A Review of M. L. Rosenthal's Running to Paradise: Yeat's Poetic Art (Oxford University Press)

 

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        The late M. L. Rosenthal was one of our finest critics as 
well as an interesting poet and translator. Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art is dedicated to the memory of his son, David Herschel Rosenthal, who died a few years before his father and whom Rosenthal nursed through his last illness. The dedication probably indicates that this book meant something particularly special to its author. Rosenthal spent much of his life meditating on (and editing) the work of W. B. Yeats. Running to Paradise is a late product of that interest. It is full of beautiful writing and passionate insight: 

                Yeats's artistry matured within the
       nineteenth-century poetic world he was born
       into. Blake, the Romantics, Tennyson, Arnold,
       and certain Irish figures (anonymous ballad-
       makers not least among them) were his forerunners.
       His technical skill grew like a second skin,
       enabling him at last to write brilliantly within
       and around the limits of traditional metrics. 
       He taught himself to use conventional verse so
       naturally, with such supple variety, that in
       his hands it almost became a rare, highly
       disciplined species of free verse. Yet his
       virtuosity was never on display for its own sake.
       He subordinated it to his gift for phrasing
       that brings a work's emotional center into view at 
       once�as in these lines at the start of "The Tower": 

           What shall I do with this absurdity� 
           O heart, O troubled heart�this caricature, 
           Decrepit age that has been tied to me 
           As to a dog's tail? 

        That seems to me masterful, a wonderful description of 
Yeats's accomplishment. "My subject in this book," writes 
Rosenthal, "is the quality of Yeats's memorable artistry in his 
lyrical poems and his plays, which so often resonate with grief 
or terror. Among the myriad studies of Yeats (as of other poets) 
filling the libraries, little attention is given to quality. Yet 
it is, precisely, quality that must be central to thinking about 
a great poet's work: a process of connecting with its pleasures, 
discoveries, and intrinsic humanity." 

        I would unhesitatingly recommend this book to anyone who 
is interested in Yeats�indeed, to anyone who is interested in 
poetry. Rosenthal's writing is clear and thoughtful, his focus on 
quality is illuminating, and he opens the poems in many delicate, 
subtle ways. 

        Yet I have a problem with Running to Paradise, as I have 
a problem with almost all Yeats criticism. Rosenthal himself 
notes his indebtedness "to the fine scholars and thinkers who 
have worked to establish accurate Yeats texts, to date and 
annotate them, and to set out their relevant biographical, 
historical, and philosophical background." As his note suggests, 
at this point, there is a fair degree of agreement about at least 
the general meaning of Yeats's poems, their "biographical, 
historical, and philosophical background." 

        In a recent exchange with Dana Gioia in the online 
magazine, Slate, James Woods remarked that "even to discuss 
�style' as an entity separable from a poem or from the poetic is 
to try to separate the dancer and the dance." Woods is referring 
to Yeats's poem, "Among School Children," with its concluding 
line, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Like most of 
Yeats's commentators, he believes the line to be an assertion of 
organic unity: the point is that we can't know the dancer from 
the dance. Rosenthal's reading of the poem, while interesting and 
subtle, is wholly in accord with Woods's reading. "The miracle 
occurs," he writes, "when the artist, unselfconsciously absorbed 
in the act of making, becomes inseparable from the organic growth 
of the work�just as the different parts of a tree are intrinsic 
to its whole living identity." 

        Yeats's line is not, "We cannot know the dancer from the 
dance"�which is what Woods and Rosenthal, among many others, 
believe it means. The line is a question. What if it is a real 
question? What if Yeats genuinely wants to know how to separate 
the dancer from the dance? What if the the poem is precisely 
about the fact that the poet has been unable to make such a 
distinction and that it has cost him dearly? Yeats writes in "The 
Choice": 

         The intellect of man is forced to choose 
         Perfection of the life, or of the work,
         And if it take the second 
         must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. 

        Critics are likely to be esthetes and unbelievers. Yeats 
was an esthete too, but he struggled with his impulse to believe 
throughout his life. For most critics, refusing "a heavenly 
mansion" is of considerably less consequence than achieving 
"Perfection of the...work." But was that true for Yeats? Is it 
possible that "Among School Children" is about refusing "a 
heavenly mansion" and "raging in the dark"�that it is more about 
confusion and "tragedy" than it is about "unity"? 

        As will become apparent, the issue here is much larger 
than quibbling over the meaning of a few lines in one of Yeats's 
poems. The lines appear at the climax of what everyone, including 
myself, would agree is one of Yeats's major utterances. From my 
point of view, the one critic who has shown genuine�indeed, 
extraordinary�insight into the meaning of Yeats's work is Paul de 
Man, with whom I studied at Cornell in the sixties and whose 
articles are almost never referenced in books about Yeats. As 
Thomas Parkinson, a prominent and brilliant Yeats scholar, once 
remarked to me, "I wish de Man had never written about Yeats!" 
There are references to Yeats in just about everything de Man 
wrote, but I would particularly recommend the two essays included 
in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, "Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth 
and Yeats" and "Image and Emblem in Yeats." What I will have to 
say about Yeats's poems in this essay is very much indebted to de 
Man. 

        Here is the full text of "Among School Children," which 
first appeared in 1928 in Yeats's volume, The Tower: 

          I                                        

          I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
          A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
          The children learn to cipher and to sing,
          To study reading-books and history,
          To cut and sew, be neat in everything
          In the best modern way�the children's eyes
          In momentary wonder stare upon
          A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

          II                                        

          I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
          Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
          Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
          That changed some childish day to tragedy�
          Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
          Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
          Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
          Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

          III                                        

          And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
          I look upon one child or t'other there
          And wonder if she stood so at that age�
          For even daughters of the swan can share
          Something of every paddler's heritage�
          And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
          And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
          She stands before me as a living child.

          IV                                        

          Her present image floats into the mind�
          Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
          Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
          And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
          And I though never of Ledaean kind
          Had pretty plumage once�enough of that,
          Better to smile on all that smile, and show
          There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

          V                                        

          What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
          Honey of generation had betrayed,
          And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
          As recollection or the drug decide,
          Would think her son, did she but see that shape
          With sixty or more winters on its head,
          A compensation for the pang of his birth,
          Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

          VI                                        

          Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
          Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
          Solider Aristotle played the taws
          Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
          World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
          Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
          What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
          Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

          VII                                        

          Both nuns and mother worship images,
          But those the candles light are not as those
          That animate a mother's reveries,
          But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
          And yet they too break hearts�O Presences
          That passion, piety or affection knows,
          And that all heavenly glory symbolise�
          O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

          VIII                                       

          Labour is blossoming or dancing where
          The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
          Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
          Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
          O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
          Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
          O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
          How can we know the dancer from the dance?

        I will not attempt a full reading of the poem�there have 
been many�but will concentrate on certain details. I will also 
assume that the reader is at least somewhat familiar with Yeats's 
tumultous relationship with Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889 and 
who appears here. It is interesting that Yeats refers to Gonne's 
"Ledean body" and calls her a "daughter of the swan": "For even 
daughters of the swan can share / Something of every paddler's 
heritage." "Leda and the Swan"�which deals with Zeus, in the form 
of a swan, raping Leda�is one of Yeats's most famous poems, and 
it is positioned only two poems before "Among School Children." 
Interestingly too, "On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund 
Dulac," the poem immediately preceeding "Among School Children," 
ends with the assertion that Yeats loves something�not 
necessarily Maud Gonne�"better than my soul...." 

        All of Yeats's ideal women have something of Maud Gonne 
in them, so we should not be surprised to find him connecting 
Gonne to Leda; he often thinks of her as Leda's daughter, Helen 
of Troy. But there is a difference between Leda and Helen. Though 
Leda is raped by Zeus, who is a divinity, Leda herself is 
entirely mortal. Maud Gonne is said to look like Leda�she has a 
"Ledaean body"�but she is also called a "daughter of the swan." 
Leda is not a "daughter of the swan"; she is mortal. In asserting 
that Gonne is a daughter of the swan, Yeats is asserting that she 
is at least half divine. And the moment he says this, he has a 
visionary experience of her: 

           And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
           She stands before me as a living child. 

        The moment after that, however, "Her present image floats 
into the mind": 

           Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
           Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind 
           And took a mess of shadows for its meat? 

        Maud Gonne may be half divine, but, like Yeats himself, 
she ages; her beauty vanishes. Was her beauty an indication of 
her divinity or was it something else? The word "image"�"Her 
present image floats into the mind"�becomes extraordinarily 
important in the poem. Yeats returns to it in the seventh stanza: 

           Both nuns and mothers worship images,
           But those the candles light are not as those
           That animate a mother's reveries,
           But keep a marble or a bronze repose,
           And yet they too break hearts.... 

        Leaving aside the question of exactly how marble or 
bronze images "break hearts," any reader of Yeats knows that his 
heart was broken by Maud Gonne�who was definitely the kind of 
"image" worshipped by a mother, not a nun. (Maud Gonne was of 
course also "worshipped" by Yeats, who wrote poem upon poem about 
her.) The reference to the mother in these lines connects 
powerfully with lines in the fifth stanza, where Yeats wonders 
whether being born is worth it. Another poem in the volume, "A 
Man Young and Old," concludes explicitly that being born is 
definitely not worth it�which is also the implication of stanza 
five, with its references to the "Honey of generation" and "the 
drug." "A Man Young and Old" ends: 

   I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long. 

   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;
   The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away. 

        Has Yeats also been "betrayed" by the "honey of 
generation"? Did his interest in Maud Gonne proceed from his love 
for the divine�was it his soul's love? Or did it come from his 
libido? Yeats insists that the images "worshipped" by nuns are of 
an entirely different order than those "worshipped" by mothers: 
they "keep a marble or a bronze repose." The difference between 
the two kinds of images is expressed in various ways: unlike 
children, who have mothers, the marble or bronze images are 
"self-born"; though they may age, they age in a very different 
way from the way in which humans age. At the present moment, Maud 
Gonne seems to have very little divinity left in her! Her 
"beauty" is not such as to entice the swan; rather, it would be 
more likely to scare him away: "Old clothes upon old sticks to 
scare a bird." She is certainly no longer something to be 
"worshipped." But Yeats did worship her, and the poem raises the 
further question: Was she ever something to be worshipped? What 
sort of "body" was she?  "She stands before me as a living 
child." What did that living child�that daughter of the 
swan�mean? 

        At this point we can begin to understand the implications 
of the concluding lines of the poem: 

         O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
         Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
         O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
         How can we know the dancer from the dance? 

        Are these lines the expression of "organic unity" that 
critics take them to be? Or are they something else?  Note how 
often the word "or" appears in the poem: "Labour is blossoming or 
dancing where," "Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole," "Or 
else, to alter Plato's parable," "That passion, piety or 
affection knows," etc. Is it likely that a poem about unity 
should have so many problematical choices in it?  The word "or" 
suggests anything but unity. 

        On the other hand, isn't a chestnut-tree (like any tree) 
an expression of the ultimate unity of leaf, blossom and bole? 
Aren't leaf, blossom and bole parts of the whole? According to 
the Random House College Dictionary a bole is "the stem or trunk 
of a tree." A leaf is "one of the expanded, usually green organs 
borne by the stem of a plant." A blossom is "the flower of a 
plant, esp. of one producing an edible fruit...The apple tree is 
in blossom." As time passes, as the tree "grows," we experience 
bole, leaf and blossom. But that is the point: as time passes. I 
think that the answer to Yeats's first question is No: his 
"great-rooted blossomer" is precisely not "the leaf, the blossom 
or the bole"�not the tree that exists in time. Rather, it is what 
Yeats calls in "Her Vision in the Wood" a "fabulous 
symbol"�something existing outside of time, or in a different 
temporal order from the human and the natural. The elevated tone 
of "great-rooted blossomer" (as opposed to the mere "blossom") 
suggests the difference. The "great-rooted blossomer" is, in 
effect, only a "blossomer" and not a leaf, blossom or bole: 
unlike Maud Gonne, it never ceases to manifest the divine. Its 
"meaning" is suggested by a passage in Basho's The Narrow Road to 
the Deep North: "The chestnut is a holy tree, for the Chinese 
ideograph for chestnut is Tree placed directly below West, the 
direction of the holy land." The "great-rooted blossomer" is like 
those images which "keep a marble or a bronze repose": it is of a 
different order of being from the organic tree of leaf, blossom 
and bole. The organic tree is an "image" like those worshipped by 
mothers�an image whose reflection of the divine is essentially 
mutable. 

        A similar distinction can be made between the dancer and 
the dance. "The dance," writes Paul de Man in "Image and Emblem 
in Yeats," is a recurrent emblem for contact with the divine; 
the following early quotation describes it well: "Men who lived 
in a world where anything might flow and change...had always, as 
it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance among the 
hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell 
upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike 
beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some 
think, imaged for the first time in the world the blessed country 
of the gods and of the happy dead"...The "dancer" on the other 
hand...is associated with the symbol of the "body" and appears as 
a real woman in the generated world of matter, capable of giving 
the "pleasure of generation." 

        Maud Gonne may well have functioned as Yeats's Muse�and 
may well be in some sense responsible for some of his finest 
poetry. His "worship" of her physical beauty may have led him to 
"perfection of the work." At the same time, however, as he 
realizes, this very quest means that the poet has to abandon 
"perfection of the life." Despite his sixty years, Yeats remains 
at the end of the poem not a figure of wisdom but a learner; he 
is himself "among school children": "How can we know the dancer 
from the dance?" The issues present in "Among School Children" 
intensify in the later poem, "Her Vision in the Wood" (section 
VIII of "A Woman Young and Old"). The woman in that poem sees 
supernatural beings "that are forever young"�eternal youth is one 
of the characteristics of the divine in Yeats�moving in a dance. 
Hoping that she will see a "fabulous symbol," she sees instead 
"my heart's victim and its torturer."  Maud Gonne too seemed like 
a "fabulous symbol" to Yeats. What she becomes in "Among School 
Children" is something quite different�and darker: "Hollow of 
cheek as though it drank the wind...."