The contemporary debate about what works should and should not be included But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Edmund Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France. Western literature's canon is very heated. In the debate, …
The contemporary debate about what works should and should not be included But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France.
Western literature’s canon is very heated. In the debate, the battle lines are drawn up between two sides. The traditionalists (so-called) argue that the inherited tradition of selection of texts into the canon is by literary merit and not because of socio-political concerns. They argue that literatuacre is literature and politics is politics, and “never the twain shall meet.” They claim their opponents wish to politicize the canon for a dangerous leftist political agenda.
On the other hand, there are those overly concerned with diversity. They feel that by excluding the out-groups, the canon silences their voices and keeps them socially and politically oppressed.
Taking their clue from poststructuralists like Foucault, they argue that discourse creates and reinforces social structures by which the powerful can maintain and support political and social repression of the powerless. They argue that the canon is how the powerful legitimize their domination over the powerless. Therefore, they set right the inequities caused by social and political systems and argue the canon must be politized. It must be politicized to give the powerless a voice so their stories may be heard.
Yet one must face the fact that both sides’ understanding of literature and politics is equally naive and dangerous. The traditionalists’ view is flawed because it does not see the political nature of literature. Let us face it; literature is political. All the great literary critics, from Plato to Burke, have believed so, and to deny it is to reject the respected opinion of the very same tradition you claim to be defending. However, the poststructuralist view is flawed because its conception of politics is overly unrealistic. They bought too much into the argument that discourse is politics and politics is discourse, equating verbal violence and ignoring the other’s discourse to physical violence and physical repression. In doing this, they fail to distinguish between politics, which is the combination of force and persuasion, and mere persuasion. The difference between discourse and politics can be seen in the old rhyme which children say to other children who call them names, “sticks and stone may break my bones, but names will never kill me.” Ignoring this fundamental truth, poststructuralists fail to see that one cannot create a political dominion by discourse alone, whereas one can by mere force alone. Although they are correct when they claim that the canon does support the existing political system, they misunderstand how it is doing that and to what effects.
In this light, the literary and political understanding of Edmund Burke and W. B. Yeats offers a refreshing alternative to both views in the debate over the canon. They both agree that literature and culture–i.e., manners, mores, letters, the theatre, etc.–are a positive force of controlling not the powerless, as the poststructuralist argues, but the powerful. Burke and Yeats would agree that all political regimes are founded upon force by brutes who are no more than thugs and ruffians. Only through time and the passing of generations are those brutes made tame, decent, and gentile to their subjects, who are powerless to resist them.
- B. Yeats’ “Meditations in Time of Civil War” is said to be “one poem and it is seven poems” (Young 1987, 32).[1] It is a poem about Ireland, or any civilization, in a time of civil and social tumult, so therefore it is akin to Burke’s Reflections. Young makes the case that the “civil war seems to be threatening poetic form” as much as civil harmony (Young 1987, 32). In the time of civil war, many are enraptured with the spirit of zealous and ideological nationalism, which typifies the revolutions that followed the French Revolution. This civil war that promised to unite and give birth to a free Irish state tore Ireland and the Irish people apart. “Meditations” is concerned with what revolution or civil war was doing not only to the Irish state and its people but also to civilized men like Yeats himself.
In “Ancestral Houses,” Yeats argues that Ireland’s cultural greatness comes not from the new vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals and zealots but from a system of patronage founded by the landed aristocracy. This landed aristocracy stems from the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. In this landed aristocracy Ireland traditionally found its unity and leadership. Yeats understands that without such a class, there can be no truly free and civilized Irish state. Yeats, however, does not romanticize their origins. He understands that the Anglo-Irish aristocracy stemmed from the victorious forces of Cromwell, who conquered and pillaged Ireland, “Some violent bitter man, some powerful man” (I:17).[2]
Yeats puts in verse what Burke argued in prose, that civilization is not handed down whole from the gods. Rather, it is founded by crude men through the force of arms and through war and conquest (see Burke 1987, 67-70). Through the desire to become something more and to be remembered not as conquerors but as good and noble men, such men establish manners and desire to leave great works behind. In an attempt to make up for their unjust use of power, they institute norms of appropriate behavior that hinder future use of force, and they refine their brutal ways into gentility and refinement (see Burke 1987, 67). To that end, they create–build–houses, gardens, and other things (I:18-24). After those rude powerful men build their houses, they leave them to their heirs, and a new generation takes control of the houses. The succeeding generations were not brought up in the violent ways of their fathers but in the ways in which their fathers desired to live. The generation, which the ideologues of revolution desired to overthrow did not receive its authority through force or power, but through inheritance. They exercise their authority through customs, manners, and laws. They are civilized and mannered, whereas their fathers were not. In this regard, David Young notes,
We recall that it was man’s “bitter” soul that was the source of all creation in The Tower. The creation, meant to assuage the bitterness, has the additional effect, when it succeeds, of vitiating the creative power. The ironic perception that creativity is its own undoing is supported by the poem’s rhetoric (Young 1987, 33).
However, T.R. Henn, an Anglo-Irishman and a major Yeats critic, suggests that Yeats realizes that this tradition–the tradition of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy–“At its best had outlived its usefulness” (Henn 1965, 6). Henn then quotes the fourth stanza of “Ancestral Houses” as support for his claim. I am not entirely convinced by Henn’s argument. Is Yeats in that stanza describing something that has outlived its usefulness or something the world no longer holds as valuable? If the latter, maybe the world that has no use for such a culture needs to be called into question rather than the tradition Yeats is defending.
At the end of “Ancestral Houses,” Yeats makes us recall this fact. Yeats also makes us think about these new revolutionaries. They destroy, with their zeal, all that men of power, men like themselves, have created. He makes us think that what these revolutionaries are doing is taking all that those violent men left behind–things of beauty, refinement, gentility, and civility–to replace them with an uneasy and uncertain future similar to the time in which those violent men first took charge. Yeats makes the reader recall the nobility and grandeur of the great Irish estates in:
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness? (I:38-40)
In the final line, we are warned that we better not forget the type of men who originated the civilization now being destroyed, the builders of those great houses. The reason this is important is that they were men of brutality and great power (I:17), that those powerful men built those houses and left this civilization to atone for their misdeeds and to leave the world a little better than they found it. They wanted to leave something behind that would atone for all the bad things they did. They wanted to leave something genteel and kind that the future would remember them through. But the revolutionaries of Ireland, a new group of brutal men, are going about destroying the genteel artifacts of the brutal men of ages past. Knowing those brutal men wanted to clean up their image, Yeats asks if this generation of brutal men do the same. Like Burke, Yeats answers that they will not. This current crop of brutal men will leave no civilization like the last crop because they know that the next bunch of brutal men will do just as they did. For this crop of brutal men realize there are no permanent things.
In the second poem, “My House,” Yeats sets up a temporal theme by recalling the type of man who built the great houses of Irish civilization. The word “Ancient” establishes a tone of veneration for things sacred. In the first line, “An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,” establish that his house reflects an age-long past about to be lost forever in the throes of revolution.
In the last section of “My House,” the past and the present merge in that Yeats notes that his house is a house of two founders. One founder,
A man-at-arms
Gathered a score of horses and spent his days
In this tumultuous spot,
Where through long wars and sudden nights alarms
His dwindling score and he seemed castaways
Forgetting and Forgot; (II:21-26).
The other founder is Yeats himself, the Yeats who wonders whether there will be anyone after him:
My bodily heirs may find,
To exalt a lonely mind,
Befitting emblems of adversity. (II:28-30)
With this thought, “My House” ends on a note of questioning whether the poet’s art, symbolized in his house–the tower (also the name of the book of poems in which this collection of seven poems was published)–will be there for his heirs, both his biological children and the future Irishmen who will inherit the artistic endowment he leaves behind. Thus “My House” connects with the theme of the temporal ancestrality that was the theme of “Ancestral Houses.”
The third poem, “My Table,” begins with a meditation on tradition. This meditation on tradition takes place as a meditation upon Sato’s sword. For Yeats, the sword is a symbol not only of the Japanese high culture of five hundred years ago but also of civilization itself. He notes that the sword is “changeless” (III:2), yet the culture it came from has long past disappeared. But the sword is not alone on the table–beside it lie a pen and paper (III:3). Yeats asks,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness. (III:4-5)
For Sato and his culture, the sword and the pottery are the artifacts by which they are “moralized.” As Yeats “moralizes” with his pen and paper, Sato’s sword is the eternal artifact of Sato’s culture. The sword is an eternal thing that will never change, and it will always give testimony to the culture that gave it form.
Yeats then asks why we make these pieces of changeless art. He answers,
only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art. (III:13-14)
Garab calls this line a confession that “not only confirms the tragic basis of artistic creation but reveals significant commentary on Yeats’s own development as well, for only a heart much beset by the burden of time would will to exchange life for chirping timelessness” (Garab 1969, 19). I argue that this interpretation reads too much of the poet’s life into the poem. Instead, Yeats’s desire for timelessness is not a desire to avoid the burden time places upon him but the desire to achieve a level of perfection in his art. Yeats understands perfection as timeless and changeless; thus, he is fundamentally a Platonist and a Romantic (Tate 1942, 591-600). His concern for perfection should be understood in terms of artistic creation because civilization and its formation are also a form of artistic creation. Yeats notes that Sato’s culture is one where,
marvelous accomplishments,
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the sword. (III:17-21)
The sword now changes from an embodiment of a particular tradition to the idea of tradition as such. As Sato’s culture handed down the craft of making fine art from one generation to the next, all cultures try to pass on their great achievements to each succeeding generation. It is tragic when all civilization’s achievements are lost due to a disaster–natural or man-made. The above sentiment, about one generation wishing to hand something down to the next, should make us recall “Ancestral Houses,” where it is said that the violent, bitter man has an impulse to create something to give his great-grandson (I:17-24).
“My Table” ends with the mere fact that things are handed down from one generation to the next. Beauty is the criterion for judging one tradition’s artifacts against another’s, and hence all traditions are unified by a timeless standard of beauty:
Soul’s beauty being most adored
Men and their business took
The soul’s unchanging look;
For the most rich inheritor
Knowing that non can pass Heaven’s door
That loved inferior art,
Had such an aching heart
That he, although a country’s talk
For silken clothes and stately walk,
Had waking wits; it seemed
Juno’s peacock screamed. (III:22-32)
The standard of judgment is that no “rich inheritor” believes that he can go to the afterlife, “loving inferior art” (III:25-27). The fear of not meeting this judgment is the reason these rich, powerful men concern themselves with cultivating gentleness and beauty (I:19-21; I:25-32). Similarly, Burke argued that civilization was about getting the powerful to give up warring and brutality, cultivating art and beauty, and having them desire gentleness rather than harshness and cruelty.
Yeats closes “My Table” with an ambiguous portrait of an inheritor of a highly civilized culture, possibly one created through Yeats’s own poetry (Young 1987, 35). This is what Young sees in the ending of “My Table.” I agree with his interpretation of these lines. However, the civilization the poem presents is highly aristocratic, not artistic. Young also suggests that we look to Yeats’s A Vision to interpret “Juno’s peacock screaming” (Young 1987, 35). Yeats says in A Vision that “A civilization is a struggle to keep self-control, and in this, it is like some great tragic person, some Niobe who must display an almost superhuman will or the cry will not touch our sympathy” (Yeats 1961, 260). Here Yeats departs from Burke, who would argue that civilization itself is not tragic. Only the demise of a civilization is tragic. Yeats sees the decline of civilization as inevitable and hence as ultimately tragic. For Burke, the cultivation of good statesmanship offers a realistic hope for the preservation of civilization.
In addition, the tension between the changeless and the changing that Young notes as being important for this poem can be seen as the theme of tradition itself (Young 1987, 34-35). Tradition, human tradition, cannot be changeless, in that human traditions change because human beings change. The only changeless things of tradition are the artifacts (hence art) it creates and leaves behind. Human things, such as human communities, must change, or they cease to be. Burke wrote that a civilization “without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” Yeats, in some sense, wishes for a changeless culture. This longing betrays a misplaced understanding of what is real. In his own way, Yeats is a Platonist who believes that the idea is really real. But Yeats’ Platonism also holds that art is more real in that it is like the ideal, in that the ideal is eternal. Art for Yeats is closer to the ideal and thus is more real than human action and the phenomenal world. Burke, hardly a Platonist, would argue that art is a reflection of a moment of human existence and man’s desires, but one that is secondary to human existence. For Burke, though beautiful and pleasing, art is secondary; mankind is primary. For Yeats, the primary concern is with art, not with humanity as such. Although future generations are mentioned as a concern of Yeats in the poem (I:19; II:28; I:23), one wonders what Yeats cared more for, the survival of his work or his descendants.
In “My descendants,” Yeats continues the theme of ancestral piety of the earlier three poems:
Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, (IV:1-4).
He notes his obligation to nature and the species by leaving behind a son to carry on his family name. Yet for Yeats, this seems enough in that,
yet it seems
Live scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot; (IV:4-7).
These lines seem despairing in that the obligation to leave behind a “woman and a man” is nothing more than a “fragrance on the wind,” “torn petals,” or “morning beams.” These are momentary things without permanence, persistence, or lasting character. He continues to ask about his heir:
And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
(IV:9-12).
Leaving a “man” behind offers the speaker no particular feeling of accomplishment. It is as though he expects each generation to fall away from the previous one. He now associates his offspring with his house:
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry (IV:13-15).
He wishes his home to be “roofless” that the owl, a bird of decadence, of the night, and of wisdom–e.g., the owl of Minerva– can take roost and cry a cry of “desolation to the desolate sky” (IV:16). The image of the desolate sky is a symbol of the waste and destruction that he feels will come in the future. This symbol leads into the next and last stanza of the poem.
The “primum Mobile” is summed up and is said to have, fashioned us
Has made the very owls in the circle move; (IV:17-18).
These images of “owls,” “desolate sky” and the “Primum Mobile” summon forth the mood of the “Second Coming.” It is a mood of utter despair:
what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
(“Second Coming”:21-22).
The desolation of the sky is like the following lines from “Second Coming”:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
(“Second Coming”:3-6).
However, this dark mood in “My descendants” is then discussed by the speaker:
And I, that count myself most prosperous,
Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl’s love, (IV:19-22).
But these lines ring false in that what follows seems to recognize the futility of putting one’s hope for the future in one’s heirs. This is most clear in the following lines:
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine. (IV:23-24)
Interestingly, the stones remain as his monument, not his heirs. He places his hopes in the stone, hence his art. He hopes that his art, rather than his descendants, will represent his life. Again this is Yeats’s Romantic-Platonism showing. He believes that the artifact (hence art), in this case, the stone tower, is more fundamental than his descendants. This is the case because the artifact imitates perfection–in that it is changeless, whereas his descendants are just mere humans. It is better to be judged by one’s art than one’s descendants because one has total control of one’s art, whereas one doesn’t have total control over one’s descendants. That the stones will be not only a monument for him but also for his heirs strengthens this point. He wishes that he and his heirs are judged by his art because that art is changeless and, in some way, echoes perfection.
In the following poem, “At My Door,” as Young notes, “the war intrudes directly” (Young 1987, 37). The poem begins with the image of an “affable Irregular” (V:1), a soldier in uniform yet still irregular. This irregular is said to be “A heavily-built Falstaffian man” (V:2). But, unlike the Falstaff of Henry IV Part 2, this irregular thinks
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun. (V:4-5)
Hal’s Falstaff avoided battle and duty; he pursued pleasure and comfort. This irregular Yeats calls Falstaffian may have the playfulness of Hal’s Falstaff, but this playfulness is connected not with pleasure but with warfare.
The next character Yeats presents us with is a
brown lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform, (V:6-7).
The adjective “half-dressed” plays two roles in this line. First, it shows that the nation is not yet a nation, that it is divided into many parts. Until the war is over and they are unified, there will be no nation. Only when there is one nation will there be fully dressed men in national uniform. The second role of “half-dressed” is to show that these men are not soldiers but ordinary men captured in the passions of the moment–the zealous pangs of nationalism and ideology.
Yeats will have none of this. He complains
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear–tree broken by the storm. (V:8-9).
He refuses to be caught up in the frenzy of politics which has ensnared the half-dressed irregulars. Instead, he complains not about “the big going on’s” but about the everyday disasters of life on his farm.
The last stanza is a puzzling one. Yeats presents a description of the irregulars as,
those feather balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream, (V:11-12).
Young interprets the “balls of soot” at first glance as though “they suggest generation, the continuity of life in nature, an echoing of the inheritance theme in terms of the larger impersonal forces that move the owls in circles and send them to nest in ruins” (Young 1987, 38). Although this interpretation has merit, it stretches the symbolism of “balls of soot.” I believe that Yeats associates the “balls of soot” with the irregulars and “the moor-hen” with the “brown lieutenant.” By doing this, he depersonalizes them and makes their actions more the antic of barnyard animals than of human beings at war.
However, the following line is even more puzzling in that he says that he makes those associations to “Silence the envy of my thought” (V:13). Yeats says that he turns the men and lieutenant to soot and a hen in his mind because he wishes to “silence the envy” he has for what they are doing. In this regard, Jeffares argues that this passage suggests that Yeats began to doubt the value of the contemplative life. Jeffares argues that the poem suggests that “life seems useless, measured against the active purpose and appeal of the solider’s life, a contrast accentuated by the previous descriptions of how his predecessor in the tower has been a man-at-arms who gathered a score of horse and spent his days in the tumultuous place, and how he had found in the tower a poetic symbol–Befitting emblems of adversity” (Jeffares 1966, 229-30). This is very interesting, for in the earlier poems, Yeats seems to disdain the life of action and to desire the life of contemplation and of art (II:11-16). Yeats can get rid of his envy of the soldiers only by making them into “soot” and the officer into a “moor-hen.” Doing so, he can then
Turn toward my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream. (V:14-15)
He turns away from the life of the world into the “cold snows” of the imagination.
Concerning the bee and bird images in the first stanza of “The Snare’s Nest by my Window” Yeats notes,
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother bird brings grubs and flies. (VI:1-3)
There is still life in the loosening masonry is the message of these lines. He says that even as his walls are loosening, honey-bees build “in the empty house of the stare” (VI:4-5). For Young, the invitation of the bees that ends each stanza
has an air of desperation. “The sweetness that all longed for night and day” in “Ancestral Houses” now takes this impersonal and natural form. Bees are an ancient symbol of creativity and spirituality, of swarming souls, as their honey is an ancient symbol of wisdom, but each of the poet’s summons to them issues from an increasing concern about the circumstances of civil war (Young, 1987, 38-39).
I find Young’s interpretation of this theme convincing in that he reads the speaker’s feeling of desperation; all that the speaker loves is destroying itself, and yet the bees still build. Hence even while the house–symbolizing civilization–is in decay, life goes on, and the living people go on building. But the poet implies that those who go on building are scarcely as admirable as those who built originally. The bees come to build in spite of a crumbling civilization; in contrast to the poet, they are oblivious to the tragedy. That life for the bees goes on is upsetting for those whose house is falling apart. But life will go on, and Yeats ends each stanza with a call for the bees to build and to continue building in spite of his loosening walls.
The next stanza begins with the imagery of enclosure:
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned, (VI:7-8).
Despite such occurrences, Yeats notes, “Yet no clear fact to be discerned” (VI:7). In the next stanza, the war is made even more present to him. The poet speaks of
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood: (VI:11-14).
The image of a “dead young soldier in his blood” paints the harsh reality of the war going on about him. Yet, the stanza ends again with the bid to the bees to “Come build in the empty house of the stare” (VI:15).
In the last stanza, Yeats sums up what the surrounding war has done to his fellow men:
We had fed the hearts on fantasies,
The heart is grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare. (VI:16-20)
The first two lines of this stanza seem to echo a Burkeian understanding of what ideological passion does to the human heart, that fantasies of nationalism will make the heart grow brutal and less humane. Paul Scott Stanfield makes an interesting comment on this passage.
If we recall Yeats’s already quoted 1920 judgment of de Valera–“All propaganda, no human life, but not bitter or hysterical or unjust… he will fail through not having enough human life to judge the human life in others”–we can see that Yeats saw de Valera as the inheritor of the political tradition that Yeats had first participated in, then come to see as destructive: destructive of art and intellect in the early years of the century, by the twenties destructive of actual property and lives (Stanfield 1985, 30).
Yeats finds the zealous ideological mindset as a fundamental threat to the continued survival of civilized human values. The ideological fervor has gone beyond the passion of his long-abstaining love of Maud Gonne to something far more ugly and far more dehumanizing. However, the last lines of the stanza ends with the call to the bees to build while men destroy. From a Burkean perspective, the bees are more humane and thus more human than the men who are doing the destroying or the man whose house is falling down. Burke himself would find this situation appalling, in that the non-human is more humane than the human beings destroying everything.
The last poem, “I see Phantoms of Hatred and the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” ends “Meditation in Time of Civil War.” It also sums up what the ideological frenzy does to human beings, even to Yeats himself. The poem opens with Yeats up in his tower, leaning upon a broken stone. Yeats in his tower symbolizes the artist in his state of detachment from the world. However, this is not the case for Yeats in his tower. He says that he sees,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweeps by
Frenzied bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.
(VII:2-8)
In these lines, the “mist” is civilization, and the “puff of wind” is the political tumult. The snow in this passage should be compared with the “cold snow of a dream” in “At My Door” (V:15). Yeats’ view of civilization made civilization too fragile or too unchanging. Such a view does not offer civilization the means to defend itself against the “puff of wind.” Burke argues that civilization, without the means to change, is without the means to preserve itself. In Yeats’ view, civilization cannot withstand the “puff of wind” that has come or will come in the future. Accordingly, his thought is now perturbed with darkness and monstrous images, as also presented in “Second Coming.”
The second stanza begins with a cry for vengeance,
‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up
Vengeance for Jacques Molay. (VII:9-10)
Anger replaces everything – only vengeance is desired. The following two lines conjure the sight of a mob rallying for action.
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage hungry troops
Troopers belaboring trooper, biting at arm at face,
Plunges toward nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
For the embrace of nothing… (VII:11-14).
The picture of those troops for whom rage is the only food that keeps them in motion is a powerful one. Rage drives them, torments them, and feeds them (VII:11). Because nothing else seems to motivate them as a mass, they nip and bite each other in the process of getting riled up. This mob of men takes on the characteristics of a pack of wild, mad dogs “having at each other.” Also, the “nothing” is significant in these lines. For there is “nothing” to embrace, and there is “nothing” to plunge toward. Yeats seems to suggest that all the actions of the mob are ultimately for naught – nothing. But Yeats himself is not immune to this disease that infects others.
and I, my wits astray
Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.
(VII:14-16)
The third stanza of the poem brings forth a mystical vision:
Their legs long, delicate, and slender, aquamarine their
eyes.
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
Have closed their ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a
pool
Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
(VII:17-22)
These lovely ladies who never close their eyes to the prophecies foretold by “Babylonian almanacs” of doomsday close their eyes to this sight. They close their eyes because the sight is even more horrible than doomsday. The sight in question is that Yeats himself, symbolizing all who desire those ladies, are caught up in the flood of rage that he, too, cried “vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.”
The lovely ladies on the unicorn, for Yeats, symbolize the highest human ideals of love and beauty. These ideals have withstood the prophecies of the destruction of the world that religions and cults have preached for thousands of years. However, in the poem, the lovely ladies on unicorns must close their eyes when those who claim to pursue them, and desire what they stand for, succumb to the raging tumult of the day. Yet there is a fundamental problem with Yeats’ equation of the lovely lady with the ideals of civilization. This problem is seen in the following lines,
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full,
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
(VII:23-24)
Again Yeats makes what he wishes to strive toward and preserve something so still that it does not change. The heart so full or bodies so lovely are also so still that they do not move. These ladies might as well be dead; they seem to care so little for the world they stand for they simply close their eyes when their lovers value other things slightly more. Burke, unlike Yeats, does not consider civilization a static thing. He would not represent civilization’s ideals as solid, cold images but in the context of warm, strong, and constant human feelings and sentiments.
In the next stanza, Yeats brings together the images of the other three previous stanzas:
The cloud-pale unicorn, the eyes of aquamarine,
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of clouds
or of lace
Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made
lean, (VII:25-27).
He says that those images,
Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
to brazen hawks. (VII:28-29)
The image of the hawks recalls the image of the “indignant desert birds” in “Second Coming,” which shadow the creature with the head of a man and the body of a lion who slouches to Bethlehem to be born. The hawks also recall the falcons, which turn and turn at the beginning of “Second Coming.” The hawks are a symbol of authority and power, yet also of viciousness. It also reminds one of the violent men who began civilization, as noted in “Ancestral Houses” (I:17-24). The brazen hawks are those brutal, violent men who will take charge over the indifferent multitude and impose their will upon mankind. They will be the founders of the new order – a new civilization. Yeats describes those brazen hawks thus:
Nor self-delighting reverie,
Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out
the moon. (VII:29-32)
Those who will take over are cold creatures. The order they will form will be like them. The moon represents for Yeats the artistic civilization which the clanging wings of the hawks, who hate not whatever will come nor pity what has passed but are ready to survive at any cost, will have no desire to be like the moon – to make beautiful things, to make ancestral homes, to make swords of high quality, or anything else.
In the last stanza, Yeats turns away from this vision. He also turns away from what he has seen in the whole “Meditation”:
I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the aging man as once the growing boy.
(VII:33-40)
Yeats, now in old age, regrets that he did not choose another path that could have proved his “worth in something that others understand or share.” The “something that others understand and share” is the political community and the life of politics. He regrets that he did not choose the life of a statesman in that he might have proven his worth by preventing the great tragedy he prophecies, thereby preserving all that he loves. He then chastises himself for his artistic ambition. But he soon realizes that even if he were told these horrid truths long ago, he still probably would have chosen the path of the artist. For he is and was sufficed by
The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, (VII:38-39).
He realizes that he cares and still cares more for art and his art than for the world. Here, we see the starkest contrast between Yeats and Edmund Burke. Although Yeats admits the value of both culture–art and politics, he nevertheless takes refuge in a vision of a changeless civilization–a Byzantium (Olson 1942, 209-219). This civilization is a dream that a mere “puff of wind” can demolish, as “I see Phantoms” indicates. Also, he must use the aesthetic to distance and diffuse the persistent claims of politics. Yeats turns the soldiers in “The Road to My Door” into “balls of soot” to avoid dealing with the soldiers as soldiers, as human beings engaged in political activity. He lacked faith in political action because political action, by definition, lacks perfection–it cannot be frozen like a creation of Grecian goldsmiths or as a piece of lapis lazuli. Although he is fundamentally aware of the coldness and inhumanity of pure art, of the aesthetic, he nevertheless chooses it over the life of politics.
However, Burke would never choose art over the world. Burke gave up–abandoned–the life of letters for the life of active politics. If Yeats had to choose between politics and art, art would always win. This is what the final lines of the poem suggest; he would choose poetry even though he realizes that the political life can do more good and can save the world he values. This difference between Burke and Yeats fundamentally separates their ways of life. Yeats recognizes, in “Meditation,” that the aesthetic he loves is politically a dead-end street. He knows that a life of politics is the only way to save the life he loves, but he will not sacrifice practicing the way he wants to save. On the other hand, Burke forsakes art and letters, which he loves, to ensure their conservation. Thus despite their differences concerning the relationship between theory and practice, they both agree on the origins of civilization and how it is maintained.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brooks, Jr., Cleanth. 1938. “Yeats: The Poet as Myth-Maker” The Southern Review, IV, 1:116-142.
Burke, Edmund. 1987. Reflection on Revolution in France. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.
Davidson, Donnald. 1942. “Yeats and the Centaur,” The Southern Review, VII, 3:510-516.
Garab, Arra M. 1969. Beyond Byzantium. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univerity Press.
Henn, T.R. 1965. The Lonely Tower. London: Methuen & Co.
Jeffares, A. Norman. 1966. W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Olson, Elder. 1942. “‘Sailing to Byzantium’ Prolegomena to a Poetics of Lyric.” The University Review, VII, 3:209-219.
Reid, B.L. 1961. William Butler Yeats: The Lyric of Tragedy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Spender, Stephen. 1934. “Yeats as a Realist.” The Criterion, XIV,1: 17-26.
Stanfield, Paul Scot. 1988. Yeats and Politics in the 1930s. London: Macmillian Press Ltd.
Tate, Allen. 1942. “Yeats’s Romanticism: Notes and Suggestion. The Southern Review, VII, 3:591-600.
Yeats, W. B. 1983. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. ed Richard J. Finneran. New York: Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Co.
- A Vision. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.
Young, David. 1987. Troubled Mirror. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
[1] The collection is divided into seven poems. Seven is interesting in that it symbolizes both the “seven ages of man,” hence the history of mankind, and the “seven days of the week,” representing the temporal and cyclical nature of existence. The seven poem are all, except for “My Table,” III, divided into even stanzas. “Ancestral Houses,” I, has five stanzas of eight lines each; “My House,” II, has three stanzas of ten lines each; “My Descendants,” IV, has three stanzas of eight lines each ; “The Road at My Door,” V, has three stanzas of five lines each; “The Snare’s Nest by My Window,” VI has four stanzas of five lines; and “I see Phantoms of Hatred and the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” VII, has like I, five stanzas of eight lines each. The first and the last poems have the same number of stanzas of the same number of lines. About this there is no fundamental significance except that the beginning and end of the poem are structurally identical. This suggests a structural continuity and eternity, in that the poem as a whole turns in upon itself to become a symbol of infinity. The poems begin with what they end with and end with what they began with.
[2] All unspecified references are to Yeats’ “Meditations”. The roman numbers of poems and line numbers are only provided.
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