The Classics (2): The Tower, W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats is the great English-language poet of our time - still - and if you want to know why don't worry about things like the metaphysics of A Vision or what "perne in a gyre" means in The Tower's lead-off poem "Sailing to Byzantium." "Perne in a gyre" is obscure and difficult. I've never been sure how "perne" is even supposed to be pronounced. But it's not really that important. Pay attention to the easy stuff. Look at a half-line like the "birds in the trees."

Those birds in the trees might seem, might sound, like the epitome of metrical line-fill, but in a short poem filled with arcane images they have a role. Not only as symbols of the sensual world of nature the old poet is escaping, but as, deliberately, the most prosaic symbols, prosaically expressed. Birds in the trees. Well, where else would they be? In the air I suppose, but that's about it. This is a poet with an eye for the supernatural - an "excited, passionate, fantastical imagination" - and an ear for the everyday. Together they create a harmony. The birds in the trees may be easy stuff, but they aren't just ballast, poor cousins of the mechanical thing on a bough. They are essential to Yeats's voice.

For any writer it all begins with a voice, which is always a sort of confidence trick. Buy a writer's voice and you'll buy anything they have to sell. The trick is to set the reader at ease. You don't want them to think they're reading great literature. I always find myself comparing Yeats in this regard with Conrad. English prose and poetry reached a sort of climax with these two, a maturity and confidence, a comfort zone if you want to put it another way, that it's never recaptured. Because it's one thing to write well, it's another to make it look so easy. I've heard plenty of people say that Heart of  Darkness is pompous and overblown. I don't think they feel that way when they read it. That's just not Marlow's voice. Nor is it Yeats's. At times dismissive, self-deprecating, impatient, banal, anecdotal, sly, and humorous (I love that "feathered glory" and "white rush" bit from "Leda and the Swan") - Yeats writes great poetry while remaining the voice, in Wordsworth's famous formula, of a man speaking to men. It's metaphysical poetry without being Metaphysical. Yes there are some bizarre, Byzantine images, but they are directly employed, not twisted into strained conceits. Meanwhile the verse itself (and I use the word verse deliberately) often relies on traditional rhythms and forms as well as such basic devices as the frequent repetition of key words throughout a poem. 

And by the way, whatever happened to that? I find repetition so effective, even on re-reading, that I have to stop and ask why more of today's poets don't use it. Do they think it makes their poetry sound simple or hectoring? Do they think it betrays a lack of invention, as though a poet's sole mission is variation? And yet look at how the repetition of "nature," "form," and "gold" weaves through these four lines. Is this not great poetry?

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling . . .

So yes: Yeats is first and foremost an easy poet. Which isn't to say he can't be deceptive and obscure. There is that "perne in a gyre" bit. There's also that "insolent fiend Robert Artisson," a name that will send most if not all readers looking for a footnote. But the obscurity of references like these isn't fatal. I loved the image of Robert Artisson the first time I read it - totally ignorant of who he was - and I still find his appearance at the end of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" more striking and resonant than - a comparable figure - the famous "rough beast" slouching toward Bethlehem at the end of "The Second Coming." If you ask just what that rough beast is I don't think you gain much by way of enlightenment from a reading of the secondary sources, where you'll see it defined as the antithetical cycle. That's because the image is really all you need. Yeats's cycles and phases of the moon are a fabulously rich intellectual and visionary scaffolding built on a pretty basic, and common, cultural anxiety. Bottom line: Everything is going to pot. And so here comes our new messiah, lurching rather than slouching, and cued with a suitably theatrical hush:

But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feather, red combs of her cocks.

Who doesn't recognize this terrible pair?

On another level, however, all the vision stuff is important. Or, to go back to where I started, it's essential in the same way the birds in the trees are. It might not be great poetry, but it's the stuff that makes great poetry possible. A "tumult of images" is going to stay just that unless you lend it a myth. Without such a myth all you have is imagism, lyric and anecdote. Now I'm not saying that every great poet has to be a giant system-builder, but I do think once a poet's imaginative vision gets big enough, or mature enough, it expands to such a larger architecture (even in a short poem). It's unfortunate that this is so often confused with being part of a "mythic" tradition in poetry, or as disguised ideology. The fact is every culture has its myths, which are re-cast and transformed in the same way any writer tinkers with traditional forms. Shakespeare might not have believed in a Great Chain of Being, but it was still something he could use, just as Yeats could draw on every creative artist's inheritance, those "learned Italian things / And the proud stones of Greece," (other) poet's imaginings, and memories of love. This stuff doesn't just get thrown into a pot. It builds a structure. And so the capping image:

As at the loophole there
The daws chatter and scream,
And drop twigs layer upon layer.
When they have mounted up,
The mother bird will rest
On their hollow top,
And so warm her wild nest.

Of course all of this presupposes not only a coherent cultural context but that poetry have some kind of point - what William Carlos Williams always referred to as "something to say." Such a foundation, for better or for worse, we can no longer take for granted. 

The sort of myth Yeats wanted wasn't hierarchical or theological but historical. I don't think we get much out of pinning the cycles or gyres to specific dates, but it's clear the poems in The Tower are obsessed with the passage of time, of "what is past, or passing, or to come." What's passing is greatness. The inheritors of those ancestral houses are mere mice compared to their violent, bitter forebears. As for Yeats's own children, well, at least his prayers can go with them. "Through natural declension of the soul" they probably aren't going to amount to much. "Many ingenious lovely things are gone." Or going. Maybe they'll come back in another couple of thousand years.

It is the march of time that spurs the poet's desire to create monuments out of all the stuff stored (but that really isn't the right word) in the Great Memory. The historical myth emphasizes process, and process is about making (and un-making) things. The artist is impelled by a kind of dialectic, expressed in Yeats's theory of the mask. Out of the conflict in his aching heart he builds monuments and changeless works of art, raises beauty out of bitterness, forges the eternal in the fire of mortality's sensual pain.

And yet for all his concern over posterity, what did he leave us? He wrote his will in poetry, but who were his inheritors? Though I consider him to be the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century, I'm not sure he had all that much of an influence. When I read today's poetry I don't hear any echoes or responses. As Philip Marchand recently pointed out in the Toronto Star, Yeats was not a Modernist. In his own words he was one of the last romantics, which, however you want to define it, has been an unpopular label for quite a while now. Is his poetry now just an artifact like Sato's changeless sword, waiting for the gyres to turn again in its favour, or the moon to enter another phase?

Well, any answer to a question like that is going to sound trite but I can't help ending this retrospective with a personal image I carry with me of the poet as cultural watchdog over the antics of our exotic and abstract information age, with its bright entertainments divorced from the murderous horse-play of soldiery, empire, and violence upon the roads. I like to imagine Yeats as a sentry somehow guarding us from such dangerous distractions, casting a cold vigilant eye on it all while our intoxicated generation sleeps. For the poet who had time for the commonest birds in the trees - the stare by the window, the moor-hen on the stream - also kept alert for the thunder of swans, scream of peacocks, and rage of parrots. And "there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep / Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds."

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