2
Yeats's emphasis on the "image" is important in the
context of his work and even more important in the context of
twentieth-century poetry, where the concept of the "image" is
central to a great many things. Yeats's work points—as, in
another sense, Ezra Pound's work does—to a crisis of "the image"
in twentieth-century poetry. What is the status of "visual
imagery" in the context of poetry and writing?
In this section I will discuss another of Yeats's poems,
"The Wild Swans at Coole," in which this issue is present. Here
again we will be dealing with different modalities of the
"image." "The Wild Swans at Coole" first appeared as the title
poem of a volume Yeats published in 1919. Yeats was born in 1865,
so he was in his fifties when the book appeared. This is the
complete text:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
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.
Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away.
The poem appears to be about Yeats's reactions to two
similar events, one occurring at the present time, the other
occurring nineteen years earlier. Beginning with a description of
the scene as it now appears, Yeats moves on to a description of
the scene as it was and finally, to a discussion of the changes
which have taken place in himself and in his relationship to the
swans. For him, "all"—including himself—has "changed" in the
course of nineteen years; the swans, however, are "unwearied
still," and their hearts, as opposed to Yeats's, "have not grown
old." The theme of the poem would seem to be mutability and the
concomitant nostalgia for an irrecoverable youth, and as the poem
progresses, the swans, perfectly literal creatures at first, come
to represent some principle of fixity, something which remains
"still"—a word which reechoes throughout the poem—in a world of
change.
The first stanza firmly situates us in a particular place
at a particular time. We begin with a literal description of a
natural landscape: there is a lake surrounded by woods, the month
is October, the time is twilight, and exactly fifty-nine swans
are "upon the brimming water." If we know anything about Yeats,
we know too that "Coole" is a real place and that the lake was in
fact part of his friend Lady Gregory's estate. Yet, as the poem
progresses, we also realize that the landscape, while remaining
literal, takes on a certain symbolic function: in the first line,
for example, the natural landscape "reflects" the poet, who, like
the trees, is in the "autumn" of his life. The main effect of the
stanza as a whole, however, is descriptive rather than
speculative, and though Yeats is "like" the trees and also like
the dry "woodland paths," he does not as yet seem to be like the
water—which, in contrast to the "dry" paths, is "brimming"—or
like the swans.
The second stanza brings us to another autumn, nineteen
years earlier, when Yeats "first made [his] count" and when
indeed he was like the brimming water and the swans rather than
like the trees and the paths. The speaker recollects a moment
when he saw the swans "suddenly mount / And scatter wheeling in
great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings." This sudden,
dramatic movement—in sharp contrast to the stillness and lack of
movement up to this point—intensifies the tone of the poem and
allows Yeats to make the transition from objective description to
the statement of a feeling: "I have looked upon those brilliant
creatures, / And now my heart is sore." If the young Yeats could
not exactly fly he was at least able to walk "with a lighter
tread." And if the middle-aged Yeats, like the day, is moving
towards darkness, death, he was once able to share to a certain
extent the light, the sheer brilliance of the swans, which, he
seems to imply, is not dependent on the sun—for the swans are
"brilliant" even in twilight—but on some other source.
The implications of "brilliant" prepare us for the fourth
stanza, in which the swans appear, much more explicitly, as
immortal creatures. In man the process of aging—which here seems
to have its own "beauty"—necessarily involves the weakening, the
drying up of the capacity to feel intensely; the swans, on the
other hand, still feel as intensely as ever, and "passion or
conquest...attend upon them still." They are a kind of immortal
aristocracy—"attend" suggests that they are to be regarded as
aristocratic, even royal creatures—and as such are implicitly
opposed to the mortal aristocracy of which Lady Gregory was part
and with which Yeats often identified himself. Watching the
swans, the poet realizes that though they are certainly
"beautiful," they are also "mysterious"—both outside the cycle of
nature and beyond his understanding. He can only speculate about
where they will be when—either through actual, physical death or
through spiritual death, the inability to feel—he has lost the
capacity to see them. And—with more than a hint of irony—this
loss is thought of as an "awakening."
Reading "The Wild Swans at Coole" in this way, we can see
the actual process of "double vision." The landscape is extremely
well-realized as landscape, for example, but it is also altered,
made metaphorical; though we are never in doubt that the lake is
real, we know too that it is representative of a certain aspect
of Yeats. Similarly, the swans themselves—familiar enough
creatures—are, insofar as they are swans, part of the natural
world and also, insofar as they are immortals, part of the
"spiritual" world, embodiments of "passion." In addition, the
poem is organized around the ever-present image of the poet
contemplating the landscape—whether he is seeing real swans or
immortals—and Yeats is able to maintain a delicate balance
between language which is highly descriptive and mimetic—we might
take the entire first stanza as an example—and language which is
far more expressive: words such as "brilliant," "mysterious,"
"beautiful." To be sure, one aspect of the landscape as
metaphor—the lake and the swans—is opposed to another—the paths
and the woods—but both of these are assimilated into the common
substratum of the physical setting, which functions as Yeats's
starting point. Though Yeats's mind eventually becomes quite
active, it is initially a mirror reflecting the landscape, just
as the lake reflects the sky.
In this reading, "The Wild Swans at Coole" demonstrates
very well how it is possible, as Blake puts it, "To see a World
in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower": beginning
with the natural world, we are led by analogies—or
"correspondences"—to the understanding of a state of mind.
"Twilight" is of course a particularly significant time of day
for this poet of the "Celtic Twilight." Yeats's early poem, "Into
the Twilight," suggests that it is precisely at that time that
you are able to see "Your mother Eire" as "always young":
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight....
There are perhaps some traces of that poem here. The
swans are not exactly "always young," but at least "Their hearts
have not grown old." (In "Among School Children," of course, Maud
Gonne and Yeats do "grow old.") Moreover, "The Wild Swans at
Coole" seems to document a moment in which some sort of "mystical
brotherhood" appears.
Despite all that, however, this reading is not entirely
satisfactory. Even if we grant that it is probably the correct
reading, we are still faced with some unsolved problems. The
phrase "great broken rings," for example, would seem to contain a
rather gratuitous reference to Yeats's "gyres," and my
explication provides no real way of integrating this reference
with the rest of the poem. In addition, the word "or" appears in
a problematical way, just as it does in "Among School Children."
Yeats seems to be making a rather obscure distinction between the
word "passion" and the word "conquest." We would certainly tend
to associate both words with romantic love, but the phrase Yeats
gives us is not "passion and conquest" but "passion orconquest."
The implication would seem to be that it is necessary to choose
between the two, but I have provided no reason why this should be
so—especially since the phrase seems to refer us, by its
alliterative pattern, to another "choice": "They paddle in the
cold / Companionable streams or climb the air."
Throughout my reading of "The Wild Swans at Coole," I
have assumed that Yeats presents us with a literal, observed
landscape which is also "meaningful." In other words, I have
assumed that Yeats's starting point is the natural world—a
specific place—and that in dealing with the natural world the
mind of the poet in a sense alters it, makes it metaphorical. But
this is a dangerous assumption to make when one is attempting to
read a poet who at times, both in prose and in verse, claims to
reject the natural world, to "scorn aloud / In glory of
changeless metal / Common bird or petal," as he puts it in
"Byzantium." What I have been describing is essentially an
organic model of consciousness; it allows for considerable
continuity between nature and mind. But the "great-rooted
blossomer" is an indication of Yeats's rejection of organic
models.
The question of to what extent outside sources are
relevant to Yeats's poetry has never been satisfactorily settled,
but it is certainly true that if we keep in mind at least one
text—Porphyry's essay on "The Cave of the Nymphs" episode in the
Odyssey—"The Wild Swans at Coole" becomes a somewhat different
and even more tightly organized poem. Yeats himself quotes
extensively from Thomas Taylor's translation of Porphyry's work
in "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry"—one of the essays in
Ideas of Good and Evil—and there are unmistakable references to
Porphyry's essay in both Blake and Spenser (favorite poets of
Yeats's) as well as in Yeats's own work. Yeats's only footnote to
"Among School Children" refers explicitly to Porphyry: "I have
taken the ‘honey of generation' from Porphyry's essay on ‘The
Cave of the Nymphs' but find no warrant in Porphyry for
considering it the ‘drug' that destroys the ‘recollection' of
pre-natal freedom. He blamed a cup of oblivion given in the
zodiacal sign of Cancer." Appearing in The Witch of Atlas, The
Book of Thel, and in the third Book of The Faerie Queene, the
cluster of symbols discussed in this essay is one of the key
items of literary Neoplatonism, and, as Paul de Man suggests in
"Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats," the appearance of
the Cave of the Nymphs in Yeats's poetry "marks [his]
allegiance...to a body of doctrine that considers the incarnate
state of the soul as a relative degradation, and looks upon death
as a return to its divine origin and, consequently, as a positive
act."
As described by Porphyry, the Cave of the Nymphs is a
kind of half-way house for all souls about to be born or about to
ascend to heaven, and as such is regarded as the source of all
life, which is symbolized by "waters welling everywhere." One of
its gates—"the gate of generation"—leads to the earth, and the
other—"the gate of ascent through death to the gods"—leads to
heaven. The first is "the gate of cold and moisture"—for
"cold...causes life in the world"—and the second is "the gate of
heat and fire." If we keep only these details in mind—and
Porphyry goes on to add a great many others—we can see how the
Cave of the Nymphs is relevant to "The Wild Swans at Coole." The
"brimming water among the stones," for example, is Yeats's
equivalent to the water welling among the rocks of the cave, and
the two activities of the swans—"They paddle in the cold /
Companionable streams or climb the air"—represent respectively
the descent of the soul into matter through the gate of cold and
moisture and—since air is a purer element than water—the ascent
to the divine. Yeats often imagines this ascent as proceeding in
"rings" or "gyres" and as accompanied by the sound of a
bell—here, "the bell-beat of their wings above my head." Bells
with similar meanings appear in both "Byzantium" and "All Souls'
Night."
Once we are aware of its presence, the Cave of the Nymphs
adds another dimension to the poem. The lake, for example, is now
seen as part of a relatively fixed system of symbols and not as a
"real" place at all: in the very first stanza, it is specifically
a "mirror" of the "still sky," a reflection of heaven, and as
such unchanging, always "brimming," and directly opposed to the
decaying wood of matter that surrounds it. (Though matter has its
"autumn beauty"--a beauty which arises because of its very
transience--the "mysterious" beauty of the soul is more
"brilliant," more "delightful.") In addition, it is now
possible--and only now, I think--to understand Yeats's distinction between the word "passion"--which implies the descent of the soul into matter--and "conquest"--which implies its ascent to the divine. In the first reading of the poem, these words were
associated with romantic love, and they carried with them strong
sexual overtones. (The swans are referred to as "lovers.") In the
second reading, however, sexual overtones remain only in the word
"passion"--which refers to the "honey of generation." The word
"conquest," on the other hand, now refers to the defeat of
sexuality, to the "conquest" of the entire material world. The
purity of the swans--"Their hearts have not grown old"—is due to
their ability to maintain a constant and faithful love for the
divine, even amid the "companionable" waters of the generated
world. In this context, Yeats's walking "with a lighter tread" is
an indication that he too was once a "lover" of the divine, but
with the passing of time he has become increasingly involved with
the material world and has consequently moved further and further
away from the condition of the swans. But if it is true that
death and union with the divine principle is the ultimate good,
it is also true that mutability—insofar as it brings us closer to
death—is desirable. Consequently, the process of aging is,
finally, a good, as is the swans' "flying away." The implications
of the last stanza now become more fully apparent, for death is
indeed an "awakening," a passing from darkness to "day," and the
"rushes" among which the swans will "build" are not of this
earth. Finally, I think, the poem is less about aging than it is
about the longing for the divine, and the nostalgia which
permeates it is not so much nostalgia for lost youth as it is for
a condition which existed—as Yeats puts it in another poem, "A
Woman Young and Old"—"before the world was made."
If we grant the validity of this second reading, we must
also admit that we could not have arrived at it by proceeding on
the assumptions of the first reading. From the first point of
view, the "thought," the "intellectual content" of the poem
arises out of meaningful natural objects--objects which are
present both as "fact" and as "meaning." From the second point of
view, on the other hand, the natural object as such becomes more
or less irrelevant, and swans, trees and lake do not acquire
meaning in the course of the poem but--I am again quoting Paul de
Man--"act as predetermined emblems in a more or less fixed
symbolic system which is not derived from the observation of
nature."
Like at least some of Blake's work, Yeats's poetry does
not reveal its meaning through analogies with the natural world
but through literary allusions. Unlike Blake, however, Yeats is
not willing to write poetry which is entirely non-mimetic. The
poet does not "begin" with nature--this is a poet with a full
spiritual agenda--but he does not completely transcend it either.
Rather, he seems engaged in a struggle in which two modes of the
"image" are in fierce combat.
There is of course some continuity between the "wood" at
Coole and the esoteric "wood" of matter. But a line such as "Upon
the brimming water among the stones" stretches the continuity
almost to the breaking point. Porphyry's cave has a river running
through it. He writes, "Therein are mixing-bowls and jars of
stone, and there moreover do bees hive. And there are great looms
of stone, whereon the nymphs weave raiment of purple stain, a
marvel to behold; and there are waters welling everywhere." As I
suggested earlier, Yeats's "brimming water" is his equivalent to
Porphyry's "waters welling everywhere," and "stones" appear in
both writers. From the naturalistic point of view, we have a lake
with stones in it, and the "brimming water" is part of the lake;
from the point of view of Porphyry's essay, however, there is no
lake but a cave with an underground river and "looms of stone."
In effect, one must remove the line from the context of mimetic
imagery in which it is placed and turn the poem into a sort of
puzzle of esoteric emblems. In "The Philosophy of Shelley's
Poetry," Yeats remarks that Shelley "could hardly have helped
perceiving that an image that has transcended particular time and
place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death, as it were, and
becomes a living soul." "The Wild Swans at Coole" is an attempt
to take a physical landscape--one that Yeats particularly
loved--and, by connecting it to what he believed to be archetypal
"images," turn it into "a living soul."
Another of Yeats's "lake" poems, the famous "Lake Isle of
Innisfree," is relevant here as well. The poem first appeared in
The Rose (1893), and it marks what may be Yeats's earliest use of
Porphyry:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
In his introductory remarks to a recorded reading of the
poem, Yeats explained that the name "Innisfree" meant "Heather
Island." He also asserts that the poem has only one "obscurity":
when he writes of noon as "a purple glow," he is thinking of the
reflection of the heather on the water. He goes on to say that
the poem originated when he was in London: he was feeling
homesick for his boyhood home, Sligo, and he saw an advertisement
for "cooling drink."
Despite Yeats's disclaimer, many of the details of the
poem—the water, the honey, the bee and its hive, the color
purple, the number nine, the beans—are from Porphyry. The "small
cabin" is probably Yeats's equivalent to the cave itself, which,
he writes, "may mean any enclosed life, as when it is the
dwelling place of Asia and Prometheus, or when it is ‘the still
cave of poetry.'" "Clay and wattles"—clay and sticks—I take to be
flesh and bones, as when, in the much later poem, "Sailing to
Byzantium," Yeats writes, "An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A
tattered coat upon a stick...." Note also that "The Lake Isle of
Innisfree" deliberately deemphasizes the visual—"veils of the
morning," "purple glow," "glimmer"—but emphasizes the auditory:
"bee- loud glade," "the cricket sings," "linnet's wings," "I hear
lake water lapping," "low sounds." The "sounds" referred to are
in a way echoed by the "sounds" of the poem as we imagine it—its
wonderful vowels and rhymes.
Yeats was an admirer of Walter Pater, and a passage from
The Renaissance (1873) may be relevant here as well. Pater is
writing of "music or musiclike intervals in our existence" and of
"life itself...conceived as a sort of listening—listening to
music...to the sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such
moments are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at
the unexpected blessedness." There is of course also Pater's
famous line, "All art constantly aspires to the condition of
music." But Neoplatonism is not to be outdone by Estheticism.
Plotinus's Fifth Ennead also emphasizes listening: "We must turn
the perceptive faculty inward and hold it to attention there.
Hoping to hear a desired voice, we let all others pass and are
alert for the coming of that most welcome of sounds: so here, we
must let the hearings of sense go by, save for sheer necessity,
and keep the soul's perception bright and quick to the sounds of
above."
Such passages are not irrelevant to the poem, whatever
its connection to Yeats's childhood. I think the cricket, the
linnet and the heather are indeed from Yeats's childhood—from
Innisfree itself—whereas other objects have esoteric resonances.
Yeats is attempting to balance natural elements with supernatural
ones. "Homesickness" is certainly an element of the poem, but so
is the desire to turn homesickness into the longing for the
divine. The situation here is similar to that in "The Wild Swans
at Coole." For the young Yeats, the poet can transform landscape
into—the phrase is from Porphyry—"fabulous symbol." The same
phrase appears in the lines quoted earlier from "Her Vision in
the Wood," a poem published in The Winding Stair and Other Poems
in 1933. If in his earlier work Yeats was attempting to be Homer,
to write the kind of poetry described in Porphyry's essay, at
this point he understands his poetry in a very different way.
"What can I but enumerate old themes?," he asks in the
posthumously-published "The Circus Animals' Desertion,"
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams...
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?
"Her Vision in the Wood" marks, at least momentarily, the total
collapse of Yeats's enterprise:
Those bodies from a picture or a coin
Nor saw my body fall nor heard it shriek,
Nor knew, drunken with singing as with wine,
That they had brought no fabulous symbol there
But my heart's victim and its torturer.
3
I hope these remarks begin to suggest complexities in
Yeats which have not yet been sufficiently addressed. I would not
be without M. L. Rosenthal's book or any of the other books
written about Yeats, but the fact remains that the issues raised
by Paul de Man are largely undiscussed.
Has Yeats been seriously misunderstood by the very people
who profess to admire him? And, if that is true, why is it true?
