Chronicles of War and Evil (III): W.B.

Yeats Lapis Lazuli and the cultural memory

cryptograms as twentieth century modes of defeating time - themaniac scattering
dust (cf. Tennysons In Memoriam- L). Mythical and reflexive mode
intertextualities in Yeatss war poems.
1.Parsing the title and explaining the meaning of cultural memory cryptograms;
reflexive mode intertextualities
- Cultural memory is a fashionable branch of cultural studies which, appearing as
an offshoot of postmodern thinking, believes that history is a construct, just like
literature, and uses literature to define the popular versions of history, looking at
the circulation and genealogy of social ideas in everyday parlance. When the public
memory span is restricted in scope and means of expression, we talk of
communicative memory (which spans over no more than two generations), but
when it is more far-reaching and more sophisticated, we speak of cultural memory
proper. To explain the encoding/mediation of ideas which make up public memory,
Astrid Erll speaks about the experiential, the mythical, the antagonistic and the
reflexive intra-mediation modes (modes of rhetorical expression within literary
media, in our case; see Erll, 2008 Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural
Memory Memory, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning, Cultural Memory Studies: and
International and Interdisciplinary Handbook; No 8 in the Media and Cultural
Memory Series). As explained by the author (Erll, 390-1), when the encoding of
memory is direct, confessive and colloquial, retaining the impassioned dimension of
communication in the everyday register, we have to do with experiential intramediation; when it draws upon shared myths, it is mythicizing; when it constructs
one version of the past by rejecting/refuting others, it is antagonistic; when it
establishes its own version self-reflexively (by reflection upon its own discourse), it
casts public memory in a more problematic form; paradoxically, such forms endure
longer being open (because an open form has to be understood anew, every time it
is read, which makes it less likely to become dated).
In describing the striking, unique experimental (and difficult) literary forms of high
modernism as cryptograms, we insist on their constitution (on the rhetoric of their
discourse). Cryptograms put in circulation/constitute/encode or exploit in a cryptical
way literary ideas by intertwining expressive, mythical, interrogative or open (rather
than directly antagonistic), and reflexive strands of meaning. Consequently, they
create cultural ideas anchored in both the present and the past, by complex cultural
memory mediation.1 With T.S. Eliots The Waste Land (further analyzed, in
connection with other poems, too, in the seminars) we have witnessed the
transformation of cultural grandeur into tormented, self-antagonizing, fragmentary
1

The same quality of deriving, in the present, consoling, general ideas from the past was
advocated as deliverance by Matthew Arnold. He extended the promise of delivering us
moderns from pessimism and promised that literature was able to grant the comprehension
of the present and the past and the possession of general ideas (see On the Modern
Element in Literature, 1857)

meditation shored against the ruins of the past. Paradoxically, however, the
remediation (return) to the more immediate and remoter past enriched the
everyday life of a British post-war inhabitant of Europe; as such, cryptograms open
a space of intense lucidity, as a possible first step towards regeneration (since we
have witnessed the anthropological and religious rebirth scenarios which underlay
the end of The Waste Land).
2. Yeatss War-Related Cryptograms.
Because William Butler Yeatss cryptograms give precedence to the mythicizing
mode, his discourse is more narrative, lyrical and visionary before being confessive
in the modern vein of the (satirical) dramatic monologue. To describe the
mythicizing intentions of the Anglo-Irish poets cultural memory discourse or his
chronicles of war and evil cryptograms it is useful to start from the intertextual
dialogue conducted with an as impressive number of cultural spaces, just as in
Eliots The Waste Land. But whereas The Waste Land drew upon Western and
world-literature sources, the local, parochial Celtic cultural memory space is the
starting point for Yeatss cryptograms. Yeats asserted himself as an important
Anglo-Irish activist, by setting up the Irish Literary Revival movement, which made
Celtic faiths and Gaelic names known in English to a very wide public. He worked in
cooperation with Lady Augusta Gregory to found the nationalist Abbey Literary
Theatre in Dublin, but activated in London, too, where he lived long and published
not only poetry steeped in Celtic lore, but also fairytales; the return to the Celtic
past as surviving in the present set up the literary trend of the Celtic Twilight (titled
after a collection of Celtic folktales published first in 1893, then in 1902, by Yeats
himself). The Celtic Twilight revives the hazy, mysterious atmosphere steeped in
underworld lore; according to tradition the gods of the pagan, Celtic pantheon
became submerged when Christianity came to Ireland, with the legendary Saint
Patrick, in the 5th c. For the Irish canon, Yeats remains, therefore an important
cultural nationalist figure, but he was also world-famous owing to his extraordinary
experiments in (high modernist) poetry.
What makes his experiments extraordinary is the connections he makes for creating
unforgettably subtle emblems. Emblems, as understood at the beginning of the
print age, created a space divided between the image and the text accompanying
it.2 We discover in Yeats the same competition between the obsessive images he
put in circulation and the hazy, subliminal meanings which compete with each other
for becoming conscious.

Emblem books are a category of mainly didactic illustrated books printed in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, typically
containing a number of emblematic images with explanatory text.
Scholars differ on the key question of whether the actualemblems in question are the visual images, the accompanying texts, or the
combination of the two. (Wikipedia source)

The Second Coming creates a strongly challenging recontextualization of Christian

faith for the post-war world. Consequently, on the one hand, this world is described
in the Yeatsian intertext as estranged from the Biblical space and, therefore,
ironical; on the other hand, however, the poem is in an intertextual relationship with
Shelleys sonnet Ozymandias, whose ideas it continues, rather than ironically
twisting them. Yeats renders more comprehensive, universal, in fact, the
shattered visage and scattered limbs of the once great king of kings, the Pharaoh
Ozymandias in the hypotext*;3 it overlaps the symbolic image of the derelict fall-ofprinces statue with the prophecy that speaks about the end, rather than the
regeneration of the world at the Second Coming of Christ. 4 Yeatss vision
introduces the pagan figure of the Sphinx, the shape with lion body and the head
of a man and, moreover, an overpowering colossus with a gaze blank and
pitiless as the sun so as to discourage modern humanity, with its heart of stone,
from expecting a pitiful gods second coming/return.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
3

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
4

The fall of princes label is reserved, in criticism, for the description of tragedies, which,
just like Hamlet and Oedipus the King, develop the idea of fickleness inherent, in fact, in
human grandeur. But since many a poem by Yeats and the high modernists were tragic, and
since Yeats was often in open dialogue with tragedy (as can be seen in Lapis Lazuli, also),
this label can be aptly applied to poetry emblems, too.

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Just as T.S. Eliot wrote, in The Waste Land, an English high modernist (and ironic)
epic by returning to the local/national tradition, through rich intertextualities with
Shakespeare, Spenser and other Elizabethans, Yeats returned to Shakespeares
tragedies as a privileged cultural space. The Anglo-Irish poet did not dismissively
rewrite, but rather identified with, the texts and the heroes of the most wellknown Shakespearean tragedies in Lapis Lazuli. He did so in order to set an
example of ideal behaviour for his war-disturbed (shell shocked) contemporaries.
Lapis Lazuli
(for Harry Clifton)
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,

Old civilisations put to the sword.

Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

While moving from intense lucidity to reconciliation, through art, after invoking the
great tragical statements of the literary tradition as a source of general ideas for
interpreting modern, contemporary life, this poem discovers its sermonic arguments in
the space of ancient Greek art. This important, canonical space of world culture is
invoked, through the art of Callimachus, the Greek sculptor of the 5 th century BC, in
tandem with the soothing silence of Chinese art and its cultural space in the Lapis
Lazuli cryptogram. Because, by contrast to T.S. Eliot, Yeats is enamoured of images, this
poem is an ekphrastic cryptogram:5 it finds its stimulus, as confessed by the
dedication, and as explained by literary critics, in a beautiful present of an engraved lapis
lazuli stone that it describes. In fact, the poem does more than ekphrastically describe
Harry Cliftons gift, it uses it as a kind of crystal ball to gaze and see beyond the material,
visible history of the present with an artists cultural memory tools: the grandiose
sculptures of the past (the lamp placed by Callimachus in the Erechteion on the
Akropolis) and the carved impression of eternity mediated by the Chinamen collaborate
to produce another, modern omphalos for the enfeebled post-war world. In the Yeatsian
cryptogram, the glittering eyes of the Chinamen added to the gaiety that transfigures all
that dread in Hamlet, Lear and Cordelia can, and should, hearten modern humanity
along aesthetic, even aestheticist lines. The realest protagonist of this poem is the
merger of cultures and the various media of cultural communication in the space of art.

Ekphrasis is the name of an ancient rhetorical exercise of describing a work of art in

words.

It is by tending to the same goal that, in Sailing to Byzantium, the first poem of
Yeatss 1928 volume The Tower, Greek and Byzantine art commingle and cooperate in
constructing an aestheticist hub for the unhinged postwar world.

Literature Network William Butler Yeats Sailing to Byzantium

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Sailing to Byzantium
THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Literature Network William Butler Yeats Sailing to Byzantium