Impermanence is a fundamental theme of English poetry, which easily slips into the elegiac mode. Think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, of Keats’s Odes, of the Elegies of Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold. This was a mode in which Yeats was fully at home from the first, but especially in the 1919 collection, The Wild Swans at Coole:
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread. (‘The Wild Swans at Coole’)
Coole was at the centre of Yeats’s brooding on impermanence, as his only foothold in the aristocratic culture of which he mourned the decline, as the birthplace of Lady Gregory’s son Robert, who died in 1918, and as surrounded by the cruelties of the Black and Tans and later of the Civil War.
Throes and threnodies of old age are darker in The Tower, 1928, which opens with‘Sailing to Byzantium,’‘The Tower,’ ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ and ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.’ This last poem is perhaps Yeats’ most unqualified plunge into the abyss of impermanence.
Japanese tradition vehiculates two senses of impermanence, a feminine, poetic sense of transience (hakanasa) and a masculine, philosophical sense of impermanence (Buddhist mujô). Japanese philosopher Junzo Karaki writes: ’The gap between the tempo of this rapid fleetingness of the external world and the tempo of my psychology or emotion that does not readily go along with it is what constitutes the feeling of “transiency”’ (229). ‘When this “feeling” of feminine court art is transferred to the masculine feeling of the military world it becomes the “sense of impermanence,” from which stems the grief of impermanence’ (229), or we may say that there is a shift from the elegiac to the tragic. In contrast to stagnant court life, a time of war awakens tragic emotion that ‘borrows the Buddhist sense of impermanence as an underpinning’ (229). ‘The time of impermanence and change does not advance in a linear and continuous way…. The impermanence of arising-and-extinction, continually arising and continually passing away, is time in its naked form. Time is originally purposeless, discontinuous, instantaneous arising-and-extinction…. Impermanence is clearly shown to be such nothingness and meaninglessness. Impermanence is a cold fact, an actuality quite unrelated to emotions of wonder, poetic sentiment, and the like’ (231). One ‘strategy for conferring significance on time is so-called “creative achievement,” that is, culturalism or historicism… a way of artificially adorning the present. Humans, through believing in civilization and progress, are able to affirm time and life’ (232). Does Yeats unblinkingly face this meaninglessness of time, which is an obligatory gate for the Zen meditator?
For the softer side, Yeats could tune in to elegiac tradition, as in the opening lines of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’:
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
Protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about.
But it is not only time or mortality that Yeats mourns for. Impermanence takes a far more upsetting form: the recurrance of irrational violence that shakes the very foundations of civilization and shows it to be a radically fragile construct:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.
Destruction rules, and the only refuge is retreat into ‘ghostly solitude,’ a Platonic retreat like ‘the half-read wisdom of daemonic images’ in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’:
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
And this too is a kind of half-deceit, from which the poet turns into his most grief-laden elegiac lines:
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?
These lines too are a kind of half-deceit, for they shift from the stern recognition of impermanence in all its traumatic cruelty to a softer semi-consolatory crooning over transience. For the sterner side of impermanence Yeats draws on ancient thought, especially on Platonism and, increasingly in later years, on Indian ideas of karma and rebirth. The second section of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ envisions impermanence as a whirlwind dance imaging the Platonic Year:
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
The impermanence undoes the consolatory topos of Tennyson’s: ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new,…’ ‘Ring out the thousand wars of old,/ Ring in the thousand years of peace….’ ‘Ring in the Christ that is to be.’ Yeats’s own esoteric philosophy of history did not stand him in good stead, as he admitted in a letter to Olivia Shakespear (quoted in Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence). Indeed, Yeats never let his philosophy become a barrier to experience, and perhaps in the end was deserted by it as much as by the ‘circus animals,’ and sent back to ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ (’The Circus Animals’ Desertion’). The spiritual adventure charted in ‘the book of Yeats’s poems’ (Hazard Adams) is vaster than the theories of A Vision.
Yeats’s dance to the music of time was always a circular one, threatening to be meaningless. Already in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ (1889) we hear of ‘the many changing things/ In dreary dancing past us whirled,/ To the cracked tune that Chronos sings.’ ‘The Oriental gong owes something to Yeats’s engagement with Japan, and his “plays for dancers.” He knew that gongs were used in the Byzantine Church, and linked them with the bliss of Phase 15: “When gong and conch declare the hour to bless” (“The Statues”)’ (Sikka, 264). This cyclicism might have become a soft poetic conceit, but Yeats really struggled with history, attempted to face down its tragic bleakness, and built a remarkably capacious framework for handling its paradoxes (see Whitaker, Swan and Shadow).
Sometimes Yeats embraces impermanence—the radical unreliability of all things in time—with ‘tragic joy’ so that the sadness of transience is abolished as a weak and decadent attitude, and instead one is made stronger by taking the cruelty of impermanence, exhilaratingly, in one’s stride.
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
Here we are in Shelleyan elegy, but the last line strikes an apocalyptic note, for the ‘approaching night’ is not just individual death, but the night into which civilization is sinking. And Yeats can embrace apocalypse, make his own the destructive dynamic of the Platonic Year.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things.
The opening poem of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” was inspired by Oedipus at Colonus, and later in The Tower we meet these lines from Sophocles’ play:
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day.
Espousing the winds of destruction in a ballad of self-mocking mockery Yeats seems caught up in a dance of death that contrasts with the later more constructive tower poems, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1922-3) and ‘The Tower’ (1926).
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
The final poem in the sequence make apocalptic destruction eerily seductive:
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again.
As impermanence acquires the status of full-blown apocalypytic, Yeats draws on an Irish symbol: ’Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind, and certainly the Sidhe have much to do with the wind. They journey in whirling wind, the winds that were called the dance of the daughter of Herodias in the Middle Ages’ (Yeats’s note to ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’). The wind is the dominant image of change and destruction in this poem, whereas it is the moon that dominates elsewhere (both images shared with Shelley). Yeats’s greatness as a poet is seen in the fact that of all 20th century poets he is the one who made the moon his own, so much so that we can hardly gaze at ‘The purity of the unclouded moon’ (‘Blood and the Moon’) without thinking of him.
The Winding Stair (1933) can be seen as a positive reply to The Tower on many points, notably in its more positive embrace of the world of becoming. ‘“Rereading The Tower,” he wrote Mrs. Shakespear shortly after it was published, “I was astonished by its bitterness, and long to live out of Ireland that I may find some new vintage.”’ “Already new poems are floating in my head, bird songs of an old man, joy in the passing moment, emotion without the bitterness of memory” (Unterecker, 170). Unterecker sees The Tower as masculine, The Wnding Stair as feminine (and the very titles suggest that opposition). The feminine kind of transience outweighs stern masculine impermanence in the latter collection:
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer’s wreath.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time. (‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz’)
In this poem there is a moment of apocalpytic destruction but its somewhat playful atmosphere differs from the rage of The Tower:
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch…;
Bid me strike a match and blow.
In ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ the masculine sword, ‘Unspotted by the centuries,’ is wrapped in a protective femining cloth:
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady’s dress and round
The wooden scabbard bound and wound,
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.
Both are ‘emblems of the day’ now boldly reaffirmed in the spirit of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return of the same’:
I am content to live it all again
And yet again…
The moon in ‘Blood and the Moon’ triumphs serenely over centuries of violence:
but no stain
Can come upon the visage of the moon
When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
Coole now is celebrated for ‘A dance-like glory that those walls begot’ (‘Coole Park, 1929’), and the aging figure of Augusta Gregory is the centre of elegiac pathos.
They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman’s powerful character
Could keep a swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it withershins.
Here we can say that beauty triumphs over destructive folly, perhaps the Pascalian triumph of the ‘thinking reed’ over all that conspires to crush it. The image of the swan, no longer desolate, carries the same message:
That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the night
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry. (‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931)
Transience itself is beautiful, poignant:
Where the swan drifts upon the darkening flood.
‘Byzantium’ celebrates not the ‘artifice of eternity’ (of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’) but ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’ ‘Vacillation’ appeals to ‘such men as come/ Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb’ and declares: ‘Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.’
Reference
Karaki Junzô. 2011. ‘Metaphysical Impermanence.’ in J. W. Heisig, et al., ed. Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 227-32..
Sikka, Shalini. 2011. ‘Indian Thought.’ In D. Holdeman and B. Levitas, ed. W. B. Yeats in Context. Cambridge University Press, 256-65.
Unterecker, John. 1959. A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats. New York: Noonday.
Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear -
And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?
And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear -
And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?
And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
Posted by: D | October 26, 2017 at 05:14 AM