CLASSICS REVISITED
Yeats: Our contemporary
RAVI VYAS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B.Yeats: "The Second Coming"
PEOPLE who don't read poems because poetry makes nothing happen often turn to poetry at moments when it matters — and Yeats matters now. When Yeats died in January 1939 — "Earth receive an honoured guest", as Auden's famous poem on his death put it — no one could have conceived that he would come back nearly 70 years later as the poet of another age, our own. Now, at the beginning of the new century, Yeats is everywhere by the sheer force of popular will. People are using his lines all the time, mourning the loss of rational consensus in the face of feckless sectarianism under postmodernism and the collapse of the established order of things. Thus, on the collapse of the communist world, lines from "The Great Day", one of his last poems, cropped up time and again:
Hurrah for the Revolution and more cannon shot!
A beggar on horseback lashes the beggar on foot.
Hurrah for the Revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on.
Yeats had said that "we make out of quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Yeats remained an outsider all his life but the odd thing about his poems is that as he got along in years, his adolescent interest in Irish folkways and legends turned to politics and civic matters as opposed to the dream world of myth and aesthetic reverie. But he never came to terms with the modernising industrial world. In fact, he was "worn out with dreams" of the brave new world in the making and as he "balanced all, brought all to mind,/ The years to come seemed waste of breath,/ A waste of breath the years behind/ In balance with this life, this death."
(Thus) Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all.
Yeats' "aged man is but a paltry thing./ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/ For every tatter in its mortal dress."
So, Yeats says:
Now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats' great strength as a poet lay in his power of symbolic expression. He seized upon myths, invented his own in pursuit of a view of man's nature and of human history. Despite Yeats' increasing involvement with the idiosyncrasies of the modern world, he never lost his interest in myths which he felt had an important place in the nourishment of his poetry. It is symbolism but what matters, in the final analysis, is the sound it makes. Yeats' emotional tone is our tone, even if his meanings are not always our meanings.
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Or:
The wind blows out the gates of the day
The wind blows over the lonely of heart
And the lonely of heart is withered away.
The tragic violence of Irish history gave a particular energy to Yeats' verse, even as his finest poems look to classical myth and history for parallels and structure. (For instance, in "Sailing to Byzantium", Yeats contrasts the "monuments of unageing intellect", the perfections of art, with the "sensual music" of youth, whose world was behind him.) Yeats was increasingly sucked into the Irish freedom struggle and he has two poems on Roger Casement, the Irish freedom fighter, who was executed by the British in April 1916, "The Ghost of Roger Casement/ Is beating on the door." But his greatest anger is directed against the modern state itself as "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death":
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen is Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds
Old age gave Yeats a hunger for life which was a new departure.
Much did I rage when young.
Being by the world oppressed,
But now with flattering tongue
It speeds the parting guest.
But it is "Among School Children" that he came closest to giving his views of human beings in a questioning openness before unresolved paradoxes of life and thought.
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blue-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
- chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole
- body swayed to music, - brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Few poets have ever managed to inhabit so many levels of life. Being everywhere at once while going nowhere in particular is what poets do, and Yeats did it. Where journalists write about what people are doing in public and novelists about what they are talking in private — all novels in a sense are about the private lives of nations — only poets are able to show that what people argue about in public is identical to what they talk in private, that what we are arguing about is the sum of our own guilts, fears, anxieties and hopes. And very few poets are able to show that what people are talking about in public and what they are talking about in private is always a variant of what they say to themselves when they are alone. If Yeats sounds as if he were speaking to us from a soapbox in a very big market place about things falling apart, well listen to him because he is telling us things we have not been able to see ourselves. As another Nobel laureate, Saint-John Perse said, "it is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age."
Collected Poems, 1889-1939, W.B.Yeats, Picador paperback, Pounds 5.75.
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