UNIT 43 W.B.

YEATS: BACKGROUND, SYSTEM,

AND POETIC CAREER UP TO 1910
Structure
Objectives
Introduction
The Quest for Irishness
Magic, Mythology, and Symbolism-
A Less Dream-Burdened Will
Yeats's Ireland
The System: Mask, Moon, and Gyre
Poetic Career (1889-1910)
'Adam's Curse'
'No Second Troy'
Let Us Sum Up
Questions

This unit will introduce you to the historical and intellectual background to the poetry
of W.B. Yeats, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. It will also
trace his poetic development up to 1910 since from around that time there is a sharp
change in style. It will consider two poems from this early period for close reading.

43.1 INTRODUCTION
W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. His poetic career moves from
the pre-modern to the modern: he was master of both the styles. Always interested in
magic and the occult, Yeats challenged mechanistic conceptions of the universe by
foregrounding the former along with Celtic mythology and symbolism. Soon enough
the actual world enters into his poetry. He constructs a philosophical system in order
to organize the anarchy of modem civilization. His entire poetic career is stamped
with a dialectical schematism, essentially of flesh and spirit. Beginning with escape
to a fairyland he searches for another kind of escape, into a world of pure ideas.

43.2 TITIE QUEST FOR IRISHNESS

W.B. Yeats was born in Ireland to John Butler Yeats, a painter, and Susan Pollexfen,
who came fiom a family of shipowners. Through his father's family and the literary
company that met at their hbuse, Yeats was exposed early to the ferment of ideas and
intellectual conversation in London and in Howth, near Dublin. By contrast, the
Pollexfens offered an alternative model of instinct, physical prowess and practical
wisdom. Yeats's father thought that the fusion was poetically fruitful for his son.
This may well have been the basis for a cast of mind that habitually expressed itself
in terms of polarities and antitheses. As Yeats himself has put it in Per Anlica
Silentia Lunae (1918), when we quarrel +ith others we produce rhetoric but when we
quarrel with ourselves we produce poetry, His doctrine of the Mask, his lunar
symbolism, and his symbol of the interpenetrating gyres of history are all
characterised by a dialectical schematism: the self versus the anti-self, the new or
dark moon versus the full moon, the widening and narrowing gyres. The schematism
which helped Yeats order a disintegrating civilisation may have been prompted by
the duality of his Anglo-Irish identity and reinforced by his reading of Blake,
Swedenborg and ultimately the earlier Neo-Platonist thinkers. The existential
antinomy of flesh and spirit finds resolution in Yeats's pursuit of passionate wisdom
which promises deliverance from the disturbing aspects of the life of flesh
unmitigated by the onset of old age.

His mother's family lived in Sligo, on the west coast of 1relind where, apart from
London, he spent much of his youth. A few miles north of Sligo was the mountain of
Tile Modernist Poets

Ben Bulben (immortalised in poems like 'Under Ben Bulben') under which was
Drumcliff churchyard, Yeats's chosen place of burial. The Sligo landscape,
evocatively captured in his early poetry, like 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' or 'The
Stolen Child' is steeped in Gaelic folklore and superstition. As Yeats's notes to his
Collected Poems explain, after Crossways, his subject matter, especially in X3e
Wanderings ofOisin (1889) became Irish. For reasons spelt out in an essay, 'Ireland
and the Arts' (Essays and Introductions),Yeats decides to give up Arcadian and
Indian scenes and never to 'go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own,
and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end.' But at this stage of his
poetic career, Sligo remained a nostalgic and escapist refuge from the harshness and
fragmentation of modem urban civilization.

While Yeats's attempt to construct a distinctively Irish identity was overlaid with
antiquarian and sentimental recovery of Celtic myth, magic, legend, and folklore, his
father introduced him to the English poetic tradition, the Pre-Raphaelites andfin-de-
siBcle aesthetes in particular. Being Irish, he had difficulties in his London school; in
Ireland, his Anglo-Norman origins linked him to the Protestant Ascendancy, a class
that had its loyalties divided between England and Ireland, and was virtually wiped
out in the 1916 Easter rebellion and the Civil War. Of course, this dilemma of
Anglo-Irishness did not extend to the Catholic peasantry; in history it went back to
the eighteenth century.
Although Yeats was of a religious temperament and delighted in reverie, he imbibed
from his father's circle a lack of enthusiasm for institutionalized religion. The
dissatisfaction with Christianity springs in part from the dogmatic rationalism of the
orthodox Protestant tradition but largely from the attempt to recover the Fenian
traditions of pre-colonial Ireland. In contrast to the exhausted sense of coming at the
end of a tradition that affects the work of English poets like Hardy and Edward
Thomas, Yeats hopes 'to create some new Prorneiheus Unbound;Patrick or
Columcille, Oisin or Finn, in Prometheus's stead; and instead of Caucasus, Cro-
Patrick or Ben Bulben' (Autobiographies). Thus in challenging the drabness of a
civilization dominated by calculating rationalism, technology, and the mercenary
ethic, Yeats was spiritually akin to Eliot, although unlike the latter he turned to the
heterodox tradition and studied the occult sciences.

43.3 MAGIC, MYTHOLOGY, AND SYMBOLISM

Magic and the mystical life became for the young Yeats the most important pursuit of
his life after poetry. If Christianity offered Eliotla unifying design to accommodate
the fragmentation of modern society, for Yeats this role was performed by magic and
mythology. The first mythology was to be historical, pantheistic, prophetic as well as
local and patriotic: 'Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that
marries them to rock and hill?' (Autobiographies). This unity of being, equally W.B. Yeats I
relevant to race and individual personality and often symbolized in the perfectly
proportioned human body, is rooted in the Anima Mundi, a version of the Collective
Unconscious, a vast storehouse of images. Unity of being can be attained through the
projection into consciousness of men's common ancestral memories: 'Nations, races,
and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical
or evocative of the state of mind' (Autobiographies).
Yeats was probably introduced to cabbalistic experiments by George Pollexfen, his
astrologer uncle. As early as 1885, when his first poems were published in the
Dublin Universify Review, Yeats chaired the first meeting of the Dublin Hennetic
Society. Katharine Tynan, the poetess, first took Yeats to a seance and in 1887 he
met the magician MacGregor Mathers and in 1890 joined the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn founded by the latter for the study and practice of magic. In the same
year Yeats had joined the Theosophical Society of Madame Blavatsky. From her law
of periodicity Yeats may have acquired the cyclical conception of history with a
divine incarnation at the beginning of each cycle, as the stories in The Se'cret Rose
(1897) as well as his later poetry show.
Even as he was exploring the occult, Yeats was actively engaged in the literary world
of his time, in editing and journalism. He was a founding member of the Rhymers'
Club and the Irish Literary Society in London (1891) and Dublin (1892). As Richard
Ellmann has shown (Yeats, Tlte Man and tlze Masks), Yeats's discovely of split selves
within, of a self and anti-self, which gave rise to his doctrine of the Mask was aided
by the aesthetes' conception of the artistic personality as really two men. From his
roots in decadent aestheticism, Yeats expanded his symbolist vision by giving it an
Irish identity as well as tapping the resoiyces of magic, myth, and superstition that
were available amQng the Irish Catholic peasantry. Like Lady Gregory he collected
Irish folklore and his three anthologies of nineteenth-century Irish literature-Fairy
and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1 888), Storiesfrom Carleton (1 889), and
RepresentativeIrish Tales (1 891)-show his wide reading which informed his early
poems like llze Wanderings of Oisin (1 889), plays like The Countess Kathleen
(1 892), and 771sLand of Heart's Desire (1894), and of course his own collection of
Irish stories The Celtic 7'wilight (1893, revised and enlarged 1902). Throughout this
latter book there is a desire to enlarge beyond folk-literature to a vision of the unity- of
man and nature that reason, science and the abstracting Anglo-Saxon mind had
ruptured, and that could be recovered through the 'symbolic correspondences' of
Swedenborg and Blake.
As he moved among Celtic heroes and heroines in a wistfully primitivist, pre-
Christian landscape, his growing interest in symbols was strengthened by his
experience of editing Blake's Works (1 893) and by his friendship yvith Arthur
Symons. The latter initiated hi& into Symbolist doctfines, and in 1894 in Paris, he
attended a performance of Villiers de l'lsle Adam's Axel which affected him dwply.
The influence of the French symbolists, including Mallarm&,and that of Maurice
Maeterlinck is$iscemible in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Magic offered to
the symbolists a reinforcement of their belief in the power of word or symbol to
ev0ke.a reality otherwise inaccessible. As a movement it challenged'the hegemony
of science anh rationalism. In a letter to O'Leary, Yeats wrote of 'a voice of what I
believe to be a greater renaesance [sic]-the revolt of the soul against the intellect-
now beginning in the world.'
For Yeats's early symbolism we have to go to The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among
the Reeds (1899). The symbols are drawn from the natural world, say, of woods,
waves, winds or stars, which resolve themselves into the four elentents-earth, water,
air, fire-and their conjunctions and oppositions. The moon usually stands for
weariness (as often in Shelley), water for the fugitive nature of beauty, the rose for
t h t principle of Etemal Beauty, and the veil for the life of ecstatic reverie hidden
from the world. Into the four basic elements merge the Irish mythological figures.
The unifylng bond is that of the lover to his mistress and thereby to Nature. But the
abundance of pale waters, white stars, dim sea, dim sand and so on ultimately build
The Morierrrist Poets up a shadowy and languorous world. Even the esoteric and secret symbol o f the
Rose, so central to the Order of the Golden Dawn and so various in its meanings,
cannot quite break the mood of dreaminess. However, it is in Yeats's control of a
simple and passionate diction and rhythm that an intellectual sturdiness becomes
discernible.

43.4 A LESS DmAM-BURDENED WILL

The various factors that helped bring a less dream-burdened will into Yeats's poelly
include embittered disillusionment in love, experiences at the Abbey Theatre,
political involvement and anguish at violence sweeping across Europe. His
friendships and liaisons with women managed to draw him out of his shell. He met
Maud Gonne in 1889, an encounter that was to transfonn his life. His infatuation for
her drew him into nationalist politics about which, despite strong patriotic feeling, his
attitude remained ambivalent. Despite remaining aloof fiom her brand of incendiary
zeal, Yeats came to play an increasingly important role in Irish public life becoming a
Senator of the Irish Free State (1922-28) and winning the Nobel Prize in 1923. Maud
Gonne's stubborn refusal to marry him led to his happy marriage to George Hyde-
Lees. Even as Yeats came to see Maud Gonne and other such female revolutionaries
in terms of a tragic fate whereby unity of being was mutilated, she became a
recognizable, flesh-and-blood individual freed of the patina of early symbolism.
From The Green Helmet ( 1 910) onwards, she enabled Yeats to link the anarchy of his
private life to the larger context of Civil War and the First World War.

After his first meeting with Lady Gregory and Synge in 1896, Yeats spent the
summer of 1897 at Lady Gregory's house, Coole Park, near Galway. Their
collaboration bore fruit in the Abbey Theatre as a director of which Yeats was
plunged into 'theatre-business, management of men.' This experience not only
brought out the practical man in him but deeply enriched his style through the
influence of speech and dialogue. Ezra Pound, his secretary from 19 13-16,
introduced him to the anti-naturalist and symbolical art of the Japanese Noh drama
and encouraged him towards a resolutely concrete diction. The resultant spareness of
language and style is evident in his play At the Hawk's Well ( 1 916).

43.5 YEATS'S IWLAND

Lady Gregory offered an alternative to Maud Gonne by virtue of her caring support
for Yeats's writing. Her Coole Park estate not only gave him the time and place to
write but also became a model of aristocratic nobility. Ireland in the early twentieth
century was not only different from England but even from the Ireland of Synge and
O'Casey. It was the least industrialized country in western Europe with virtually no
middkblass outside the big cities. The people who impinged on Yeals's 1
consciousness and on Irish history were the peasants and the landlords in the big I
I
houses. Yeats's obsession with ancestral houses like Coole Park which were in
decline or burnt down in the agrarian unrest of the Civil War was coloured 'by a I
nostalgic view of the bond between landlord and servant. Since the landlords were
mostly Protestant in origin and Unionist in sympathy while the conxnon people
mostly Catholic, the former in their search for identity were drawn to the world of
myth, ritual, legend, and imagery rejected by Protestant nationalism but nurtured by
the Catholic peasantry. In highlighting the rooted affinity of the dream of the noble
and the beggar-man, Yeats expressed his contempt for and distrust of the newly-
emerging middle-class. Aristocracy thus offered a vantage-point from which Yeats,
like Pound and Eliot ir. their admittedly different ways, attempted a critique of
I
capitalist-democratic values. The metaphor of horseman nnd the races in 'At Galway
Races' harks back to an age when poetry was central to human existence: 'Before the
merchant and the clermreathed on the world with timid breath.' As the poem,
'September 1913,' fiom Yeats's middle period shows, such timidity is the product of
the nexus between acquisitive instinct and calculating piety: half pence is added to
Pence as Prayer to shivering prayer until the marrow is dried from the bone. I
I
Ironically it is this world emptied of the heroic for which the Irish martyrs, the wild W.B. Ycats I
geese, were laying down their lives.

Placed within the larger context of the marginalization of art and the artist in Europe,
Yeats saw the poet's role in somewhat Shelleyail terms, as that of an unacknowledged
legislator. If on the one hand, Yeats strives to break away from a sentimentalized
Ireland, on the other, Ireland for him was a visionary project to recover buried
spiritual identity which was impeded by the revolutionary politics. Thus the Easter
uprising becomes for him much more than the search for political independence. In
one of Yeats's last poems, 'The Statues,' we find Patrick Pearse, Irish revolutionary
leader, summoning Cuchulain, the mythical hero, to his side and the moment of
disintegration initiates the realization of unity of being represented in the
proportioned human body:

We Irish, born into that ancient sect

But throwh upon this filthy modem tide
And by its fonnless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

43.4 THE SYSTEM: MASK, MOON, AND GUBaE

Marriage not only gave Yeats stability and direction but more specifically, the
supposedly automatic writing of his wife brought metaphors for poe'ny, the symbol of
the gyre, moon, and mask that became the basis for his philosophical system A Visiorl
(1925, revised 1937). Of course the doctrine of the Mask can be kaced back to Per
A~nicaSilentia Lutzae ( 1 91 8), if not even further back to the aesthetes' notion of the
artistic personality. The selfwas contraposed to the anti-selc individuals as well as
civilizations aspire to such antitheses in search of unity of being:

If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and try to

assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves
though we may accept one fi-om others. Active virtue, as distinguished from
the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore theatrical, coi~sciously
dramatic, the wearing of a mask.
(M;l,thologies)

As is evident from this extract, the doctrine possibly has its true origin in Yeats's
experience as a dramatist and theatre-manager, in particular the masked theatre of the
Japanese Noh or the Greeks. The masked performance of our own lives involves an
artistic transformation-of the disorder backstage: art is thus a nlask even as
'

aristocracy is. Human beings as well as entire epochs have their masks,

Human personality and history are divided into 28 types corresponding to the 28
phases of the moon. Phase 1 (when the moon is dark) and Phase 15 (full moon) are
states of perfection accessible only to spirits or the syinbols of poetry: the waxing and
waning of the moon accommodate the oppositioil of Primary and Antithetical
tinctures, of the egoist and the saint, the artist and the businessman. The underlying
conception of personality fits in admirably with the doctrine of the Mask, since the
antithetical Mask is 'the fonri created by passion to unite us to ourselves.' Starting
from Phase 1, man seeks his opposite at Phasc 15, and then returns to the original
point achieving union in and through division.

A new corollary symbol was introduced in automatic writing: the gyre, the whirling
cone, the pern or spool. European history was diagrammatically interpreted in terms
of interpenetrating,cones whirling inside one another, one subjective, the other
objective, At the time of Christ, objectivity is at its fullest expansion while the
Renaissance is the time of fullest subjectivity; in modem times, there is again a swing
The Modentist Poets towards objectivity, towards democracy, socialism, communism. As Yeats's note to
the Cuala Press edition of Michael Robartes and the Dancer explains,

the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the
next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest
expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present
moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of
Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. .
All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization
belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the
revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in
one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated of the civilization that
must slowly take its place . . . the revelation . . . [will] . . . establish again for
two thousand years prince and vizier.
At the dead centre of the two thousand year cycle (corresponding to the 28 phases of
the moon) which define the beginning and end of modern times comes the superbly
integrated art of Byzantium.

The three central symbols of the mask, the moon, and the gyres admirably represent
Yeats's antinomies by remaining anchored in common experience. The mask, we
have seen, is fundamentally a theatrical metaphor while the moon suggests fickle
fortune and the associative cluster of female fertility, virginity, and sensuality. The
gyres give new meaning to the childhood experience at Sligo where he saw .'a little
column of smoke from "the pern mill," and was told that 'pern" was another name for
the spool, as I was accustomed to call it, on which thread was wound' (Notes on
'Shepherd and Goatherd' in Collected Poems). The gyre image in particular simply
haunts Yeats: the winding stair of the tower he bought, the flight of the falcon ('pern'
also meant a small hawk) or the swans ('scatter wheeling in great broken rings'), the-
shining web wound by Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers with floating ribbons o f cloth
('Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'), the silken, embroidered cloth bound and wound
round the scabbard of a sword ('A Dialogue of Self and Soul'), even the mummy-
cloth in which mummies are wound ('Byzantium').

43.7 POETIC CAREER (1889-1910)

The poetic career of Yeats falls into an early and a later phase, each apparently
opposed to the other and yet inspired by a similar longing for escape from a world
dominated by mechanistic and positivistic conceptions. As we have seen, in the early
phase his specific mode of release was somewhat escapist, his fancy spiriting him
away from a busy London street to the fairyland of Sligo and its lake isles. In The
Wanderings of Oisin (1889), Crossways (1889), The Rose (1 893), The Wind Among
the Reeds (1 899) and In the Seven Woods (1 904), Yeats demonstrates the assured
mastery of an evocative style woven out of Spenser, Shelley, William Morris and the
Pre-Raphaelites. If it lacks in sinewy strength and precision it is only in comparison
with his later style. Far from being a pastiche, however, Yeats's earlier style has a
harmonious integrity that established his reputation as a lyrical poet. The symbolist
and somewhat hieratic tendency was balanced by a contradictory impulse towards
simple passionate speech. While his plays, performed from 1899 onwards, taught
him the poetic resources of dialogue, from 1896 he spent the summers at Coole Park
collecting with Lady Gregory folktales from peasant cottages. In the evening she
wrote them out in dialect which exposed him to the living speech of peasants later
used admirably by Synge.

What Yeats learnt most from the 'tragic generation1-Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson,
George Russell (AE)-was the need for painstaking, fastidious craftsmanship. In the
'nineties, the Rhymers' Club shared a hatred of dry, cerebral verse and of clearly-
defined philosophies, believing in a sense of mystery and in melody. But even before
bitterness on the private and public fronts had sharpened his vision, deepened his
passion and tightened his style, Yeats went beyond the autotelic poetry of the
Rhymers and aesthetes to construct the heroic image of Ireland as the poets have W.B. Yeats I
imagined it, terrible and gay. The mask of the Celtic hero triumpharit in defeat
gradually changes into that of spiritual autonomy and wisdom, the magisterial
shaping power of mind over circumstance confronting physical decay even as his
home, the old Norman tower he had bought in 1915, was surrounded and threatened
by anarchic violence. As early as 14 March 1888, in a letter to Katharine Tynan,
Yeats wrote that in the process of correcting his poems he had noticed things about
his poetry he had not known before, that it was 'almost all a flight into fairyland from
the real world,' a poetry of 'longing and complaint, the cry of the heart against
necessity.' He hoped some day to alter that and write the poetry of insight and
knowledge.

43.8 'ADAM'S CURSE'

Already I n the Seven Woods (1904) suggests a departure in Yeats's poetic career, an
awareness of the actual world with its unpoetic responsibilities and political conflicts.
'Adam's Curse' remains an important instance of this stylistic evolution: it hovers
between the earlier languorous idiom and rhythm and a new conversational, even
witty tone disguising a sub-text of emotional yearning and disillusionment. Written
in 1902, before the marriage of Maud Gonne to Major John MacBride, the whole
poem is a controlled expression of Yeats's futile love for her. As her autobiography
notes shrewdly, there is a link between unhappiness in love and beautiful poetry, a
link in which Yeats's self-pity plays% role. But the transmutation of failure or
inadequacy into poetry is more than a Romanticised self-indulgence. The very title
of the poem indicates loss of innocence and idyllic happiness. In the fallen state of
humanity, art as labour co-extensive with life brings together poetry, feminine
beauty, and love. Each in its own way offers variations on the Yeatsian dialectic of
nature and art, each is an artificial re-fashioning or idealization of life. The poem
itself is a stylistic enactment of this dialectical process: the biographical self is
sufficiently transformed in order for it to become available for detached examination
in the mask of the courtly lover, and this love becomes visible rather like the hollow
moon.

It is a conversation-poem involving Maud Gonne, her sister,,Mrs. Kathleen Pilcher,

and Yeats himself. Although it is addressed to Maud, the romantic conventions of
intimacy are forestalled by Mrs. Pilcher's presence; moreover, Maud remains
enigmatically silent and unresponsive throughout. The irony of this is heightened by
the almost banal tone in which an autumnal mood is introduced ('summer's end').
Despite the elegiac tone, there is a movement away fiom lushness looking forward to
the dry woodland paths of the autumn of 'The Wild Swans at Coole.'

Mrs. Pilcher's mild beauty and sweet, low voice (contrasted, for instance in 'Easter
1916' with Con Markiewicz's voice grown shrill in political argument) links her to
femininity as the nurturing and creative principle ('On Woman'), to the beauty that is
rooted in custom and ceremony ('A Prayer for My Daughter'). Maud Gonne's fiery
beauty presents an alternative to this and Yeats the poet is located between the two,
pulled towards both, towards involvement and withdrawal.

The talk on poetry contrasts hours of revision with a moment's thought in order to
establish the paradox of living, spontaneous beauty as the product of painstaking,
artificial re-fashioning of experience. As a poet Yeats was given to revising his work
repeatedly. The paradox has been compared to the Renaissance notion of an art that
lies in concealing art, to 'sprezzatura' or nonchalance as Castiglione had called it. It
also looks forward to the timelessness that is specific to art, a theme that informs
Yeats's 'Byzantium' poems. The domestic imagery of stitching and unstitching
unobtrusively relates poetry to women; it also seems to anticipate that unity of the
artist and the artisan that Yents cclebrated in Byzantine culture. After all, the golden
bird of Byzantium is a handiwork of Grecian goldsmiths.
The second stanza offers a racy defence of poetry in a society increasingly dominated
by the emerging bourgeois ideology. This new world, summed up by the bankers,
schoolmasters, and clergymen, was aggressively hostile to art and distrustful of the
vital energies. The attitude of this 'noisy set' to the proposed Dublin art gallery
invited Yeats's anger in Responsibilities (19 14); as late as 'Lapis Lazuli' (Last Poems)
we encounter hysterical women denouncing poets and artists for their uselessness at
the time of war. This is the community that sets off the loneliness and autonomy of
the artist. Withdrawn from conventionally strenuous and utilitarian obligations, the
poet uses his freedom from the drudgery undergone by the housewife or the old
pauper to engage in the far more challenging labour of artistic transformation. His
defiant triumph is earned at the cost of self-destruction: 'Among subjective men (in
all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory is an
intellectual daily re-creation of all that exterior fate snatches away'
(Autobiographies). The unremitting psychomachy--self versus anti-self-is directed
towards the Unity of Being that is suggested, a little unsatisfactorily, in the
articulation of sweet sounds together, and implicitly in the perfectly proportioned
human body. More satisfactorily, the unity is mirrored in the poem itself, a whole
composed of division. Mrs. Pilcher's witty parallel between the poet's labour and
woman's, recorded in Maud's autobiography, relates feminine beauty to unity of
being through the doctrine of the mask or the theatrical discipline of self-fashioning.
Like the poet, woman also achieves spontaneity.

Feminirie beauty with its implicit notion of the discipline of the mirror (or the mask)
leads on in the fourth stanza to the lover emulating the artifice of the mask. As Yeats
puts it, 'Each divines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the mere
daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in
daily life; for love also creates the Mask' (Autobiographies). With autobiographical
poignancy Yeats talks of lovers who, in defiance of the bourgeois ethic (stanza 2)
chose the mask of courtly love. His unrequited love is thus located within the custom
and ceremony of an aristocratic culture. The note of detachment and self-parody
suggests a transition in the poem. The mask of the sighing and bookish courtly lover
ironically merges into a literary convention, studiedly archaic in its beauty like the
opulently produced old books. Lofty idealization is judged now from the point of
view of the everyday world and therefore dismissed as an idle trade. If Yeats extracts
beauty out of futility, here we have, as it were, the reverse process at work: the
troubled actual world intrudes and dialectically confronts the impulse towards
autonomy.

We have here a resistance to the aestheticization of love that looks forward to the
interpenetration of the purity of artistic form and unpurged, rawexperience. The very
mention of love draws out the emotional sub-text, the silence of w h & calls into
question the decorums of conversation. The interpenetrating opposition is captured
in the image of the moon. The approaching evening is described in a language
somewhat stilted and lush. This is then questioned by a subtly unconventional use of
the moon as the objectification of shrivelling bitterness which is the legacy of time.
Perhaps reminiscent of Shelley's use of the moon and the shell, the symbolism
suggests weariness as well as recovery, an end as well as a beginning. The recovery
is manifest in the mood of unsentimental confrontation of the trutn. The thought that
the poet had reserved for Maud's ears alone reads like a summing-up; at the same
time, there is a clear sense of waking up from a pleasant dream.

43.9 'NO SECOND TROY'

The new Yeats becomes clearly visible in Tlze Green Helmet and Other Poems
(1 910) in which his public rhetoric and satiric control of disillusionment-anger,
hatred, and bitterness in personal and public life--are in evidence. In fact, in the
period 1910-14, Yeats moves away from his earlier misty symbolism and mythology
to concrete, realistic detail. Yeats's style becomes more supple and economical, and
Maud Gonne is here a real individual despite being identified with Helen of Troy in
 \

terms of personal symbolism. The Trojan war, which ended with the destruction of W.B. Yeats I
Troy by the Greeks after a ten-year siege, began because Helen (wife of Menelaus,
King of Sparta) was abducted by Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy. Her whole
situation including the context of the Trojan War (on which Homer's epics are based)
offer a parallel with a difference to Maud Gonne, Yeats, John MacBride and Irish
nationalism. After repeatedly refusing Yeats, Maud Gonne finally manied
MacBride, one of the revolutionaries executed in 191 6, in 1903 but was separated
from him in 1906. When she appeared in the Abbey Theatre on 20 October 1906
after her divorce, the audience hissed her (see 'Against Unworthy Praise'); after this
she withdrew from public life until 1918.

That kind of public reaction sums up the narrow-minded ideology of hatred that
characterised the lower middle classes in particular:

The root of it all is that the political class in Ireland-the lower-middle class
from whom the patriotic associations have drawn their journalists and their
leaders for the last ten years--have suffered through the cultivation of hatred
as the one energy of their movement, a deprivation which is the intellectual
equivalent to a certain surgical operation. Hence the shrillness of their
voices. (Autobiographies)

Maud Gonne's revolutionary ardour becomes a kind of heroic mask tragically at odds
with the dominant mercenary-prudential ethic of the age. Ironically, it is this class
that she and her tribe of activists wished to influence and instigate to political
violence: in 'No Second Troy,' she is shown to have 'taught to ignorant men most
violent ways.' The poem places personal experience in the turmoil of Irish history
and widens out to heroic myth: history becomes myth even as myth is linked to
history.

Maud Gonne was always reproaching Yeats for not putting his art in the service of
nationalist propaganda. After she withdrew from the more extreme I.R.B. (an Irish
Secret revolutionary organisation) about the turn of the century, she introduced Yeats
to Arthur Griffith of the Sinn Fein movement: she desired to keep the Irish literary
movement abreast of the policies of Sinn Fein. Before her marriage Maud Gonne
was increasingly involved in anti-British activities. She linked the I.R.B. with French
military intelligence and offered a Boer agent in Brussels a plan to put bombs in
British troopships bound for Africa. As Joseph Hone notes(W.B.Yeats, 1865-1939),
Yeats wrote in his diary that Maud Gonne never really understood his plans, or nature
or ideas: 'Then came the thought-what matter? How much of the best I have done
and still do is but the attempt to explain myself to her?' That Maud did not
understand him or there was a gap in communication is turned to poetic advantage by
Yeats: 'If she understood I should lack a reason for writing, and one can never have
too many reasons for doing what is so laborious.' While Maud had perceived that
Yeats poetically thrived on his unhappiness, his own realization (see 'Words')
suggests freedom from self-indulgence. With the help of the larger contexts of
history and myth, Yeats forestalls the whining complaint of unhappiness that the
opening line of 'No Second Troy' can degenerate into.

In spite of the disparity between twentieth-century Ireland and heroic Greece, the
Trojan war relates Maud Gonne to the violence around her in terms of the
Annunciation that develpps in 'The second Coming' and 'Leda and the Swan.' That
from the eggs of Leda came love and war enables Yeats to locate his passion within a
' context of disintegration.

As Yeats saw it, on the one hand the rising middle classes were sunk in ignorance and
superstitious piety; on the other hand, they were being incited to blind hatred of the
English. At the deepest level, the blindness is an incapacity for honest self-
examination and has a corrosive effect on the vital impulses and affections. Ireland
must acquire an identity, a spiritual unity of its own before it can embark upon
The Modernist Poets political nationalism. Of course the coupling of ignorance and violence and timidity
and desire may suggest Protestant-aristocratic prejudice about the Catholics. But
when the courage did equal desire in the Easter uprising, Yeats paid a noble tribute to
it.

The image of the little streets being hurled upon the great has been annotated in terms
of the many little semi-literary and semi-political clubs and societies out of which the
Sinn Fein movement grew. Yeats had indeed come to distrust and quarrel with them.
But the image is a succinct evocation of the topography of political resentment and
unrest in a city like Dublin: the narrow lanes and back-alleys from which anger spills
out (often in processions) on to the big streets of power and privilege.

Instead of the ambivalence that enabled Yeats to comment on Irish politics from a
distance, Maud Gome's mind and beauty are described in terms of her single-minded
intensity. If the modem sensibility is a divided one then her fiery commitment
presents an antithesis to it. The fire image along with the noble simplicity or purity
and restlessness of her mind telescopes the idea of a curious innocence untouched by
obsequious clinging to conformity and the irony of its warped destructiveness. The
comparison of her beauty to a tightened bow not only suggests the tensile and arched
grace of her body but also the energy of stress, a taut and tense sexuality.

Yeats has written elsewhere that she looked as if she lived in an ancient civilisation
and her face was that of a Greek statue. Yeats highlights her supremely lofty, almost
inaccessible presence, her aristocratic mask of Olympian solitude and disdain set off
against her populist politics in order to cast her in the sublime, tragic mould. The
poem is a series of four questions suggesting a man's examination of himself
rigorously pursued through the logic of feeling and thought.

43.10 LET US SUM UP

In this unit you have learnt about the poetic career of W.B. Yeats from 1889 to 1910.
Apart fiom tracing his poetic development, the unit has introduced you to the
function of Yeats's philosophical system and occult beliefs. His poetry is related to
his embattled Irish identity and to the fundamental dichotomy of flesh and spirit.
Various experiences, private and public, drew him out of an imaginative fairyland to
the search for insight and knowledge.

43.11 QUESTIONS
1. Write short notes on i) the doctrine of the Mask, ii) the phases of the moon,
iii) the interpenetrating gyres. (See 43.6)

2. Bring out the interrelationship of the mask, the lunar symbolism, and the
gyres. (See 43.6)

3. How are magic and symbolism related in Yeats's poetry? (See 43.3)

. 4. What were the factors that made Yeats outgrow his yearning for escape into a
land of fantasy? (See 43.4,43.5 and 43.7)

5. Show how Yeats's choice of the aristocratic mask springs from his view of
Ireland. (See 43.5 and 43.2)

6. in what way are poetry, feminine beauty, and love related to one another in
'Adam's Curse'? (See 43.8 and 43.6)

7. Bring out the significance of Troy as a symbol in 'No Second Troy.' (See
43.9 and 43.6)