The Columbia History of British Poetry (141 page)

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Page 555
a lifted boot, anyway preferred. The inhuman other is elsewhere, even when it is violently here. It gives the lie, the laugh, to worldly powers. How could it not appeal to those sickened by their human country, their human blood?
Yeats
"The Dolls" and "The Magi," which appeared side by side in
Responsibilities
(1914), were Yeats's first modernist poems. Clean as a whistle of spiritual alarm, they implied that an acceptance of our alienated animality was long overdue. In the first poem, the human ego is a failed dollan anxious, self-exhausting refusal of biological life. How aloof sit the dolls on their shelf of self-sufficiency! But their fear of death, hence of change and accident, persists beneath their planned perfection: they are alarmed, shrilly repulsed, when the doll maker's wife brings among them her newborn baby"A noisy and filthy thing.'' Yeats intuits that this is the condition of prewar life: this mean opposition to death, this hollowing out of the body in the interest of a doll selfthe static thing in us that says no to the flesh.
The human as dissatisfied doll is the burden, also, of "The Magi"; but, in contrast to the dolls, the magi, appearing and disappearing "in the blue depth of the sky," cannot bear their divorce from animality. They have identified themselves with the good, have practiced renunciation, to the point of becoming like stonereligious statues. In preferring the holy (the divine as purified of everything malefic) to the sacred (the animal, spontaneous mixture of benign and malefic qualities), they have lost everything, even their souls. For the soul is erotic, psychosensual; its true religion is the sacred. This is the view not merely of Yeats (if only at times), but of D. H. Lawrence, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes (as, also, in muted ways, of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce)the view of the neopagan branch of literary modernism.
Whether in the experience of the holy or the sacred, the divine consists of continuity. But the sacred fosters the continuity of all that we are with everything that exists; the painfully persistent and finite flesh is not excluded. What the magi seek is a renewal of the "uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor," the sacred as manifested in ritual blood sacrifice (for instance, "Calvary's turbulence"). The blood victim is the surrogate of a pain-induced intimacy with the divine, which the profane order prevents the unsacrificed from experiencing directly. But the
 
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turbulence dies out, the "bestial" becomes exorcized, the flesh stiffens. In "The Magi," it is time for sacred spasms to afflict such unliving flesh.
The partial inversion of the human into the animal (the rediscovery of life as power) is figured in the sacred "rough beast" of Yeats's next major religious poem, "The Second Coming" (1919). This god-stuff of a new historical dispensation, this "shape with lion body and the head of a man," combines pitiless intellect with ponderously sensual thighs. Yeats, then, is not prepared to abdicate mind: it is a great weapon in the midst of enemies, and the sacred monumentalist in the poet had many at the time he wrote ''The Second Coming"especially Marxists ("the worst," full "of passionate intensity"), who he feared would divert Irish nationalism from its native spiritual strain (whatever that was; Yeats seems to have invented it) by their murderous ways and grubbing materialism. All the same, he delights to juxtapose "power" and "knowledge," the sensual and the lucid, in the same being: it makes a kit for sacred admixturesexplosions. The "rough beast" that "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born," its "hour come round at last" (the impatience is the poet's, not the beast's), is rank with the malefic components of the sacred, and thus a veritable anti-Christ. Christianity has had its crack at evoking the sacred; the inspiration fails; the ethical (e.g., Marxism) predominates; and so an uncontrollable mystery
must
return.
"The Second Coming" is hard-edged, impersonal, emotionally stark. Its resonance is bone-deep; it is enormously grave. Little else in the language can compare with it. The asymmetrical formeight lines followed by fourteenregisters the unequal powers of the present and of what is to come. The rhymeoften even less than slant, as in the four consecutive lines that end "everywhere," "drowned," "worst," and "intensity" (an
a b b a
rhyme, if you will, that consists in syllable count alone)is far more comfortless, less established, than in any of Yeats's other poems. Even though the poem is in "form"Yeats said he would fall to pieces in free verseit stands frighteningly close up to what it says. For Yeats, form was not evasion.
His next great poem in this prophetic and pro-prophetic series was "Leda and the Swan." ("Easter, 1916" is in it, too, but there the sacred has only nationalist bearings; more on this later.) But, despite Jean-François Lyotard's argument that modernism is limited by its nostalgia for good form, for communal ritualhence not sublime, as achronic "postmodernity" always is"Leda and the Swan" sets the teeth of the sonnet form on edge through sheer dramatic power of content, begin-
 
Page 557
ning with its syntax-violating opening: "A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / above the staggering girl. . . ." No, the community for which Yeats is nostalgic here is precisely the sublime union he imagines between Leda and the bird-goda confrontation that is at once harrowing and exalting for the human subject, the entity (if it is one) that Leda represents. She does not represent either woman or the Greeks, exactly, still less "the colonized everywhere," as Edward Said puts it in
After Strange Skies: Palestinian Lives
. (Yeats would glorify neither men nor imperialism the way he idealizes the swan.) The swan itself is, in part, our own animal heritage (sex and aggression): the main ingredients of our turbulent history (the eggs Leda lays, Yeats said, hold Love and War). He is our animal history in its sacred aspectas "caught up" in a mysterious, uncontrollable totality. (Even the swan lacks free will: it must mate with Leda, must determine the Greek history to come).
As the conscious human subject, Leda would be independent of everything blind, accidental, disorderly. But an assault "from above" (and only from there, Yeats said, could a new movement start, one that would reverse the effects of Hobbes, the Encyclopedists, and the French Revolution) throws her into the sort of turbulence craved by the magi (the human subject in petrified form). She is shattered, uplifted, penetrated, then dropped by all that she would (but perhaps finally would not) exclude. Such vulnerability, Yeats implies, is our tragedy and our hope. For if we are the controlled and not the controlling, can we not at least "put on" not only the "power" but the knowledge of what somehow needs us, wants us so brutally? (The locution comes from Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians [15:23], where what is to be put on is immortality.) If sex and aggression are our ways of putting on its power, its knowledge could only be put on through a startlement of mind that opens it up to something previously hidden. (The poet questions whether Leda is so privileged; he doesn't dare conclude that she is.) The sacred, says Georges Bataille in
The History of Eroticism
(volume II of
The Accursed Share
), "is a leap into the unknown, with animality as its impetus.'' Such is Leda's leap, such her impetus. Bataille speaks, further, of "the poverty of a desire not enhanced by any horror." This is Yeats's view exactly.
Yeats had small tolerance for profane life except in its aristocratic form, where the beautiful is an end in itself, thus marked enough to be a substitute for the sublimeand where the ethical life is exalted as nobility: heroism and largesse. The vapidity of democracy, science,
 
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rationality, economics,
things
everything far removed from the sacredis what the swan must jostle Leda free of, if she is to represent the too-passive present of 1923, the date appended to the poem, and its possibility of renewal through terror. George Moore had asked Yeats for a poem on the contemporary state of things for his magazine,
The Irish Statesman
, but the sonnet ends forlornly in a glance back over three thousand years of history. The poet himself has been dropped, like Leda, from the visionary intensity of the octave, has fallen into the history books, has lost the prophetic note. So the poem comes off as an elegy for sacred experience.
To go back to "Easter, 1916": here the sacred is a magical element of hope, but in relation to Ireland's renewal alone. The only constant line of the two-line refrain, "A terrible beauty is born," names the fusion of the appalling and the moving, shared by tragedy, the sublime, and the sacred. Something has entered and transformed Irish nationalism, something with a self-perpetuating life (hence "is born," not "was"). Out of sacrifice has come new life and a new intimacy and continuity, Irish to Irish. This is how the sentiment of the sacred announces itself, this opening of a customary ''me" into a sense of community that is endless to feeling.
Yeats doesn't narrate any of the incidents of the Easter Rebellion; he even hides the act of rebellion itself by speaking only of the rebels' dreams: "We know their dream; enough / To know they dreamed and are dead." Only the adjective "terrible" acknowledges their sacrifice. But the poet's knees bend to the "terrible beauty" in a way that cannot be doubted. He does the rebellion the greatest homage in his refrain. But in the rest of the poem, he chafes, scolds, lectures.
There was so much about the rebellion for Yeats to disapprove of. For one thing, its emotional inspiration came from a Catholic, Patrick Pearse, and Yeats had long since counted himself a sort of adopted son of the Protestant aristocracy. Another leader, James Connolly, was a Marxist. There was one aristocrat among the leaders, Constance Markievicz, but she is presented as a traitor to her class: descending from her former heights ("young and beautiful, / She rode to harriers"), she became a leftist hag ("That woman's days spent / In ignorant goodwill, / Her nights in argument / Until her voice grew shrill"). Besides, as Yeats stated in a later poem, "The Man and the Echo," he feared that the rebels' rashness could perhaps be traced to his play
The Countess Cathleen
. So, on the one hand, he might have grieved that the rebellion was not his, and, on the other, felt that it rested on his conscience with
 
Page 559
unbearable weight. In any case, he himself had been trying to pull away from politics, because poetry exists, he said, in our quarrel with ourselves, not with others.
Certainly in "Easter, 1916" Yeats quarrels with himself. His heart is like a mobile with three hangings, each dipping and swinging to gain preeminence, none content with the presence of the others. First, there is the surprise and gratitude of his own Irishness, which the rebels' sacrifice of life (the British were so unwise as to execute sixteen leaders) has made terribly beautiful, that is, sacred. Then there are two reasoned objections to the uprising (among the several that remain concealed). One is nothing less than a worldview that leads to the poet's wind-brisk celebration of the profane earth in stanza three. It is to this world, he implies, that we naturally belong, a world in which thingsclouds, birds, streams, horses and their riderschange minute by minute, in contrast to the rebels, all of whom changed "utterly," were sublimely "transformed."
From the same atmosphere of thought that inspired Bergson; from Yeats's own aristocratic values (the world he paints in the third stanza is like an aristocratic parkland, and its horserider recalls Con Markievicz in her youth); and from his profound love of natural mobilityequal, almost, to his counterlove of historical monumentalityYeats conjures up a "living stream" that a fanatical heart, however "Irish," can only "trouble" like "a stone." (Maud Gonne's fervid patriotism similarly troubled Yeats himself, kept her from calling to him as, in the words of stanza three, "hens to moor-cocks call.'') So the rebels violated the very principle of existence. (Yeats never acknowledges that only thus could they have brought about that miraculous renewal and universality of Irish sentiment.)
The other objection to the rebels is grounded in the related ethic of moderate behavior (this from the poet of "The Second Coming"!). Perhaps England will "keep faith," make good on the parliamentary promise of Home Rule (checked by the outbreak of the Great War)perhaps, then, the rebellion was "needless death." Yeats even patronizes the rebels as childlike, unable to curb their native wildness (a view uncomfortably close to that of the colonizers):
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

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