:: William Butler Yeats, Tower and Winding Stair ::                                 

 

For today I want to work out the following sequence of concerns: 1) What are the fundamental sources of pain that for Yeats at this time promise also to isolate the possible strengths or situatings of soul that poetry can meaningfully pursue. Here I think the most important issue is the possibility the Vision materials give of correlating the state of individual psyches with the nation and with the large historical forces that impinge on both. Yeats presents himself as wanting to speak for a nation while being desperately afraid that he will be consumed by that identification into the very forces that are destroying its spirit. 2) What does the increasing concern for the tragic add to his version of soul-making? How do poems like meditation in time of civil War and Leda and Dialogue of Self and soul extend and alter the forms of self-possession that we tracked from Irish Airman to prayer for Daughter? 3) My way of responding to this question will be to track how Yeats now casts the life of the subject as inseparable from how it engages the constant pressure of objectifying forces within and without. One cannot construct masks against history but one must test oneself by how fully one feels its otherness to what one desires. Then the issue becomes how can one be an intense willing and self-regarding subject without being a fool, given the objectifying forces within history and even in one’s nagging psyche? How can subjectification not be embarrassing in relation to objectifying forces within history and society and time. Then the Winding Stair inaugurates a recasting of subject-object relations to stress not their opposition to one another but the possibility that the only feasible intensity for the subject is to find ways of fully identifying subjectivation with something like a rage to inhabit the forces that traditionally are seen as making one an object. This is not merely engaging history but somehow of possessing its violence. But even here two sets of forces emerge that keep restoring the battle of self vs soul since one set of objectifying forces drive us to the craziness of being a body within history, the other toward being a soul driven out of the body by its own orientation toward death.

A.1)The opening situation of The Tower has to establish links and tensions among the personal, the metaphysical, and the social on its many levels of manifestation. And in doing that it composes what we might call the field where the tragic takes on focus for consciousness, because his sense of his aged being makes every form of action seem only to remind him that “that is no country for old men. “Sailing to Byzantium” sets what we might call the personal confrontation with mortality that defines a basic role for both art and philosophy—to make visible what a plausible object for imaginative identification might be to the heart sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. The first two stanzas begin with painful indicatives, and they prepare the way for the visionary imperatives of the third stanza. So why add a fourth? *What does this stanza add? At the least it indicates that the prayer for transformation cannot suffice for a mortal who cannot not imagine what he will be after nature. Then in the very effort to interpret transcendental desire I think he finds the ultimate irony of being in history. He still wants to keep in touch and have an effect on the living. And while he fantasizes knowing what will come, he also reveals his continuing dependency on historical forces—in fact and in desire.

2) Perhaps because he cannot escape history, the next poem, “The Tower,” begins from the idea that the heart cannot be consumed. One has to frame its passions by looking to abstract argument, and hence replacing the art of sailing to Byz with philosophy of sorts. That at least promises an alternative to the life of the dying body. But how get from the personal to the philosophical without having the philosophical destroy the very sense of self that one is trying to appease? *What do you think of how Yeats handles his pain in this poem? Parts two and three of the poem try to anchor the movement to abstraction in series of personal gestures that have to risk two kinds of embarrassment. They can embarrass as evidence of sheer neediness, and they can embarrass as indications of his own limitations, of the ways that turning to personal resources cannot successfully secure or ground the wisdom and the power he needs. The “I” verbs and the reliance on his own creations seem to me hopelessly inadequate to the assertions proferred. And even the nature of his worries about woman won or woman lost and about his own turning away from the heroic seem to me painfully evasive of the level of suffering with which the poem begins. So I see this poem as a monumental failure for his poetics of personal monuments. The soul he will need is not something he can make, and the distance he projects for this soul at the end is not something he can fully will because of his interests in the dimension of time. The subjectivity he wants cannot flee or abstract the world of objects but must make itself within them. We are on the way to the value of tragedy.

3) But before we get to tragedy, Yeats has to work more intensely on this sense of his own evasiveness of the very sources of his pain. He must let the objective conditions emerge more fully so that what challenges soul as subject can be more fully encountered. So far he has treated the objectivity as primarily the state of his body. But he may be suffering even more from his relation to those aspects of his social body that deny him the possible role of subject who wills his relation to public life. a) Why begin “Meditation in Time of Civil War” with “Surely.” I see the very status of assertion being called into question, as if assertion were also reassertion and hence entirely suspect—not unlike Arnold. The poem begins by giving occasion on every level for the sense of mockery to come. And the effort to establish the subject here also provides evidence for its problematic imaginary activities that it needs to shore itself up. Homer gives us a model of life’s own self-delight extending into writing. But when Y tries figures for delight like the fountain as a metaphor for what the rich provide, he can only trust instead figures like the empty sea shell. What is the basic difference between these two classes of figure? Part of an answer emerges when his own inabilities seem to generate the next fantasy—if the rich are not organically an extension of life maybe they can figure an antithetical relation to natural plenitude. To have plenitude we must begin with a vital bitterness. But if that is true, then all his fantasies of aristocratic ease seem terribly limited because he has taken the mask for the reality and so left out the kind of force necessary for what he imagines. Consequently he has not faced the historical factors that suggest once the ease is established the constructed world might “take our greatness with our bitterness.” And stylistically he will have to wonder about chiasmic plenitude as imaginative achievement. That may not catch the bitterness and so risks leaving itself all too vulnerable to history. Also by engaging the issues this elementally he can perhaps avoid the dependency on his own will that limits his position in “the Tower.” **So the second poem turns away from the “I” of “the Tower” to the “this” of his material situation attempting to build within bitterness.

b) The third poem brilliantly builds on this building. It narrows the focus even further—from my house to my sword. But in doing this it also locates for him the possibility of still a role to play since there remains a workable fiction of passing value on. And the violence of the sword now returns in relation to its beauty, as if one could explain the other. The last line also does its own violence to the meter as its version of screaming and pushing the limits of what can remain art.

c) The fourth poem lets history back in. Can one have confidence in heritage. Probably the force of history is much more powerful than the force of artifact and heritage. No state of the subject can compete with this level of objective existence. He can save his own self-image but only at the cost of withdrawal into the world of private purposes. d) But history will not even let the self-image survive this situation. *Poem 5 is incredible because of how simple structural contrasts so measure the demise of the ego’s illusions. The first two stanzas are pure description. History and these men leave no room for Yeats at all. So when he does enter he has to face the fact that he has no place in the scene—one of the deepest anxieties possible I think. And notice how he makes the rhyme so strong here to isolate “caught” sonically as well as syntactically.

e) I love the idea that the next poem has to begin by looking back at the bees, at an order of building that has nothing to do with human hope or purpose. For the humans there is only the progression from uncertainty to specific death to the dark side of the bitterness theme. Bitterness may lead to producing spare beauty. But it also may just brutalize by giving more substance to our enmities than our loves (as has happened to much contemporary criticism). So the poem can only evoke the honey bees and use a refrain as if that could provide the social connection and urgency that content cannot do.

f) Finally Yeats tries the old visionary position of the top of the tower. What can one see from there at this specific time? He sees at first only landscape in very general terms. So what he cannot find on the outside he starts to provide from the inside in terms of monstrous familiar images. There seems only violence (going back to Jacques Molay) and violence has the tendency to fill his own void by sucking him into the chants for revenge. Then he does manage to have bitterness create its opposite in the figure of the unicorned ladies. But the images no sooner catch his attention than they are erased by history. *It is as if Yeatsian imagining now seems out of phase with its fatality, so there is no transformation but only violent vacillation. Syntax then takes the stage to define what it means to give place to the brazen hawks. Their force is to make every other alternative appear negated so that there is only a “nothing but” self and world reduced to various metonymies. g)*I don’t know what to do with the final stanza. It seems as if Yeats has to turn against history, that is against all that he sees from the tower to return to a world he constructs by fantasizing. But he sees that any positive won from this mess immediately becomes a negative because of all the contrasts and dangers it produces. So why does he link his interest in images to his ambivalence as a growing boy. How many uses of “as” enter here? I think one use emerges as a literal equation—I feel nothing but the raging impotence of youth, only now I have to see it as hopeless impotence that makes the entire quest for soul in self seem doomed to the status of evasion.

B.I think “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen tries to find in energy what the previous poems could not find in thinking and imagining, as if there were a nature that would support voice. There is no detour into the “I.” There is directly the “we,” defined by two emotions so intense that it is impossible not to share them. There is the sense of history as loss leaving only an intolerable present and the desire for ghostly solitude. And there is a tremendous sense that everything once allowing lyric desire now has to turn back on the self, or on what had been self, in an impersonal and inescapable sense of irony. The “I” becomes the “we” or the “he.” And piecing thoughts together offers only the sense of being weasels fighting in a hole. Traditionally lyric seeks an “I” that can speak for the universal. Here the universal proves too easy, too much just the stance of pathos leaving no space for individual resistance. And so all energy has to take the objective form of mockery, a form where the subject turns on itself to treat self as irreducibly object open to debunking knowings. Finally the shape of the line imitates the movement into reduction. Then as the line expands and dream returns one looks for Yeatsian transformation. But in fact the prosaic, reduced line leads not into myth-making or soul-making but into a nightmare even worse than the historical facts. Imagination yields only the image of the basis of aristocracy—the idealization by which women choose their breeding—now in a situation where desire is condemned to submit to the insolent and stupid fiend Robert Artisson.

C. The volume ends in despair, wound in mummy thoughts and trying to identify with that abstraction. But “Leda” at least opens another path that Winding Stair will pursue. This poem is a sonnet but a strange one pulling against its own formal imperatives but remaining recognizably within them. “Leda” uses conventional form in order to break poetry away from the space of reflection into something like the immediate event, where the poetry comes as close as possible to participating within the rape that it accounts. But, as we have seen with all of Yeat’s major breakthroughs since Responsibilities, it seems as if he can achieve such events only by identifying with a voice that is not his personal one. Here we find another effort to identify with a female consciousness, but this time in the form of a mythic figure within high culture whom he cannot simply create as a figure within his own parable. He has to grant the strangeness of the situation, and he does so by intensifying what is utterly strange and other about the event that no self can control. We as critics then have to ask How this poem actually engages the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor, and how it manages to suggest that even here a certain kind of articulate consciousness might be possible if one foregoes any dream that one can discursively interpret one’s relationship to history?

1) What relation does the poem establish with its audience and how might this relation differ from more conventional poetry. Why is this a deformed sonnet? Are we given an overheard thought, a public statement, a personal expression, a dramatic situation to be seen as if it were on a stage? None of these alternatives seem to me quite right. I think we have to treat this poem as an attempt to have language compose a series of actual states for its audience as if they had to witness the force of this event. One could say that this is a dramatic poem, but with two important differences--the drama is literal: the events within the reading of the poem carry the metaphorical power, and the stage for the event is one where the spirit explores its own possibilities.

2) What are the constituents of the event, and what does the event do or, better, where does the event lead the imagination? Look at the first stanza. Literally it presents the event of the rape, but what other basic properties does the event have? Syntax provides an interesting drama for consciousness. It has to hold in relation participles that do not modify the main clause, all expressing violent conditions, with the flat image that it has of the result of the event.

3) What does the poem make of the event qualities in what follows? I think it uses formal parallels to develop quite intricate contrasts among mental states. The second quatrain offers a series of event based questions that are primarily psychological intensifiers. Then notice the third stanza’s tremendous shift from psychology to sheer physicality that in turn becomes the bearer of history. Conception is set in motion, and everything that is fated follows. This immense leap from psyche to body and then from body to history sets a situation in which the participles of stanza 1 and the questions of stanza 2 return in stanzas three and four but in a very different way. What is different about the participles? They now do modify a noun and are not absolute constructions. Why might this matter? It requires us to focus on what her consciousness can contain and grasp. Now the questions are not about her emotions but about her knowledge. But knowledge of what? And what kind of knowledge does the shift in participles seem to make possible? The poem wants us to pursue these questions. Minimally the knowledge is of a rapist-god with tremendous power. But it is also knowledge of a god who is himself subject to some greater power, some power that allows the beak to let her drop. This power could just be pure sexuality--he has to finish. And it also could be the history that needs him to finish so that she will conceive. In either case Leda's knowledge is that of a rape victim aware of being in the direct power of awesome forces. But the poem also offers the possibility of somehow turning victimage into a strange and thrilling transcendence of her ordinary humanity, figured in how the participles transcend the opening ones. She can feel the full force of various necessities. More important, *she can go from question to exclamation without passing through the indicative. So the poet can imagine a form almost adequate to what this effort at knowing victimage might involve.

4) Yeatsian modernity now proposes the link of two grand feelings. One is the feeling of that victimage as total, without a caring god to ease the abandonment. The other is of the greed to want to know the fullness of that abandonment and the strange sense that in art one can rival the very god who is the victimizer because one can envision full knowing. The shock of a poem identifying with being raped is part of the overall sense of how we come upon ourselves as victims of history. And turning shock into exclamation promises a transcendental new barbarism. The one thing that can measure up to the barbarism is the full grasp of what linguistic resources allow as grounds for knowing Leda.