off aorta lity, his bonda3e to the cosmic serpent or dra3on which
orthern mytr1olo3v described as entwined amo 13 the roots of the

world ash, Y33drasil. Sy mbolic of the waters of the abyss, the

serpent embodies the demiur

Q

of generation.

Philip hheelwright suggests that the origins and development
of dramatic action and convention demonstrate their affinities
with chthonic rather than ura' nian e perier ce. "The gods of the
bri3ht skv invite mimesis in other media-—in the clear delineation

of sculptured forms in the geometry of temnles and Shl ines ,and,

"45

where literature is concerned, in the epic. Vheelwri3ht's

observation implies that he has fallen prey to the same ecuati
of deity w1 th reason whic11 Blake attacked as allacious, but his

ar3ument is borne out by the evidence of the dramatic tradition.

If drana tic eypress ion falters as an instrument for the
revelation of transcendent reality, it is clear from For3a el's
speech in the final acting version of The Shadowy Waters that
Yeats also doubts the efficacyo flan0u91e itself as a medium

0“".3

for conveyin: visionary experience.

U

Forgael: Yet sometimw there's a torch inside my head
That makes all clear, but when the light is gone

I have but images, analo3iesé~

[0

With this mi3ht be compared

A

o *3“. .-

the climactic apotheosis 0L hpipsychidlon.

ic qualities be lon3in~ to the we; ld

r
\

helley's thwarted stru3gle to exores;

 

The win3sd words n which by 5011: would pierce

Into th .ei'1

o
of Lrve‘s rare U,‘v rte,
Are chains o d

arouni its f]i"it Ff P1r3_.47

Yeats eventually turned to the ”eoflatsnict W>o;y of anita muno 1
as a Leens of justifyin3 syitolic expr051io as sonatfifov tore
than mere images or analO3ies, but as a way of unfolding in its
integrity the transcendent lerspective of vi ionary exweri; ca.
Yeats was to ext3nd these speculations to his drauwtnr3y as well,
and contrive a peculiar mnie of dranatic erpresrion thch he felt
induced the trance-like respor33 reouis its to visionary revelation.
But symbol, he Cite to realiz3, must be subsumed in or reinforced
through symbolic action, which is defined only by dranatic conflict
in the turbulent arena of human experience. Again Yeats was brou3‘t
face to ffce wi th his obli3st on as a dr313tis: to the world of
generation. Yeats was free to indulge his speculations in anira

mundi, the life of the foul, only by affirming its counterpart,

 

l

anima hominifi, tte existential erperience whic1 his own ap1re Ht1ce-

 

ship as a practisin3 dratmtirt could no lcn3er perm t hi to dis-

:1drd.
he Shadowy Haters was, for Yeats, a perronal voyt: 3e of dis -

covery. The discipline imposed by dramatic form was certainly

J

not in itself wholly responsible for focusiig his attention on
thes Mi le world, but the ever preseit na33in3 dilem a posed

by his play could not help but brin’ :t forCefully to his attention

-4

as an aesthetic respoisibility. The Shacggy 'ate L lirobably
articulated a great deal Kore for Yeats him~elf in terms of a
growing awareness of the implications of his alt then it ever

mana3ed to impart to its bewildered audiences.

 

 

 

 

   

 

CHAPTER II

Plato and Heraclitus: Two Sides of One Coin

The previous chapter has attempted to describe Yeats's growing
awareness of the two facets of experience which were to inform his
poetic vision. At first no more than vaguely felt conflicting
sensibilities of sympathy and revulsion, they were defined and
articulated in the laboratory of the poet's art; in short, understood
in themselves and in their implications. I have suggested that Yeats
came to terms with his own Platonist temper and the dissolution it
threatened as a viable aesthetic, by augmenting it with its counter-
truth, the existential experience. Yeats's Platonist tendencies
had discovered their proper mask, just as Yeats the dreamer would
find his alt§3,ggg in his commitment to a national theatre and the
public world of Irish politics.

Yeats's first duty was to serve his personal, literary, and
political commitments as he understood them, but like many a young
writer, he began with no more than a vague assemblage of sympathies,
certain emotional or ill-defined predispositions, so that it was
long before he was to become aware of what his stance or orientation
actually was. The interplay between Yeats's reading in traditional
philosophy and the formulation of his own symbolic system is, then,
understandably complex. One can never be certain when Yeats is
imposing upon his reading a set of rigid preconceptions or when his

own position is being shaped and modified by his exposure to tradi-

43

 

44
tional philosophy. Yeats himself would have denied any deliberate

attempt to rationalize experience, for this, he recognized, was the
way of the meddling intellect as opposed to the role of the poet.
One can only propose a continuous interplay between his experience
as a poet and thinker, and a systematic but pliant arrangement of
experience, a conclusion which would appear to be borne out by
Yeats's constant development and growth as a poet and by the con-
sistency and integrity of his roles as playwright, thinker, and
public man.

It might well be considered foolhardy to hazard a brief account
of such complex traditions as those of Platonic and Neoplatonic
thought, and a gross misrepresentation to yoke these with certain
apparently heterogeneous elements of Heraclitan speculation, but my
chief concern is to consider these elements which Yeats himself,
with baffling ingenuity and little trepidation, chose to yoke to-
gether in his own poetic system. My only defense in proposing such
a Sghmeltzprozesg is that Yeats himself may have been guilty of
similar misdemeanors. Yeats was not, as the curious implication
behind the research of F.A.C.Wilson would suggest, an historian of
ideas dedicated to preserving in its integrity a body of inviolable
traditional thought. He was, before all, a poet in search of meta-
phor. On the other hand, Yeats did not recklessly pillage tradition,
but brought to it, if not the objective bent of the conscientious

historiographer, his enthusiasm and respect.

ii

The Platonist position announces the first major triumph of

 

45

the dialectical progression from the particular to the general
known as the inductive method. The traditional means of moral and
political inquiry, it was to provide as well the basis for the
subsequent development of the scientific method. Individual
persons and unique events have always proven the bane of the
scientific as well as the philosophic mind in its efforts to merge
the particular with a universal order. The multiplicity and hetero-
geneity of experience which obstinately resists assimilation in a
rational system of thought has traditionally been accorded short
shrift by the systematic thinker. The failure of the method of
generalization lies in its inability to cope with those unassimp
ilable elements which it has cursorily relegated to the "irrational."
Plato first speaks of his "ideal theory" tentatively, as a
dream, one possibility among many alternative solutions (232}.4390).
But his readiness in the early dialogues to accept even its contrary,
the concept of universal flux, eventually gives way to the deifica-
tion of ideas as final realities. Consequently, the duty of the
philosopher is to turn his back on the sensible world and seek these,
the unchanging and eternal.1
Plato proposed a cosmic dualism, but one which was, nevertheless,
subjected to the overriding potency of the One. Timaeus relates that
two things are in themselves unable to effect a satisfactory union,
that they must share a common bond welding them together into perfect
unity.2 The dialectical frustration which results from attempting
to compare apparently diverse and unrelated entities can only be

resolved through the mediatorial presence of an Absolute, a fixed

 

46

point to which all relationships may be referred in order to reveal
their own nature and relevance. It is this method which constit-
utes the "upward dialectic," the Platonic dialectic of the One.

The world—soul, in its Janus-role mediating between the

intelligible and terrestrial, comprises both Nous and Ananke,

 

unpredicated spirit and material necessity, the two circles of same
and other whose conjunction first brought the cosmos into being.
It is necessary to keep constantly in mind the poles of the
Platonic paradox, the ultimate unity which eternally emanates and
resolves that which gives form to multiform reality. To this end,
Plato proposed mathematics as the vital educative discipline, the
mode of thought which trained the mind to a habitual awareness of
both dichotomy and unity. Thomas Taylor writes of the Platonic
paradox: "But Plato . . . delivers as the concause of natural
things, an all-receiving matter, and a material form, as subservient
to proper causes in generation, but prior to these, he investigates
primary causes, i.e. the producing, the paradigmatical, and the
final.“3

The essential attribute of the generative world, Taylor relates
in his commentary on Timaeus, is the act of Becoming: "the body of
the world should be consummately vital, and perpetually generated
or have a subsistence in perpetually becoming to be."4 Pure Being,
which is an ideal consummation, resides in a condition of apparent

stasis uncontaminated with Becoming. The opposition between Nous

 

and Ananke lies between that which always is and that which is always

 

becoming. The motive principle of the world soul is in the eternal

 

47

act of rising above generation or falling back into its bondage.
Freedom, then, lies with the disembodied, and only the disembodied
soul fleeing multiplicity and determinateness, and striving
unimpeded toward the One, realizes its freedom. Will, therefore,
is the rational act of the soul toward Good, and will and essential
Being are one.

Finite form, the spirit "ensouled" in the material, is treated
as a retrogression in the Platonic scale of Becoming. Fullest
Being is the final realization of the disembodied soul, an "ontic
indeterminateness" in which the soul transcends the limits of "this
and that." The Platonic terminology, understandably, gives rise to
some confusion. It must be remembered that what would appear to be
"indeterminate" spirit, represents in Platonic terms the full
realization of its forms. Consequently, Plotinus is enabled to
describe "blind" matter or evil as "measureless," lying in a "state
of unmeasure" (Enneads 1:8:8). From the Platonist point of view,
the soul does not "realize" itself by imbuing matter with form and
order; it limits its former transcendence through its commerce with
the material. The scale from limited to full transcendence encomr
passes the system of values which are inherent in the Platonic cosmos,
and it is from this hierarchy, bridging the poles of the cosmic
paradox, which Plato derives his moral and ethical universe.

Plato appears to have derived his definition of psyche from the
puritan dualism which characterized the distinctive religious and
magical legacy of Thrace and Asia Minor. The figures of Dionysus,
Bacchus, and Orpheus introduced to Greek thought the themes of guilt

and atonement, condemnation and election. The telistic madness

 

 

48

which characterized the rites of the Orphics, Eleusinians, and the
Cabiri promised release from the sins and suffering of the psyche
which had been attributed to its pollution by the mortal body.

The Orphic accounts of the dismembering of Bacchus or Dionysus
Zagreus furnished a vivid myth of the nature and fate of the soul,
which was conducive to an explicitly Platonic interpretation.
Bacchus, the intellect of the mundane gods, is ensnared through the
wiles of the Titans, the mundane gods, who provide him with the
treacherous mirror of selfhood. Through contemplation of self,
Bacchus forfeits his transcendence and sinks to the world of
generation where he is dismembered and devoured by his betrayers.
The myth establishes its relevance as a cosmic principle when man
is created by Zeus from the ashes of the Titans, so that mankind
embodies the mundane circle of generation as well as his innate
communion with spiritual reality, the mixed blessing of titanic
nature and the divine spark of the fallen god.5

The Cratvlus, Geor ias, and the Repgblic, as Plotinus was to
observe, agree with Orphic doctrine and the mysteries in suggesting
that a sense of guilt and punishment is associated with the arrival
of the soul at the body.6 Plato and the Neoplatonists share a common
vocabulary in describing the soul's plight: it has been "imprisoned,“
"entombed"; it has undergone an "enchainment”or "encavernment."
Taylor's translation of Plotinus relates that "when the soul has
descended into generation she participates of evil, and profoundly
rushes into the region of dissimilitude, to be entirely merged in

which is nothing more than to fall into the mire."7

 

 

49

Under Plotinus the doctrine of the soul received its systematic
philos0phic form, and the Neoplatonic ethical position emerges as a
fully articulated moral rendering of the Platonic metaphysic.
Plotinus observes that the soul's design and all its properly
directed energies are contrived to effect its escape from "couplement,"
to overcome the promptings of the body by emulating or attaining
likeness to God.8 To effect this, the soul is not to model itself
on man or sensible nature, which is no more than the distorted image
of an image, but on the Supreme Exemplar. Its mode of perceiving is
properly through the "eye" of the soul, by noetic apprehension rather
than through the senses. It is this way of knowing which constitutes
the life of the intellect, the apperception of true reason, as con-
trasted with the doxastic, the sensibly generated products of opinion
and persuasion.9

Human virtue lies in the harmonious adjustment of the body to
the vision and will of the entrammeled soul, the submission of the
material to its informing spiritual impulse. Vice is discord, when
body seeks to command soul. Desire, emotion, evil, experience, and
sense perception belong to the animate and are not the province of
the soul, though they conspire to encumber its movement and hinder
its intellective act. Evil has no existence within Authentic Being,
but finds its source in selfawill, the continual down-going from the
good by which the slothful soul accepts that which is alien to its
own essential nature.lo Similarly, the material attains beauty only
through communion with the thought which flows from the Divine, by
submitting to its penetrant form. This is the condition which induces

pleasure. Ugliness lies in the self-imposed isolation from the One,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

50

and pain is the conscious recognition of this alienation, that the
body is in process of being deprived of soul.

The final stage of the descent, total alienation from the Good,
is the condition of matter, in which the active principle has
succumbed to an inert level of non-being. Ugliness and evil are
associated with the want of form or its overmastery by the material.
However, Plotinus denies that matter is an independent existing
principle against the One, as it performs the appointed service of
providing the receptive element for divine forms.11 The moral scale
which Plotinus has elaborated from the dialogues appears to have
mitigated the suggestion of a more defined cosmological duality, and
further affirms the all-embracing potency of the One. Plotinian matter
is not illusory, yet it is non-material in any physical sense. It is
treated simply as the principle of externality, the nether limit of
what has become in Plotinus a preeminently moral universe. By
qualifying matter into a moral category, and transforming the universe
into what is essentially a moral paradox, Plotinus has repressed the
spectre of Manicheanism which inevitably hovers over dualistic impli-
cations. But Manicheanism dies hard, even when subordinated and
subsumed in a unified conception of reality, and its moral implications
still serve to delineate the antithetical nature of non—being.

Although the Neoplatonist defines more rigorously the concepts
of immaterial and subjective existence, he affirms an ideal of theoretic
virtue rather than surrendering to mere practical moralizing. The
strain of personal asceticism which colours the Enneads, and the sub-

sequent eminence of Plotinus as the forerunner of medieval mysticism

 

51

have served to emphasize a significant change in the moral interpre-
tation of the Platonic cosmology.

Plotinus establishes his position as the classical exponent of
mysticism by claiming that the objects of our spiritual vision are
not outside the percipient, but inherent in that facet of the psyche
which contemplates the world-soul. By effecting a division of the One
as a triad of divine hypostases, Plotinus evolved as the third stage
in the process of emanation that which he described as the universal
soul. It "overflows from all sides into this mass, spreading within
it, penetrating it intimately, illuminating it as the rays of the sun
gild a dark cloud . . . . imparting to it movement, life and
immortality" (Epnggd§:V:l:2). The world soul has become the mystical
immanent principle of production and activity, and in consequence,
the individual soul has derived a real existence of its own in which
the universal laws lie encompassed within the individual. "The flight
hence . . . is not a matter of place, but of acquiring virtue, of
disengaging the self from the body; this is the escape from matter"
(Enneads I:8:7). The derangement of the body from the principle of
the Good has become, then, an inner spiritual detachment, and Plotinus
can dispense with the spatial metaphor which had characterized Platonic
myth.

Plotinian asceticism is evident in the philosopher's claim that
freedom or self independence belongs properly to the contemplative and
not to the active life. It may be recalled that the "upward dialectic,"

the path of the philosopher of the Phaedo, lay in forsaking sensible

 

appearances and turning to the unchangeable objects of discourse. But

the quest for ideal forms is, in terms of the generative world, a

 

52

seeking after death. "The true votary of philosophy," says Socrates,
'is always pursuing death and dying."12 (In terms of the Platonic
paradox, it might be considered as an ascent from death to life.)

In order to affirm the material world as an integral aspect of the
self-perpetuating whole, Plato is forced to bridge the poles of his
paradox, and mind must complete the cosmic circuit and return to
resolve the relation of form to events. Timaeus is preeminently

the dialogue of the return, the "downward dialectic" by which mind
returns to the material. The Re blic, which explores the organic
relationship of soul and state (as Timaeus is built on the homology
of soul and cosmos), proposes the return of the philosopher king from
his contemplative pursuits as a necessary commitment to the political
processes of the state. The Platonic cycle of knowing, then, is from
death to life, from life to death. The career of the philosopher king
in carrying his vision to the ggmgg, is a perilous one, however, and
the parable of the Orphic myth furnishes a discomforting precedence
in portraying the plight of the mundane soul at the hands of the
demiurgic Titans. Plotinus, who took comfort in the consolations of

asceticism was,.perhaps, even less anxious to hazard a return.

iii
Heraclitan thought, as well as that of the later Platonic and
Neoplatonic tradition, had developed a unified concept of reality,
but countered Platonic speculation by proposing as its cosmogenetic
principle the eternal conflict of dissident elements. The law of
eternal and recurrent motion which Plato describes in Cratylus (but

which he always attributes to the activity of the self-moved soul)

 

53

was for Heraclitus the immanent cosmological principle, with its
origin not in soul, but in the internal necessity of the material
universe. In the Heraclitan cosmos nothing is permanent, neither a

Nous nor Ananke. Birth and death, growth and decay, are the conditions

 

of its origin as well as its continued vitality. All is involved in
unremitting process; there can be nothing fixed, no peripatetic first
mover or first cause other than absolute motion and eternal flux.

The Heraclitan world is rooted in the concept of primal fire,
but this itself undergoes ceaseless change, passing successively into
air and water.13 The Empedoclean primal elements are not fixed or
unchanging, but continually passing into one another. The sun itself
sinks to a diurnal death, passing into the surrounding ether, and thence
into the waters of the western sea.14 The three-fold transformation
and its reversal, the "way up" or return to the fiery element are
analogous with the daily life of the soul and the periodicity of the
world itself. Elemental fire is characterized not by the generative

impulse of the Platonic Nous, the benign impulse to imbue all with

 

penetrant form, but the tendency to descend into the strife of opposing
elements and transform its own essential character. Fragment XXVI
suggests the nature of Heraclitan "deity": "God is day and night,
winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger. But he under-
goes transformations, just as fire, when it is mixed with spices, is
named after the savour of each."

The Platonic Nggg_or the transcendentalism of a Xenophanes posit
as the center of Being, an Absolute which is indivisible and unmoved,

a condition of aspatial stasis. Anaxagoras and Plato effected the

   

 

 

51.

full separation of reason and materiality, and this concept of a
transcendent reason traditionally rests upon two defining character-
istics, that of identity, and that of pure separation. Anaxagoras
proposed the divorce of reason from materiality, while Plato
established the complete transcendence of the ideal world. The
transcendent ideal, however, is completely untenable from the
Heraclitan point of view, in which the world intelligence itself is
committed to universal process. The Heraclitan world abhors stasis,
and derives its own characteristic harmony or unity from opposition
itself. "God" ceaselessly takes new forms: His is a hylotheistic
immanence rather than an unsullied transcendence. While Xenophon and
the Platonic tradition stood opposed to the manifold, the Heraclitan
cosmos thrives on the diverse, and derives its unity from including
the manifold within itself.

The Heraclitan "God" is, in effect, a Divine Law or Universal
Reason which orders the universal process, but he is in no way remote
from it, his nature being absolute motion. Heraclitus commonly calls
this unity of the whole "Fate," "Justice," "God," "Will," or "Zeus,"
but it is clear that in doing so he intended no more than to appeal
to traditional forms and concepts in order to render his own thought
intelligible. Fundamentally, he was unalterably opposed to anthrOpo-
morphic conception.

The greatest source of dissatisfaction with the Heraclitan system
probably lay in what seemed to be its apparent disregard for the habit
of mind which characterizes the unific impulse which ordered Platonic
thought. The "harmony" which Heraclitus had projected, offered but

cold comfort to the soul in the throes of an embattled life or death.

 

 

 

55

Yet, as G.T.W. Patrick has observed, Heraclitus had evolved a
principle in his Universal Law which imparts an overriding meta-
physical stability to the impermanent world of experience. "He
nearly formulated the concept that the one permanent abiding element
in a universe of ceaseless change is mathematical relation."l5

Act in the Platonic world is essentially a psychic attribute.

The imprisoned, but essentially inviolate soul, animates the genera-
tive world and finally overcomes the bonds of matter and embarks on
its homeward flight. Matter without the vital principle, or matter
which has encumbered and enslaved it, is inert. The source of all
motion lies solely in man's intellectual being and its participation
in pure Intellect. But in Heraclitus, it would seem that the vital
perception is rooted in the senses, and that the motive source of
human action lies in the emotions. Understanding is not conferred on
human nature, whose capacity to surrender to the universal law is
measured in terms of his receptivity to it. But receptivity in a
Heraclitan world carries no suggestion of a personal or ascetic passi-
vity, rather, it implies the pure desire for activity, the thirst to
live one's life in accordance with perceptible cosmic activity by
abandoning oneself to desire and conflict.

Conceivably, the hero of a Heraclitan myth might find his own
proper role in the way of the world, wracked on the wheel of necessity.
By his own volition, he is impelled into the arena of conflicting
experience and warring circumstance, not as a mere sensationalist,
but as one who has found the vision of reality and the act of Becoming

inseparable from the turmoil of the human and cosmic condition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

56

The Heraclitan position, which identifies the motive source of
human action with the emotions, finds but an echo in the Platonic
dialogues, where its implications would appear to be almost entirely
alien to the Platonic position. The S osium, however, suggests that
love, rather than the quest for a purely intellectual correspondence,
might stimulate the motive energies of the soul. The myth of Eros,
the inciter of souls toward his mother Aphrodite Ouranos, supernal
beauty, or the soul freed from matter, suggests something more than
a frigid intellectual attraction. Plotinus' own interpretation and
elaboration of this myth as it appeared in the Phaedrus and the
S osium, reveals his own interest in the psychological aspect of
the intellective act, and suggests an attempt to render the Platonic
myth somewhat more compatible with his own predilections.16 It is
likely, however, that he would have regarded his own reading of the
myth as no more than a clarification of what had already been latent
in the Platonic account. Here Plotinus discusses the emotional nature
of the attraction of the soul for the Beautiful: "Now everyone recog-
nizes that the emotional state for which we make this 'Love' responsible
rises in soul's aspiring to be knit in the closest union with some

beautiful object. . . ."17

In the Enneads, andamong the later
exponents of mysticism, the desire of the soul for fu1fillment is cast
in terms which portray vividly the intensity of the psychic experience.
That the soul desires to be at one with its divine source is constantly
in evidence in the Platonic dialogues. But because Plato had hyposta-

tized the human faculty of reason into God, the characteristic

rationalism of his universe tends to determine the nature of all its

 

57

processes. In spite of the asceticism which colours Plotinus'
writings, and perhaps, because of it, his personal narrative acquires
an emotionally charged poetic character which often brings to his
writings the intensity of religious experience. The Plotinian concept
of ecstasy, and Plotinus' accounts of his own experiencing of Godhead
in an ineffable act of identification bring about a fusion of religion
and philosophy which contrasts forcibly with the rational restraint
of the dialogues. In this respect, Plotinus might be considered as
having effected, or at least having emphasized the reintegration of
the emotions and intellect as the vital response of the soul in its
pursuit of the One.

The two movements which constitute the Platonic soul journey, the
systole or flight from the multiform to the One, and the contrary
diastolic emanation from the One to the Many are understood as aspects
or processes of a unified Absolute providing metaphysical stability to
the cosmos as well as imposing a unified field for ethical inquiry.
The two poles of Platonic experience in which ngg and Apgpkg enact the
archetypal combat of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, are
subsumed in a vision of universal self-perpetuation, an eternal act
of Becoming sustained by the ineffable presence of a peripatetic
unmoved first cause.

The Heraclitan world with its incompletely defined moral centre,
in which an awareness of the nature of Divine Law serves merely to
reconcile one with the vicissitudes of the human condition, rather
than procure for him the means of effecting his own salvation, gives
way to the Platonic microcosmic arrangement of soul, history, cosmos,

and state. With the inclusion of the state within this homologous

 

58

structure, morality and cosmology fall into a unified pattern
culminating in the identity of the Good with the One. Systole
therefore becomes the condition which is morally relevant to human
action and conduct, while diastole is largely a matter of cosmic
necessity and logical coherence. It is this, the systolic journey
toward God, which elicited the fervid emotional responses of the
Neoplatonists. Plotinus had associated freedom with the contemplative
rather than the active life, and it is this spiritual agrophobia
which appears to have coloured much of subsequent Neoplatonic
tradition.18 The ascent to the One or the ineffable awareness of
Godhead with which Plotinus associated ecstasis provided the over-
whelming moral focus and emotional immediacy which perpetuated
Neoplatonic thought.

The reaction which the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonists,
More, Cudworth, Glanvil, and Burthogge, launched against Hobbesian
materialism, in upholding the concrete unity of life and spirit, was
cast in the mould of the traditional pattern. Opposing analysis and
the Cartesian dualism of spirit and matter, More concentrated almost
solely on the reality of spirit in its act of Becoming, and showed
little concern at all with the problems of matter and the soul's
descent into generation.

The Cambridge Platonists found in Plotinus their spiritual
mentor, and in the syncretist efforts of the Alexandrian Platonists,
their dialectical procedure. The enormous eclecticism of their
pursuits led them to mine the workings of the Plotinian pantheism,
Jewish philosophy, the writings of the gnostics and the mystics, the

Rosicrucians, and the Cabala, and to synthesize an unwieldy composite

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

:

f ,7...
t” I ' ’ ’ '

59

 

of precedent and sanction for their own fusion of Platonism with
the Christian moral ethos. Their overruling preoccupation was
with the spiritual and pietistic significence of their hetero-
geneous doctrine rather than its purely logical aspects.

As had Pico della Mirandola before him, More himself had
little difficulty in adapting his sources to his own syncretic
pietism. The Cabala provided a cosmogeny remarkably consistent
with that of the Neoplatonists. The Cabalistic universe, as an
emanation of the Sephiroth, the corresponding tripartite font of
illimitable Being, descends in a hierarchy of created forms to the
lowest ebb of spirit,matter. The ascent, moreover, is perfectly
consonant with the Neoplatonic account. The ascent of the Sephi-
rotic ladder, or Mount Abeignos, the symbolic mountain which the
hermetic initiate must scale, is effected by an annihilation of
self and a condition of ecstasis achieved through obedience to a
succession of traditional initiatory disciplines.

Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, managed to preserve the Platonic
heritage in spite of the unfriendly philosophic temper of the
eighteenth century. His translations and commentaries, moreover,
appear to have played an important role in the establishment of the
romantic reaction against the "age of enlightenment." Plato was
henceforth perpetuated as "Taylor's Plato," and the Taylor trans-
lations served as canon well into Yeats's own day. Yeats himself
appears to have looked upon the new Jowett translation with its air
of contemporaneity and suggestion of a "scientific scholarship" with

some mistrust.

 

60

Like More, Taylor had reacted against the spiritual aridity
which he found in contemporary thought, but as a dedicated
classicist, Taylor showed little sympathy for More, Pico, or
Ficino, whose efforts to reconcile Christianity with Platonism
acted, he felt, to the detriment of both. This in itself might
have enabled Taylor to right the imbalance which Neoplatonism had
imposed upon Platonic thought, had not Taylor, in spite of his
title, been himself an avowed Neoplatonist. Taylor's glosses on
the dialogues are almost entirely derived from Plato's own Neo-
platonic commentators, and Taylor further indulged his fascination
for the involved methods of Neoplatonic exegesis in his trans—
lations of their own works.

The mainstream of Platonist thought then, acquired a dominant
moral tone which characterized the upward dialectic almost to the
exclusion of the other half of the Platonic cosmology, the
demiurgic aspect of Being. Plato himself appears to have been
concerned principally with these aspects of theocentric experience,
and although he effected a dialectical or mythic nexus between
the two in the cosmology of Timaeus, he seems to have reached no
emotional reconciliation. The result was that the Neoplatonists
produced what might be described as a pietism rather than a
comprehensive dialectic of Being.

Yeats's own dissatisfaction with this aspect of the "Platonic
pathos" may well have been fed by his enthusiasm for Heraclitus.
It is clear, at least, that Heraclitus provided a philosophic

sanction for stabilizing the imbalance of the Platonic impulse.

 

 

61

The most repugnant aspect of the Platonic cosmos was for Yeats,
as it had been for Blake before him, its traditional association
with a "reasoning" deity, and the soul's reluctance to affirm
the experience of generation.

I have endeavoured to outline in the briefest manner those
positions held by the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Heraclitan
schools which appear to be relevant to Yeats's own speculations.
Yeats was, in the course of his lifetime, continually preoccupied
with the claims and solutions offered by these traditions. And
yet, in spite of his fascination with Platonic thought and
imagery, Yeats appears to have been just as often repelled by
the implications of the Platonist or primary position. He repeat-
edly resorts to the gnomic Heraclitan fragments as a sort of anti-
dote or counter-truth to the Platonic argument. This sort of
ambivalence, however, reflects an already familiar and fruitful
dilemma, and served, moreover, to fashion Yeats's own dialectic
as well as the vocabulary itself with which he realized in his
art the conflict between Being and Becoming.

Plato has recognized in Timaeus and in the Republic what
has been called the downward dialectic, or the necessity of con-
fronting the existential, although he had accorded it short shrift.
The Neoplatonists had ignored this almost entirely in their
obsession with primary orientation, but heraclitan Speculation
revels in the mire and conflict which constitutes antithetical
experience. Each point of view served to clarify much of what

already lay in Yeats's own preoccupations, his fascination with

 

 

 

 

62

the cosmic duel of Being and Becoming. Plotinus might well have
served to clarify a question which disrupted the somewhat erratic
course of Thg_5hadogy Egtggg. In the Enneadg the Platonic
metaphor of spatial separation gives way to a principle of
immanence or incarnate Being which led Yeats to pursue its impli-

cations in terms of anima mundi or the "world soul" throughout the

 

whole canon of the Neoplatonists and the Cambridge Platonists.

And yet, the world of Plotinus and his followers, ascetic, moralized,
spiritualized, and immaterial as it was, scarcely found a symp
pathetic emotional response in the Yeats who learned to cast his

lot with the experiential and the concrete. Platonism and the Neo-
platonic pietismmight well have satisfied Yeats's temperament in his
early career, but it did not in itself provide the rounded view of life
he sought with his maturity. Heraclitus too, offered a principle

of immanence, but one which affirmed and glorified the changing
world of Becoming with an intensity which matched the primary
enthusiasm of the Neoplatonist or mystic. But Yeats's solution

lay neither with Plato nor Heraclitus alone; it sought to explore
that vital resolution between these which might be effected by a

historical, aesthetic, or personal integration, Unity of Being.

 

 

 

 

ll J'I\ {'41: L

 

 

 

CHAPTER III

The Daimon: The Failure of Neoplatonism

 

 

 

‘_.
E‘Ln'gzi

 

 

. . . ....-. a. -
.e‘flgfifirfiir’fl‘” '

 

Although acquiring a unique character from its fusion with

the dialectic of the Four Faculties, Yeats's conception of the
daimon, as it is described in A Eigigg, finds its roots in a
number of traditional sources as well as experiences of an en-
tirely personal nature. I have chosen to examine the role of the
daimon in Yeats's cosmology, not only because it exemplifies the
poet's habit of refashioning traditional sources in accordance
with his own personal predilections, but because the figure of the
daimon emerges as the agent or mediator between primary and anti-
thetical being. The daimonic role effects the nexus of theo-
centric and existential experience and anticipates Yeats's
formulation of Unity of Being as a psychological, cultural and
historic solution to their opposition. The most obvious sources
for the account of the daimon are Platonic in origin, but it was
characteristic of Yeats to seek out contrasting accounts and tra-
ditions in order to supplement what he recognized as the onesided—
ness of Platonic experience. Yeats's eagerness to embrace con-
trasting points of view and to exhume a formidable array of
esoteric precedence is not mere perversity, but the poet's attempt
to comprehend in a symbolic system the ambivalence and diversity
of human experience.

Yeats's formulation of the "daimonic nature" is characteristic

64

 

65

of his customary practise of feeding and fortifying personal
predilection with the full authority of traditional precedent.

"We are starved," his instructors complain, and it is apparent
that in his final version of A Eigign, Yeats did his utmost to
satisfy their hunger for metaphor.1 "We have come to give you
metaphors for poetry,” they insist, but it is Yeats himself who
must clothe those metaphors in substantial dress. In the portions

of A Vision where he feels that his system is still threatened

 

with the spectre of abstraction, Yeats offers his hurried apology
and proceeds with apparent misgivings.2

This does not appear to have been entirely the case of the
earlier 1925 version, which is characterized by a more cautious,
tentative approach to the subject. Yeats first disowns authorship
of his system, and speaks of it as a net woven for ”the herring
fisher" which might, when drawn from the depths, repay the poet's
efforts with a rewarding harvest? With this in mind, the 1925
version might be considered as merely a preliminary sketch anti-
cipating the subsequent elaboration of the final published version.
Drawn from his own experience, both personal and literary, A

Vision represented a commitment to a systematic arrangement of

 

this experience, which would serve as a program for future poetic
growth. With its help, Yeats might seine the confused tide of his
own observations, gathering in that which would serve to clothe

his thought in a coherent symbolic whole. In preparation for his
1937 edition, Yeats embarked on an intensive reading program, one

which immersed him in a flood of history and philosophy, grist for

.. ‘.
'- " '
C ,‘r
:- '

‘-r

 

 

the mill which would charge his thought with the resonant metaphor
of his poetic vision.

The diligence with which a number of Yeats's commentators
have ransacked his literary and philosophical readings and the
repositories of traditional symbols as a means of performing their
exegeses, has often been sadly misdirected. Those who have laboured
to compile the QAgggg Ordinarig of the numerous traditions with
which Yeats was familiar, applying them as a touchstone to the
“total meaning" of his poetny, exhibit a lamentable indifference
to the dietinction proposed by Coleridge between prosaic fancy
and the alchemy of poetic imagination. Yeats was undoubtedly less
devoted to conscientiously preserving the contextual integrity of
his sources than those he chose to damn as “pgariah dogs, devourers
of dead symbol."4

Yeats's poetic system, as it is elaborated in A 1132.39, and
embodied in his poetry, involves a highly personal and often idio-
syncratic synthesis of traditional forms and thought. A M23
proposes a systematic dramatization of experience in which values
are constantly shifting and realigning themselves about fundamental
antitheses. Had Yeats evolved an inert abstraction from traditional
precedent as a program.for his poetry, he would have committed his
future career as poet to allegory. Coleridge, who also defined
character as rooted in the play of antitheses, was, as was Yeats
himself, fully aware that the complexity of human experience was
not to be reduced to a simple mechanical shuffling between extremes,
but involved "the infinite gradations between opposites which form

the play and all the interest of our intellectual and moral being.”5

 
 

 

 

 

67

Although in his 1937 edition Yeats must have felt that he had

finally achieved a systematic account of human experience which
allowed for infinite variation and modification, in reality, A
11331.93 could never be completed, it could only grow and deepen

with the mind of its creator.

ii

As Richard Ellmann has pointed out, the term "daimon" enters
the Yeatsian vocabulary as early as 1895 in an essay on Verlaine
in which it suggests no more than a striking, if somewhat limited,
metaphor.6 Yeats's title as an initiate of the Hermetic Students
of the Golden Dawn, Qgggp _e_s_t Dag Inverflg, implied the opposition
inherent in the daimonic conception, and probably drew on standard
hermetic authority, in particular the persistent doctrine of the
”subtle body" which G.R.S. Mead had traced to its Byzantine and
Neoplatonic origins:7 The fuller implications of the daimon as
an integral figure in Yeats's evolving system appear to have been
consciously grasped when, as Yeats claimed, he encountered his
spiritual interlocutor and daimonic mentor, Leo Africanus. Yeats
recounts with some skepticism, but apparent fascination, his
subsequent correspondence with Africanus, in which the poet acted
the double role of interrogator and surrogate pedagogue for his
spiritual tutor, a form of automatic writing which anticipates that
which in A 13.3149 he would attribute to his wife 's mediumship.
Yeats chose to recognize in his dialogue with a personal daimon
the affirmation of his own theory of the mask as a cosmic rather

than merely a limited psychological principle. The msk, as Yeats

 

 

68

had conceived of it, had hitherto derived its form from.a wiSh
projection of the individual will or ego, but it was not
necessarily relevant, as Yeats might have wished it, to anything
beyond the scope of personal activity. By establishing a link
between two orders of being, the spiritual context of the daimon
and his mundane interlocutor, Yeats extends the dialectic of the
mask into an overriding metaphysic, so that history and the cosmos
align themselves about a single psychic process. Africanus had
obligingly suggested to Yeats the relevancy of the daimonic min-
istry to the historical as well as individual development: "What
was Christ himself but the interlocutor of the pagan world, which
had long murmured in his ear, at moments of self abasement &
death, & thereby summoned."8 The idea that the daimon ushers not
only the individual soul through its phasal transitions, but his-
tory or human activity as a whole, finds its final enunciation in
é;!igiggz I'Nations, cultures, schools of thought may have their
‘Egigggg. These Qgimons mbve through the Great Year like individual
men and women and are said to use men and women as their bodies,
to gather and disperse these bodies at will."9 It is this daimonic
intercession which is responsible, in the essay "Dove or Swan,” for
the destiny of Hellenic civilization. "Certainly their tribes
after a first multitudinous revelation-dominated each by its
Meg and oracle-driven—broke up a great Empire and established
in its stead an intellectual anarchy."10
In A Vision, Yeats describes the daimon as the “ultimate self"

of man, a being enacting a vital reciprocal relationship with its

 

69

interlocutor, a reciprocation which serves to dramatize the role
of the mask, which had been previously thought of as no more than
an inert projection of the will. The exchange between man and his
daimon is frequently depicted as an attraction and repulsion
analogous to that between the sexes, and by 1925 Yeats habitually
thought of it as a confrontation with a female principle enacting
its sexual rapport: I'M'an and Qgiggg face each other in perpetual
conflict or embrace."ll In 22; Amiga Silentia Lana; the daimonic
opposition suggests a similar pattern: "The Qgiggg comes not as
like to like but seeks its own opposite, for man and 222225 feed
the hunger in one another's breast."12
At this point it might be useful to summarize the nature of

the four interrelated Faculties as Yeats describes them in A Vision.

 

It must be understood, however, that Yeats further elaborates his
design by proposing four interlocking "Principles" or spiritual
counterparts which inform and complement the operation of the
Faculties. The Faculties, however, dramatize the process of the
human personality only in its earthly sojourn between birth and
death. The contrapuntal Principles extend the pattern to the life
of the soul in its mediary path between successive incarnations.
Consequently, it is the Faculties which are conscious, and which
impose their dialectic upon human action in time, thereby shaping
the course of human history. Moreover, Yeats seems anxious to dis-
claim responsibility for assaying the "forbidden gates of Pluto"

in his account of the Principles in the essay "The Soul in Judgment."

However, A Vision is filled with such disclaimers: a prevalent

 

7O

ironic tone, the occasional buffo circumstances behind Yeats's

 

encounters with his spectral "instructors," and the high comedy

of the mask enacted in his incredible account of Huddon, Duddon
and O'Leary, a burlesque which has much in common with Egg glgygg
93922, which Yeats finally exercised only by turning to mockery
those speculations which he had once approached with temerity and
a tragic sincerity. Was Yeats apologetic in l‘The Soul in Judgment"
for a systematization which he felt had not yet managed to banish
the spectre of abstraction which the whole formulation of the final
version of A Eigigg was intended to exorcise? He later suggests
that the value of "The Soul in Judgment" lies, or will lie, in
shaping his poetry yet to come: "I set down what follows less for
present use than because at some later date I may return to the
theme and wake these dry astrological bones into breathing life."13
Yeats appears to have found his account of life after death a
necessary component in the dialectical integrity of his system,

but had, as yet, failed to subsume it completely in metaphor.

The Faculty of the Will, Yeats proposes, is synonomous with
ego, the "first matter of the personality,n the unarticulated
composite of personal feelings, emotions and tendencies whose
energies have not yet been channeled and directed towards a single
object of desire.

Mask is the sum of one's personal aspirations, everything he
is not, and all that he wishes to become. As a projection of the
ego, it is predisposed in terms of the various components of ego
and the ego's own recognition of itself. Consequently, one might

choose either a true or false mask.

 

 

 

 

71

Creative Mind is defined as Intellect, not in the sense of
a purely rational faculty, but the Intellect as Yeats understood
it before its historical dissociation of sensibility, the total
energies of the mind which are consciously constructive.

Body of Fate, the Fourth Faculty, constitutes the contextual
physical and mental environment.

By virtue of its reciprocal relationship with man, the daimon
shares in the Four Faculties. The Will of man is the mask of the
Daimon, and the Creative Mind of Man is the Body of Fate of the
Daimon, so that the two are locked interdependently, sustaining
and opposing one another, drawing upon their mutual energies.
Yeats provides the following account:

If one will think of a man as Will and Creative Mind
alone, perpetually face to face with another being who
is also Will and Creative Mind, though these appear to
man as the object of desire, or beauty, and as fate in
all its forms. If man seeks to live wholly in the
light, the Daimon will seek to quench that light in
what is to man wholly darkness, and there is conflict
and Mask and Body of Fate becomes evil; when, however,
in antithetical man the pgimonic mind is permitted to
flow through the events of his life (Daimonic Creative
Mind) and so to animate his Creative Mind, wit t
putting out its light, there is Unity of Being.
Elsewhere, Yeats explains his elaborate game of psychic charades
in terms of the Commedia dell'Artg. Since Yeats insistently plots
his psychomachia in distinctly dramatic terms, the analogy is
appropriate.

The daimon, then, acts as our mentor as well as our frustrator,
turning the mind on itself in a condition of internecine war, or
leading it to the achievement of a vital harmony between its in-

dividual elements. Yeats identifies the psychic harmony which has

_&W

 

 

 

72

been effected through daimonic intercession with Unity of Being,
that individual or historic collusion of antitheses when "Intellect
and emotion, primary curiosity and the antithetical dream are for
the moment one."15

Socrates, it appears, was attended by a similar "daimonion,"
and he tells us in the Apglogz that it appeared to him frequently,
Opposing him.even in the most trifling matters, a circumstance
which was to be turned against him.by his enemies in his own in-
dictment.l6 Socrates‘ personal gadfly, however, was more than a
mere frustrator, and Plutarch attributed to the philosopher's
attunement with his daimon, the source of his greatness, or as
Yeats might have it, his Unity of Being. Plutarch writes: "As
human speech affects the ear, so the Logoi of the demons directly
affect the human soul. What ordinary people experience only in
the relaxation of sleep is given to human beings with a pure, serene
soul-whom.we then call holy or demonic--in their waking lives.
Such a human being, free from.disharmony and turmoil, was Socrates."
Yeats too, had proposed in‘gliigigg that the products of our dreams
and fantasies find their source in the Creative Mind of the daimon
which expresses her energy or bias .18 In £93 £11.19; sgentia am,
where Yeats identifies the daimon with the souls of the dead in
the trials of their purification, he describes the daimon as the

'vehicle of anima mundi, creating the intuitive link between anima

 

mundi and.gnigg,hominis: "The dead living in their memories are,
I am persuaded, the sources of all that we call instinct. . . ."19
The tradition of Greek demonology upheld the common view that

the daimonic realm acted as mediator between the human and divine.

l7

 

_—ii.u_4 .‘

73

Although a pertinent passage from Heraclitus' Fragments has given
rise to innumerable interpretations, E.R. Dodds maintains in a
convincing argument, that in Fragment CXXI, Heraclitus had
attempted to 1:111 the popular Greek daimonic tradition.20 Dodds
translates it as "character is destiny," and it may with equal
authority be construed as "A man's character is his daimon."
Yeats, however, in 29; Amie; Silentg _L1m_§._e., quotes it from memory
as “the‘Qgiggg is our Destiny."2l Yeats's memory may have played
him.false, but it is clear that he thought of Heraclitus as pro-
viding a sanction for his own concept of daimon, that which was
more compatible with the polytheistic implications of the popular
tradition.

Timaeug tells us that the god gives to everybody a daimon as
part of his soul, while the Hepgblic affirms freedom of choice and
moral responsibility in claiming that the soul is free to select
its daimon or way of life before it enters the cycles of incarna-
tion: "The demon will not cast a lot for’you; but you.will choose

the demon."22

Thus, character is not confined to earthly life, but
passes across the threshold of spirit between its succesive incarna-
tions. Yeats describes the saint and the love he brings to God as
having been founded.under somewhat different circumstances in a
past life, pillowed "upon a woman's breast.”23
In order to preserve the preeminence of the active intellect,
Plate is forced to stress a correspondence between it and the daimon,
and consequently, in the Statesman, the supreme power is referred

to as the greatest daimon.24' It is probable that in the Sympgsium

 

74

he conceived of the principle of Eros as subordinate to the over-
ruling daimon.

The Socratic ”daimonion" received conscientious amplification
at the hands of Plutarch, Apuleius, and Proclus; and what had
once been myth assumed the characteristics of a rigid schematisation.
Philippos of Opus effected an ingenious union of the daimon with
the five elements, while Xenccrates defined their nature in terms
of the geometry of triangular forms. Dionysius the Areopagite
appears to have associated them with the trones, cherubim, and > :r‘- J
seraphim of the flowering science of angelology. Yeats appears to
have been at least conversant with this final permutation of the
daimonic tradition. He relates that "Lionel Johnson was fond of
quoting from Dionysius the Areopagite, 'He has set the borders of
his nations according to his angels', but Swedenborg thought that
all angels had once been men.”25 Johnson's observation, Yeats was
bound to recognize, would have applied as well to the office of
the daimon, but Yeats would take sides with Swedenborg in placing
the origin of angels among the dead.

Plutarch's myth of Timarchos provides what is perhaps the
classic account of the daimonic nature. Timarchos, hidden in the
cave of Trophonios, learns from an oracular voice that the daimons
are the stars which he sees floating above the darkness. They are,
it is explained, that part of the reason which has not suffered
the mingling of soul and body, that which serves to buoy up the
encoupled soul, a guardian to which it is inevitably conjoined,

whether willingly or unwillingly.

 

75

Some [souls] are merged entirely into body, and are
disturbed by passions throughout their whole being during
life. Others are in part mixed up with it, but leave
outside their purest part, which is not drawn in, but is
like a lifeebuoy which floats on the surface, and touches
the head of one who has sunk into the depth, the soul
clinging around it and being kept upright. . . . That
which is left free from dissolution most persons call
mind, taking it to be some thing inside themselves
resembling the reflected images in mirrors; but those
who are rightly informed know thgg it is outside theme
selves and address it as spirit.

The Trismegistic tractates, as G.R.S. Mead has indicated, are deeply

tinged with Neoplatonist influence, and the "subtle body" after

death, known as the image (eidolon, image, simulacrum) or shade

27 The term

(gggg, 22939) permeates the Hermetic tradition.
"Augoeides" had received a new currency under Bulwer Lytton in
his novel‘ggggni, in which he described it as the radiant sphere
of the soul, unconstrained by couplement. The doctrine of the
subtle body appears to have recognized the existence of two forms
of manifestation: a hollow image or phantom of the physical body
after death, and a more substantial daimonic nature which retains
the character and personality of its earthly life.

F.A.C. Wilson describes Yeats's theory of the daimon as
"perhaps his most significant departure from orthodox Platonic
theory,” and bases his argument on the fact that the Platonist
daimon came to man as "like to like,“ while the relationships be-
tween Yeats's daimon and his interlocutor subsist; through its

opposition.28 Wilson cites a passage from‘£g§.Amica Silentia‘ggggg

 

in which Yeats appears to graft on the Platonic daimonic tradition
the more congenial doctrine of Heraclitan opposites: “Plutarch's

precepts. . .have it that a strange living man may win for Daimon

 

 

76

an illustrious dead man; but now I add another thought: the
Daimon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite,
for man and Daimon feed the hunger in one another's breast."29
Yeats hag effected a permutation of the orthodox Platonist account
of the daimon, a redefinition which was imposed by his awareness
of the implications behind his own formulation of the contrasting
roles of primary and antithetical man. The Platonic daimon, howb
ever, does not‘gggg “like to like" to a deserving man, as Yeats
had implied; it provides an inherent link between the encoupled
soul and its divine source which has never,in effect, been severed.
One might think of the worthy soul in its sojourn in the generative
‘world as strung on a leash which serves it as a constant reminder
of its proper master, and which will eventually recall it to its
preper home. In effect, the daimon is no more than a convenient
personification bridging the inevitable metaphorical spatialization
of‘flggg and the encoupled soul, accounting for the loyalties of
the soul to the hypostasized divinity which it bears within itself.
The Platonic account would perhaps furnish a rationale for
Yeats's concept of primary man, whose role is to abjure the mask
and surrender to an external order, but it does not serve the role
of antithetical man who must constitute an “inner order" by seeking
mastery over all that he recognizes as Opposing him. The role of
the Platonic daimon, then, is associated with the primary upward
dialectic of the One, but the antithetical "path of the serpent"
represented for Yeats the obverse side of primary experience, a
diastolic impulse through which the soul acquires its mastery by

imposing its own forms on discrete experience. The Platonic daimon

 

”

77

 

would scarcely serve Yeats as a suitable mediator for his anti-
thetical man, and he was forced to reconstruct his daimon from
the more congenial materials provided by the Heraclitan doctrine
of opposites. Yeats had on a previous occasion,it will be
remembered, understood Heraclitus as affirming the daimonic tra-
dition. Mereover, in the light of his repeated borrowings from
the Fragments, Yeats appears to have looked to Heraclitus as the
champion of antithetical experience. However, in this instance
at least, Yeats need not stand accused of toppling the Platonic
tradition. His daimons, which are still heavily indebted to Plate,
are merely the supernatural machinery which account for that
obverse function of the Platonist cosmology which he felt the

Platonist tradition, as primary theocentric speculation, had slighted.

iii

The concept of the daimon might well pose a threat to the
Platonic concept of the One by proposing a pantheon or plurality
of gods, each exercising an individual potency. Plato had fore-
stalled such a conclusion by associating the gods with the One,
and Plotinus upheld the orthodoxy by placing ”all the gods" within
the figug. Plotinus had been content to find the origins of
plurality in the intelligible world, but, as Yeats suggests, paved
the way for the belief that the autonomous daimonic natures become
limitless: IIt was perhaps obvious, when Plotinus substituted
the archetypes of individual men in all their possible incarna-

tions for a limited number of Platonic Ideas that a Greatest Year

 

78

for whale and gudgeon alike must exhaust the multiplication
table."30

The last major figure of the Platonic school, Proclus, sought
the highest authority for multiformity, and projected the origin
of plurality into the highest stage of emanation, the First
Authentic Existent. To this end, he posited a congeries of
"Divine Henads," self completed unities emanating from the Primary,
through which the One is mediated to the ends of the universe.
Because of their relative position, below the infinite, they must
of necessity be finite in number, but they are nevertheless in-
finite in their potency since they remain unbounded in their re-
lation to what lies below. By accepting such an arrangement, Proclus
was able to preserve the Neoplatonic practice of subordinating
Fate to the order of Providence. Nevertheless, it is apparent that
he developed what amounted to a highly sophisticated rationale for
polytheism.31

Both Henad and the Primal One participate in each other, the
Henad resembling a small world, each with its Primal sun, but
these "monads" are inevitably thought of as gods in themselves.
The order of Being, Proclus affirms, is in accordance with the pro-
vidential order of Henads, and the Henads are graduated correspond-
ingly, some more universal, some more particular, but it is the
universal which exercise the greatest causal efficacy.

Although Yeats associates the daimonic realm.with the Third
Emanation, the Egg M of the Plotinian hypostases, his
schematization owes much to the submerged tradition of Greek dai-

monology as it was reasserted and systematized by Proclus. I'I

 

79

shallg'he wrote,"when I come to write upon the Great Year of
antiquity, refer to the fact that Proclus had the same conception
and gave to the smallest living creature its individual year."32

In Book II of §,Vision, I'The Completed Symbol," Yeats pro-

 

poses a triadic schematization by which he attempts to identify
his Principles with the Plotinian hypostases. "With some hesi-
tation" he writes, "I identify the Celestial Body with the First
Authentic Existant of Plotinus, Spirit with his Second Authentic
Existant, which holds the First in its moveless circle; the
discarnate Daimons, or Ghostly Selves, with his Third Authentic /
zYl‘
Existant or soul of the world, which holds the Second in its X
moving circle."33 But Yeats is obviously dissatisfied with his
formulation, and is unwilling to accept the ordered hierarchy imp
plied in such a conception, just as he had shown himself unwilling
to accept the peripatetic concept of a First Authentic Existant
as a remote, unmoved mover bearing no immediate relation to human
activity.
But this diagram implies a descent from Principle to
Principle, a fall of water from ledge to ledge, whereas
a system symbolising the phenomenal world as irrational
because a series of unresolved antinomies, must find
its representation in a perpetual return to the starting
point. The resolved antinomy appears not in a lofty
source but in gze whirlpool's motionless centre, or be-
yond its edge.
In a footnote, he identifies the whirlpool as an antithetical
symbol, the descending water as primary.
Yeats's sentiments as well as his metaphor find their echo
in the earlier remarks of Michael Robartes in the playful account

of the maskings of Huddon, Duddon, and O'Leary: "Life is no series

 

 

80

of emanations from.divine reason such as the Cabalists [or Neo-
platonists] imagine, but an irrational bitterness, no orderly

descent from.level to level, no waterfall, but a whirlpool, a

gyro.“35

“All things are from antithesis," Yeats claimed, and when
he seeks that which overthrew the Platonic ncabinet of perfection,"
he offers the figure of Christ, the ultimate expression of all
that apposed Greek rationalism: nHe controlled what Neopythagorean
and Stoic could not-irrational force. He could announce the new
age, all that had not been thought of or touched, or seen, be-
cause he could substitute for reason, miracle."36 When the Greek
rationalist of Yeats's play'Ihg Resurrection encounters the risen
Christ, he is confronted with a living embodiment of the irration-
al, the miraculous order which gives the lie to his own passing
world, and recoils in horror, "The heart of a phantom is beating!"37

Yeats does not call into question the validity of primary
experience, although he does recognize that it bears little
apparent relevance to his times. In his 1930 diary he observes,
somewhat grudgingly, that many of the younger poets seemed to have
turned against the monotheistic system. In the same diary, Yeats
sets up the two conceptual modes which he finds at the root of
all human experience. The first is the single enduring reality
which he finds expressed in Shelley's Th2 Sensitive Plggt: "We
become aware of those of the first kind when some symbol, shaped
by the experience of itself, has descended to us, and when we

ourselves have passed, through shifting of the threshold con-

 

 

 

mg“;- -* ‘-"'“""

 

 

81

sciousness into a similar state."38 The experience which Yeats

has outlined in his Platonist reading of Shelley is essentially
unific, intuitive, permanent, and enduring. "The second kind,
because it has no universal virtue, because it is altogether
particular is related only to the soul whose creation it is. . . ."39

In his discussion of Paul Valery's Cimetiere again in.é
Eigigg, Yeats recounts his enthusiasm over the poet's initial
images: the "ouvrages purs d'une eternelle cause," and their
counterpoint with the nephemeral foam of life.”0 However, he
balks at what he recognized as a cultivated urbanity which leads
the poet, in a fashionably hollow lament, to deny the possibility
of immortality. Yeats turns to the memory of a young girl stand-
ing at the edge of the sea, singing of change and the passing of
civilizations, but with the imploring refrain "O Lord, let some-
thing remain.“ valery's testimony, and all the evidence of our
conscious rational being can but affirm transience and mortality,
but the cry of the spirit forever hungers for the consolations of
permanence and continuity. "I cannot imagine an age without metro-
politan poet and singing girl."41 Yeats, in effect, can imagine
nothing without the two principles which these figures embody,
and it is on these abiding truths which his vision must rest.

If Yeats's loyalties appear to alternate between the primary
and the antithetical, between the cry of the spirit and the lament
of the cosmopolitan, they find their counterpart in the doctrine
of the mask and the formulation of the Great Wheel, his account
of the transitional phases of soul and of history, which dramatize

the varying pursuits of the individual. Yeats had identified him!

 

82

self with solitary, antithetical man, hopelessly out of phase

in a primary dispensation. His efforts as a mythmaker to drama-
tize the history of the soul as cosmic process commit him to
reading into all experience that which he recognized as his own
nature, a practice which can only serve to compound his isolation
from the primary. But the kingdom of the post, to appease his
instinct for permanence, must provide for him as well, the king-
dom of God. His own system must porn with the fabric of the 7 ’ ‘
phenomenal world, but also trap in its whirling matrix the like-
ness of the incarnate God. Yeats's role as a poet is to achieve
this mythopoeic mastery, that which in A‘Eigigg, he had attributed
to Dante, who nin the Divina Commedia imposes his own personality

 

upon a system and a phantasmagoria hitherto impersonal; the King

has everywhere found his kingdom."42 In his commentary on the
Mandpgyg ypggighgg, he traces the elaborate system of correspondences
proposed by Indian thought, in which mind, heart, intellect, and

ego merge into Brahma, and exults in his discovery: "I found myself

reflected everywhere in the whole universe!"43

iv
"What if Christ and Oedipus, or, to shift the names, Saint
Catherine of Genoa and Michaelangelo, are the two scales of a
balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw?"44 The two vital prin-
ciples which, in A Eigigg, Yeats arrays upon his hyperbolic see-
saw, the historic, cosmic, and psychic principles, must owe their
efficacy to the presence of their opposing play-fellows. The

consequence, should Saint Catherine or Michaelangelo desert their

 

83

post, are painfully foreseeable. Without the presence of the
opposing party, there could be no game. Yeats writes in his 1930
diary: "could those two impulses, one as much a part of truth
as the other, be reconciled, or if one or the other could pre-
veil, all life would cease.”45 Reality, Yeats maintains, rests
with neither principle in itself, nor with a motionless point of
equilibrium between the two, but encompasses the whole continuing
process.

In order that two conflicting principles perpetuate themselves,
they must enter into a single circulation. Diastolic movement
must find its inevitable recourse in systole; systole must in turn
find its course in diastole.

. . .the ultimate reality must be all movement, all
thought, all perception extinguished, the two freedoms
unthinkably, unimaginably absorbed in one another.
Surely if either circuit, that which carries us into

man or that which carries us into God werzbreality, the
generation had long since found its term.

 

In the early version of’g Vision, Yeats had traced the tran-
sitional phases of the soul in the circuit of the Great Wheel, and
Michael Robartes had suggested comparing the universe to an egg.
But it is in the final version that the sphere, the "perfected
symbol” which Yeats claims to have taken from Nicholas of Cusa,
emerges as his figure of permanence and continuity beyond flux and
recurrence: “The sense for what is permanent, as distinct from
what is useful, for what is unique and different, for the truth
that shall prevail, for what antiquity called the sphere as dis-
tinct from the gyro. . . ."47

If ultimate reality is spheroid, Yeats maintains, it must

 

81+

remain unknowable. Subjected to our limited conceptual capacities
and the derangement of our senses, it can only be consciously
perceived in the imperfect terms of antinomies or a phasal
pattern. “All the symbolism in this book applies to begetting
and Birth," Yeats wrote of A Eigign, "for all things are a single
form which had divided and multiplied in time and space."48 The
mutations imposed by the conscious mind are not unlike those

which characterize Shelley's "charnel house” of the mutable world
in Agonai . The preconceptual "white radiance of eternity,“
shattered on the refracting dome of the sky, washes the world of
man in the fleeting and brilliantly deceptive hues which constitute
the limited perceptions of his finite mind. Having finally es-
tablished the ultimate nature of reality, Yeats can new claim that
the cones and tinctures of his system are but imperfect mirrors

of that reality, and "are in themselves pursuit and illusion."4'9

A Vision establishes the realm of the daimon within the phase-

 

less sphere, or the crucial thirteenth cone, which serves to miti-
gate the determinist inferences of Yeats's system by admitting

free will and deliverance from the cycles of generation, that which
each minor cycle has imperfectly mirrored in those phases alloted
to supernatural incarnation. But "life cannot exist at the dark
and full of the moon,n and because dispensed in time, the supernal
vision cannot be perfectly achieved. The sphere, incarnate in

the temporal flux, can at best offer direction and impetus, and

a visionary experience which must be fragmentary, momentary, what
Yeats has described as the sudden lightning. "We perceive in a

pulsation of the artery and after slowly decline."5o Because the

 

85

daimon partakes of primal unity,"all things are present in an
eternal instant,ll without temporal or spatial distinction, '"but
that instant is of necessity unintelligible to all bound to the
antinomies."51 Except through fleeting intuition, the mind which
is bound to succession can never approximate that which grasps
reality instantaneously. Could the Beatific Vision be experienced
in its overwhelming integrity, the gyres must cease, all movement
resolved. Man must be content with epiphany alone.

The reluctance which Yeats's instructors demonstrate in their
refusal to expatiate on the nature of the sphere, and their pre-
ference for dwelling on the processes of the phenomenal world, are
partially explained by their medium's chronic inability to com-
prehend that which they experience in its totality. Moreover, the
instructors come to be fed, and not as altruistic pedagogues.

They seek in the lives of the phenomenal world the means through
which they might constitute those personal syntheses which they
themselves had been unable to command in their previous life, there-
by achieving the perfected freedom of the soul which has resolved
all its antinomies. Consequently, their revelation is apt to be

as frustrating as it is illuminating.

In his 1930 diary, Yeats wrote:

I think that two conceptions, that of reality as a con-
geries of beings, that of reality as a single being,
alternate in our emotion and in history, and must always
remain something that human reason, because always sub-
ject to one or the other, cannot reconcile. I am always,
in all I do, driven to a moment which is the realisation
of myself as unique and free, or to a moment which is the
surrender to God of all that I am. I think that there

are historic cycles wherein one or the other predomi-
nates. . . .

 

86

Yeats has proposed two orders of being, those of Saint Catherine
and Oedipus, a primary or providential order, and an antithetical
"congeries of autonomous selves," an order of providences, which,
could they be intuitively or imaginatively grasped, are one, the
phases of a total sphere. The congeries which Yeats describes
as "autonomous beings each seeing all within its own unity," are
identifiable with the daimonic souls who serve as human destinies
in the act of achieving their own purification.53

Those beings which Yeats has proposed as the "providences"
of antithetical man, have much in common with the Henads of Proclus.
The Plotinian order, Yeats recognized, was shaped by the primary
tincture which characterized Plotinus' epoch, and which led hhm
to propose primary order as ultimate reality. Plotinus had only
supplied the beginnings for a rationale of the congeries, and
hesitated to follow those implications which would prove entirely
alien to his primary position-Platcnist loyalties. The Henads
of Proclus represent a departure from the primary impulse in pro-
posing a congeries of beings which threaten to acquire the
character of an autonomous polytheistic pantheon, were it not that
they, as well as the primal One, participate in all Being. Yeats
has, in effect, as had Proclus before him, pushed the principle of
plurality into a higher stage than that of the intelligible world,
yet retaining the essential unitive nature of his congeries.

Yeats had expressed his dissatisfaction with the hierarchical
conception of successive emanative levels (the waterfall) in their

relevance to a phenomenal world torn between primary and anti-

 

 

87

thetical experience, substituting for the Neoplatonic figure the
gyre as a symbol of recurrent process in the temporal dimension.
The gyre, however, and the waterfall (which Yeats never makes

use of as a poetic metaphor), as symbols of the two orders, are
consubstantial within the overriding efficacy of the ultimate
phaseless sphere. But in spite of Yeats's tentative proposal,
"with some hesitation I identify the Creative Body with the First
Authentic Existant of Plotinus," it is clear that the Plotinian
triad has undergone a radical transmutation; one that suggests
its decapitation.54 If this is the case, Yeats's most significant
modification of the Neoplatonisttradition lies not merely in the
perversity of his daimons, but in a radical adaptation of the
essential tripartite Godhead.

Yeats's descriptions of ultimate reality are understandably
confusing, often incoherent, necessarily fragmentary, but from
what we can gather from.his struggles to express the inexpressible,
it would appear to have little in common with a peripatetic unmoved
mover. More compatible with his own system is the second Plotinian
Emanation, Divine Thought or‘flggg, from which emanates the all-soul
or gins; m. A similar truncation is suggested in Proclus, who
posits no more than angaDdOEOL, the Primal One and the mediatory

order of Henads, in what is more akin to a dyadic arrangement.55*

* A diagram.illustrating these relationships is found at the end
of Chapter III.

 

__
Hedi

 

 

88

v
Although the Platonic tradition had sought to align the

figure of the daimon with that which Yeats understood as primary
orientation, for Yeats, the daimon was generally associated with
the chameleon path of antithetical experience. The motivation
behind this permutation lies perhaps deeper than the authority of
any philosophic tradition, but in the selfsame impulse by which
the mythopoeic mind tends to polarize its cosmos, to oppose the
noumenous with the demonic, heaven with hell. The experience of
the noumenous or the sacred inevitably evokes an ambivalent re-
sponse, the awesome sense of mystery which the aestheticians of
the sublime described as both humbling and exalting. More speci-
fically, the sacred elicits not only an attraction towards the
supernally desirable, but a fearsome revulsion as well, a
reluctance to surrender to the total demand of the noumsn. Man,
Mircia Eliade writes, "is called upon to make the supreme decision,
either to give himself over completely and irrevocably to sacred
things, or to continue in an uncertain attitude toward them."56
The noumenal then, offers to the imagination not only the concep—
tion of a primary, rational reality, but an irrational or demonic
phase of experience as well, the self-assertive recoil which seeks
to preserve the personal and individual integrity of wholly sub-
jective experience. The extreme expression of this response is an
"antithetical mysticism," a mysticism of horror, such as that
evolved by certain forms of eastern Tantrism, or the nonrational
demonic phase of the noumenous as elaborated within the Christian

cosmology by the German mystic Jakob Boehme.

 

Yeats's enquiries into Neaplatonic tradition and his sub-

sequent dissatisfaction with what he felt were its shortcomings
inevitably led him to seize upon those writers who offered a way
out of the impasse created by a solely rational or primary account
of experience. He appears to have found some consolation in
Proclus, under whom the Platonist orthodoxy was already totter-
ing, and in A M, he acknowledges the influence of Nicholas of
Cusa, whom he knew through Pierre Duh‘eme's Lg §zstéme d_u_ Mg.
Nicholas was a seminal figure in the late medieval protest against
the extreme rationalism of Thomism, and provided Yeats with the
final lineaments of his vision, the intuited sphere which Yeats
described as "Nicholas of Cusa's undivided reality which human
experience divides into opposites.” Georges Poulet claims that
the earliest extant reference to the sphere as such comes from a
twelfth century hermetic text: "Deus est sphaera cujuS' centrum
ubique, circumferentia nusquam," but the spheroid was tradition-
ally represented by those philosOphers from Parmenides on who
affirmed an absolute Being.57 It served as a figuration of divine
immensity, a metaphoric expression of eternity in which contraries
are reconciled in the divine life. By the analogical‘pagg‘pggntgtg
process which is characteristic of mythic expression, and which is
fundamental to Yeats's own system, the sphere was understood to be
relevant to all aspects of human life and experience as well as to
the divine. Incarnation makes manifest the infinite within the
finite, so that the sphere of divine vision manifests itself within

the narrow sphere of the corporeal. Yeats had found in Unity of

 

90

Being the expression of the individual and cultural integration
which overmasters the conflicting terms of experience. The analogi-
cal projection of the principle of Unity of Being as the perfected
sphere of cosmic process and integration witnesses the fundamental

inherence of Yeats's personal and universal vision.

 

91

* The following diagram attempts to illustrate the correspond-
ence between Yeats's "phaseless sphere," the @50g of Proclus, and
the Nous of Plotinus. Yeats and Proclus have, in effect, jettisoned
the unmoved mover, the first person of the Plotinian trinity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plotinian Trinity Proclus Yeats
ABSOLUTE
emanates
NOUS or DIVINE THOUGHT 650$ Phaseless sphere
(Universal intelligence ' (Resolved antinomies
which contains all par- and perfected daimons
ticular intelligences) who are no longer
efficacious as indi—
emanates vidual destinies)
ALL SOUL Providential Order Anima Mundi
of Henads. Each (Daimons and the
partakes of Oeog congeries of gods or
I o o o o o I destinies)
Couplement of soul Man confronted with Anima Hominis. (Man
and flesh. his individual confronting his
destinies. daimon)

Yeats describes the Plotinian trinity in hierarchical terms
(the waterfall). Although a diagram may imply as much, it is mis-
leading to conceive of Yeats's arrangement as a hierarchy, although
his own account of the ascent or purification of the soul in judg-
ment may suggest this. Temporalized man's inability to conceive of
the phaseless sphere which transcends the categories of his thought
leads him to think in terms of succession and antinomies (the gyro),
and to pursue but one of these alternatives at a time, in Yeats's
words, nto serve one master." These fundamental antinomies are seen
as primary and antithetical. Thus:

2%
The temporalized sphere
is recognized as God or

which are, i . Man, or anima hominis,
in reality, a fic principle. must either choose will-
one-the fully or surrender.
Agtithetical ’
phaseless The Surrender associates him
sphere is inter ret- i
sphere ed as a daimonic dispen- th primary being, choice

sation, a congeries of With antithetical.

individual realities.

 

CHAPTER IV

Unity of Being: Integration

 

The predisposition which led Yeats to divide his poetic

world into antinomies, and which eventually led him to conjoin
them as terms of an essential paradox, finds its expression in his
conception of Unity of Being, a principle which he extended through
a series of analogous relationships from the soul to the historical
continuum, and to the appointed roles of his artist, saint, sage,
and hero. In the 1925 version of A Eigign, Yeats wrote: "I wished
for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to
create as it chose, yet make all that it created, or could create, part
of the one history, and that the soul." Dante and the Greeks, he
maintained, had discovered such a system.1

Yeats's fundamental antinomies were those exemplified by
Platonic tradition: spirit and matter, 3931 and Anankg, and the
corresponding systolic and diastolic movements of the soul. Yeats
claimed to have found in the early Byzantine and renaissance epochs
those historical periods which were most expressive of the achievement
of Unity of Being as a generalized cultural phenomenon. On his tour
of Italy with Lady Gregory and her son Robert, Yeats had recognized
in the vast, formalized Byzantine freizes of Ravenna, a mastery of
design which he understood as expressive of the unified cultural
aspirations of a whole people.2 Although the Byzantine culture failed
to offer Yeats a comparable literary tradition because, as he
feared, language had taken on discursive qualities and turned solely
on argument and abstraction, he was to describe in 1912 his new-found

93

 

94

literary Byzantium beyond the Indus:

These lyrics . . . display in their thought a world

I here dreamed of all my life long. The work of

a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the

growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.
A tradition where poetry and religion are the same
thing has passed through the centuries, gathering
from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion,

and carried back again to theamultitude the thoughts
of the scholar and the noble.

These cultural phenomena are integrated with the system of gyres
and historical process outlined in A Vision, but it is clear that in

 

this respect Yeats's system shuns a rigid historical determinism.

An individual, or a group of individuals might attain a comparable
Unity of Being through their own efforts, although these must needs
fly in the teeth of the more pronounced cultural and historic moment.
Yeats was later to recognize in the failure of his own poetic movement,
and in his frustrated efforts to impose an unpopular drama upon an
indifferent audience, that "the dream of my early manhood, that a
modern nation can return to Unity of Culture is false; though it may
be we can achieve it for some small circle of men and women, and there
leave it till the moon bring round its century." 4 Yeats's efforts to
achieve an "emotion of multitude“ failed to find their attentive
multitudes, although he doggedly held on to the hope that his theatre
might find a sympathetic following among an intellectual aristocracy,
a coterie audience.

"We lose life by losing that recklessness Castiglione thought
necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady Truth."5 Castiglione,
as Yeats was fond of relating, served as spokesman for the renaissance
synthesis which upheld an ideal of conduct in which recklessness and

courtesy were held in fee, a modus vivendi in which passion and intensity

 

_

95

enacted a fruitful union with traditional forms of conduct. Yeats's
account of literary history, his "soul history" of the literary artist,
proposes a sort of dissociation of sensibility following the wake of
the early renaissance and continuing until the present age, save in
those exceptional cases where the artist has successfully achieved

an individual Unity of Being in his role as artist, and transcended
the impetus of historic moment.

Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts

of EurOpe by a hundred years or so, and in some
earlier, men attained to the personality in great
numbers, 'Unity of Being', and so became like a
'perfectly proportioned human body“, and as men

so fashioned held places of power, their nations

had it too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought
and feeling. ‘What afterwards showed for rifts and
cracks were there already, but imperious impulse held
all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding
of the pappy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time
personality seemed but the stronger for it. Shakes-
peare's peOple made all things serve their passion,
and that passion is for the moment the whole energy
of their being--beasts, men, women, landscape,
society, are but symbols and metaphors, nothing is
studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no
surface, depth only.

.If abstraction had reached, or all but reached.
its climax, escape might still be possible for many,
and if it had not, individual men might still escape.
If Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves
from Chaucer's crowd, forgot their common goal and
shrine, and after sundry magnifications became
each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play
and had after split into their elements and so given
birth to romantgc poetry, must I reverse the
cinematograph?

By 1934 Yeats had felt that the cinematograph might yet accommodate
him by reversing itself, and in his introduction to Egg.ggt,ggg,thg
‘gggg, he no longer bemoaned the fact that we might never find a
Shelley and Dickens in the one body, but anticipated the advent of

an antithetical dispensation, a new turn of the gyro of history

 

 

96

which would effect the desired reintegration of the artist with his

culture. "Perhaps now that the abstract intellect has split the mind

into categories, the body into cubes, we may be able to turn back

toward the unconscious, the whole, the miraculous." 7
Yeats repeatedly cites Chaucer as having given tongue to an

age in which artist and his public were in perfect accord, an age

in which intellect turned to renew itself with the vitalizing materials

of common experience. "When there was but one mind in.England Chaucer

wrote his Iroilug,ggg Cressida . . . . A.whole people, a whole civilization

seems to have been taken up into this imagination, and yet we are not

moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own

image or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature our voice

as in a dream.“ 8 The Autobiographies relate the continuing influence

which the example of Chaucerian vitality held for Yeats. when ashamed

of his own tendencies to seek truth in generalization and forsake the

world of experience for a remote world of literary allusion, he relates

that be resolved to sleep upon a board, "I began to pray that my

imagination might somehow be rescued from abstraction and become as

preoccupied with life as had the imagination of Chaucer.n9 Later in

life, Yeats was to find in Balzac his modern literary hero. Balzac,

in his breadth of interests and literary explorations, appeared to

Yeats as a nineteenth century Chaucer. Balzac, as had the hero of

his novel ngig Lambert, accepted "all that lay hidden in his blood

and his nerves," and while Seraphitg and ngi§,Lgmbggt g Sweden-

borgian affinities prepared Yeats for his eastern ventures, his

fascination with the Egg, and the idealism of an eastern philosOphy

which dismissed matter as the illusory dance of Maya, the massive

 

97

accomplishment of the Comedic Humaine served to redirect his
attention to the national and social drama.10
The Unity of Sensibility which Yeats recognized in Balzac,
however, differed from that of Chaucer, which was imposed externally
by an achieved cultural synthesis. As a man of phase twenty in
Yeats's schematization, Balzac had attained, as had his phasal
counterpart, Shakespeare, a unity through creative fiat, rather
than a personal Unity of Being. Yeats's explanation owes, it
would seem, much to Keats's theory of negative capability: "He no
longer seeks to unify what is broken through conviction, by imposing
those very convictions on himself and on others, but by projecting

11 The accomplishment of

a dramatization or many dramatizations."
Shakespeare and Balzac was perhaps even more meaningful to Yeats
than that of Chaucer, for these were solitary figures writing "out
of phase," confronting an antagonistic cultural tide with a synthesis
of their own creation.

Shelley, whom Yeats gradually came to regard as his most
pervasive influence, and possibly his most pernicious one, is placed
in the forefront of the moderns: the French symbolists, the PreRaphaelites,
and Yeats's companions of The Cheshire Cheese, those of the "tragic
generation," all those who found their delight in "essences," "states
of mind," "pure imagination": those who divorced their concerns as
artists from instrusive experience. 0f Rossetti, Yeats had claimed:
"His genius like Shelley's can hardly stir but to the reflection of
matter, whose delight is profusion, but never intensity, and like
Shelley's it follows the Star of the Magi, the Morning and Evening

12

star, the mother of impossible hope." Yeats charts their common

 

98

course as that of the flight of the bird, "Upward into evergrowing
subtlety," a refinement of the gross and material, a literature
aspiring toward a condition of religion.13 These efforts to achieve
a rarified passion, Yeats claimed, spring from an inherent imbalance
of sensibilities:

We have lost in personality, in our delight in

the whole man-blood, imagination, intellect, running

together--but we have found a new delight in essences,

in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that

comes to us most easily in elaborate music.

When Yeats wrote these words, he was filled with enthusiasm
for the new movement. Such, he felt, was the condition of modern
literature and the modern sensibility. It might be suggested that
he never completely lost his fascination for the "poetry of essence,"
that it had absorbed his energies as a young poet, and had
insistently shaped his theories of the drama, those theories which
had subordinated character and action to an overriding lyric effect.
But at the same time, it is clear that Yeats had always been wracked
with misgivings, that Chaucer and Balzac, and perhaps even the figure
of his own father, loomed as admonitory spectres in the back of his
mind. Yeats recalled in the Autobiographieg memories of his father
reading to him as a child passages from his favourite poets:

He never read me a passage because of its speculative
interest, and indeed did not care at all for poetry
where there was generalization or abstraction however
impassioned . . . He did not care even for a fine
lyric passage unless he felt some actual man behind

its elaboration of beauty, and he was always looking 15
for the lineaments of some desirable, familiar, life.

Gradually the poetry for which Yeats had once felt such a strong
attraction came to represent all that he had grown to detest in

contemporary literature, the soft, insinuating effeminacy and

«if

 

 

99

pallid otherworldliness which characterized much gig gg sihcle

 

writing, and to which he had once, in his essay "The Autumn of the
Body" given all his enthusiasm. However, the overwhelming evidence
of what Yeats could not fail to regard as highest literary achievement
constantly stood before him, until even his own early theories must
have met with a hollow ring in his ears. The writingsof the medieval
saints, he was to admit, had somehow lost their appeal for those whose
tastes have, since the renaissance, been nurtured on an art "where
the cry of the flesh and the cry of the soul seem one.“16 "Here and
there," he wrote, "in Blake, in Keats, in Blunt, in Browning, . . .
there is a deep masculine resonance, that comes, I think, from a
perfect accord between intellect and blood, lacking elsewhere since
the death of Cowley. "17

Consequently, Yeats came to balance the elusive flight of the
bird with the way of the market cart, or ashs suggested elsewhere
in even more graphic terms, the nightingale with the bull: the
downward movement of the soul in its descent to experience, where
it acquires simplification and solidity, its "baptism of the gutter."
This diastolic movement, I have suggested, does not represent a

complete volte face; Yeats was not oblivious to its appeal even in

 

the days of the Celtic Twilight. It represents simply the obverse
side of his personal experience as well as the logical extension of
his personal metaphysic, an insight no longer limited as a simple
tweedimensional pattern, but extended into the depth of manybfaceted
experience.

In his essay "J.M.Synge and the Ireland of His Time," Yeats

proposes to compound his antitheses through the integrating power

 

100

of the poetic imagination. Imagination becomes the unific element
which, like the Platonic psyche, meditates Janus-faced on the two
opposing categories ofeaxperience. But for Yeats, imagination as
a poetic faculty implies a measure of personal passivity, and is
not associated with an act of will or fiat which serves to impose
an intellectual integration:

Artists like Byron, Goethe, Shelley, who have impressive

personalities, active wills and all their faculties

at the service of their wills, but he [Synge] belonged

to those who, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goldsmith,

Keats, have little peigonal will but fiery and

brooding imagination.

In his essay on Shelley, Yeats examines the enigmatic figure
of Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound, whose presence, he contends,
renders the whole poem incomprehensible. Shelley, he finds, was
motivated by the necessity to balance a miraculous and superhuman
conception of reality with a figure from nightmare, a figure thrust
upon him by his personal compulsions. Yeats attributes the horrific
rendering of Demogorgon to Shelley's unconscious acceptance of the
Victorian bogey, an intrusion of an external moral order which
conflicts with that generated within the poem itself. Demogorgon,
as Yeats himself had found in his rewritings of 222 Shadogz 35322;,
is indispensable in providing the limits of the poetic vision, and in
serving to induce an awareness of the uranian quality which he
serves to define through opposition. Yeats's quarrel with Shelley
is not simply over the inclusion of Demorgon, the eternal combatant

in the struggle of Noug and Ananke, but over his refusal to affirm the

 

demiurgic aspect, and the moral revulsion with which Shelley confronts

it. Similarly, he cites the case of Aubrey Beardsley, whom he

 

 

 

101

associated with Shelley in having subdimated sex to a condition of

"unearthly receptivity" in his Salome drawings, as having been compelled

 

to "sacrifice to Priapus" by embellishing the corners of his engravings
with the grossest Obscenities: ". . .he [Beardsley] had come to see the
images of the mind in a kind of frozen passion, the virginity of the

19 Beardsley, the street urchin, leaves his graffiti

intellect."
upon the great church door of Victorian propriety, but his furtive

gesture is not unlike that which is demanded of Yeats's virginal

of passion."20 But ”desecration and the lovers' night," the descent

into passion and experience, is no more reprehensible than the sterility

of the chaste intellect; "fair and foul are near of kin," as Crazy

Jane instructs her bishop, and "nothing can be sole or whole/ That

has not been rent."21
Against Shelley, Yeats produces the example of Blake, whose poetic

world is generated in its entirety within the terms of his personal

symbolic system, owing nothing to the conventions of a vicarious

public morality, and affirming the marriage of heaven and hell,

Aphrodite and Priapus, Nous and Ananke, within one overmastering imagin-

 

 

ative vision.

Shelley, Yeats contends, was not a mystic, but a Platonist, “his
system of thought was constructed by his logical faculty to satisfy
desire, not a symbolic revelation received after the suspension of
all desire."22 Yeats's tone of disapprobation suggests that the poet might
do better if he were a Plotinian rather than a Platonist, and that
the arch-romantics, Shelley, Byron, and Goethe forfeit much of their

poetic integrity by surrendering their vision to the meddling intellect.

 

Shelley, Yeats was to confess in A Vi ion, where he placed him with

Dante in the seventeenth phase, that of daimonic man, was not entirely
to blame. Unlike Dante, Shelley lived in an unaccommodating age which
thwarted Unity of Being, ". . .but partly because, being out of phase
so far as his practical reason was concerned, he was subject to an
automatism which he mistook for poetical invention, especially in

his longer poems." Hence, Yeats finds the justice of Prometheug
Unbound "no more than a vague propagandist emotion, and the women

that await its coming are but clouds."23
To give intellect its due, and at the same time to relegate it

to its proper role, Yeats claims that it is with the intellect, as
distinguished from the imagination, I'that we enlarge the bounds of
experience and separate it from all but itself, from illusion, from
memory, and create among other things science and good journalism."24
Yeats has recognized in the intellect or the rational mind those
qualities from which it has derived its strength as well as its
liabilities. Intellect effects the fundamental synthesis of discrete
perceptions, but in divorcing experience from its vital context, and
in imposing upon it its own conscious forms, it violates the essential
unity of all human experience. It is significant that Yeats attri-
butes to the rational mind as its major accomplishments, his two personal
bétgg oire , science and journalism. The relevance of the intellect
to the role of the creative artist, as Yeats suggests in his criticism
of Shelley, is a menacing one, and although it is unlikely that he
would suggest that the romantics were allegorists by default, Yeats
does imply that they failed through their submission to the promptings
of intellect to maintain a desirable equipose between their roles as
visionaries and artificers. Intellect is committed exclusively to a

 

'— j ._ ._-_ fl. _

world of matter, "the discursive mind must by its nature pursue
something, find something," and in his essay on Blake, Yeats claimed:
"A.symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible
essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory
is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or
familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to the imagination:

25 But because

the one is a revelation, the other an amusement."
imagination and symbolic expression mediate between spirit and matter,
and subsume as well the intellective synthesis, thus restoring its
equilibrium, these only can perceive and affirm the total vision of
reality, Egg§_andpgg§gkg absorbed in their mutually interdependent
cosmic drama.

Yeats's use of the term "intellect" as preoccupied with matter,
should not be confused with the Platonic Intellect, which also seeks
to impose its form on matter, but at the same time acts upon a
schizophrenic impulse to be rid of it and to revert to pure spirit.
Yeatsian "intellect," unlike the imagination, presents but one face,
and that toward matter, seeking to draw into itself those materials
which buttress its own self-centred being. Intellect and the rational mind,
which provide only one aspect of eXperience, are generally terms of dis-

approbation for Yeats, until in A:Vision, he redefines intellect and

 

restores it to its original meaning, before the seventeenth century
dissociation of sensibility, as those 393g; energies of the mind
which are consciously creative. Having done this, Yeats might apply
the Keatsian touchstone, confirming with the pulses the measure of

 

104

ii

Imagination, for Yeats, is synonomous with the energies of
the Platonic soul in the performance of its systolic and diastolic
act. Consequently, when Yeats warns that "we should ascend out of
common interest, the thought of newspapers, of the market place,
of men of science, but only so far as we can carry the normal,
passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole," he is not
denigrating the baptism of experience, but affirming it as a vital,
though partial, aspect of the integrative process.26 "We believe,"
Yeats maintains, "only in those thoughts which have been conceived
not in the brain but the whole body. "27
Yeats offers as his symbol for immediate sensation, the raw

material of the intellect, water, and contrasts it with the wine
of emotion. It is not unlikely that he imagined the situation in
explicitly sacramental terms, and we are perhaps justified in
extending his own metaphors, so that wine and water, intellect
and blood, find their antinomies transmuted in the eucharist of
the imagination. This sacramental view of the imagination fittingly
lies behind Yeats's personal conception of the historic figure of
Christ, who serves to exemplify his frequent allusions to the
attainment of a personal Unity of Being.
Yeats submits as his creed:

. . .the natural and supernatural are knit together,

that to escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study

a new science . . .a Christ posed against a background

not of Judaism but of Druidism, not shut off in dead

history, but flowing, concrete, phenomenal. I was born

into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it,
my Christ, a legitimate deduction from the Creed of

 

105

St. Patrick, as I think, is that Unity of Being
Dante compared to a perfectly proportional human
body. Blake's 'Imagination', what the Unanishads
have named 'Self; nor understandable, but immanent,
differing from man to man, age to age, taking upon
itself ain and ugliness, 'eye of newt, and toe of
frog.‘

In "Dove or Swan" Yeats describes the earliest sculptural
representations of Christ as having been copied from those of the
apotheosis of Alexander the Great, and interprets these in terms
of his own symbolic system as expressive of Christ's attainment
of Unity of Being.29 He cites the prevalent medieval tradition
which claimed that Christ's stature and bearing were those of
perfected physical man, the merging of athlete and sage. But as
perfected physical being, Christ must die, just as civilization
perfectly achieved must itself face its inevitable annihilation.
The primary dispensation which Christ ushers in demands sacrifice,
and the drama of the Incarnation and the Passion serve Yeats's purposes
as yet another explicit reenactment of the mission of the scapegoat
hero. Christ, the new Adam, must die for mankind in his appointed
role in order to perpetuate the vital principle which he embodies.

The distinction which Yeats acknowledges between fancy and
imagination is a characteristically Coleridgean one. But Coleridge,
who proposed his account of the primary imagination as analogous to
that of God in the eternal act of creation, attuned his metaphysics
to the sanctions of Christian orthodoxy. Yeats, in constructing his
poetic cosmos, provides no imaginative account of the drama of
creation, because the historic process as he conceives it knows no

beginning or end, but subsists only in eternal recurrence.

Oh those occasions, for the most part in his early writings,

 

106

when Yeats refers to millennium or apocalypse, the ultimate flowering
of the Rosicrucian "yellow rose over all," or a Blakean or Sweden-
borgian vision of a triumphant last day when "the whole creation will
be consumed and appear infinite and holy," it is generally in terms of
traditional symbol or someone else's thought. Yeats appears curiously
reluctant to fashion his own myth of creation. His own preoccupations
with apocalypse as a historical consummation are never really disting-
uishable from the vague goal of a spatial passage to a Tir nan og,
or a personal consummation beyond the western sea. When in 1904 Yeats
inserted in Th2 Shadogy Hgtggg the lines:

When the world ends

Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible joy

The flagstone under , the fire of fire

The root of the world
the metaphor of the spatial journey became for him, as it had for
Plotinus, superfluous. Eternity is indwelling, immanent, the vital
element of the soul in the generative world. No longer a remote goal,
it is incarnate within the spatial and temporal dimensions of the
physical world. Thus the concept of a cosmic apocalypse, an ultimate
temporal goal toward which all creation and history proceed at the
"far end of time," is equally superfluous, and gives way before a
succession of epiphanies which serve to direct and impel historic
moment. Yeats balks at extending the limits of his poetic vision
to an Alpha and Omega beyond the bounds of time and space. Surveying
the succession of historical epochs, he will go no further than the
Ledaean annunciation, and beyond, a glimpse of Babylonian "mathematical
starlight," the anterior primary dispensation in its decadence. Yeats
proves himself unwilling to hazard the perilous journey backward to a

 

 

 

107

preexistent One, or forward to ultimate resolution, those conditions
which admit of no predication, no conflict, and hence, of no metaphor.
There can be no ultimate victor in the incessant warfare of Egg; and
gpggkg which defines our mortality, and it is within this squalid
arena which the poet must find his anchorage and the lineaments of
his poetic vision.

Yeats then, does not dramatize his vital principle of the
imagination in terms of an initial act of Divine fiat as did
Coleridge, but in terms of a recurrent historic role, and his Christ
achieves His eminence not in His unique capacity as the historic
Galilean, but as the incarnation or expression of the inexorable
historic process which brings forth successive "Christe" who have
attained Unity of Being. It is difficult to subscribe to Virginia
Moore's well-intentioned but entirely misleading claim that Yeats
was at heart an orthodox Christian, when the messianic role he portrayed
is usurped by a succession of Messiahs whose office is wittingly or un-
wittingly to introduce antithetical as well as primary dispensations,
those turbulent epochs which at every perning of the gyro, indiffer-
ently evolve a historic realization of a principle of "anti-Christ."31
Yeats's "Galilean Symbol'l (his own expression) is, in effect, no
more than a trope expressive of a principle of historic continuity
and the attainment of a personal Unity of Being which secures that
principle. is such, His role is no more preeminent than that of
Oedipus and his descent into the earth "riven by love," or the
offspring of those dubious parents, the ravished, uncomprehending

Leda, the Swedenborgian Attracts, or the nightmare creature who

 

108

nurses its young in the dark, drum resonant grove: "What from

the forest came? What beast has licked its young?"

 

CHAPTER V

The Hero: The Chameleon Path

 

e a ° 1 e ° a 8
Th ristocrat c arrogance of Yeats's solit h roes has

been variously ascribed to the poet's disillusion with his public,
his reaction to the Civil War "days of the rabblement," his
personal pretensions as a seemingly self-conscious poseur, or the
character of the heroic tradition of Celtic literature from which
they are derived. More significant than any of these consider-
ations, I believe, is the manner in which Yeats's conception of
the heroic role meshes with his own rationalization of experience,
and his aesthetic.

Yeats's gutpbiographies and many of his prose writings provide
a mine of information for those who would isolate the earliest
experiences which shaped the thought of the mature poet. In
reading the ggtobiographies, however, one cannot but be aware that
Yeats is already at work fashioning from his memories a poem of
childhood and youth, a vita poetae in which a deliberate sifting
of personal eXperience anticipates the more comprehensive "stylistic
arrangement" of Awyisigg. Occasionally it would appear that the
Aptobiographies have been accepted as an objective case history
providing access to the poet's personal psychology at a formative
stage of his life. However, Yeats himself had little confidence
in his own powers of memory, and claimed to retain only those in-

’cidents which had been dramatically impressive or meaningful

110

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

|||1 4“ [I‘ll ‘II. 7 All 4| ‘b
‘ll

 

111

through association with a memorable place or event:1 The
Autobiogganhies tell us more of Yeats at the time of their writing
than they do of his childhood. They are not, however, a calculated
sham, a deliberate falsification of experience, for Yeats was
conscientiously attempting to give his own life form and meaning,
and wrote John Quinn in 1916, before continuing his account: "I
will purify my own imagination by setting the past in order."2
Those who are determined to "set the poet's life in order" by re—
constructing his childhood memories cannot fail to recognize that
the autobiographer has anticipated their efforts, and that they
run the risk of violating the integrity of the form which he him—
self had evolved. The Autobioggaphies are of incalculably greater
value than any "objective" account in revealing through a studied
arrangement and selection of incident the pattern which Yeats would
seek to impose upon all experience.

The "hindsight" afforded by the Autobiographies suggests, in
Yeats's account of his boyhood idols, divided loyalties which could
only have been consciously grasped through the enhanced clarity of
perspective.Yeats's earliest heroes were typical of those which
people a childhood dream of romance. They came from his earliest
literary enthusiasms: "My mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley's
dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying
philosophy in some lonely tower.n3

In 1894 Yeats attended with Maude Gonne the first performance
of Villier de l'Isle Adam's Aggl at the Theatre Montparnasse. The

story of Axel of Auersburg, a young student of the occult, who had

 

112

renounced the world for a life of study and meditation in his
stronghold in the Black Forest, met with a responsive chord.

Yeats had found his new sacred book, and responded with an enthusi-
astic review for the ngggg Bookman: "The infinite is alone worth
attaining, and the infinite is in the possession of the dead."4
A321 combined all the elements that had hitherto fascinated Yeats:
his early romance with the Gothic gloom and romanticism of solitary
dreamers, Alastor, Manfred, and Athanase, and his own predilection
for Rosicrucianism and the occult.

But Axel and Shelley's dreamers mangués, who preferred to
leave the distractions of life to those less deserving than them-
selves, could do little to feed Yeats's admiration for that which
his father had often praised as "intensity." Of his mother, Yeats
recalls in the Autobiographies, "she had always, my father would
say, intensity, and that was his chief word of praise. . . ."5
J.B. Yeats's passion for dramatic poetry, and his detestation of
abstraction and generalization, his son would suggest, provided
him with one aSpect of that personal conflict which led him at one
moment to seek out his Shelley, and at another to lean upon his
Chaucer. It was, perhaps, during his "Chaucerian moments" that
Yeats lent his childish fascination to the figure of the brawling
squireen of Bergen Castle, "the last household where I could find
the reckless Ireland of a hundred years in final degradation."6

Yeats had from an early age cast his seafaring grandfather
in a heroic mould, and would later confess that "even today when I

read King Lear his image is always before me and I often wonder if

 

 

 

 

 

 

113

the delight in passionate men in my plays and in my poetry is

more than his memory."7 Nor was he to forget the family miniatures
of the Yeatses with their carefully drawn air of courtesy, gentle-
ness, and a "half-feminine charm."8 Pollexfen and Yeats had indeed
fulfilled their roles in the poet's personal mythology. In the
Autobioggaphics he recalls with some pride: "It was a Yeats who
observed we have ideas and no passions, but by marriage with a

“9

Pollexfen we have given a tongue to the sea-cliffs. Their role
was no less important to him in 1919 when in his poem "Under
Saturn," the mixed seed of his ancestry continued to goad him on:
my horses flanks are spurred
By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,
And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,

And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died
Before my time, seem like a vivid memory. 0

ii
A young writer might well admire those passionate lives which
seem to express a vitality remote from the isolation of his own
bookish pursuits, but almost invariably his thoughts will turn
on his own self-conscious role as artist, and those "sacred books"

which he feels have shaped or gained access to his creative life.

 

Yeats found in his Alastor and Axel his first vocabulary as a poet,
and in their stock romantic posturing his earliest model for
heroic action. Forgael, who is a direct descendant of this
eviscerated breed, and Aleel, the listless poet of Th2 Countess
Cathleen, fulfilled their highly mannered roles all too well, and

rewarded Yeats with characterizations which were implausible and

 

 

 

114

dramatically ineffectual. But even in 1898, when at the height

of his infatuation with Villier de l'Isle Adam's pallid hero, in his
essay "Blake's Illustrations to Dante," Yeats was to enumerate
approvingly those qualities which Blake had found essential to

all good art: "to seek determinate outline, to avoid generalized
treatment, to desire abundance and vitality."lllf Yeats had not
yet learned the vocabulary of the "reckless brawling squireen" who
had once exerted a tug on his sympathies, he was soon to acquire it
through his collaborations with Lady Gregory. Th2 gigglg Threshold
in its earliest version, and Deirdre, with their somewhat bloodless
characterizations remember their affinities with an earlier self-
conscious tragic breed, and neither can number characterization
among its virtues. Egg fiigglg Threshold earns its laurels largely
through the powerful verse of its closing scene, while Deirdre is
signifiCant largely as a technical triumph, as a remarkably con-
trolled exercise in classic form and compression. But when the

figure of Cuchulain grips Yeats's imagination in 9g Baile's Strand,

 

the squirarchy and its brawling vitality reassuringly asserts its
transformation of the tragic role.

The words "reckless" and I'gesture" become increasingly imp
portant to Yeats's tragic theory, but neither are to be interpreted
as implying that Yeats is less concerned with the seriousness and
the centrality of the tragic nature of life. "Tragic gesture,”
although it may suggest the futility of the tragic role is, in effect,
double edged; it implies as well, a triumphant heroic defiance,

"that assertion of the eternity of what Nature declares ephemeral.“12

But Yeats's own experience with the theatre nevertheless made him

 

 

 

 

 

115

painfully aware of those singlewminded judgments which persist in
dismissing tragedy, with beauty, as a "strange unserviceable
thing."

It was, however, precisely in those values which were most
"unserviceable" that Yeats placed his poetic faith. John Sherman,
Yeats's thinly veiled gltgg,ggg in his early short story, had found
little of value in life beyond the moments of idleness which he
had spent in his boyhood home in the West Country, and until he
resolved to return and share them with his patient Solveig, only
their memories served to sustain him through a restless London
career. Yeats recounts in his Letters tg'thg,flgg‘;§l§gd gloating
over the busy drones in the reading room of the National Library
while savouring the idle play of his imagination, and his essay
"If I were Four and Twenty" provides an engaging defense of the
riches of impracticability.13 Red Hanrahan, Proud Costello,
Seanchan, Forgael, Michael Robartes, and martin Hearne are all
figures who have very little in common with what Yeats would stig-
matize as the prosaic "garden city mind." All are solitaries
whose lot it is to be misunderstood by the practical good sense
of their neighbours. "Decadent," Yeats maintains, thinking perhaps
of his companions of the Tragic Generation, is "a favourite re-
proach from the objective everywhere. . . .How could they that
dreaded solitude love that which solitude made"?14 The solitary
is irreconcilably riven from primary man: "all minds that have a
wisdom come of tragic reality seem morbid to those that are
accustomed to writers that have not faced reality at all: just

as the saints with that obscure Night of the Soul, which fell so

 

 

 

116

certainly that they number it among the spiritual states. . .
seem morbid to the rationalist and the old fashioned Protestant
controversialist."l5
The rhetoric of the press and the pulpit, which Yeats saw
as instruments of that particular form of knowledge known to
Plato as ggga, are forever at odds with the subtleties of the
noetic or intuitive understanding. "Indeed all art which appeals
to individual men and awaits the confirmation of his senses and
his reveries, seems, when arrayed against the moral zeal, the con-
fident logic, the ordered proof of journalism, a trifling, im-
pertinent, vexatious thing, a tumbler who has unrolled his carpet
in the way of a marching army."16 The popular Optimism which
results from their limited vision fails to grasp the nature of the
eternal conflict, the vision of "evil" as well as that of the
"good”, that the nature of life is tragedy, and that it is played
in the midst of armed camps where there is no final victory.
In his essay "At Stratford-onQAvon," Yeats castigates the
utilitarian heroes of George Eliot and her contemporaries:
They and she grew up in a century of utilitarianism.when
nothing about a man seemed important except his utility
to the state, and nothing so useful to the state as the
activities whose effect can be weighed by reason. The
deeds of Coriolanus, Hamlet, Timon, Richard II, had no
obvious use, were indeed no more than the expression of
their personalities. . .a revelation and not reformation.
Because society exalts social success and judges all endeavour
in these terms, ShakeSpeare, Yeats maintains, has been reduced by

his readers to a'Vulgar worshipper of success," and Henry V has

been offered to generations of schoolboys as a model of exemplary

 

17

 

 

 

 

117

conduct. But Richard II, whom Yeats regards as an example of the
solitary dreamer, had no less a place among Shakespeare's affections,
and though he should lay claim to a comparable place in our own,

he has consistently fallen prey to those who recoil before his
ineptitude as a social functionary. By utilizing reason as its
measure of excellence, society has chosen that limited instrument

of judgment which seeks to propagate its own values, and which
blinds itself to all others.

The heroic figure, whose misfortune it is to be born "out of
phase," will inevitably be misjudged by his contemporaries until
that sensibility or direction which he has imparted to the his-
torical current establishes itself. Society and civilizations,
committed to an unremitting but futile struggle to perpetuate
themselves, create and impose law and reason. But law and reason
are no more than rigid forms which seek to arrest the constant flux
which impels civilization toward its flowering or its destruction.

A created form of this sort might well lead a civilization toward
its highest achievement by providing a disunified people with an
image of their own desires, an ideal which serves to marshal in-
dividual effort and create social coherence, the self-realization
which Yeats has described as Unity of Being. But Unity of Being,
whether individual or cultural, is of the order of epiphany, a
momentary condition, if indeed it may be achieved fully in time at
all. Yeats's Great Wheel of history refuses to pause in its course.
What had served as a transforming ideal becomes in the face of change

a rigid, constricting pattern.

 

118

"If we were not certain of law," Yeats writes, "we would not
feel the struggle, the drama, but the subject of art is not law,
which is a kind of death, but the praise of life, and it has no
commandments that are not positive."18 Rigidity, law and reason,
as Yeats would have it, vaunts its nay-saying before the vital
processes of life itself. If life is essentially formless, defy-
ing rational formulation, law and reason enact no more than a
futile struggle to stem a restless tide. Rational form then, is
paradoxically that which gives expression to life, but that which
at the same time seals its own death pact, and condemns its own
fragile crystalization of life to destruction, just as civili-
zations are driven from the mixed seeds of their inception to their
final dissolution.

Yeats's tragic heroes take their stand with life against the
inbred forces of self-destructive order, and our sympathies are
theirs because of our own painful suspicion of the inequality of
the match. But in reality, we suffer from the limitations of our
own cramped perspective, and the match, though seemingly catastrophic,
is in the long run not unequal. "No battle has been finally won
or lost," and there is perhaps something of heroism on either side.

It is our consciousness of law, because we ourselves are sub-
jected to it, as a seemingly palpable reality, which provides the
friction between personal and public motive. One must defy
somethigg before he can aspire to personal heroics, and the spec-
tators of the tragic agon must be equally aware of a concrete

struggle against substantial odds. The lack of this sense of

 

119

"dramatic friction" provided by a confrontation or open combat
between dramatized values served to inhibit any sympathetic

response to Yeats's play Th2 Shadogy Waters, where his audience

 

could only be uncomfortably aware that they were asked to exchange
one insubstantial reality for another.
The tragic act falls beyond reason and logic, as that which
flies in the teeth of form and order must inevitably be consigned
to the irrational. The hero's lot is a solitary one because it is
played in defiance of those bastions of the moral law, "the enemies
of life, the chimeras of the Pulpit and the Press."19 Yeats has
drawn his hero as antithetical man cast upon an ordered, primary
dispensation. A primary world demands of its disciples surrender
to an accepted code of behaviour or thought, whereas subjective
man is content only "to spin a web out of his own bowels," to fab-
ricate his own vision of reality.20 Shakespeare's heroes, Yeats
claims, suffer at the hands of the primary moralist who cannot
comprehend that Shakespeare himself, as well as his own creations,
rose from an age and mind which had begun to throw off external
order.
Shakespealewrote at a time when solitary great men were
gathering to themselves the fire that had once flowed
hither and thither around all men, when individualism
in words and thought was breaking up the old rhythms of
life, when the common people, sustained no longer by the
myths of Christianity and of still older faiths, were
sinking into the earth.21

To sink into the earth is, in Yeats's terms, that descent into

the “dung of passion," the shrugging off of abstract morality for

a regeneration through experience. It is Yeats's Christ who would

 

 

 

 

Ill-I‘ll! 1.4;!

Lulu! I 1
{II-I: (ll-[Hillel Ill-I. l‘u.l l-IV l

 

120

ascend into an abstract sky, but his Oedipus who sinks into the
earth, "riven tw'love." Surely Yeats's thought had turned to
Oedipus when he wrote: "I canrot discover truth by logic unless

that logic serve passion, and only then if the logic be ready to

”‘7

. . 4.
cut its own throat, tear out its own eyes." I
Although the subjective hero must confront prinary order,
he knows, in the only way he can know--through his instincts and
emotions-nothirg of prirary experience. Yeats had, it will be
remembered, expressed his belief in opyosing views of reality in
his 1930 Diary:
If reality is timeless and spaceless this is a goal,
an ultimate Good. But if I believe that it is also a
congeries of autonomous selves I cannot believe in one
ever victorious Irovidence, thorvh I may in Providences

that preside over a man, a class, azgity, a nation, a world
--Providences that may be defeated.

By accepting primary reality as an ultimate goal, one is committed
to a moral system which identifies the One with the Good, and which
rationalizes all human effort in terms of a unifying ethic. But

if the unified conception rives way, either historically, or for

(J
the individual, its moral implications collapse with it. Korality
becomes arbitrary, and indeed if it exists at all, is relevant only
to the individual himself and the efficacy of his own struggle
toward a unique self—realization.

In so far as we believe that reality is a congeries we
shall be uncertain of victory. We and those other souls
to whom we are as it were bound and sworn, with whom we
share a morality, may be defeated, and to those who
believe in the final victory of Good there is greater
heroism in our uncertainty. In morality itself there

may be something arbitrrry, as in the morals of Oedipus,
as perhaps in all morality before the philosophy of Unity
prevailed, as if it were the spegial discipline of a
class, or a city, or a reginert.

 

 

 

121

The stature of the tragic hero is enhanced by the uncertainty
which clouds his struggle. He is neither a reformer nor a self-
conscious martyr convinced of material or spiritual rewards, but
one aware of nothing but personal conviction and certainty,
striking out blindly and instinctively with the full strength of
his will in a frenzy of selfhassertion. In 1904 Yeats wrote of
the artist what might well serve to define the moral relativity
which he associated with the heroic act:
Every argument carries us backwards to some religious
conception, and in the end the creative energy of man
depends upon their believing that they have, within
themselves, something immortal and imperishable, and
that all else is but an image in a looking glass. 80
long as that belief is not a formal thing, a man will
create out of a joyful energy, seeking little for any

external test of an impulse that may be sacredzsand
looking for no foundation outside life itself.

iii

The subject of all art is passion, Yeats claimed, and "art
at its highest moments creates intense feeling, pure life."26
Tragedy, above all, necessitates the play of a pure passion, and
to achieve his impersonalized sense of tragedy, Yeats sought to
simplify action and purge "character" of those qualities which
inhibit rather than express passion. The antagonists in the
tragic agon are refined of all these personal idiosyncrasies which
serve to particularize them as individual man, until they represent
no more than a nascent ideal, a single passion defined only by its
motive. The workings of such a passion are intensified by direct-

ing it towards an obstacle, the visible or material world, or

a principle which seeks to obstruct its pursuit. Character gives

 

 

 

 

122

way to an all-absorbing activity of soul, "aroused into a perfect
intensity by opposition with some other passion, or it may be with
the law," and the result "is an eddy of life purified from everyb
thing but itself," or as Coleridge might have described it, "the
melting down and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual."27
Viewed from a perspective of naturalism, Yeats's characters
appear uncompromisingly inhuman, incapable of establishing a symp
pathetic bond with their audience. But to insist upon an identi-
fication between the audience and the individualized character of
the hero, and the consequent arousing of pity for his dilemma, is
to lose sight of the peculiar qualities which Yeats's tragedy has
to offer. Yeats seeks identification not with the accidental nature
of character, but a rapport with the generic experience which that
character in his role has come to embody. The essence of tragedy
is for Yeats the revelation of reality, the point at which the
actors assume in the mind of the spectator the generic properties
of mythic figures engaged in their timeless agon. Baudelaire had
found the same experience essential to all mythology, where "human
relations almost completely lose their conventional form, which is
intelligible only to the abstract reason and show what is eternally
comprehensible in life."28
Yeats wrote in the Autobioggaphieg: I'I was indeed to number
character itself among the abstractions."29 Character, he insisted,
could be no more than an arbitrary and inconsequential category imp
posed by the rational mind, and as such had, in terms of antithetical

man, no validity of its own. Actually, Yeats has very little to

 

 

 

123

say of what he understands as character at any time, even in the
schematization of the Four Faculties proposed in g_Vision. In

this system it appears to be loosely associated with will or ego,
the undefined collocation of impulses which we first bring to our
bout with the daimon. These unarticulated energies achieve their
true existential being through act, but previous to this, they

have no reality of their own. Will must find an object to love

or strive toward, and this it recognizes in its mask, the sum of
all its aspirations. Mask, then, as the object of pursuit, is the
formal cause which delineates will and calls it into being, just as
food might serve to define and make intelligible hunger. Directed
against that which seeks to thwart its attainment of mask, and hence
Unity of Being, it becomes pure potency, shorn of those original
extraneous impulses which weighed it to a chaos of indecision.

But this unleashing of will or passion, Yeats claims,cannot be
of a purely cerebral nature, for it must involve the combined energies
of mind and body seeking hypostasis in Unity of Being. Rational
thought alone excludes a whole order of vital experience, and scorns
synthesis for sterile, desiccating analysis. "An exciting person,
whether the hero of a play or the maker of poems, will display the
greatest volume of personal energy, and this energy must seem to
come out of the body as out of the mind . . . .We believe only in
those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in
the whole body."30 Rather than rational in its origin, the heroic
impulse of the will is purely intuitive, a matter of blind faith,

and as such, Yeats claims,owes more to the body than it does to the

 

124

brain. "Our bodies are nearer to our coherence because nearer
to the unconscious than our thought."31

When attacking George Bernard Shaw's dramatic cerebrations
in'Qg‘thg Boiler, Yeats insists "but thought is not more important
than action; masterpieces, whether of the stage or study, excel
in action, their visibility. . .we are not coherent to ourselves
through thought but because our visible image changes slowly."32
Thought seeks to impose its artificially rigid concept of character
on the processes of human life in the same manner as it attempts
to arrest historical and cultural change within the created forms
of law and rational order. The attempt to arrest change serves to
inhibit act, and consequently the self-realization which threatens
its sovereignty. Character therefore, implies fixity, acquiescence
to the primary rule of thought, but human life is broken upon the
selfsame cycles which impel history, and which abhor the static;
antithetical man must therefore meet his world on his own terms,
through a constant act of Becoming.

In spite of the lyric qualities of a number of his plays, and
Yeats's own bemused proposal to rehearse his actors in barrels in
order to curb their movements, Yeats was intent upon utilizing all
the auxiliary resources of the theatre: music, the dance, painting,
and sculpture, thereby achieving a Gesamtkunstwerk, or Uagnerian
fusion of all the arts. Iis conception of theatre owed nothing to
a static realization. If Yeats sought to inhibit his actors' move-

ments, it was only to exorcise their stock repertory of meaning-

less melodramatic gesture, so that gesture and movement might

125

recapture their expr ssiveness and significance. Yeats's fasci-
nation with the controlled movement of the Japanese Egg plays and
his own experiments with the dance, were largely an attempt to
achieve a further dimension of meaning through dramatic action.

A play, he maintained, must "use the bodily energies of its
principal.actors to the full."33 Yeats's strictures were not
merely unrelated exercises in practical theatricalism, but were
rooted in his conception of the nature of action as fundamental
to the process of Becoming.

The Platonic tradition had always upheld activity as th
essential attribute of the soul. Plato's doctrine in the Phaedrus
of the self-moved soul as the initiator of all local motion
received considerable emphasis at the hands of the Cambridge Neo-
platonists. Henry Here based his whole argument for the existence
of spirit on the need for a cause for motion in the world, and
Whichcote, in his redress of the Cartesian dictum, Spelled out the
Cambridge position as "I act, therefore I am."34

Although Yeats's hero might be described as antithetical man
confronting an alien primary or recognizably Platonic world, the
constitution of his soul is nonetheless identical with that of his
Platonist fellows; only his instincts differ. The soul in its
intellective or systolic act, as well as in its antithetical dia-
stolic movements, retains its essential nature; it merely seeks
varying expressions of its inherent dual impulses. In 1904 Yeats
wrote John Quinn: "I have always felt that the soul had two

movements, primarily: one to transcend form, and the other to

 

126

create forms. Nietzsche called them the Dionysian and the
Apollonian, respectively. I think I have to some extent got
weary of that wild god Dionysus, and I am heping that the far-
darter will come in his place."35 Yeats's Nietzschean distinction
might appear strangely inappropriate when applied to his early
plays and poetry. One hesitates to associate a Forgael with "that
wild god," but nonetheless, Forgael's role as a hero is essentially
that characterized by Dionysus Lusios, the liberator, and the
aspirations toward an ineffable inane which is expressed everyh
where in Yeats's early writings, is recognizable as a yearning to
transcend the world of things, as the systolic impulse to slough off
the imperfect traces of the experiential world for an ideal con-
dition.
In the same year, Yeats had described his Ideas pf Good.gnd

Evil to AE as

. . .only one half of the orange, for I only got a grip

on the other half very lately. I am no longer in much

sympathy with an essay like "The Autumn of the Body,"

not that I think that essay untrue. But I think I mis-

took for a permanent phase of the world what was only a

preparation. The close of the last century was full of

strange desire to get out of form, to get some kind Of

disembodied beauty, and now it seems to me the contrary

impulse has come. I feel about me and in me an impulse

to create form, to carry the realization of beauty as

far as possible. The Greeks said that the Dionysiac

enthusiams preceded the Apollonic and that the Dionysiac

was sad and desirous, but the Apollonic was joyful and

self sufficient.
Yeats's "other half of the orange" (perhaps his first intimation
of the nature of reality as a sphere) was to emerge as the arena

of antithetical man, whanhe had come to associate with the

Apollonian. Antithetical man seeks to assert his own mastery by

127

imposing form through a self-assertive creative fiat which en-
ables him to stand at the centre of his own universe. As an
artist, he defies primary order with his artifact, the embodi-
ment of his personal vision. But as here, he seeks to express
it in terms of his own flesh and blood, to achieve a perfected
Unity of Being which lies beyond all established order and,
probably, as Yeats came to admit, beyond the human condition
itself. The here as well as his primary counterpart seeks the
Beatific Vision, to become in reality what he is potentially. But
unlike primary man, he seeks it on his own terms. The primary
would find God in surrender or contemplation, while the spiritual
egoism of Yeats's "doomreager" heroes impels him blindly and
catastrophically on a course of action bent on victory in the here
and now. The hero of Yeats's poem "The Hero, the Girl, and the
Fool" tells his love:
I have heard one say
That men have reverence for their holiness
And not themselves.37

Yeats's heroes doubtlessly held his sympathies no less than
they hold our own, and the ultimate victory of the heroic gesture
is not denied them. But neither is the comparatively unappealing
victory, if indeed it may be described as such, of primary man,
Yeats's saint or sage. Yeats had perhaps discovered in his
Heraclitus, long before he encountered Nietzsche, that "the road

38

up and the road down is one and the same."

iv

Ibsen and Shaw, the most controversial dramatists of their

128

day, appear to have exerted no direct influence on Yeats's drama.
Ibsen's plays in particular drew down 1'eats's withering criticism

of the whole movement of realistic theatre: "I was divided in

mind," he said of The Dollflg House, "I hated the play,. . . .I
resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern

educated speech that music and style were impossible."3'9 Rosmersholm
could offer Yeats no more than a savour of symbolism and "a stale

40

He retreated imperiously to the security

Al

odour of spilt poetry."
of Goethe's pronouncement: "Art is art because it is not nature."
Realism, Yeats concluded, was for those "who are without the memory
of beauty and emotional subtlety"; it was clearly the bane of
modern literature and drama, and represented everything Yeats had
rebelled against]+2

Of Shaw, Yeats was never certain, although he apparently
associated his plays with the new movement. He hated the plays
and delighted in the iconoclast, never certain whether "the cock

crowed for my blame or for my praise. As a dramatist, Yeats had
associated himself not with pepular realism, but with the conflict-
ing tradition: that of Wagner, Mheterlinck, Claudel, and the later
Strindberg, those symbolists who had found their expression in the
theatre. Ibsen, Shaw, and their followers chose the naturalist
eXpression of Balzac and Flaubert, which Zola had first adapted

to the stage in his Thérhse Raquig, while Yeats chose the stage of
the anti-realist, which had come to him largely through the work of

Wagner's friend and admirer Villiers de l'Isle Adam, who represented

the link between the symbolist music drama and the symbolist theatre.

 

 

129

Impatient with theses, social problems, character, and the detail
which he associated with both comedy and realism, Yeats remained
loyal to his tradition, which was essentially a poetic one.
"There is no observation of life," and little of character,
"because the poet would set before us all those things which we

44

feel and imagine in silence." In lieu of the conventional
realist's approach, the poet was to search out his own private
synthesis of spiritual, dramatic, and poetic values.

Yeats's position was influenced largely by his sympathies of
the eighties, when the intellectual life seemed divided into two
Opposing camps. In one were the scientists and the realists, who
maintained an optimistic faith in the efficacy of progress, and
in the other were the aesthetes: Johnson, Hilde, Dowson, Beardsley,
and others of the Rhymer's Club, who were united by a common
distaste for modern life and regarded the "new age" as the trump
of doom. Yeats, who regarded science "with a monkish hate," sided

45

with his companions. Years later he wrote in his "Introduction
to Egg Resurrectiod! "When I was a boy everybody talked about
progress, and rebellion against my elders took the form of aversion
to that myth."46 The times were against the Rhymers, however, and
Yeats later saw in that ill—timed group and its thwarted aspirations
the reckless heroism of subjective man, alone and misunderstood
before the popular hollow Optimism. "I do not know whether John
Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that 'morbid effort'

that search for 'perfection of thought and feeling,‘ for he is

hidden behind failure to unite it 'to perfection of form'."47 Had

John Davidson achieved that solitary perfection in life, Yeats

 

130

discloses, his role might have been a heroic one; had he achieved
it in his art, he might have taken his place with those artificers
"of the great moment" who eXpress in their art the unity for

which they hesitated to stake their lives. When the battle against
realism and the popular Optimism of the eighties had been fought
and lost, it assumed for Yeats the character of the archetypal

heroic struggle.

v
Although Yeats's acceptance of the anti-realist faith allied
him with that theatrical tradition which stemmed from the music
drama of Richard Yagner, it is doubtful whether Yeats, with his
unmusical ear and his notorious mistrust of musicians, ever attended
a Magner performance, or would have felt any sympathy with the
music drama had he done so. But Yeats had, as early as 1887,
acknowledged Wagner as the master of the symbolist movement in
Germany, and grouped him with those with whom he chose to cast his
lot.
The reaction against the rationalism of the 18th century
has mingled with a reaction against the naturalism of
the 19th century, and the symbolical movement, which has
come to perfection in Germany with Magner, in England
with the PreRaphaelites and in France with Villiers de
l'Isle Adam, Mallarmé andeaeterlincEB . .is certainly
the only movement saying new things.‘
Wagner, the enfant terrible of nineteenth century letters and
music, had inaugurated a theatrical as well as a musical revolution,

and enlisted a number of partisans as vehement as his many critics.

Among these were the young Nietzsche, and Baudelaire, who in L'art

 

 

 

131

Romantique, a book which 0 he to Yeats's attention, defended

 

Uagner's position while the composer was flailed by the Paris

0 0 -/+9 0 '1 o 1 o
critics. It 18 reasonable to Claim that an admixture of
Wagnerian and symbolist ideals formed a significant part of the

intellectual and creative milieu of fin de sieclg England and

 

Yeats had read Nietzsche as early as the summer of 1903, and
it is evident from his letters to John Quinn that he had accepted,
or at least recognized his own position in the aphorisms of
Zarathustra. It may reasonably be assumed that he also read Th2
Birth 2: Tragedy, a work which was to become the gospel of many
a nineteenth and twentieth century dramatist. Egg Birth gprragedy
from.the Spirit gf’Music, written before Nietzsche's disenchant-
ment with Wagner, was an adulatory confirmation of the composer's
dramatic theories and, in particular, the tragic principle behind
his Tristan Egg Isolde.

Yeats had indicated a continuing interest in Wagner. In 1901
he had voiced his approval of the design of the Bayreuth auditorium,
and in March 1903 he had written Sturge Koore of his intention to

350

stage The Shadowy Waters in costumes "of Wagner's period. Hoore

had recommended to lfeats a copy of one of Adolph Appia's books,

51

probably La Else 2g Scene d3 Drame'wagnerien.

The Swiss designer
Appia was the first cousin of Narie Sturge Moore and the forerunner
of Gordon Craig, who had built on Appia's techniques for the staging
of symbolist drama. Appia's book was not a mere handbook of stage—
craft, but an inquiry into Wagner's theories of drama, and an

attempt to create through them a more suitable style of production

   

 

 

132

than the clumsy mechanical wizardry of Bayreuth could provide.

In July 1905, Yeats had read in The Quarterly Review, while
rewriting The Shadowy Waters and The King's Threshold, and
plotting his Deirdre, Arthur Symons' article "The Ideas of Richard
Wagner," and he replied to its author:

my dear Symons, the Wagnerian essay touches on my own
theories at several points, and enlarges them at one or
two. . . .I have spent the entire summer rewriting The
Shadowy waters. . . .In one place your Wagner essay
helped me. A certain passage had always seemed wrong

to me, and after I had rewritten it several times it was
still wrong. I then came on that paragraph where Wagner
insists that a play must not appeal to the intelligence,
but by being, if I remember rightly, a pigge of self
consistent life directly to the emotions.

Symons' essay, a consideration of Wagner's "A Communication
to my Friends," concerns itself with the composer's avowed anti-
intellectualism. "He proves to us," Symons relates, "step by step,
that none of his motivations were prolonged by reflection, but

solely by practical experience and the nature of his aesthetic

"53

aim.° Wagner argues:

Art is an inbred craving of the natural, genuine and un-
corrupted man, not an artificial product, and not a product
of mind only, which produces science, but of that deeper
impulse which is unconscious. . . . In drama. . .an action
can only be explained when it is completely justified by
the feeling; and it is there the dramatic poets look not

to invent actions but to make it so intelligible through
its emotional necessity that we may altogether dispengz
with the intellect's assistance in its justification.

We might assume that Wagner's essay helped Yeats in more than a
single passage; it furnished an impressive corroboration for his

own concept of tragedy and the nature of art. The Wagnerian world

is essentially anti-rational and anti-intellectual. Passion becomes

the only reality in our experience, Wagner observed, and charted

 

133

his drama accordingly. Had Yeats read enough Wagner, he probably
would have found his position too extreme for his own tastes.

But Wagner had forcefully outlined Yeats's own sentiments con-
cerning the inadequacy of rational thought, and his description
of the drama coincided perfectly with Yeats's own observations on
the tragic experience. For Yeats the tragic moment offered "pure
lyricism, unmixed passion, the integrity of fire," and tragic art
"the passionate art, is the confounder of the understanding."55
"The test of poetry," Yeats wrote in the "Discoveries" of 1906,
"is not in reason but in a delight not different from the delight
that comes to man at the first coming of love into the heart."56

Yeats and Wagner chose identical themes to underlie their
art: the conflict between intuitive and discursive knowledge.

Their motivations were similar: Wagner had built his world, as
Nietzsche had constructed his ethics, as a protest against nine-
teenth century materialism and religion. Yeats had abandoned
rhetoric as the language of a reasoning materialism to the natural-
istic theatre, and chose the language of symbol and intuition as a
means of exploring a world transcending rational discourse and,
rational experience.

Because of their common footing as artists in the fipIdg siecle
impasse, there are, in spite of the forcible contrast in their
personal characters, a number of striking parallels in their
respective careers. The need of the fig‘dg siecle artist to
synthesize a poetic myth in an age which had abandoned myth for a

mutually exclusive dualism of materialism and idealism, drove him

in a number of desperate directions. Very often the path led,

134

through embittered frustration, either to the church, or the
weary pilgrimage to the brothel. Not entirely oblivious to the
lures of either, Yeats and Wagner turned to found churches of
their own; first a national church, and then a private chapel.
"Wagner," Yeats observed in 1900, "spent seven years arranging and
explaining his ideas before he began his most characteristic

C
music.”7 Yeats was to spend a great deal longer. He would turn
from his dream of creating a national myth to the highly personal
and eclectic liturgy of'g Vision; Wagner, from his Ring to the
elaborate pagan and Christian syncretism of Parsifal.

Yeats was not unaware of his kinship with Wagner and their
relation to those of their contemporaries who had, in a similar
fashion, been forced back upon a tradition that had provided them
with a common fund of symbol which poet and priest had, from anti-
quity, held in common.

Wagner's dramas, Keats' odes, Blake's pictures and poems,
Calvert's pictures, Rossetti's pictures, Villier de l'Isle
Adam's plays, and the black-and-white art of Mr. Beardsley
and Mr. Rickets, and the lithographs of Mr. Shannon, and

the pictures of Mr. Whistler, and the plays of M. Haeterlinck,
and the poetry of Verlaine in our own day, but differ from
the religious art of Giotto and his disciples in having
accepted all symbolisms, the symbolism of the ancient
shepherds and star—gazers, that symbolism of bodily beauty
which seemed a wicked thing to Fra Angelico, the symbolism

of day and night, winter and summer, spring and autumn,
once so great a part of an older religion than Christianity.

58
But there were, Yeats was to recognize, varying degrees of allegiance
to the past: a servile antiquarianism which was, in effect, not

unlike the flight to the church, or that position which he associated

with Wagner's as well as his own as mythmaker: "There is indeed a

 

135

systematic mystic in every poet or painter who, like Rossetti,
delights in a traditional symbolism, or, like Wagner, delights
in a personal symbolism."59

Both Wagner and Keats would renounce the world of their
Tristan and The Shadowy Wategg, which are, in effect, the same
world. The Shadowy Waters shares with Tristan its‘fig‘gg siecle
background, its basic attitudes, and even much of its internal
symbolism. The circumstances in the two stories are broadly similar.
Forgael and Dectora are adrift in a night-world, they are at first
antagonistic, but are "awakened to love/By magic strings," a super-
natural device as efficacious as Isolde's love-potion.60 The con-
flict of Yeats's play, identical with that of Tristan as a strugg
between the spiritual and material, is resolved, or more properly,
overwhelmed, in a similar fashion, in a medley of night, love, death,
and primordial oneness. .

In 1851, in "A Communication to my Friends," Wagner wrote:
"To the path which I struck with the conception of The Flying Dutch-
man belong the two succeeding dramatic poems, Tannhauser and
Lohengrin."61 The path which Wagner described was a search for
redemption through mystic union which often found its expression,
as in Yeats, through sexual symbolism. The sehnsucht motive,
Forgael's indefinite yearnings, and Tristan's longing for transcend-

ence are entirely characteristic of the fin e siecle love-in-death

 

formula.
Tristan had been written after Wagner laid aside the second

act of his Siegfried, and the path which he had claimed to follow

5-: 7

136

in Tristan, the exaltation of Liebestod, was inevitably projected
into the more complex world of his fligg cycle. Yeats too, had
come to reject the thirst for an "impossible perfection," a fatal
adolescent Sehnsucht which he had associated with his heroes Axel
and Alastor, but their "longing after death" nevertheless served to
colour his own mature concept of tragedy, the curiously hybrid
"tragic joy" which he proposed as the essential tragic experience.
Wagner's‘fiigg concludes with the destruction of the gods and heroes,
but also with the leitmotiv of redemption through love. Siegfried
is destroyed, but his death implies his own salvation through love,
enabling him to exult in death: "Leuchtende Liebe/lachender TodE
gleaming love, laughing eath. 62 The tone is Nietzschean, the
tone of Zarathustra's vision of tragic joy and laughing destruction:
"The world now laughs, the great curtain is rent, the marriage of
light and darkness takes place." It is, moreover, that of the
closing scene of Yeats's play The Kingfs Threshglg, and the poems
Th§_Gy§es and Lapis Lazuli: "They know that Hamlet and Lear are
gay/ Gaiety transforming all that dread."63
Yeats's enumeration of the traditional symbols which he, Wagner,
and their contemporaries revered (day-night, winter-summer, spring-
autumn) suggests those antithetical symbols through which the fig

6 siecle artist dramatized what he recognized as the dualism of

 

the cosmic and human condition. They suggest, moreover, the cyclic
pattern by which dualism as a temporal manifestation emerges as
recurrent process. As Yeats realized, his own generation had re-
enacted the romantic revolt against an arid rationalism, and the

romantic poet too, had found night as the kingdom of sensibility

 

 

137

age ainst res son, his congenial home. Tristan and The She dowi Waters

 

share also a night—world of their own. The nocturnal world of
Tristan provides the lover's night and constitutes the only "real"
world. All else is illusory; darkness and night become symbols
of good: day is "lying," "deceitful," "full of dread." It is

to reject the false light of reason that Isolde extm guishe er

01
D4

torch, surrendering to the infinite possibility of night.
The night and day conflict as s eh, is scarcely evident in

Yeats' 5 play. There is, however, the implication that hi ima re-

crowded sea must, of nece851tm', belong to a night-world. In fact,

it is much too perishable for the light of day. But the same con-
flict is very IUCh in evidence in the characters and the contrasts
between them, cortrests wh 1ch Yeats had struggled to heighten in

his successive revisions. Yeats consistently characterized the
primary, rational order as solar, and his antithetical as lunar or
nocturnal. The visionary experience belongs exclusively to a night-

world, and the visions of Byzantium follow upon the coming of night,

*-

when "the unpurged images of day recede." Elsewhere Yeats

U
associates day and night with male and female principles:

There are some who understand that the sizple unrm':terious
things livirg as in a clear moonlight are of then ture of
the sun, and that vague many—imaged thin5s have in them the
strength of the moon. Did not the Egyptian ca ve it on
emerald tlat all living things have the elm for fa tm rand
the moon for mother, and has it not been 88 aid thata man
of genius takes the most after his mother?

fsd

Txomas Lann in his essay "Sufferings and Greatness of Richard

”agner" commented on Wagner's use of hi ht in terms which are

equally applicable to Yeats's usage:

138

This deliberate stress upon the night, the lovelier
half of the day is arch—romantic; and its romanticism
is bova1d up with th 3 whole mother-and—moon cult which
since the dawn of human tire and h 1an sunworship has
stood gpposed to the male and father-religion of the
11‘ tho

Yeats was to become increasingly sensitive to the effete
quality which he felt had threatened his early work, and which he
found everywhere about him in t1e writings of his contemporar:108.
He wrote AB in 1904: "I cannot possibly be quite just to any
poetry that spoke to me with the sweet insinuating voice of th
dwellers in t1at country of the shadows and hollow nights. I have

. . . "66, 1
dwelt there too long not to dread ail that comes out of 1t. leats
had resolved to overcome the "soft insinuating voice" by the "sound
of steel on steel."

Yeat s's most common embler1 for the subjective role is the
moon, which he describes in his Shelley essay as "the most change-
able of symbols, and not merely because it is the symbol of change.
As mistress of the waters she governs the life of instinct and the

O ._ .367 O 4- ‘0 ' Q P ~
generation of th1ngs. Assoc1ated with Yeats s cnangeinl path
of the haneleon, existential experience, the moon has suggested
to the nvth-mal :er a erennial attern anala ous to that of the human

‘v
tragic condition. Its phasal fragmentation and reintegration enact
an unending parable of death and rebirth, the rhytt1ms and cycles
of sublunary life. The sun, however, is ever the same, never in
any sense "Becoming," but the cosmic analogue of "Being." The moon

probably gave rise to the first primitive conceptions of tine; 1ts

perpetual return to beginnings, its cyclic nature, and the imzediacy

 

 

139

of its association with the realities of natural life, the tides,
the menses, and the crepe appear to have imprinted it1es a potent
symbol on many a primitive culture. Mircea Eliade cites a pre-
valent symbolism of spirals, snakes, and lightning, all of which
are associated with the notion of the moon as the measure of
rhythmic change and fertility.68 All of these are, of course,
identified by Yeats with the moon haunted h9gg§_ghameliontog of
antithetical man. Eliade has quoted Hentze's Opinion that in
effect, all dualisms find in the moon's phases if not their his-
torical cause, at least a mythic and symbolic model. Moreover,

the lunar passage has always been linked with the way of intuition,
magic, and the imagination, as contrasted with the solar attributes
of reason, reflection, and objectivity.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that Yeats respected this tra-
ditional association. If one is to accept Becoming (or in Bergsonian
terms, duration) rather than an abstract, static ideal of Being, it
follows that intuition alone provides the only possible instrument
of knowledge. Moreover, Yeats was undoubtedly aware of the power
of the moon over the Irish imagination, that the Celtic moon goddess
Dane presided over the pantheon of the Tuath de Danaan, the pro-
genitors of the race of faery and supernatural beings which per-
sisted in haunting the Irish imagination in Yeatss own day.

Although Yeats's sympathies lie with the solitary lot of his
antithetical hero and his chameleon path, his ultimate solution rests
with the attainment of Unity of Being, the power to command the

totality of experience, both primary and antithetical. It is,

 

140

however, only antithetical man who seeks actively to effect the
interpenetration f these opposed planes, to banish dualisms,
perpetual return aid fragmentary existences by integrating ex-
perience with the prinal unity of an overmastering vision of
reality. Only in this way can the p “sly existential be trans-
muted, made incarnate with the totality of Being.

The legendary figure of Cuchulain in Irish mythology has
been associated by Rhys with the attributes of a solar god or
hero, but the symbolism which Yeats had elaborated in A'Vision
places heroic man within the twelfth lunar phase, where antitheti-
cal man seeks self-realization at the full of the moon.69 The
night-world, or the solitary world of mists and still waters, is
the traditional habitat of Yeats's antithetical figures who shun
the anatomizing light of reason for the solace of the lunar night.
But the heroic role demands that the here do battle, and the heroic
stand is not a surrender or retreat to the more congenial world of
night. The role of antithetical man seeking Unity of Being denands
activity, not passivity; the promise of victory lies in battle,
not acquiescence. The hero, who is driven into an impassioned
frenzy in pursuit of his mask (which, if it is a true mask must
come from a primary phase), seeks to attain that self-realization
or Unity of Being which promises victory over the antinomies of
day and night, reason and intuition. He must, therefore, do battka
in an unfriendly dawn before the cold light and tumbling clouds,
where the perishable half-tints of his dusky world give war before
naked conflict in its terrifying clarity. Until Yeats had extri-

cated his here from an interminable sojourn in the night-world,

141

and impelled him into open conflict, he had no opportunity to
dramatize heroic action or tragedy.

But day follows night in the same diurnal round in which
night triumphs over day, and the here must meet his ritual nemesis
on the battlefields of dawn. By the harsh light of reason, he
has met with total and ignoble defeat; his sacrifice is without
consequence and meaning. But reason, which worships only its own
limited ends and is blind to all else, seeks to arrest or, more
properly, disregard time and change, and fails to look to the
gathering dusk. Beneath its bark, Yeats's tree of life, like the
world of Heraclitus, resounds with the continual clash of swords,
and what appears as conciliation or stasis to the myopic eye of
reason, is no more than illusion or a mere ebb and gathering of
forces in the drama of the cosmic agon, "dying each other's life,
0 o ' 1 "70 >
liv1ng each other 5 death.

Even our best histories treat men as function. Why must

I think the victorious cause the better? Why should
Mommsen think the less of Cicero because Caesar beat him?
I am satisfied, the Platonic Year in my head, to find but
drama. I prefer that the defeated cause should be more
vividly described than that which has the advertisement

of victory. No battle has been fiially won or lost; 'to
Garret or Cellar a wheel I send'.

CHAPTER VI

Artist, Saint, and Feel: The Paths of Chameleon and Arrow

Of the various roles defined by the phasal scheme of‘g‘yigigg,
those of the here, the saint, and the artist, recur most frequently
among Yeats's inquiries into the nature of the creative process.
Although hero and saint are assigned explicit positions at phases
twelve and twenty-seven of Yeats's Great Wheel, the poet or artist,
depending on his personal characteristics and the character of his
art, might be found in any number of primary or antithetical phases.
It is the saint and here, however, who anticipate the crucial phases
or supernatural incarnations which impart to the whole wheel its
direction and moment and, in consequence, serve to define and clarify
the graduated nature and roles of all intermediary incarnations.

The saint, or the final triad in which the figure of the saint
emerges, is diametrically Opposed to the heroic triad which ushers
in the fifteenth phase, perfected Unity of Being. The increasing
subjectivity which is expressed by the here, "the sensualist," and
"the obsessed man" (phases twelve to fourteen), mark the culmination
of the antithetical term, the diastolic movement from a primary,
unific order towards complete self-realization. Conversely, the
condition symbolized by the final triad of the cycle (phases twenty-six
to twenty-eight), dramatizes the soul's systolic impulse towards
its goal of total absorption in primary Being. These two goals of
the One and the Many, yoked within their common circuit, imply as well,
distinct orders of knowing, the paths of intuition and reason which
Yeats characterized in £§£_§miga Silentia Lungs as the serpentine
path of Nature, and the straight line of logic or Sanctity.1

The artist is committed to the experiential world of the many-

coloured serpent, where all is tangible and recurrent,

143

144

and where insight is limited to the momentary illumination of
instinct and epiphany.

Instinct creates the recurring and beautiful,

all the winding of the serpent; but reason. . .

is a drawer of the straight line, the maker of

the arbitrary and the impermanent. . .Sanctity

has its straight line, also, darting from the

centre, and with these arrows the many-coloured

serpentztheme of all our poetry is maimed and

hunted.
The course of the arrow, which Yeats associates with the sanctity
of the saint and his rationalist precursors, is the natural antagonist
of the poet and his art, indeed of all the vital processes of life
itself. The poet, could he forsake his commitment to the serpentine
path of the experiential world, and his personal vision, would forfeit
as well his role as artificer, and the very fabric of his art, exper-
ience, language, and form. Primary man, in the closing phases of his
cycle, eschews the dialectic of the mask which binds him to the
experiential world, surrendering to a supernatural unity rather than
struggling for the synthesis achieved by heroic or creative fiat.

I now know that there are men who cannot possess

'Unity of Being,‘ who must not seek it or express

it,-and who, so far from seeking an anti-self,

a Mask that delineates a being in all things the

Opposite to their natural state, can but seek

the suppression of the anti-self, till the natural

state alone remains. These are those who must

seek no image of desire, but await that which

lies beyond their mind-unities of God.3
If we are to think of the saint as choosing a mask, it is clear
that his mask lies not among the procession of earthly incarnations,
but with the "antithetical self of the world," with the perfected
Sphere which is the antithesis of the existential act of Becoming.
The choice of Sanctity is to be nothing, whereas the heroic would

become everything.

145

The saint provides a curious and comparatively lacklustre
mirror image of the here, an inversion of those self-assertive
qualities which define and energize the tragic role. Whereas the
tragic hero articulates the extreme tendency of antithetical man's
course toward self-realization, the saint embodies the objective
tendency which anticipates the complete revnunciation of selfhood
for an obsessive preoccupation with the noumenal.

The saint, who achieves the total vision of reality by
renouncing experience, is subject neither to the reasoning blindness
which characterizes his fellow primaries, nor to the blind unreason
which characterizes the hero in his emotional struggle to attain
his mask. Because the saint perceives both orders dispassionately
as mere facets of a comprehensive reality, he can surrender his
loyalties neither to the one nor to the other; his allegiance lies
with the serenity of the whole rather than with its warring parts,
and he forgoes the necessity to do battle. In choosing the impassivity
of the meditative life, he renounces the process of Becoming which
is the generative world, for inactivity, a waiting upon God. And
yet, Yeats insists, the saintly office is not mere escapism: "Saint
and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image
and after become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if
they could, resemble that antithetical self."4 Both saint and here
are impelled, not by mere dissatisfaction with the world as they find
it, but by the desire to make deliberate sacrifice in order to achieve
their own ends, to realize in its fullness an impounded sanctity of
soul.

If we are to consider the rewards that are his, it would appear

146

to be the saint rather than the tragic hero whose efforts to achieve
his mask are crowned with success:

For a hero loves the world until it breaks him,

and the poet till it has broken faith; but while

the world was yet debenair, the saint has turned

away, and because he renounced experience itself,

he wears his mask as he finds it. . .And yet is

the saint spared despite his martyr's crown and

his vigil of desire, defeag, disappointed love,

and the sorrow of parting.
Consequently, the saint might well represent the heroic culmination
of the primary term, and were it not that "success" belongs to the
primary vocabulary alone, he might assert as well his preeminence
over the role of the tragic hero. But primary and antithetical orders
embody contrasting values, and antithetical man recognizes in a world
whose nature lies in tragic uncertainty, no system of rewards, no
measure of success,and he offers no allegiance to what might constitute
external necessity. From an impartial perspective, the saint might
appear the equal of his heroic counterpart, but impartiality, from
within the world of g;21§igg where all subsists by conflict and mutual
antagonism, and the final assertion of life lies in the tragic
assertion of mixed triumph and defeat, is unimaginable.

The supernatural incarnations, phases one and fifteen, cannot, from an
omniscient or visionary point of view, be evaluated in terms of an
individual efficacy or superiority. As the limits of experience,
they simply exist as sustaining polar principles. Judgment belongs
to the limited perSpective and loyalties of the gub_§p§gig_aeternitati ,
and implies an inevitable blindness to the comprehensive nature of
reality. Values, then, derive from one's own relative position and

limited point of view from within Yeats's system itself. Before one

can pass judgment, he must recognize a fundamental predication of

147

experience to which he applies his terms of good and evil; he

must create his heaven and hell. The supernatural incarnations, as
the perfected expression of the human antagonists, are removed,
because of their perfection, from the arena of conflict, and as such
they might be considered as the informing ideologies of Opposing
camps; one's heaven is inevitably another's hell. Unless he is
caught up within the omniscient impartiality offered by the
visionary pose, man cannot attain from.within the cycles to the
luxury of the impartial perspective; he is committed to one term or
the other, and his values spring from his loyalties.

Yeats cast his lot, or recognized that his lot lay, with the
company of subjective beings. For Yeats, primary experience gradually
lost its appeal, except as it served to define his own antagonisms
and to sustain his conception of cosmological and psychological
process. In this respect, Yeats recognized in his own loyalties
an inversion of the moral and ethical emphasis which characterized
NeOplatonic tradition, in which antithetical or diastolic motivation
had been largely ignored for a moral scale deriving from the summit
of primary existence, the One. And yet, Yeats could not but be
conscious of the incompleteness Of his own position, and he could
not accept a vision of reality which did not take into account the
existence Of the primary term. To surrender to the vision of the
perfected sphere, however, was to surrender to visionary indifference.
As a poet, Yeats's commitment lay with the materials of eXperience,
and as a dramatist, it lay with conflict, and although the historic
process had accorded to primary order its moment Of fleeting triumph,

Yeats persisted in his ill-timed sympathies: "I prefer that the

 

 

148

defeated cause should be more vividly described than that which
has the advertisement Of victory."6

The ambivalence from which Yeats's portrayal of the saint
emerges, produces an ironic characterization which suggests both a
tacit acceptance and an emotional rejection of the primary role.
Although Yeats does not deny his saints their experience Of the
beatific vision, they emerge in his poetry and plays as curiously
ineffectual grotesques in the company Of Yeats's lggi naturae, the
hunchback and fool. Yeats's saint in his poem {132 11333 H rmit ,
stands on the shores of the sea of life, rummaging rags and hair,
cracking fleas, between the figures of hunchback and a hundred-year
fool who is primary Being in its ultimate physical incarnation, who
"Giddy with his hundredth year,/Sang unnoticed like a bird."7 The
saint of the play Ihg_gg§_§pg,th§,flggg, and the tonsured Ribh,
studying the pages of his holy book by the spiritual conflagration
which is the intercourse of angels, are in their perfected innocence
little more than drolleries, strangely supercilious in the knowledge
which they alone possess, and which "makes them better than other men."

11
Whereas the saint wholly rejects the experiential world, the
hero is totally committed to it, and it is the role Of the artist
which, Yeats writes, "stands between the saint and the world of

impermanent things."8

In the struggle to achieve Unity of Being,
the hero wagers his life. The artist, who seeks his "impossible
perfection" only when he writes, would appear to risk much less,

although unlike hero and saint, he enters a Faustian pact in which

149

he stakes his art for his soul.

The imaginative writer differs from the saint

in that he identifies himself-to the neglect

of his soul, slash-with the soul of the world,

and frees himself from all that is impermanent

in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine,

but of the newspapers. Those things that are

permanent in the soul of the world, the great

passions that trouble all and have but a brief

recurring life of flower and seed in any man

are indeed renounced by the saint who soaks

not an eternal art but his own eternity.
The saint dedicates himself to the antithetical self of the world,
or chooses as mask the perfected sphere which transcends flux and
recurrence, but the artist identifies himself with the ”soul of the
world," and pursues his mask among the fleeting incarnations within
the circuit of the gyres. "The poet, because he may not stand
within the sacred house but lives amid the whirlwinds that beset
its threshold, may find his pardon. "1° Unlike the saint, he has
no assurance of salvation or ultimate reward. The artist's lot
is a solitary bout with his mask and his art, a heroic creation
of order in the midst of turbulence and uncertainty.

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work.

And if it take the second must refuse 11

A.heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

The apparent equivocation in Ieats's understanding of the word
"permanent'l lies in the inevitable ambiguity within the word which
suggests one meaning for primary Being, another for the subjective.
The saint seeks an eternity which lies beyond flux; the artist, the
eternity which is flux, the recurrent pattern of the eternal return.
For the saint, impermanence might constitute all activity, all
Becoming, everything but the divine Being to which he must surrender.

The artist recognizes impermanence in that primary reasoning principle

 

150

which seeks to arrest flux and change: the newspapers, the polls of
public opinion, the bastions of a fixed but precarious morality.

If it be true that God is a circle whose centre

is everywhere, the saint goes to the centre, the

poet and artist to the ring where everything

comes round again. The poet must not seek for

what is still and fixed, for that has no life for

him. let perhaps he must endure the impermanent

a little, for these things igturn, but not wholly,

for no two faces are alike.

Yeats's saint or sage, an orthodox Plotinian or Christian
ecstatic, seeks those transcendent forms which are won only through
an annihilation of self. In the curiously ambivalent figures of his
saint, sage, or mandarin, may be discerned the final evolution of
Yeats's early "Dionysian" heroes, Axel, Forgael, and Martin Hearne,
who,through their refusal of life, are shorn of all relevancy to
life itself, and become more curios, enigmatic men “with a secret"
which might, perhaps, not even be worth the telling.

I The tragedy of Martin Hearne in 1;; Ugicorn gag! thg giggg lies
in his credulous assumption that he can carry to the masses his
personal vision. Martin is a saint returned from the visionary
mount, a "man with a secret” miscast as a revolutionary. His personal
desire to “become nothing," to achieve primary union with God, is
misinterpreted by his followers as a rallying cry for political anarchy.
Martin has no more rapport with his followers than had Forgael with
his mutinous crew. His personal vision is mistakenly identified
by his followers with apocalypse, and he forfeits the security of
the saintly office for the role of scapegoat in an irrational world.

If the saint‘s quest is for the transcendent, the artist's

is for immanent form inseparable from the coursing tide of experience.

 

151

As artificer, he substitutes for the passivity of sanctity, pure
action.

Only where the mind partakes of a pure activity

can art or life attain swiftness, volume, unity:

that contemplation lest, we picture some slow-

moving event, turn the mind's eye from everything

else that we may experience to the full our own

passivity, our personal tragedy; or like the

spider in Swift's parable, mistake for great
possessions what we spin out of our guts. . . .

13

The mind at rest is the reasoning, not the creative mind; it
arbitrarily isolates events, abstracts, anatomizes, and loses the
power of synthesis, the demiurgic capacity to perceive and imbue
form. "The artist," Yeats claims, ''becomes as all the great mystics
believed, a vessel of the creative power of God," an Apollonian
giver of forms.14 But the saint would relinquish even his capacity
as a divine vessel, for the emotion of sanctity, which characterizes
the final phases of the wheel, emerges when all attempts at synthesis
have been abandoned for an acceptance of fate. The saint would become
God's fool: "His joy is to be nothing, to do nothing, to think
nothing, but to permit the total life expressed in its humanity

to flow in upon him and to express itself through his acts and

thoughts."15

And in the following incarnation, which expresses
the final deterioration of form prior to complete dissolution, the
saint's aspirations find their culmination; it is the fool who
achieves as much: mindless, selfless, he drifts "a straw blown
by the wind."16
If the emotion of sanctity lies in the rejection of the desire
for personal salvation, and a surrender to external fate, the heroic
casuistry of the artist and hero lies in the affirmation of the personal,

the ultimate triumph of self, and a desperate defiance of external

 

152

necessity.

Among subjective men. . .the victory is an

intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior

fate snatches away, and so that fate's antithesis;

while what I have called 'The Mask' is an emotional

antithesis to all that comes out of their internal

nature. We begi$7to live when we have conceived

life as tragedy.

The artifact, like the heroic act, is proffered in defiance

of external order. "The artists have made all the rest, because
Providence has filled them with recklessness. . .for being without

fear they have held to whatever pleased them.n18

Denied and, in
effect, spurning the rewards and popular acclaim accorded the
confident rhetorician, Yeats writes, "we sing amid our uncertainty,"
and like the heroic assertion, the song is pure gesture, whose
integrity lies beyond all external criteria of judgment.19 Its
permanence lies in its unique articulation of those recurrent patterns
which elude the rational mind, but which inform all human experience,
while the heroic gesture finds its permanence in its affinity with the
same forms which have been accorded traditional expression as ritual
enactment. Both partake of pure activity as opposed to the passivity
or inaction exemplified hy the saint, the ill-fated heroic confrontation
of will with necessity, or the creative conflict of soul divided
within itself, a psychomachia which absorbs no less the total energies
of being.

The gap between leats's creative aesthetic and his dramatic
concept of the tragic hero had been bridged by his speculations in
the essay uHodos Chameliontos," where the tragic hero's struggle for
mask and a perfected Unity of Being is perfectly consonant with the

efforts of the artist absorbed in the creative process.

 

153

. . .that Dante and Villon might through passion

become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all

to Mask and Image, and so be phantoms in their

own eyes. The two halves of their nature are so

completely joined that they seem to labour for

their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens,

being at the same time predestinate and free,

creation's very self. we gaze at such men in awe,

because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the

recreation of the man through that art, the birth

of a new species of man, and it may even seem that

the hairs of our head stand up, Eacause that birth,

that recreation, is from terror.

The visionary knowledge which the saint, artist, and hero,

as well as the initiates of the tragic spectacle share is essentially
one and the same, that of the paradoxical nature of life. Their
awareness, however, varies according to the nature of their varying
degrees of commitment, as well as in the fundamental difference
which the act of knowing implies for primary and antithetical exper-
ience. For the artist and the tragic hero, and perhaps to a lesser
extent through the empathy by which the audience engages in the tragic
agon, the vision of reality is fought for and won, born from the
battleground of the experiential world, and their awareness is
consequently one of the pulses rather than the intellect. The artist
creates his paradox, bridging the abyss between two orders of being,
or rather, containing them within the sphere of his art. The here
would himself become the paradox, and the tragic spectacle provides
a sacramental participation in the same visionary ritual. The saint
as well, is aware of the existential paradox, but having long since
fallen out of love with the world, and having offered himself on the
visionary mount, he merely contemplates the paradox itself, intellec-
tually and dispassionately, because his true allegiance lies with an

eternal referent beyond the contrivances of paradox and metaphor.

 

 

 

154

The saint has "shot his arrow at the sun," and the predication of
experience which provides the signposts for the winding road of
the chamelion and its journeyman is merely superfluous and futile.
His vision is no more nor less than that of others, but because he
has quit the tragic arena, his vision can scarcely be described as
”tragic."

To the awakening, the revelation of reality which is attributed
to the saint, the creative process, the hero, and the heightened
awareness which accompanies the tragic spectacle, Yeats applies
the single epithet, "ecstasy." "This is the end of all art, the
achievement of a joyous energy." “It is not joy, as we understand
that word, but an ecstasy, which is from the contemplation of things
vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen."21 The triumph
over thesis and antithesis which constitutes Yeats's ecstatic vision
of reality, has been identified by Henri Bergson with the aesthetic
experience. It ”takes us into a region that is not only anti-
predicative but preconceptual, where subject and object are coalescing
into a concrete 'being' of the world, but when that being still
retains some of its possibilities."22

For Bergson, as for Yeats, the aesthetic experience provides
an awareness of a preconceptual, and hence, unpredicated, suprara-
tional reality, and as such, its apprehension lies solely with the
intuition. Yeats's and Bergson's insistence upon the intuitive
nature of the aesthetic experience finds its parallel in the "joyful
knowledge” ascribed by the Thomist Jacques Maritain to the apprehen-
sion of all beauty. Maritain describes what Yeats might well have

acknowledged as "ecstasy":

   

 

 

 

 

155

The beautiful is that which gives joy, not all

joy, but a joy superabounding and overflowing

from such an act because of the object known.

If a thing exalts and delights the soul by the

very fact of its being given to the intuition of 23

the soul, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful.
The heightened awareness which Bergson and Maritain describe is
not limited to tragedy, but applied to all aesthetic experience,
the apprehension of the beautiful. Neither does Yeats reserve his
"tragic ecstasy" solely for formal tragedy, but proposes it as the
ultimate test of all creative expression.

All art, Yeats maintains, derives from the relationship of man
and his mask, and constitutes "man's flight from.his entire
horoscope,“ the limitations both of self and external necessity.24
But that ”happy art” which Yeats attributes to Keats and those who
he felt had failed to achieve the noblest expression, he describes
as a "fulfilled image of desire," an all-too successful flight
which results in a hymn of surrender to the mask. The poet, in his
anxiety to create a perfection remote from the vicissitudes of his
own life, has given himself wholly to what he regards as his mask
of perfection, and dreams away his awareness of the antinomies.
Like the saint, he foregoes the creative struggle within his own
soul. 1

All happy art seems to me that hollow image, but

when its lineaments express also the poverty of

exasperation that set its maker to work, we call

it tragic art. Keats but gave us his dream of

luxury; but while reading Dante we never long

escape the conflict.
Dante's dream of the Beat; Beatrix was in itself incapable of
providing his art with the tragic dimension. But Yeats is drawn

to an "element of baseness“ in Dante's character which delineates

 

 

156

both Dante's Beatrice and Dante the squabbling Florentine partisan,
and it is through the continuing struggle of the heavenly vision
and the earthly reality that the lineaments of his tragic art emerge.

Had notDante and Villon understood that their

fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had

they lacked their vision of Evil, had they

cherished any species of Optimism, they could

have found a false beauty and suffered no change

at all but changed as the wild creatures, or

from Dagil well to Devil sick and so round the

clock.
Unless the antinomies of the dream or the vision of the Good are held
to their turbulent pact with the Vision of Evil, the visionary poise
or the creative synthesis gives way to the unyielding stasis of
the rational mind, or consciousness is bound wholly to the temporality
of the circling gyres.

”If you take away from art its martyrdom," Yeats writes, "you
take away from its glory. It might still reflect the passing modes
of mankind, but it would cease to reflect the face of God!27 The
martyrdom which is the heroic gesture, and the artist's willingness
to forego sanctity of soul for the integrity of his art, rise from
the acceptance of the tragic nature of life, the eternal combat which
creates the noblest forms of art, as well as those of society, nations,
and philosophy. "All life is such a struggle," and the creative syn-
thesis which is the highest social or artistic achievement is founded
on that bifurcation of self whereby the extremes of human conscious-
ness must themselves be experienced to the full before they yield
their final knowledge. "Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness,
false beauty as our offering to the world. He can only create the

greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs. . . ."28

 

 

157

The drama of awareness Yeats describes as a'btruggle between
the sexes," and one must become possessor and possessed, "thrall and
enthralled"; he must know triumph as well as defeat before commanding
the resolution of antinomies promised by their marriage bed.29

In his 1930 Diary, adapting a metaphor which might well have
been drawn from Thomas Taylor's NeOplatonist commentary on the
Tigaggg, Yeats limns with a chilling brevity the dimensions of his
tragic vision of a world whose triumphant assertion lies with the
final knowledge born of conflict and human suffering: "When a plant
draws from and feeds upon the soil, expression is its joy, but it is
wisdom to be drawn forth and eaten."30 Yeats's argument spells out
his final quarrel with primary experience and the Neoplatonist
tradition. Taylor's metaphor of the soul, sown in the soil of
generation and flowering in the sunlight of its own intellective act,
boasts a comparatively pallid bloom when contrasted with Yeats's
vision of the human tragedy. Taylor writes:

For it is necessary that the soul which is

hurled like seed into the realms of generation,

should lay aside the stubble and bark, as it

were, which she obtained from being disseminated

into these fluctuating realms; and that, purifying
herself from everything circumjacent, she should
become an intellectual flower and fruit, delighting

in an intellectual life instead of doxastic nutriment,
and pursuing the uniform and simple energy of the
period of sameness, instead of the abundantly wander-
ing motion of the period which is characterized by
difference. For she contains each of these circles
and two fold powers. And of these horses, one is
good, and the other the contrary: and one of these
leads her to generation, but the other from generation
to true being; the one also leads her round the circle
of sense, but the other round an intellectual essence...
which life those that are initiated by Orpheus in the
mysteries of Bacchus and Proserpine pray that they
may obtain, together witgin the allotment of the spheres,
and a cessation of evil.

 

 

 

158

 

Taylor's Neoplatonic commentary echoes the characteristic

figures of Yeats's poetic myth: the hodos chameliontog, the

 

path of sanctity, and the divided loyalties of the soul. As a
rationale of the nature of primary experience, Taylor's account might
well have been recounted by the complacent Owen Aherne, or by one of
Yeats's enigmatic saints in his solitary hermitage on the Mount of
Abnegation. But for Yeats, the testimony of the primary or Neoplat-
onic experience alone, could no longer command any more authority
than that which we are asked to accord his saint, sage, or fool.
Yeats's sympathies lie with his Michael Robertes, who unlike the
ineffectual Aherne, strives heroically to encompass within his own
nature the struggle between saint and sinner, the vision of Good and
the vision of Evil. The hgggg’ghgmeliontgs, or Taylor's "period of
generation," is no longer for Yeats a degcensus gd infero , but is
affirmed as a "vale of soul making" in which man achieves his final
vision of tragic fulfillment, when in embracing the role of the fallen
god, he joyfully lends himself to be rent and devoured.

iii

Yeats’s career as a dramatist testifies to the poet's growing
awareness of the demands of dramatic form as well as his continuing
search for a pg§§i2,dg_th6§tre. But the experience which Yeats
brought from his personal trials with the Abbey plays and their
audiences shaped not only his evolving dramatic art, but his poetry
and personal aesthetic as well. The "passionate syntax" which Yeats
pursued as his characteristic poetic voice owed much to his school-
ing before the Dublin public, and it is apparent that his own theories

 

 

159

and strictures concerning style are applied impartially to dramatic
and lyric verse. The ideals and the debilities which shaped Yeats's
early verse are recognizably those of the plays as well, and the
colloquial pungency and tensile strength which characterize the
mature poems are equally characteristic of the later plays. Yeats's
public and private voices, his theatrical and lyric expression, are
inseparably one through all their permutations in a long and varied
career, and it is clear that the poet chose to recognize no distinction
between the lyric and the dramatic, that both in their intensity are
one, and constitute the highest expression of the poetic sensibility.
The develOpment of Yeats's poetic eXpression is closely
associated with his efforts to resolve the personal and aesthetic
problems posed by the dualism which informs his earliest work. In
his early plays, as in the poems, Yeats had already arrived at a
simple division of experience, the opposition between spiritual
and materialist values. His first impulse as a dramatist was to
extend his poetic techniques to the stage, and embody his latent conflict
solely in the metaphoric resources of his language. Butthe subtlety
of the narrative technique was wholly unsuited to the clarification
and discipline necessary to dramatic performance, and Yeats's first
tentative solution led to an impasse. In order to emphasize the nature
of his theme, Yeats "thrice-piled" his hyperbole, and the fragile
craft of his voyage of discovery wallowed under a smothering flow
of metaphor. Inevitably, Yeats became aware of the necessity to
personify his dualism in terms of warring characters engrossed in a

tangible conflict.

 

 

160

The subsequent revisions of the early plays,in particular
Th2 Shadogy flgtggg, witness Yeats's efforts to align his characters
with an external principle of duality. In 1895 Yeats had advised
Olivia Shakespeare concerning the portrayal of character in her
novels: I'you need never seek for the half tints, but must strive
for the black and white."32 The statement is of importance, both in
indicating Yeats's dissatisfaction with the vague, elusive quality
of his early work, and in revealing the tendency which would manifest
itself in the course of the revisions. Yeats was obviously groping
toward a concept of character in drama, although he had as yet,
insufficient experience to understand its practice. For several
years he continued writing in the half-tints of Qigig and the early
Shadggy Eatggg, until it was clear that a tint was infinitely more
perishable on the stage than a bold stroke of colour.

The emergence of a more tangible "black and white" quality
in the heroic plays of 1904 lent a new urgency to dramatic conflict,
and supplied a new definition (if not a completely satisfying credi-
bility) to character and situation. It promoted a tendency toward
an improved dramatic structure, and snatched character and situation
out of the mists so that they might supply opposition and friction,
and a much needed sense of dramatic movement.

Traditional form would have committed Yeats to exposition,
character, motivation, and those conventions which he dismissed
as the abstractions of the reasoning mind, the tools of the detested
dramatic realism. Consequently, he satisfied himself with the
rudiments of characterization, the personified dichotomies by which

his actors fell into one of the two camps, black or white: the

 

161

Yeatsian actor was either the visionary or the materialist, hero

or administrator, the subjective or objective being. The narrowness

of this theory of opposition when applied to traditional drama forced
Yeats to condemn the "excesses" of characterization which he found

among the Elizabethans. Yeats had attempted to reduce fiamlgt and Othello
to two conflicting principles, dismissing character and subtlety as
unnecessary extravagance and concessions to public taste. Although
Yeats would eventually reappraise the role which he had assigned to
character in the light of a deepening awareness for dramatic experience,
during the Abbey years he treated it simply as an extension of the
antitheses he found central to life and art. But despite his professed
distaste for Elizabethan drama, Yeats was ever of two minds, and the
characteristic ambivalence which lent his sympathies at one moment to
Axel and at another to his Chaucer, had elicited his grudging admission
that the only dramatist he had ever cared for was Shakespeare. Yeats's
dramatic theory was as yet incapable of serving the breadth and complex-
ity of his own sympathies. -

The principles which Yeats had personified by warring characters
gradually found their expression as warring factions within the indiv-
idual psyche, and develOped into the dualism of self and antiself
which constituted the doctrine of the mask. With a deepening aware-
ness of its dramatic implications, Yeats had restored the conflict
to its place of origin, the battleground of the human soul.

The doctrine of the mask, as it is outlined in 29; Amiga §ilentig
huggg,provides more than a view of human personality; it becomes an
account of creativity itself, and consequently assumes a central
role in Yeats's aesthetic. With 2g;_§migg,Silentiaqhugag,‘Thg

 

162

glgyggqguggg,had undergone its long and troublesome gestation.

It would appear to have been Yeats's first enthusiasm for his doctrine
of the mask and the daimon, and his efforts to embody it within the
relationships of his characters, which thwarted his efforts to

write the play as tragedy.

I began in, I think 1907, a verse tragedy, but

at the same time the thought I had set forth in
For Amica Silentia Lunae was coming into my head,
and I found examples of it everywhere. I wasted
the best working months of several years in an
attempt to write a poetical play where every
character became an example of the finding or not
finding of what I have called the antithetical
self; and because passion and not thought makes
tragedy, what I made had neither simplicity nor
life. I knew precisely what was wrong and yet
could neither escape from thought nor give up my
play. At last it came into my head all of a
sudden that I could get rid of the play if I turned
it into a farce, and never did I do anything so
easily, for I thi3§ that I wrote the present play
in about a month. '

The abrupt transition of Yeats's play from tragedy to comedy is hardly
compatible with the ideals of the early Yeats. Yeats had written
comedy before, under the tutelage of Lady Gregory, but had attached
little significance to his efforts or to the genre itself. The urge
to farcify a situation which he had taken up in high seriousness
was, perhaps, indicative of a new grasp and command of experience,
both personal and poetic. Much of his early work had been uncompromis-
ingly humourless, and Yeats's doom-eager heroes had often suffered in
consequence from a limited breadth of conception.

In 1906 Yeats had told of witnessing a dreary play of heroic
Ireland in a rural community, where the audience had failed to
respond sympathetically. He too,had turned from the play in distaste.

A comedian then began to act a fares, and the audience recovered its

 

163

good-humour. Recalling a glass shattered by a drunken harriden in
a quarrel with her bishop, Yeats observed: "here was something
secular, abounding, even a little vulgar."34 Yeats permitted a
long repressed sense of humour to run riot in.ghg,§;gy§g,guggn,
humour which reappeared in many of the later plays and poems, until
it would seem inseparable from that "toughened wisdom" which Miss
Ellis-Fermor had found underlying the strength and power of his
mature work.

The doctrine of the mask, as it was first conceived, preposed
a reduction of human experience to a simple psychomachia, a psychol-
ogizing of external antithetical principles, and the limited possi-
bilities of Yeats's mechanism of the mask threatened to reduce his
play to an allegorical rationale of human behaviour. Yeats, as a
dramatist, had unwittingly placed himself in the primary role,
submitting the vitality and complexity of human motivation to a rigid
behaviourism which narrowly determined the possibilities of character,
as well as limiting the suggestibility of his own art.

As a practising dramatist, Yeats was forced to move from
allegiance to a contrived principle into the infinite possibilities offered
by the world of A .V_:_l_s_i_o_n_. Only through this step could he acknowledge
and exploit the Chaucerian abundance and vitality which held his
admiration, and yet contain it within an integrated account of
human experience. Yeats had discovered that the systematic dichot-
omies which shaped his conception could yield, in Coleridge's words:
"the infinite gradations between opposites which form the play and
all the interest of our moral and intellectual being.“35 .glligigg

projects Yeats's conflicting principles and their assimilation as

 

 

164

the doctrine of the mask into the temporal dimension, allotting
to human character its twenty-six incarnations and the limitless
possibilities provided by combination and perspective. Yeats's
two-dimensional principle had found its fulfillment in a multi-
dimensional world. A Mg is largely the result of the redaction
and assimilation of Yeats's own eXperience as a practising dramatist,
and it provided him.with a world of infinite possibility in which
a metaphoric rather than discursive congruity rescues it from
artistic Chaos.

From Yeats's earliest plays and poems onward, it is clear
that the poet recognized in his own work an attempt to evoke an
experience analogous to the visionary ecstasy which he later accorded
to his saint, hero and artist. In this sense, his poems as well as
his plays might be considered as a poetry of process, an initiatory
rite contrived to induce in the sympathetic reader heightened
sensibility. Yeats's odyssey as a poet and playwright was primarily
a search for the poetic syntax which might serve this end. To achieve
his impersonalized sense of tragic revelation, Yeats began by employ-
ing a raft of poetic and theatrical devices which would.minimize
any illusion of character of the Dinglich qualities which he
associated with the experiential world. In his early plays Yeats
began with a generalized or mythically remote setting, and through
the hypnotic inducements offered by a monotony of language and controlled
rhythm, attempted to induce revery, or the trance-like response
which he associated with the visionary experience. The method
eschewed action and dramatic movement for a thoroughly static realiz-

ation, and its effect was perhaps more somnolent than revelatory.

 

 

“ Il‘ll’li(l\ .,
((1.1 (I! III

 

 

165

Yeats's final stand, clarified by his experience with the
Abbey and assimilated in the theory of personality evolved in
A;Xi£l2§. signalled a new acceptance of the role of character and
a willingness to dramatize personality, which is, perhaps more in
evidence in the mature poems than in the plays. Although the hero
as an.unindividualized figure remained essential to the generic
nature of the revelation provided by tragic experience, Yeats
could now afford a measure of characterization set in a comparatively
vivid temporal situation, and effect at the climactic moment a
heightened intensity through an abrupt movement from the particular
to the general, from the personal to the generic. ”The persons
upon the stage," Yeats wrote in 1910, “greaten till they are humanity
itself. We feel our minds expand convulsively or spread out slowly
like some moondbrightened image-crowded sea."36 The abrupt psychic
transition which Yeats would provide, he describes elsewhere as a
”sort of violent imaginative puberty" which is "the excitement at
the first reading of the great poets," a process of psychic readjust-
ment which, of necessity, must begin with the limited and the particular,
and move to the revelation of a seemingly illimitable and confounding

37

perspective. Yeats's account of psychic transformation finds its

echo in Bergson:

When the darkest depths of the soul are stirred
what rises to the surface and attains consciousness,
takes on there, if it be intense enough, the form
of an image or emotion. The image is often pure
hallucination just as the emotion may be meaning-
less agitation. But they both may express the fact
that the disturbance is a systematic readjustment
with a view to equilibrium on a higher level: the
image then becomes symbolic of what is about to
happen, and the emotion is a Sgncentration of the
soul awaiting transformation.

 

\I_

 

166

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of Yeats's technique is
furnished by the volatile compression of his sonnet "Leda and the Swan," in
which the intensity of focus and dramatic immediacy established by the octave
is riven by the sweeping visionary perspective of the sestet. As in the play
T_he_ Dreaming 9; £13 m we are thrust from the confines of a carefully
delineated dramatic situation into an overwhelming rush of multiple associations
and an unfolding of a historical perspective, a divided world made whole in the
congruity and magnitude of its metaphoric resonance.

The ingenuity of Yeats's efforts to forge the theatrical Gesamtkunstwegk,
a fusion of all the arts providing a rich field of reverberation for action
and language, finds its further expression in his essays on the Japanese‘flgh
tradition. The crux of the let. play, its moment of "no action"-the symbolic
pause of frozen gesture suggesting both repose and exertion, the static and
the kinetic-accretes as do Yeats's dance interludes, the entire symbolic
significance of the dramatic action. Yeats recognized in the dance, defined
by its explicit literary context within the dramatic text, the opportunity to
force an enhanced awareness of the nondiscursive totality which both lyric
and dramatic art would offer.

In the play The gap and the 331.229.: Yeats's blind beggar shoulders
his antithetical self, the crippled beggar, and attains the vision
granted to those who have achieved Unity of Being. He looks on the
tawdry relics and votive offerings cluttering the holy well of
Saint Coleman, and sees it transfigured as "a great and a blessed
sight."39 For Yeats, the office of art is to provide precisely this

experience, an insight into the "trysting-place of mortal and

immortal, time and eternity," the revelation of a world made whole

167

through the power of the imagination.40

 

CHAPTER VII

The Dimensions of g Eision

This study of Yeats has dealt with the emergence of a crucial
dualism in the poet's thought and art, with his efforts to clarify
and portray these terms of conflict as dramatic or poetic state-
ment, and finally with his struggle to wield them into the central
paradox of his poetic vision. Edward Engelberg and Thomas R.
Whitaker have, in separate studies, dealt with Yeats's vision of
historical and cultural evolution.1 Whitaker has examined the
sources and influences behind Yeats's theory of history, and Engel-
berg has traced the projection of the Yeatsian dualism in terms (1'
the poet's idiosyncratic history of art and world civilization.
What Yeats's critics have often failed to emphasize, however, is
the crucial unity inherent in these aspects of his thought, that
Yeats's view of history, that his dialectic of east and west, and
his psychology of the mask are analogous constructs, projections
of the individual or psychic microcosm. As Plato wrote his Repgblic
as a macrocosmic construct of his ethical vision of the human soul,
so did Yeats construct _A_ ELM as his account of the schism which
the individual soul has always confronted.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the spatialization
of Yeats's world, his metaphoric geography of east and west as it
unfolds from a personal dualism, and to relate this polarity to

169

 

 

 

 

 

 

170

these spatial categories which have traditionally preoccupied
the mythopoeic mind. Yeats has often been accused of utilizing
shoddy and unreliable sources in his account of the cultural
play between east and west. Considering the dubious nature of
Yeats's historical assumptions and the often baffling logic

of his conclusions, can his efforts be dismissed summarily as no

 

more than a poetic fiction, Dante's bells meggggna? Or does the

 

"lie" commend itself through the truth that lies beneath the web

of fiction? Perhaps the answer lies with the “truth” or pattern

which is embodied in the exercise of the mythopoeic faculty itself.
Befbre discussing Yeats's own elaboration of the spatial

pattern within A Eisign, we might consider the relevance of Ernst

 

Cassirer's account of mythopoeic structure to Yeats's own speculations.
Cassimer's description of the self-contained, self-sustaining
"charmed circle" of the forms of myth, religion, art, and science
furnishes a penetrating account of the inner cosmos generated by

the work of art.2 Clearly, Yeats thought of ; W as of this
order. A,Ei§igg shares the nature of the poemror the heroic gesture,
which generate their own statement in the teeth of external oppoe'
sition and empirical evidence, and which insist only upon the

unity of their own expression and the intensity with which it is
realized. ”I have comtructed a mythfl Yeats wrote in 1931, "but

then one can believe in a myth-one only ascents to philosophy.”3
The element of belief is, for Yeats, all important, as it implies
the fundamental distinction between myth or poetry and philosophic
assertion. One appeals to the whole man, to the "unified sensi-

bility," as Yeats understood it, while the other addresses itself

 

171

only to the partial comprehension of the intellect. It is this
particular quality of myth which Mircea Eliade has described as
being "addressed to the whole man, neither to intelligence nor
imagination alone."4 Eliade insists upon the preconceptual nature
of mythical expression, and describes its decadence as the
systematization it undergoes at the hands of the allegorists,

the philosophers, the systematisers who would divorce it from its
vital office of revealing the structure of reality, "an unveiling
of mystery.” In zlay§_ang Qgptrggergi g Yeats wrote, "somebody
has said that every nation begins with poetry and ends with
algebra, and passion has always refused to express itself in
algebraic terms."5 Yeats had read Croce in 1926, and he was to
confess that his familiarity with the writings of Vico was acquired
through Croce.6 In 1934 he wrote in his Introduction to the play
111;; 9:1}. and IE9. m: "Myth is not, as Vice perhaps thought, a
rudimentary form superseded by reflection. Belief is the spring
of all action; we assent to the conclusions of reflection but
believe what myth presents; belief is love, and the concrete alone
is loved."7 It is characteristic of Yeats, perhaps, that these
reflections were written on a play completed seventeen years
earlier. In 1930 Yeats wrote in his diary an observation that
applies not only to this practice of delayed reflection, but to
the process which gave rise to ;;E;§;gp,itself: "By the study of
those impulses that shape themselves into words without context
we find our thought, for we do not seek truth in argument or in
books but in clarification of what we already believe."8

By its very nature, Eliade insists, myth cannot be particular,

 

 

 

 

172

private or personal. 0n the other hand, Ernst Cassirer‘s
strenuous objections to Platonic myth lay with his contention
that Plato was forced to utilize the language of myth in Timaeus
as the only language capable of expressing the process of Becoming
which the dialogue recounts. But Cassirer sees iimgggg as a
consciously intellectual construct or dramatization of a pre-
conceived dialectic, so that its roots lay within the philosophy,
rather than philosophy emerging from the mythic pattern itself.9
Cassirer and Eliade would appear to be diametrically opposed in
their views on the nature of the "personal" and the "public" myth
but, in effect, each position serves to illuminate separate
aspects of the Yeatsian dialectic.

Fbr Yeats, the gratuitous nature of the hero's.or poet's
role identifies it as a creative one, an assertion of order by
personal or poetic fiat which might bear seemingly little relevance
to that which lies beyond its immediate scope. In effect, it is
this apparent irrelevance to social or historical contexts which
brands it as defiance or heroic gesture, the triumph of the human
spirit. But poetry, the mythmaker's art as well as the heroic
gesture, finds its genesis in "the foul rag and bone shop of the
heart," within the pulses of generic human experience. Moreover,
implicit in the creative fiat of poet or hero is an enactment of
the cosmogonic myth itself, the myth of creation. Eliade relates
that "when the cosmogonic myth tells us how the world was created,
it is also revealing the emergence of that totality of the real

which is the cosmos, and its ontological laws; it shows in what

 

 

 

173

10 The antithetical role of the Yeatsian

sense the world is."
here or poet, as we have seen, is synonymous with the act of
Becoming, but the act of Becoming is'ht the same time, the
emergence of a reality and the disclosure of its fundamental
structures."11 Since Becoming, then, is fundamentally the
revelation of cosmogony, the existential mode of myth serves to
reveal itself, as does ritual, as a manifestation of plenary
Being. Since myth serves to reveal the structures of reality,
all myths or all action, heroic or poetic, are for Yeats's purposes
relevant to one myth, the myth of integration, that revelation
which ultimately overmasters all the apparent dualisms of primary
and antithetical, of Being and Becoming. Myth.then, is for
Yeats the dialectic of incarnation, the assertion of integration
and synthesis, while philosophy or that didactic art which claims
lip service to philosophy is analytic, destructive of the integrity
of human experience as well as of cosmic process itself.

The zodiac, by means of which Yeats charts the path of his
Great Wheel, traditionally pertains not only to cosmic process
but to the life of the individual as well. The significance
of the zodiac, J.E. Oirlot claims, "concerns the process by which
primordial energy, once fecundated, passes from the potential to
the virtual, from unity to multiplicity, from.spirit to matter,
from the non-formal world to the world of forms. "12 The phasal
progressions by which Yeats marks the passage from.primary to
antithetical experience (and for which he provides the corre—

sponding figures of the zodiac) enact , moreover, the same process

 

 

1'74

by which the Iimaggg dramatizes the life of the universe as
split into two opposing yet complementary phases: the material
and the spiritual, and their ultimate resolution.13

In considering the development of Yeats's own poetic sensi-
bility in terms of Cassirer's and Eliade's accounts of the
primitive mythopoeic sensibility, one must be aware of the differ-
ences as well as the striking affinities. It must be realized

that the poet, unlike the primitive, is to some extent a self-

 

conscious artificer who is sustained by his romantic dream of the
primal unity of a world beyond the limitations of necessity.
Yeats's earliest poems express an ill-defined longing for such a
romantic transcendence. The pattern of his earliest verse, and
in some measure, that of his earliest play, Ihg_§hggggz;!§tggg,
suggests in particular a Shelleyan flight to the disembodied, a
sustained effort to realize a uranian aspect of experience.

In their studies of the growth and development of the mythic
consciousness, Gassirer and Eliade describe an initial sense of
primal unity which has not yet been subjected to the separation
or spatialization of the sacred and the profane, an awareness
which recognizes neither conceptually nor linguistically any
distinction between the universal and the particular. The golden
age recounted by western myth witnesses this primal synthesis,
an existential world as a manifestation of pure presence. The fall,
which Eliade has described suggestively as ”the secularization of
work," anticipates the beginning of conceptual thought, which
must utilize the fundamental distinctions that proliferate from

 

 

175

the polarization of the sacred and the profane.14The structure
of conceptual thought presupposes and affirms dualism, thrives
on distinction, and is contingent upon a linguistic structure
which has learned to manifest itself in terms of a syntax of
predication.

Eliade describes how an original transcendent sky god
eventually gives way to the sexual dualism of the fertility
celebration and its presiding gods. This withdrawn god, or deg:
gtiggg§,fbrfeits his religious actuality and yields to a surrogate
pantheon, the emergence of the Great Mother and her doomed lovers,
whose relation to the interests and preoccupations of a new agrarian
society are immediate and dramatically relevant.15 Hence, Ouranos,
who provided nothing more than a figure of chaotic procreation,
gives rise to Aphrodite-order and balance, proportion, or in Yeats's
account, the Swedish actress he noted riding the sea near Rapallo,
or the Doric discipline imposed by Hellenic civilization on the
formless potency of the East.16

The same rupture within Being is described by Gassirer as
the earliest urge of man to create distinction, to dissolve the
union of holy and profane, to create the distinctions of temporal
and spatial division. The first of these created distinctions is
the spatial determination through which we acquire an awareness
of the attributes of the divine, demoniac, holy, or the profane._

From this awareness of a fall from unity, man moves to enact
a third stage. Now that he has known the particular, he seeks
to reintegrate, to return to the original feeling for space and

 

— -I g, 7' I _— .

 

176

a God which transcends the particular. Having passed through the
secondary stage of distinction, the process becomes a conscious
effort to overcome the created forms and reintegrate the bifurcat-
ed sensibility which has been broken on opposition. Cassirer
cites Schelling as having established that the initial conception
of unity can be attained only through its bifurcation into
opposites. An "other" emerges as a viable conception only after
the unific consciousness passes through its necessary cleavage.
Only this recourse to polytheism can serve to advance conceptual

monotheism.17

The general sequence which has been outlined can
be seen as yet another expression of the cosmogonic round as traced
by Iimaggg: the descent from Absolute presence and a transcendent
One to the duality of soul and matter, and the impulse of the
alienated soul to effect its return, to recover its lost Eden.
Cassirer's refusal to accept the mythography of Plato springs
from his insistence that myths are intuited and turned into images,
and that Plato's system is rooted in the intellect rather than in

man's intuition of the world of things.18

Rather than acknowledge
a schism between these ways of knowing, Cassirer implies a close
and inseparable union: two spheres or, more properly, two
hemispheres conjoined in the process of awareness. But it is
11mgggg itself which established precisely this solution. Cassirer
apparently ignores the central myth of the Timaeug which grapples
with this same reconciliation between the two phases of knowing,
one which seeks to transcend the finite categories of an empirical

world, and one which seeks to accept the limitations of that world.

 

177

It is precisely this dual aspect which distinguishes Plato's
thought from the mysticism of his Neoplatonic followers. The
tendency to surpass the limits of the empirical world is checked
dialectically by a contrary demiurgic function which leads back
to this world in order to organize it and bring it into rational
values. Only thus can the universal reveal its meaning and
purpose by rendering possible the order of the particular.
Cassirer's claim that the two are left unreconciled in the Platonic
vision ignores the fact that these two impulses are comprehended
within the cyclic process proposed by the Timaean cosmology.

In spite of the emphasis on rationalism.which is generally
associated with the Socratic dialogues, it is clear from the
Iimgggg that Plato's world must, as must any other system.of
thought, be reared on a foundation of intuited experience. More-
over, in any system of dialectic, the final resolution of that
system must always be intuitive. A.symbolic system tends to
proliferate without end, and in order to maintain its stability,
closure must be effected by an element which is not in itself
part of that system. Rationalism must, in the final analysis,
take recourse in something which is not rational; and its final
resolution must be understood as an act of intuition, of faith.
The half-humourous and bizarre circumstances which Yeats recounts
in connection with the dictation of §_11§ign serve to emphasize
the irrational genesis of his system. Mereover, Yeats insists
that his system, once evolved in its outline, became a self-
generating process whose growth was governed neither by dialectical

logic nor even by evidence offered by empirical observation. When

 

178

scanning the history of European civilization for concrete
examples of his final triad of the Great Wheel, Yeats could find
none. "One must create the type from its symbols without the

help of experience} he writes, and the process he describes in
limning his mythic cosmos is one of symbolic proliferation.19
Yeats's spiritual interlocutors appeared to have little faith in
his specious philosophizing. "I am always afraid," an exasperated
communicator apologized, ”that when not at our best we may accept

from you false reasoning."20

ii
To accept a chronological sequence imposed by the concept
of serial time was, for Yeats, to endorse an abstraction which
could not be concretely experienced. The problem, as Philip
Wheelwright has suggested, lies in the fundamental antagonism
between the existential and rationalist views of experience:
Nethin in our experience attests to so sterilized a
graph the concept of linear time]. Spatial models of
time detract us from our existential knowledge of its
character. . .we fasten upon any set of concepts which
reassure us by their familiarity and formal stability;
we forget that they are artifacts and not confrontable
realities.21
In the mind of the mythopoeic historian, events appear to
coalesce and align themselves through a congruity or similarity
of pattern in the same manner in which the primitive consciousness,
as Cassirer has pointed out, effects a similar concrescence of
events in the mind of the celebrant during the enactment of a

22

rite. Ritual enactment, Cassirer writes, is not to be thought

of as a symbolic commemoration of an historically remote event,

 

179

but a moment when the ritual act coalesces with its archetype,
and when normal succession gives way to what Eliade has called
"sacred time.“

The sacred time in which the mystery occurs of the

transubstantiation of bread and wine into the Body

and Blood of Christ is different not only in quality

from the profane succession from which it is detached

like a space enclosed between the present and the

future; not only is this sacred time linked with that

of the Masses preceding and following it, but it can

also be looked on as a continuation of all the Masses

which have taken place from the moment when the mystery

of transubstantiation was first established until the

present moment. The profane succession, on the other

hand, which flows between two Masses, not being trans-

formed into sacred time, cannot have any connection

with the hierophanic time of the rite: it runs parallel,

so to speak, to sacred time which is thus revealed to

us as a continuum which is interrupted by profane intervals

in appearance only.23
Consequently, mythic time eschews past time as a disparate, self-
contained entity, and because the world of myth is anchored in
existential experience rather than abstraction, in affirming the
process of Becoming, it finds its expression somewhere between
present and future, a presence which Leibnitz has described as
"charge du passé et gros de l'avenir," that which is ever coming
to woo.24

Similarly, the mythopoeic attitude is reluctant to recognize

an arrangement of its physical universe in which the four cardinal
points of the compass exist only as an abstraction providing no
more than a system of relative orientation. The world of myth,
Cassirer has shown, is segmented structurally rather than by a
purely functional system such as that offered by geometry. Be-
cause the space of myth is not a homogeneous space, it cannot

be symbolically represented by geometry. The confusion generated

 

180

by an examination of the maze of interlocking cones, gyres, and
schematizations with which Yeats's bride illustrated A,Visign
is, then, perfectly understandable. Yeats himself was fully aware
of the inadequacies of geometrical constructions as a gloss to
the machinations of a system already fully subsumed in its own
symbolic language. To attempt the reduction of §;Vigion to
geometry was to revert to abstraction. "I think," he writes,
"that the forms of geometry can have but a symbolic relation to
spaceless reality,"25 and later, when he attempts to anchor his
system in the conventional spatial and temporal rationale of the
historian, he confesses: "Is that marriage of Europe and Asia
a geographical reality? Perhaps, yet the symbolic wheel is time-
less and spaceless."26
Cassirer's studies of the nature of the primitive imagination

recount the manner in which the mythopoeic or literary imagination
creates the dimensions of its own cosmos. Mythic directions,
Cassirer writes, are neither abstract nor ideal, but independent
entities charged with a life of their own,

. . .even attaining the characteristics of gods. . .

perhaps there is no cosmology however primitive, in

which the contrast of the four cardinal points does

not in some way emerge as the cardinal point of its

understanding and explanation of the world. . . .It

is an organization in which the various spatial

positions and distances exhibit definite characters

of expressive meaning. . .Proximity and distance,

height and depth, left and right are not realized

as more variables of a sophisticated space thinking;

in the world of myth they figure as true values,

interpreted with reference to given systems of magical

significance.2

But before any systematization of this order can acquire its

congruity, the various elements must evolve and express their

 

 

181

individual characteristics. These, Cassirer proposes, are
acquired by the introduction of the fundamental Opposition which
inferms all mythic thought, that of the sacred and the profane.
Since myth is recognized as the conceptual language of a
phenomenal world of Becoming, it must submit to this spatial-
ization in order to establish a centre of orientation amid an
apparent chaos of total relativity; but if it should seek to
stabilize sensuous phenomena in order to achieve this, it de-
generates into a system of abstraction.

The development of this rudimentary feeling for the character
of space appears to have taken its origins from an awareness of
the natural opposition of day and night, light and darkness,
perhaps the most potent stimulus for either the primitive or the
creative imagination. As the dichotomy of the holy and the profane
aligns itself with that of diurnal light and darkness, the realm
of the dead and the dying sun becomes spatially distinct from that
of the living and resurgent light, Just as other events of life
begin to acquire their meaning from the relation in which they
stand to the solar passage. Similar values begin to extend to
north, south, east, and west, which emerge as hostile or divine

in their connotations. Cassirer writes:

Whenever mythical thinking and mythical feeling endow a
content with particular value, wherever they distinguish

. it from others and lend it a special significance, this
qualitative distinction tends to be represented in the
image of spatial separation. Every mythically significant
content, every circumstance of life that is raised out of
the sphere of the indifferent and commonplace, forms its
own ring of existence, a walled-in zone separated from its
surroundings by fixed limits. . . .2

 

“I

182

It is this "walled-in" zone or mythic cosmos-whether it en-
compasses a tribal organization of totem and belief, or whether
it constitutes the bounds of a historical or literary vision of
reality-which affirms its relevance to the restless change of the
phenomenal world; yet, in evolving its centre of orientation, it

provides its resolution of the existential crisis.

iii

Yeats's spatialization of his poetic world owes much to
mythical sources, speculative and often specious accounts of
cultural migrations, literary analogies, and a highly idiosyncratic
personal integration of these with the operative dualism which in-
forms A M. Irish folklore, Christianity, astrology, and
theosophy constructed an elaborate system of correspondences based
on the quaternary. The Zohar relates the four cardinal points to
the four elements; it also extended these to the four seasons.
Through tradition, a recognizable pattern of equations evolved.
East is associated with spring, with air, infancy, dawn and the
crescent moon; south with summer, fire, youth and the full moon;
west with autumn, water, evening, the waning' moon; north with
winter, earth, old age, night, and the new moon.29

Mythic or ritual orientation affected the sites of pre-
Christian places of worship as well as that of the great European
cathedrals. Christian tradition developed an elaborate dialectic
of the four cardinal points, and as Christianity fashioned its
own temporal dialectic in which human history centres about the

incarnation, so it developed a spatial segmentation in which the

 

   

 

183

extremities of the cross were identified with celestial and

31

cosmic directions. The Christian practise of turning the
novice eastward in the sacrament of baptism in order to profess
his faith, and westward to denounce Satan echoes the same
polarization which led tradition to associate the isles of the

32 It is this sort

dead with the direction of the westering sun.
of mythic articulation of the four cardinal points which provides
the fundamental orientation which derives cosmos from the baffling
relativity of chaotic experience. Nissan has furnished evidence
tracing the manner in which the mythical cardinal points arranged
about the solar path gave rise to the entire system.of Roman
theology and left its formative imprint on every aspect of the
juridical, social, and political life of Roman civilization.33
East and west, as they first appear in Yeats's writings, carry
those connotations which western tradition commonly read into the
diurnal passage of the sun. West implied the direction of the
dying sun, and east, the source of life. Hence the island of
the immortals, E1ysium.or Tir nan Og,lay in the western sea, while
the course of human life, whether individual or collective, moved
westward from its eastern source. ”Every civilization," Yeats
wrote in his essay "The Holy Mountain," "no matter where its birth,
began with Asia."34 Yeats never really altered this fundamental
ur-myth, and he derived from it an elaborate mythical account of
cultural geography and history based upon the fundamental duality
suggested by the two cardinal points. "Asia seeks solar or

primary orientation," he explains in §,Vi§ign.35 The west is

lll'lll'll'lll

 

 

 

 

184

identified with antithetical Being, and the interplay of these
hemispheres provides the poet's dramatization of world history
as well as the personal psychomachia which is realized by the
individual. East and west confront one another like man and his
daimon, and Yeats's customary metaphor for this confrontation
is explicitly sexual.

Yeats's initial spatial division into symbolic east and west
reflects the simple two-dimensional dualism which first lay behind
his theory of the mask. With the formation of 4‘21Qign_and the
charting of Yeats's Great Wheel, simple opposition proliferates
into sequential oppositions and a series of masks. Thus human
life is conceived no longer in terms of the struggle of fixed
characteristics, but as a struggle which manifests itself in
Becoming. Dualism, projected into the temporal dimension, has
become the operative principle of process and is symbolically
represented by the sphere which embraces the two modes of Being.
Consequently, Yeats utilizes the zodiac as a gloss to the machin-
ations of the Great wheel, the representation of universal process
and integration. Moreover, east and west are supplemented by the
remaining cardinal points, north and south. Phase one, absolute
objectivity or primary Being, is associated with the north and
those attributes which Yeats chose to identify with the character
of northern civilization: geometry, non-objective art, and the

36

creation of abstract systems. Phase one is the absolute (hence
unrealized) expression of these characteristics; humanity and in-

cidence disappear; its attribute is total passiVity. The descent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

185

from transcendent Being becomes, at phase eight, aligned with
the west, and its emblem as represented in Dulac's woodcut for

37 Phase eight is described as

A E2123 is a cup or chalice.
potency (the pure potency manifest from.phase one) in the process
of submitting to form or limitation. The chalice or receptacle
represents the traditional demiurgic cup or crater in which pure
spirit accepts the lineaments of matter. The passage then ranges
through the antithetical hemisphere and reaches its culmination
at phase fifteen, the subjective or antithetical extreme. Opposed
in all its attributes to the north, south represents naturalistic
human form, the human and the spontaneous, H.H. Auden's "southern
gesture," the existential as opposed to the primary or noumenal.

Phases, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen follow, those stages
at which Unity of Being er Unity of Culture are realized, and
anticipate the east, which is reached at phase twenty-two. Sym-
bolic of human power, will or spirit, the east represents the
gathering forces of intellectual authority, as opposed to the
emotional or natural intoxication associated with the west; hence,
its emblem is the scepter. Yeats's identification of the east
with a formless potency antagonistic to the evolved ferms of the
west underlies the same cultural and metaphysical conflict which
E.M. Forster has drawn between the colonial and the Anglo-Indian
Raj in his novel, _A_ Passage t_q_ Luge.

For Yeats, the struggle between form and potency realizes
itself in the historical confrontations of western culture with

the east. The vitalism of the west is achieved by its imposition

 

186

of form on the primary east, but such forms outlive their
efficacy and inevitably prove to be no more than a codification
of that which is inherently vital, becoming in the course of

time and change increasingly rigid, irrelevant, and finally self-
destructive. western history, therefore, in contrast with that
of the east, is a revolutionary one, a violent and unremitting
process of casting off those forms which no longer serve to
accommodate its drives and desires. In the essay "An Indian Monk"
Yeats describes an encounter with "an exceedingly religious
MOhammedan" at Wilfred Blunt's, who maintained that India would
never organize. "'There are only three eternal nations,‘ he said,
'India, Persia, China: Greece organized and Greece is dead'."38
Mircea Eliade comments on the same antipathy to the abstract
formulations of history which the Indian dismisses as the illusory
dance of’REya. "India has never allowed philosophic importance to
History. India is preoccupied with Being; and History, created by
becoming is just one of those forms of I‘l'on.---being."39 Considering
the course of modern history, Yeats might have gloated over the
ill-advised and disastrous dream of Adolf Hitler to drive the
relentless logic of the gutgbahn into the remote wastes of the
asiatic steppes.

The schematization of A E;§;9g_provided Yeats with more than
simply I'metaphors for poetry." Its influence on Yeats's thought
and art are far reaching and pervasive. Rather than signalling
the emergence of a new dimension in Yeats's sensibility, it is,

however, more a symptom.and confirmation of an awareness that had

 

187

been shaping over the years. A_Ei§igg did not spring newly

born from Mrs. Yeats's mediumship in the early years of their
marriage, but poetry and prose, as I have indicated elsewhere,
witness its gradual formation long before 1925. Yeats's early
plays and poems evince at times a certain disconcerting shallow-
ness, an attenuated remoteness from genuine human experience which
is rooted in a conceptual pose reducing life to simple fixed
terms of conflict. (In its earliest expression, Yeats shies even
from this, and rather than conflict, he resorts to flight.) This
approach did, in effect, court the sort of abstraction and hazard
the allegorical expression which Yeats himself abhorred. The most
vital innovation in Yeats's art was his projection of life, not

as an oscillation between fixed and intransigent extremes, nor as
a static system, but as a dynamic process. With this development,
character, event, and circumstance root themselves in a conception
which admits of infinite variation, combination, and interaction,

and a deepened awareness of their contingencies.

iv
The "systematic arrangement of experience" proposed by
Yeats's Great Wheel in A 15223 serves as an account of historical
process as well as the psychic growth of the individual and, as
such, it recounts the personal odyssey of Yeats's poetic and
public career.
I have attempted to show that Yeats's early poetic ideals

attest to a theocentric or, in Yeats's words, a "primary"

 

 

 

 

188

orientation. When primary reality is recognized as spatially
distinct from, rather than immanent in, the experiential world,
identity and integration give way to dualism and metaphoric tension,
and the quest, as in 2hg_ngderingg gf_Qi§in and Th§_8hadggy
.Haters, emerges as a rit§_dg_pa§sage. The theocentricism which
informed Yeats's early work threatened to lead him into the same
impasse which snared the young Shelley, the inability to express
the inexpressible, to run against the stubborn substantive grain

of language itself. And so Yeats entered upon the phase of his
career which he understood as a commitment to the experiential.

The desire for the integration of the personality and for permanence
in art led no longer in the direction of a disembodied transcendence,
but to a confrontation with experience, and its affirmation as
incarnate reality.

In the course of Yeats's education as a practising dramatist
there emerged a gradual definition of these opposing terms. To
achieve his immediate goals as nationalist and dramatist, Yeats
was forced to accept at least a momentary commitment or perspective.
“This isn't just an epigramr observed the chronicler of Jay Gatsby's
career, "life is much more successfully looked at from a single
window."40 Yeats's "single window" provided a view of his anti-
self, his aSpirations of the moment, and the dialectic of the mask
urged a conflict between self and anti-self in order to achieve
personal mastery or integration. However, exposed to new goals
and the varied and often conflicting testimony of experience, one

chooses in the course of a lifetime not a single mask, but a

 

 

 

 

189

succession of masks, or a pantheon of gods. Thus, spiritual growth,
the breaking through successive thresholds of personal limitations,
is realized in a series of confrontations, the act of Becoming
which is impelled by each turn of the Great Wheel. The solution
proposed by A 23119;; was not a resolution of the tensions generated
by the Yeatsian dualism, but an affirmation of cyclic process

which encompasses the two terms of Being and Becoming in the

cosmic round which represents the totality of experience.

With this, there unfolded the final chapter in Yeats's growth
as a poet. Having confronted the antithetical crisis, or the
extreme of subjective experience, there began the final passage
in which his sympathies came full circle and realigned themselves
with theocentric or objective Being. But no longer is this merely
a reversion to what had once proven a naive, hawkish sentiment.
Yeats's final phase represents his final integration. The condition
anticipating the achievement of a unified consciousness must in
Yeats's, as in Plato's world, presuppose the cleavage of dualism.
In his old age, Yeats was drawn to the transcendentalism of the
east, which dismissed the arena of experience as no more than the
illusory dance of Maya. He addressed himself to the study of
philosophy, biography, and history, those frail abstractions which
he had once dismissed as objective pursuits which did violence to
the integrity of experience. This direction involved, however,
no mere reversion to a poetically untenable position, but a
deepened awareness of the two halves of experience, and Yeats

brought to it the toughened wisdom won in the gutter of experience.

 

190

Yeats was, in effect, still struggling to redress an imbalance
in sensibility, still striving for the integration of the opposed
facets of his personality and thought.

A.year befbre his death, Yeats wrote Ethel Mannin that
"all men with subjective natures move towards a possible ecstasy,
all with objective natures towards a possible wisdom."41 The
time for ecstasy was long past, and the wisdom of age was to
come, if it was to come at all, from living life whole, in the
complete awareness of its cyclic passage. In his last month of
life Yeats wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say,
'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.‘ I must embody it
in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and every-
where draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not
the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.“+2

The course opreats's own life as he understood it provides
the central paradox of his poetic vision, that which contains
both the career of the Saint and the street singer, those dancers

in the round dance of life.

 

 

FOOTNOTES

 

 

192

Whenever possible, I have made use of the Variorum edition of
Yeats's poems, the Macmillan editions of the prose, plays, and
poetry, and the Wade letters. The citations for these are as
follows:

W.B.Yeats, Autobiographies (London, 1961).
Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), cited

as Essays.

Explorations (London, 1962).

Extholcgieg (London, 1959).

lhg Collected Plgys 9f W,B.Yeats (London, 1953),
cited as Collected 131418.

T_h_e_ lelected Poems; _o_f W.B.Yeats (London, 1933),
cited as Collected Poemg.

A Vision (London, 1962). The privately printed
early)version of this work is cited as A Vigion
1925 .

Peter Allt and Russell Alspach, eds. £th Vagorum
Edition of the Poems of W,B.Yeat§ (New York, 1957),

cited as Variorum.

 

 

IN TRODUC TI (11

2A..O. Lovejoy, T_h_e_ Revolt Against Dualism (New York, 1930), 2.

 

3Ibid., 12.

 

193

J

 

 

CHAPTER I

lThe publishing history of th Shadm Waters is a confused
one, and Yeats's own notes to the play in later collections are
not always reliable. The following is a brief account of its
various appearances. (3! refers to the numeration in Wade's
bibliography. )

A Narrative version. North Amarican Revi_e_xg, CLICK (May, 1900).

B The Shade Waters. London, 1900, 1901 (v.30); N.Y., 1901
(W731); N.Y., 1901 (W.32); N.Y., 1905. A new narrative
version.

C Poemg‘l§22:lflgfi. Dublin and London, 1906 (W.64). Another
new narrative version, apparently that produced at the
National Theatre Society in January 1904. Yeats was in
America at the time and did not see the performance. Followa
ing this, Yeats busied himself with rewriting the play for
a London Theosophical convention in July 1905 at the Court
Theatre under the direction of Florence Farr. He appears to
have been revising the play well up until the time of per-
formance. Immediately after this 'execrable performance" he
spent the rest of the summer rewriting his play once again.

D Egg Shado_gy Waters. London, 1907 (W.66). This was described
by Yeats as a "Special Acting Version," the product of his
labours during the sumer of 1905. It served as script for
the Abbey production of December 1906.

E Th; Poetical Works at; W.B.Yeatg. vol.II, Dramatical Poems.
N.Y. and London, 1907, 1909, 1911 (W.71). Contains the C
narrative and the D acting versions.

F Th; Collected Works of William Butler Yeats. Stratford-on-
Avon, 1908. vol. II (V7.76). Contains narrative and acting
versions identical with E.

G Poems: Second Serieg. London and Stratford, 1910, 1913
(91.92). Contains C narrative version.

H P s for _a_g Irish Theatre. London and Stratford, 1911, 1913
(W.92). Contains C narrative and D acting versions.

I 2h_e_ Poetical Works 9;: W B Yeats. Dramatic Poems, vol.II.
N.Y. and London, 1912 W.98 . Acting and narrative versions
following H. Reissued 1914., 1916, 1917, 1919, 1921.

J gter Poems. London, 1922. Am. ed. 1924, 1928 (W.131.).
Preserves C narrative version.

194

 

195

 

{lag in Prose and Verse. London, 1922, 1926. Am. ed. 1924
must Contains D acting version

All subsequent editions preserve either the C narrative or D
acting text, or both.

2The Variorum edition of Yeats's poems collates only the narra-
tive versions of Th_e Shadm Waters. Whenever possible, references
have been made to this edition. Variorum, 746,7 (1900 version).

3Variorum, 221. Identical with the narrative version published
in M m _a_n_ Irish Theatre (London, 1911), 193.

4Acting version from Plays f2 an. Irish Theatre, 193.
5Variorum, 843.

61h his essay "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" (1900), Yeats
mentions Oisin's vision of the hounds and a deer chasing one another
across the water, and attributes it to a Gaelic poem. He explains
that the image represents desire and longing. Essays, 90.

7The Arrow, I (24 September 1906), no pagination.

833A. MacCulloch, lhg Religion o_f_ 29 A_ncient Celts (Edinburgh,
1911 ’ 52.

9Ibid., 58. cr. John Rhys, Lectures g th_e_ Ori gig Growth
_o_f_ Religion g Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom London, 1888),
395 ff-

bl.

 

 

 

loIady Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (New York, 1911.), 3.

 

 

llNational Library MS. 8762, 73‘ 1, 9, 19.
12_Ip_i_d_., #8, 9.

l3’Variorum, 747n.

11‘Ibid., 749.

l5Ibid., 745,6.

 

 

 

261112 Shadom Waters, North American Revieg, our (1900), 711.,
72 .
17

Letters to the New Island (Cambridge, Mass., 1931.), xii.

 

18Letter to Katherine Tynan, March 1888. Letters, 63.

191etter to A.E., April 1904. Letters, 434.

||l|l|l|ll||l|l' III] Ill.’lll’ III’

 

 

 

 

s1,

 

 

 

 

1%

2°Letter to Mrs. Clement Shorter, 21 June 1899. Letters, 322.

21Letter to Florence Farr, July 1905. Letters, 454.
22National Library MS. 8762, i3‘49.

23Variorum, 750 (1900 version).

21*_I_b;d_., 228.

25Ibid., 229.
26

 

Ibid., 230.
2721—311? fg an Irish Theatre, 197.
28

Variorgm’ 227.
29Letter to A.E., November 1899. Letters, 327.
3ovariorum, 222n, 252.

31Plato, Repgblic VI, Tbg_nialggggp_gg Plato, trans. Benjamin
Jowett (Oxford, 1892), III, 186.

32Cogected P1213, 360.
33Ibid., 363.
3(”Alfred Nutt, th m 9;" Bran (London, 1895), II.

 

35Erwin Rohde, szche, ghg Cult 2; phg Soul 22g Belief ip
Immortality Among £13 Greekg, trans. W.B. Hillis (London, 1925), 56.

36W.H. Auden, The Enchaféd Flood (New York, 1950), 20.

37Variorum, 817.

38F.A.C. Wilson, Yeats and Tradition (London, 1958), and Yeats's
Iconggragg (New York, 1986).

39Plotinus, T_h_e Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London, 1956),

wHeraclitus, g; 1113 Universe, fragments boniv, lncii. Porphyry,
g; 1.32 Cave o_f 1.3 ths in 1.113 Thirteenth Book 9f 13% My, trans.
Thomas Taylor (London, 19177, 29, 3o. Yeats was familiar with the
fragments and with Taylor's translation of The Cave of is W.
A discussion of Porphyry's imagery is to be found in eats's essay
"The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" (1900) in Essays, 82 ff.

I‘lVariorum, 249.

 

197

42Letter to J.B. Yeats, 5 November 1884. Letters, 236.
“has. is: an. Irish Theatre. 193. Acting version.
u’Variorum, 251.

[’5 Philip Wheelwright, 111g Burning Fountain (Bloomington, 1954),
191.

460olleoted Plays, 152.

 

478helley, Epipgzchidion, Th2 Complete Poeticgl‘Works pg Shellgy
(Cbcford, 1956 , 424m

CHAPTER II

lPlato, Phaedo, 64.

2mm, lanes. 318.

3 Plato, The. Cratylus, Phaedo, Parmenides ing Timaeus, trans.
Thomas Taylor (London, 1793), 370. Wherever possible I have used
the Taylor translations, which were read and admired by Yeats.

4Ibid., 379.

5Taylor follows Plotinus in interpreting the Orphic myth in
Neoplatonic terms. Thomas Taylor, Tpp_Eleusinian gpg,Bacchic
Meteries, A Dissertation (New York, 1891), 187-209. Cf. Walter
Wili, th Or hic Iflsteries .a_n_<_i, 3132 Greek Spirit _i_p 3.112 meteries
(New York, 1955 , 64992.

6The body is described in Cratylug, 4000 as the grave (6fiua)
of the soul, and Plato cites Orphic belief as authority.

Georgias, 493A; Republic, 514. Plotinus comments on Socrates'
account of the myth of the cave: "Everywhere he blames the
commerce of soul with body as an enchainment and entombment, and

upholds as a great truth the saying of the nnrsteries that the Soul
is here a prisoner" (Enneads IV:8:1). '

7Thomas Taylor, _T_h_g Eleusinian ppg Bacchic meteries, _A_
Dissertation (New York, 1891), 38. Taylor translates Enneads

I:8.
8
Enneadg III:8:4.

9The distinction between dog and dianoeia is discussed in

1OlEnneadg 1:8:1.
11Enneads 1:8:3, 5.
12Plate, Ehaedo, 64.

13 Heraclitus, fragment xx. I have made use of the translation

of G.T.W. Patrick, Th3 Fra ents pf Heraclitus pf Ephesus 9;;
Nature (Baltimore, 1889) .

“Heraclitus, fragments xxiv, xxxii.
l5G.T.W. Patrick, 60.

l6Plato, S sium, 2030. Plotinus, Enneads, III:5:1-9.

198

 

 

199
Plotinus, Enneads III:5:1.

17

18Plotinus, Enneads III:8:6.

 

CHAPTER III

1A Vision, 12.

2Ibid., 8.

 

lg Vision (1925). 251.
‘Wl93o Diary,“ pgploratiopp, 302.

5S.T. Coleridge, Lectures pp Shakegpgare (London, 1907), 33.

6Richard Ellmann, Yeats, The Man and the Mask (New York, 1958),
195.

7G.R.S. Mead, Egg Doctrine 2; figs Subtle Body ip Western
Tradition (London, 1919). Mead cites the prevalence of the idea
that the physical body is an exteriorization of an invisible
subtle embodiment of the life of the mind. The "subtle body" is
the envelope or vehicle of the soul.

8Ellmann, 197.
2; Vision, 209.
10Ibid., 269.

1%; Vision (1925), 27.
12

 

 

"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," yfijpologies, 335.
13g Vision, 207n.
14

A Vision (1925), 28.

15; Vision, 293.

16Plato, Apology, 40A.

l7Plutarch, About Egg Daimonion pf Socrate , quoted in Paul
Friedlander, Plato, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York, 1958),L37.

1%; Vision (1925). 28.

 

19"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," Myphologies, 359.

20E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (California, 1951),

21"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," gxphelogies, 336.

200

201

22Plato, 1112 Republic, 617E.

2%; Vision, 206.

24Plato,,2hg Statesman, 272A.
2%;
26A.0. Prickard, "On the Genius of Socrates," Selected Essays
g; Plutarch (Oxford, 1918), II, 38. In his essay "Swedenborg,
Mediums and Desolate Places,” Egplorations, 59,,Yeats claims to
have read Plutarch on the daimon.

27G.R.S. Mead, _T_h_e_ Doctrine _o_r_ 3132 Subtle Body in Western
Tradition (London, 1919 .

28

Vision, 209.

F.A.C. Wilson, Yeats and Tradition (London, 1958), 245.
29"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," mimiogies, 335.
30"Introduction to The Resurrection," Migrations, 396.
31This is claimed by Thomas Whittaker, The Nee-Platonists

(Cambridge, 1901), 174. E.R. Dodds's translation of Proclus,

gig Elements 2;; Theolog (Oxford, 1933) is indispensable for the

study of Proclus, but I am.convinced that Yeats was familiar with

Whittaker's study. .

32; Vision, 202.
331mm, 193,4.
34mm, 194,5.
35Ibic1., 40.

361mm, 274,5.

37Collected Plays, 372.

38'1930 Diary," Egplorationg, 330.

39:212.. 330.

‘01 11.62531. 219.

411313., 220.

423.111... 289.

43"The Mandukya Upanishad,",§§§§z§, 481.
“*1 mass. 28.9.

 

202

45"]930 Diary," Ex lorations, 305.
4693a,, 307.

47"Bishop Berkeley," Essays, 401-

481. liaise. 212-

49;b;i_c_1_., 73.

50"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," Minologies, 361.

51A Vision, 193.

52::1930 Diary," Elplorations, 305-
533351." 311.

54A m, 193-4-

55569 diagram p. 91-

56Miroia Eliade, Patterns _i_q Gomflative Religion, trans.
Rosemary Sheed (New York, 1958), 460.

57Georges Poulet, _1_1_e_§ Metamogphoses Q Carole (Paris, 1961), iv.

 

 

 

.1
w.

 

II.ll-I all! Ill-Ill .III. I "I 'll lull. l' I‘ 'II [I

CHAPTER IV

11 irisiciu. (1925). 81-

21 liens. 280.

3"Gitanjali," Essays, 390.

4“The Tragic Generation," Autobiographies, 295.

5"J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time,"‘§§§gy§, 315.
6"The Tragic Generation," égtpbiographieg, 295.

7

8"Gitanjali," Essays, 391,2.

9”Four Years, 1887-1891," Autobiogyaphies, 188.

1OnThe Holy Mountains".§§§32§i 448'

12"The Happiest of Poets," Essays, 54.

13"Discoveries," Essays, 226—7.
14Ibig., 226.

15"Reveries over Childhood and Youth,“ Autobioggaphies, 65.

16"Gitanjali,” Essays, 392.

17"Louis Lambert,” E35 8, 446.

18"J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time," Essays, 329.
19"The Tragic Generation,n Autobioggaghies, 332.
20Collected Plgys, 390-6.

21Collected Poems, 255.

22"Eyometheus Unbound," Essays, 421.
2BA‘Vision, 144.

 

21”Discoveries," Essgys, 284.

203

204

25"Blake's Illustrations to Dante," m, 116.

26"The Tree of Life," The Cutting 2;: ,8}; A9132 (New York, 1912):
70.

27"Certain Noble Plays of Japan," 13.5.5313: 235.

28% General Introduction," Essays, 513-

291 Vision, 273.

30Letter to Florence Farr, July 1905. Letters, 454.

3lVirginia Moore, _T_h_e_ Unicorn (New York, 1954).

CHAPTER V

1"Reveries over Childhood and Youth,’l Autobiogaphies, 32.

2Letter to John Quinn, 1 August 1916. Quoted in Richard
Ellmann, Yeats, The Man and the Masks (New York, 1958), 216.

3"er Years, 1887-1891, " Autobiograwg‘ es, 171.

I‘Review in London Bookman, April 1884; quoted in Joseph
Hone, W.B. Yeats 1865-1232 (New York, 1943), 112.

5"Reveries over Childhood and Youth," Autobioggamies, 62.

6Ibid., 54.

7Ibid., 9.

8Ibid., 23.

9Ibid.

l0Variorum, 391.

11"B1ake's Illustrations to Dante," Essgys, 123.

"1930 Diary," Mlorations, 295.

13 Letterg 1.3 312 Egg Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Harvard, 1934).
144-5.

14% People's Theatre ," oration , 253.

12

15"J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time," Essays, 323.
19;g;g., 318.

17"At Stratford—onquon," Egsgys, 103.

"ésflhsiazl904." Eirisisiiaea. 155-

l9flsamhaingl903," E_:gplorations, 119.
20

18

"Four Years 1887-1891,” Autobiographies, 189.

21"At Stratford-on—Avon,“ Essays, 110.

22"1930 Diary,“ Egplorations, 301.

2312101.. 309.

205

 

206

24Itid. , 308-9.

25nsamhain31904," munitions, 151-
26

2’7S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 9;; Shakespeare (London, 1907), 14.

"Estrangement," Autobio a hies, 470.

28Charles Baudelaire, L'art Romantigue, Oeuvres Comgetes

29"Four Years, 1887-1891," Autobiogapgies, 191.
30"Certain Noble. Plays of Japan." Lassa. 235°
31"On the Boiler," mlorations, [+46-

32921.40

33"Personality and the Intellectual Essences,” 292, @3123 9.1:
as Agte, (New York, 1912), 58.

31’Benjamin Whichcote, Quoted in Flora Mackinnon, Philosophical
Writings .o_f_ £13m More (New York, 1925). 296.

35Letter to John Quinn, 15 May 1903. Letters, 402.

36Letter to AE, 11. May 1903. letters, 402.

37Variorum, 448.

38Heraclitus, Q; 3132 w, fragment 11:11:.
39"The Tragic Generation," Autobioggaphies, 279.

401.10.31.51... 280.

“gig” 279.

42"Certain Noble Plays of Japan," Essays, 227.

43"The Tragic Generation," MW 284.
““Certain Noble Plays of Japan," Essa s, 231.

45"Reveries over Childhood and Youth," Wigs, 82.
46"Introduction to 1133 Resurrection," Eggplorationg, 392.
47"The Tragic Generation," Autobio a hies, 315.

48"Ideas of Good and Evil," Essays, 187.

 

 

 

 

 

al-lll'lll

 

207

49Charles Baudelaire,'§;art Romantigue, Oeuvres Completes
(Paris, 1961), III.

5O"At Stratford-onquon," Essays, 99. Letter to Sturge Meore,
March 1903. W.B. Yeats gag T. Sturge Moore, ed. Ursula Bridge
(London, 19 537: 7 o

SlYeats does not give the title of Appia's book, but it was
either.Lg Miss 23 Scene g3 Drama Wagnérien (1895) or Musik Egg
Inszeniegggg (1899). Yeats had no knowledge of German, so in all
probability it was the former.

52Letter to Arthur Symons, 10 September 1905. Letters, 459-60.

53Arthur Symons, "The Ideas of Richard Wagner," Qflterly Review,
00111 (July 1905), 74.

54Ibid., 77-9.

55"The Tragic Theatre," Essays, 240.

56"Discoveries," Essgys, 279.

”issues if. ices iii _Ev_i_3!-.. ism. 154.
58;bid., 149-50.
59Ibid., 150.
60
Collected Plgys, 105.

61Richard.Wagner, "A Communication to my Friends," Richard
Wagger's Prose Works, trans. WtA. Ellis (London, 1895), I, 306.

62Richard'Wagner, Music Dramas, trans. Ernest Newman (Leipzig,
1914), 364.

63variorum, 565.
6‘l'l'Emotion of Multitude," Essays, 216.

65Thomss Mann, "Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,"
Essays 9; Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1947),
334-

66Letter to AE, April 1904. Letters, 434.

67"The PhilOSOphy of Shelley's Poetry," Essgys, 91.

68Mircea Eliade, Patterns,ig Compgyative Religion, trans.
Rosemary Sheed (New'York, 1958), 156,7.

208

69Rhys suggests that Cuchulain, whom the Book 31; gig 2gp; tells
us is Lug reborn through the body of Dechtere, is the reincarnation
of the Celtic Apollo, and therefore the sun, or a personification
of the sun. John Rhys, Lectures gg‘thg 0ri in gag Growth of
Religion 23 Illustrated gy Celtic Heathendom London, 1888): 435.
Rhys's account belongs to the school which attempted to reduce
all mythology to a fundamental solar myth. The issue has been
hotly contested. Cf. J.A. MacCulloch,,2hg Religionlg§,tgg.Ancient
Celts (Edinburgh, 1911), who refutes the identification of
Cuchulain with the solar god.

70Yeats's account of the Eden tree is from.his 1930 diary: "I
do not know whether it was before or after this that I made a
certain girl see a vision of the Garden of Eden. She heard the
music of Paradise coming from the Tree of Life, and when I told
her to put her ear against the bark, that she might hear the
better, found that it was made by the continuous clashing of
swords.” Yeats's paraphrase of Heraclitus is from "On the
Boiler," lorations, 430.

71"Introduction to,2hg Resurrection," Eyplorations, 398.

 

 

 

 

'l‘u ll. I Itcll. ix

llll.‘ I III! I] ‘v!

- rid...

CHAPTER VI

1"PerAmica Silentia Lunae," gythologies, 340.

2"Discoveries," E_s_s_ay_§, 288.

3"Ireland after Parnell," Autobio a hies, 247.
4"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," mythologies, 333.

51bid., 337.

6"Introduction to Th3 Resurrection," Eyplorations, 398.

7Variorum, 298. Although Yeats attributed the genesis of A
Vision to the automatic writing which began with his marriage in
1917, the materials of‘A_Vision and even certain aspects of its
formal elaboration are apparent in his poetry long before this.
Respgnsibilities (1914) indicates that Yeats had already arrived
at some understanding of the nature of his Great Wheel, although
it may not yet have been consciously articulated as a coherent
pattern. The personal dilemma which Yeats confironted in

Responsibilities,” a fascination with the attractions of the
public life and the consolations of the solitary, readily follows
the antinomial pattern suggested by primary and antithetical
experience.

The question which King Guaire poses in the comic debate,
"The Three Beggars? suggests a weighing of the merits of saint
and hero: "Do men who least desire get most/ Or get the most
who most desire?" The poems in this collection alternate be-
tween the public and the introspective pose, and the titles ”To a
Wealthy Man. . .," "Oh those that Hated the Playboy" suggest the
intrusion of an.Augustan element of “public poetry." These are
contrasted with poems dealing with the role of the solitary,
Yeats's Father Rosicross, surely one of Yeats's men "with a
secret," who in the midst of a rousing wake "lies all wisdom shut
into his onyx eyes.” ”The Hour Before Dawn" is resolved in a
bitter denunciation of he who would, like the saint or sage, ferego
the inconveniences of the temporal world "And wait Him in a
drunken sleep." Yeats's "cursing rogue" leaves the sleeper in
the security of the Cruachan to face his own cold comfort before
the tumbling clouds of dawn. The characters in the poem."The
Three Hermite" are recognizable as Yeats's hunchback, saint, and.
fool, and their appearance suggests that the poet had already
evolved the final triad of incarnations of his Great Wheel.

8"Discoveries," Essgyg, 286.

9121-1.

209

 

 

 

 

 

210

10"Per Amica Silentia Lunae", mhologies, 333.

llVariorum, 495.

12"Discoveries,” Essays, 287.

13"Bishop Berkeley," Essays, 409.
uuThe Return of Ulysses,“ Essays, 202.

15A Vision, 180.

16Ibid. , 182.

17.117013. Years, 1887-1891," Autobio a hies, 189.

18"Poetry and Tradition," Essays, 251.

19"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," whologies, 331.

20"nodes Chameliontos," Autobio hies, 273.

21"Estrangement," Autobiogygphies, 471.

22Henri Bergson, quoted in I.W. Alexander, Ber son, Philosomer

2; Reflection (London, 1957), 94.

23 Jacques Maritain, Art 213d Scholasticism and, other Essays,
trans. J .F. Scanlon (London, 1943 , 23.

2“"‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae," Mologies, 328.

2?;p;g., 329.

26"Hodos Chameliontos," Autobioggamies, 273.

27

28"Per Amica Silentia Lunae," W, 332.

"Ireland and the Arts," Essays, 207-8.

29"1930 Diary, " oration , 302.
30Ibid.

3:I'Plato, Thg Timaeus ing thg Critias, trans. Thomas Taylor
(New York, 1944), 15 n.

32Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 12 April 1875. Letters, 257.
33W.B. Yeats, Pays _i_n. Prose and Verse (London, 1922), 428-9.

31”Discoveries," Esggys, 263-4.

211

35S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 22.8hakespeare (London, 1907), 33.

36"The Tragic Theatre," Essays, 245-

37"Synge and the Ireland of His Time,” Th2 Cuttigg'gflgg Agate,
151-2.

38Henri Bergson,‘2hg_ Two Sources of Mord ity and Religion,
trans. R..A. Audra and C. Brereton W(London, 1935yrjl96.

39Collected Plays, 300.

40"Poetry and Tradition," Essayg, 255.

 

CHAPTER VII

lEdward Engelberg, The Vast Desigg: Patterns _in_ W.B. Yeats's
Aesthetics (Toronto, 1914). Thomas R. Whitaker, Swan an_d Shadow

(North Carolina, 1961.).
2Carl H. Hamburg, Mbol _a_n_d Reality (The Hague, 1956), 79.
3Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, February 1931. Letters, 781.

Artistes Eliade, hs, Dreams a_nd meteries, trans. Philip
Mairet (New York, 1960), 16.

58amhain, 1904. E_xglorations, 167.

6Yeats tells of reading Croce in a letter to Olivia Shakespeare
24 Sept 1926. Lettere, 719. He admits knowing Vico through
Croce's writings in a letter to Mario Rossi, 5 October 1931.
letters, 784.

7"Introduction to The Ca; en_d the Moon " Morations, 400.

8Ibid., 310. T_h_e 5% exp gee Moon was probably written in 1917,
although it was not performed until 1928.

9Ernst Cassirer, '1‘_h_e mth 9; t_h_e State (New Haven, 1946), 47.
10

 

 

Mircea Eliade, mm, Dreams 91$ 1 sterie , 15.
11Ibid.
12

J .E. Cirlot, A. Dictiow 31; Smbole, trans. J. Sage (New York,
1962), 362.

13Yeats admits to structural relationship between A Vision
and Timaeus. When comparing the consistency of his own system
with that of the zodiac, he writes: ". . .they have much the
same character, being respectively particular and universal, as
the circles of the Other and the Same in the Timaeus." A Vision,
251.

l‘l'Hircea Eliade, who, Dreams _a_.ng I. steries, 37.

 

15Mircea Eliade, mth and Reelity, trans. W.R. Trask (New York,
1964), 92. Eliade furnishes a fuller account of this in his
Patterns y; Cmnmative Religion (New York, 1958), 127.

16"On the Boiler," oration , 451.

212

 

213

17Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy 2; Syhbolic Forms: hyhhical
Thopght, trans. Frank Nanheim New Haven, 1955), II, 8.

18Ernst Cassirer, The hyhh 2T State (New Haven, 1946), 47.
19A Vision, 177.
20Ibid., 21.

21Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington, 1954).
318 .

22Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy 2; Syhbolic Forms: hypthal
Thggh‘b, II, 238,9.

23Mirceu Eliade, Patterns Th Commgative Religion, 388.
24Ernst Cassirer, pp. eTh., 1II.

Zéh Vision, 69.

2631.1” 205.
27

Ernst Cassirer, pp. eT§., 97. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy
2;, olic §2£Eé= The Phenomenology eT Knowleege, trans. Frank
Manheim New York, 1957), III, 98.

28Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy 9T Syhbolic Forms: hyhhical

 

29J.E. Cirlot, A Dictiom 2; Symbols, 256-8.

30The association of the weather and seasons with the quaternary
was not unknown to Ireland, the kingdom of the four kings. In the
following poem from the Feis Tigh Chonoin the cardinal points
demonstrate their role as benign or malignant influences presiding
over birth and directing the fate of the newborn:

 

The son who is born when the wind blows from the West,
Shall obtain raiment and shall obtain food;

He shall obtain from his lord

Only food and raiment.

The son who is born when the wind is from the South,
Shall get honey: he shall get fruit;

In his house he shall entertain

Both bishops and musical performers.

The locality of gold is the wind from the East:
This is the best wind of all winds:

The son who is born when that wind blows

Want shall never reach him.

214

The son who is born when the wind blows from the North,
Shall win victory and be subject to defeat;

He shall be wounded, he Shall wound another,

Before he shall ascend to Heaven of the angels.

Whenever the wind does not blow

Over the grass of the plain, or the heather;
Whosoever is then born ‘

Whether male or female, shall be an idiot.

I'Fate," from Vol. II of the Ossianic Society Publications,
translated by Hyde for Mackenzie, and quoted in D.A. Mackenzie,
lThe_Miggation‘eT Syhbols (New York, 1926), 39, 40.

31Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy,pT_§yhbolic Forms: 1 hical
Insight. II. 102.

32Danielou writes: "Praying towards the East re-connects us
with the paradisiac themes; to turn to the East appears to be an
expression of the nostalgia for Paradise." Jean Daniélou, Bible

{eh Liturgie (Paris, 1951), 46.

33Heinrich Nissan,‘hee Templum, Antiquarische Untersuchgen
(Berlin, 1869), 8.

34Essays, 467.
35A Vision, 203.
36Yeats acknowledges his sympathy with the work of the

archeologist Josef Strzygowski in associating the cardinal points
with the different modes of visual expression. ,h Vision, 282.

37A yiehop, 66. or. 258.

38Essays, 427.

39Mircea Eliade, Tithe, 22.9311! egg hysterics, 238.

401?. Scott Fitzgerald, 11.1.9. erg; m (New York, 1953), 4.
41Letter to Ethel Mannin, October 1938. Lettere, 917.

42Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, 4 January 1939. Letters, 922.

 

“wt"
t

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Bridge, Ursula, ed. W.B. Yeats 921.4. T, Sturge Moore: Their
Correspondence. London, 1953.

Yeats, J .B. Letters he hi__s_ gee, W,B, Yeats ehd Others, 1869-1222,
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