II. ACTION IN YEATS' POETRY

A. Introduction

Baudelaire and Yeats both created or reached toward a literalized world of the imagination in their writing. This stance, or premise for interpretation, might force them to be considered as late romantic writers, anachronistic to "modern" literature. For them, however, the imaginative world was crucially bound to the contemporary one. A reader cannot misconstrue their "modernism"—which shows itself in the tension in their language and in the different forms that evolve to fix the place of the romantic imagination in a dis-illusioned world. The quality of Yeats' and Baudelaire's allegorical world differs from that of the Romantics. It is an alternative reading of history, a reunderstanding of what is a necessary basis for life, and a re-evaluation of the effort of poets as men to comprehend the relations between themselves, their world and their poetry. Their world is not of poetry, nor is it poetic. If it were, these poets would have been discarded with the aesthetes long ago. Eliot commented on Yeats' position between aesthetic and socially responsive art:

Born into a world in which the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake' was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes, he held firmly to the right view which is between them, and showed that an artist, by serving his art with entire integrity, is [at the same time] rendering the greatest service he can . . . .

The tension of world and imagination in the work of Baudelaire and Yeats involves it with the world itself and forms the "bridge"—the span, of words across a chasm; forms the "surface" which touches both mind and world, the interface which permits the alliance of these sources.

This series of metaphors is applicable to many forms of literature. Central to the aim of evolving a way to talk about modern literature is an understanding of the way in which it reflects on or mediates between the mind and reality. Among modern authors, beginning consciously with the symbolists in poetry, there has been an effort to make the poem represent the world, not contain or explain or order it, but to translate its forms and its tensions from perceived to linguistic reality. Although this effort may be found in many works of literature, among classic authors it was less intentional. It seems to be linked to two sets of changes, in man's perception of himself in the world (philosophical) and in his perception of the world around him (socio-political). These two changes might be subsumed under the switch in emphasis form religion to psychology. Order in a world which becomes increasingly man-made is no longer external but internal. Poetry cannot rely ostensibly on an order external to itself, but contains a working out of man's relation through language to the world. Questions of ontology and of epistemology lie behind all ages of literature; in the modern period the poem symbolizes this relation.

For most readers, Yeats is identified with certain poems: "Leda and the Swan," "Among School Children," "The Second Coming," "Lapis Lazuli" and certain others. For many critics, Yeats is identified with A Vision , and they spend their time reconciling his work with his mythology. It is not his work; Yeats is a poet. He is also a playwright, to a lesser extent a critic, and in some terms—perhaps—a visionary. But he did not present himself to be dealt with as such.

In this essay, discussion of some of Yeats' most successful poems offers a way of looking at the rest of his lyric poetry. They define the most accurate context for interpreting the effort of his less achieved works. A Vision ; a political or cultural context; or biography, might surface other insights, but the poet's language is his own best testimony of the significance of his work.

B. "Leda and the Swan" and other poems

"Leda and the Swan" has been a difficult poem for critics to illuminate. Bloom, Winters, and other critics state that its form overrates its value; that it receives too much recognition; or that its subject is poetically unworthy. This manner of criticism seems difficult to deal with in a poem that has so much power. Both thematically and structurally, the poem is about power. Yet difficulty arises for the reader when he tries to understand this power, when he seeks a theme or a lens for interpretation. The poem resists explanation: it is dynamically hermetic, self-contained and inscrutable.

Yeats chose the sonnet form. It was never simply a lyric form: already it asserts itself too much as form, and contains too many potential contradictions, to adopt a wholehearted 'lyric' voice. The lyric was defined formerly as "having the character of a songlike outpouring of the poet's own thoughts and feelings (as distinguished from epic and dramatic poetry, with their more extended and set forms and their presentation of external subjects.)" But, paradoxically, the modern lyric has become capable of greater formal sophistication and specific "presentation of external subjects" than either of the earlier, more narrative forms. The musical and individual character of the early lyric tended to represent pastoral situations; the early poet in society or the state looked for larger patterns, for more authoritative forms to convey external order. But as those patterns, and their formal authority, began to disintegrate, the lyric came to provide individual integrity, which asserts itself over a weakening of public authority. The character of this modern "lyric" has evolved beyond the definition of its predecessor; "Leda and the Swan" takes on a voice which seems to be more than Yeats' own.

The first stanza is entirely descriptive. The grammatical structure consists of two parts: an exclamatory phrase ("a sudden blow",) and its unraveling into a series of adverbial phrases which describe the situation of the girl and the bird pictorially. As an image it is filled with motion. The phrases modify, and in fact draw precedence over the declamatory statement, "He holds her helpless breast upon his breast," which resolves the blow. The phrases, ". . . the great wings beating still/Above the staggering girl," "her thighs caressed/By the dark webs," "her nape caught in his bill. . ." characterize both woman and bird and sketch their relationship.

The initial situation of "Leda and the Swan" is not unlike the beginning of the "Second Coming."

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

especially in the original draft. The situation of the woman and the bird contains the same tension of center and flight, of sphere and gyre, but with a greater sense of immediacy. The image seems about to split apart. The bird is described by "his great wings beating still," "the dark webs. . ." which caress, "his bill. . ." which catches her "nape." The adjectives, "dark" and "great," create the image of an immense cloud or shadow which passes across the sun, of an image which engulfs rather than entraps. There is an intangibility to this description, an intentional lack of visual specificity, a fearful presence. The reader senses only the wings, the webs, the bill: sudden details lying on the periphery of an indefinable form. The verbs carry the strength and the contradiction of the passage: "beating . . . above," caressed . . . by," "caught . . .in," the three participles complemented by adverbial phrases which set up a deceptive symmetry. Reading the image, the forms take on presence and power; reading the language, the relationship is a contradictory one of violence and possession, of closeness and terror.

This ambiguity continues in the language of the description of Leda. She is "the staggering girl" with "thighs," "nape," and "helpless breast." Her image is not distinct from that of the bird: she is described in the same terms, and is not distinguished by visual characteristics but by her position on the passive side of the verbs. Girl and bird melt into a unified image of radical conflict and contradicion, which is also contained in the double use of "still" ("continuing" and "unmoving") and in the resolution contained by the last line of the quatrain.

The poem starts from a single scene, describing a woman and a swan. The action is so much contained within the moment that the scene becomes an image: visual impact dominates narrative description. The scene, like the language, does not lay itself open to inspection; scene and language both surrender themselves to the image, which is as hard as a painting to dissect into narrative. The language is dynamic; each word acts, integrally, as both signifier and signified, creating form and a network of tension. The meaning of the words is invested in the visual image, which gains its immediacy from this quarrel within its language.

        . . . the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs . . .

These two lines alone are filled with contradictions: in addition to the contrast of "beating" with "caressed," the great wings and dark web characterize something unnameable,and contradict the helplessness of the "staggering" girl. And yet the two images are one—her nape caught in his bill , her breast upon his breast . Over the unity of these words in contradiction, the ambiguity of the word "still" comes into play.

But it is clear that the description is not of simply any woman nor of any swan: the woman is Leda and the swan is the god, Zeus. Their mythical status is, however, of little importance to the poem: the language must earn the authority to convey the universality of a symbol. But what is the connection in this poem between language and myth; why "Leda and the Swan"? Why this mythical prototype? Does a possible "misnaming" occur, presenting the poem with a precedent which its language cannot create? What is the poem's appeal to to allegorical language? What is the relation of myth to the poetry? And how does this use of symbol and allegory compare formally with their use in the poetry of Baudelaire? But a definition of form can only be drawn from the specific expression of each poet, and not from previous formal definitions which the poet is free to revise.

The next stanza is composed of two questions, "how can . . . fingers push. . . glory from . . . thighs?" and "how can body . . . feel the . . . heart beating?" The questions seem rhetorical: technically they require no answer. Their syntax is simple. They seem to depend on modifiers for complexity. However, the substantives stand in a curious relation to one another. Each question connects two parts of the body (fingers to thighs and body to heart), two very different parts of two very different bodies. Yeats is fusing not only the body of a girl and that of a swan, but also internal and external surfaces. In the language there is in fact no distinction between "her" and "his": fingers, thighs, body, heart, seem to belong to both of them and to be fused into a single image.

But the poet is asking a question here. And the conjunction of internal and external is important to his poetry. He implies a larger question when he asks how those terrified vague fingers can push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs; and how body, laid in that white rush, can but feel the strange heart beating where it lies . . . . He implies his own involvement with words as conveyors of meanings.

Those "terrified vague fingers" are in part the poet's fingers; reading beyond that, one does not want to push so literal an unravelling. But the tension of the poet's own process of creation/procreation contains these initial stanzas, hammers and fires them, forming them emotionally. The intensity of expression derives from the poet's presence in the act of writing (choosing words), as well as in its images.

A poet seeks a form for his anguish which will transmit it as anguish and not as a, n, g, u, i, s, h. The "letters" of his form are words, and the sum of his words, a "word." Two questions enter this poetry: what is his form, and what is the source of his conflict? These questions occur on two levels, one existential and one historical. The existential question arises out of the conflict of man with "reality"; the historical question out of the conflict of a man with his contemporary "world." The existential question gives rise to the fact of separation in language of word from object, and the relation therefore between sign and referent, of an internal system of comprehension to an outside and unsystematized unknown. The historical question in language influences the relation of man to his environment, the relation of one relative system to another, of sign to system and not to a (conjectured) "reality." These questions enter any poet's work, and any author's. The question of source, of ontology, must ultimately be determined in an existential context. The question of form is in part determined by its historical context. The derivative question which guides the focus of this paper is what specific form did "modern" authors find for their work, and why.

A conflict—or even a source of conflict—is expressed in the image of Leda and the swan. Yeats wrote the poem in reponse to a request by the editor of a political review. However, in the course of writing the poem, the importance of the image as a political image became secondary for Yeats to the image itself. He stopped using it as a political metaphor and it became the poem.

The image is of Leda and the swan. It is an image for whatever it is interpreted as being for. Like the myth of Leda and the swan, which may be told and retold without losing the form of its story, like a painting of Leda and the swan which may be seen and seen again without being applied as a visual form to any structure other than itself; the poem takes on meaning in each of the contexts it enters—but an explicit verbal meaning which replaces the immediacy and the ubiquity of its meaning as poetry. The poem suffers such multiple interpretation becasue it is subjected to expression in language which is less perfectly ordered to enact its content than the language which made it poetry.

Language effects metamorphoses in the images it plays with: "vague," an image of shadow, bursts into potential "glory." "Body" is "laid in a rush"—stillness extended in movement, noun in verb. "That white rush" embodies movement, the concrete adjective grasping the abstracted verb. The language assumes an unaccustomed tangibility; at the same time it takes on an unfamiliarity, a duplicity. It plays a double role, as object (word) and idea. This double role, this role-playing of language, becomes especially important to the forms of twentieth century poetry.

Yeats' language constantly displays this unheralded ambiguity. Why is the heart "strange"? Is it strange to the body ? In fact, it is: as strange as words are to emotion. And "lies" rings out with a strained overtone: the heart beats where it lies. ". . .beating where it lies" gives the image of an active verb imprisoned in a passive one, like a young bird caught in a cage or one whose wings do not have the power to fly. The word ("lies") is itself not false—its homonym can not be reconciled with the context.

The verb "laid" is opposed to "push," as well as to the active present "lies." "Feel' (passive) and "beating" (active) reinforce the opposition of active and passive, one structure which contributes to the poem's hermeticism. For a poet whose work gives so little evidence of struggle, and is never dominated by its struggle for expression yet admittedly reaches expression through effort, Yeats' poetry, with as few chinks as it offers, treated fairly, cannot be any easier to read than it was to write.

If twice the poet asks, "How can. . ." (any) fingers, in part, write, twice the reader must ask not only what the poem is sying, but how it manages to say it. What is its process ; what is its intention? Tension exists between these two levels of reading the poem as well as within the poet's choice of words.

An instance of this (latter) tension exists in the gap between "and" and "but."

And how can body, Laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

Should "but" be considered as "only," as "not," or as "nevertheless"? How do these multiple interpretatios contribute to the meaning of the poem? If the passage refers to the dichotomy of form and feeling in the use of language, then "but" expresses the opposition between them. But if this dichotomy is one which the poet is trying to overcome, then the ambiguity reinforces his erasing of the distinction. The pronoun "it" is also ambiguous in its reference. Where what lies—the heart—the body? Or is it most significant that it could be either? Is this ambiguity what conveys the unity of the image? Is this figure of deception the lie? But the "it" seems other than the heart; the alternate reading would suggest "Where body lies . . ." "Body" would be the subject that lies.

These first two stanzas represent the octet of a classical sonnet. There is a division between the octet and the sestet in Yeats' use of the form. Between the octet and the sestet, the poem breaks out of its self-enclosed frame; it opens the door to history (to the implication of war) and to doubt—(the final question which may be answered either "no" or "yes.")

This division was indirectly present within the first stanza, which, although a picture, was quivering, "still." The second stanza poses a succession of questions. Without an answer to them, the poem hesitates; "How can it continue?" it asks, on the verge of dying.

The poem has sustained this division, uniting in language "that white rush;" it has given its "sudden blow." Language continues to fuse the substantive and abstract. "Loins" engender "wall . . . roof . . . tower . . ."—reminiscent of Troy, the Trojan War, and history. This act of creation engenders destruction; language gives birth to war. There is a tangibility in the language, which spans both idea and object. It contains their discontinuity, it leaps magnificently from the physical to the ideal, from the specific to the universal. "The brute blood of the air" also spans this contradiction: like the "white rush" or the "fingers pushing glory," the substantial modifiers nail down the insubstantial presence of the "air." What level of language permits these "crossings-over"? What shudder, what nightmare, engenders such poetry, which places "death" side by side by "being"? And how can it permit language to attain such power, outside of a present that the poem itself creates—creates, or gives the illusion of.

For Yeats, ". . . Being so caught up,/ so mastered. . ." is the key to the creation of this poetic space of being, within the present in which poetry dwells, in included death and strife. The opposition of "dead. . ." and "/Being. . ." in the poem introduces a gap which the language can barely cross. The conjunction of these opposites suggests Yeats' schema in A Vision of the conflicting gyres contained within the sphere. This does not lend itself to literal interpretation as a scheme for his use of language, but points to a certain correspondence between the working out of ideology and of language.

That gap in the middle of the sestet divides two directions that the poem takes. The effort of union engenders destruction: the broken wall, the burning roof, the "tower," the death of Agamemnon. (Helen, for all her beauty, caused the Trojan War.) The image of Leda and the swan almost gives way here to an image of the Trojan War, an implicit destruction within creation. But the poem stops itself and affirms, "Being so caught up. . ."—affirms her being caught up, the power of the "brute. . .," and the power of the poet's language still to assert, "brute blood of the air." The final question, "Did she. . ." is a different quality of question than that asked by the poem itself, which seems to question its own sucess.

The sestet questions and affirs the octet. Without the question, there is no possibility of affirmation. The final description splits the visual image, dividing the swan's and the woman's separate bodies. It does not distinguish them visually but separates them syntactically in the final question,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Without splitting the image, there is no possibility of realizing the separation of language from object that has been overcome in the language of the poem. The progression of prounouns from the beginning of the poem has expressed not only a fusion and a separation of body and body, or body and air, but a transferral suggested by the movement from " He holds her helpless breast upon his breast" to "Did she put on his knowledge with his power?" The replacement of the subject pronoun by the possessive indicates that the subjects have exchanged places, but only momentarily, "Before the indifferent beak could let her drop. . ." The poem effects this transferral without sustaining it; but it does, then, answer its own question by its last line.

The poem leaves open the problem of the subject, and of voice. Within the poem, neither embodied god nor woman takes precedence. There seems to be no room for another narrator. Narration—"figuration" is perhaps more precise—seems to come from within the language. A third voice may be admitted by the questioning. But the initial description was formed by an eye outside of the fusion of Zeus and Leda. The image has bypassed the eye that perceived it; it projects itself through the action of its language, and the reflected tension of the double image.

In all of Yeats' later poetry, the reader retains a strong sense of a voice behind the poetry, propelling it without drawing attention to itself, or even to its situation. That voice seems to know itself, even when it doesn't know the form of its own expression. Its words sometimes mask it. Sometimes they are a shield; a decoy; a dwelling. But Yeats, as an author, stands in some relation to his poetry, and to his words. Is it that relation, between a poet and his language, which he most essentially conveys; is it the relation which most characterizes Yeats' poetry as his ? Or is it the opposite: is that relationship the one most nearly determined, most influenced by the assumptions and presumptions of his age; is that relation the one based on external premises which the author may owe to society, to a generation or to an epoch?

The relation of the poet to his language is figured in his poetry. That figure, which is not rhetorical, is related to the potential of the "age" for self-expression. Can a poet lead, guide, express, understand, symbolize or dominate his time? What do poets have to do with politics; what is the source of their responsibility, of their forming or being formed by (their relation to) their times? How does the language get beyond reference to a particular context? How does it create its own listeners and why do they listen?

"Leda and the Swan" conveys a sense of crisis. Like the "Second Coming," it seems to portend a time of trouble, a time of war—some terrible impotence faced with some terrible violence. The sestet seems the more implicitly political. But Yeats' politics were Irish politics, and the more general reading of the poem as foretelling cataclysm—and not simply for eternity in the guise of a myth—was not intended by the poet. He has admitted to having abandoned the first political implications he had seeded in the image. The poem asks for no context, or asks most directly for what is just a personal context; creates it; demands it; so that by that demand it is read, and understood, and applied. World cataclysm; Irish politics; the creative process of the poem; these do not prove themselves so different from one another in their implication.

* * *

In both "Leda and the Swan" and "The Second Coming" Yeats effaces his voice from the poetry. In the poems that follow each of these, Yeats faces himself with his poetry. In "Among School Children" Yeats tries to bring the central image of "Leda and the Swan" back into a context: the context of his own life and experience. The poem starts with "I," and leads into the context of the schoolroom, of education ("Among School Children") and of religion (the "kind old nun"; and into the context of the modern world. This effort is shown to be important to the poem by the title which places the emphasis on "among..." And why "school" children? As so much of Yeats' poetry testifies, particularly "Prayer for my Daughter" (which can be read as a lament for those qualities which prevented Yeats from loving Maud Gonne,—and yet for which he loved her—but his writing of the poem would not deny that) children are not as often the subject as the people to whom Yeats' poetry is spoken. It is as ifhe must try to teach them, perhaps to reconcile his language with their ear; he expresses his sense of distance from them as he turns around to describe their looking at him:

. . .the children's eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon
a sixty year old smiling public man.

This poem is full of "questioning;" of sudden perceptions of himself; of a continual drifting away from and tying back into context.

None of the eight stanzas stands well alone; on a first reading, this uneven quality is emphasized by the famous final couplet which seems to jump out abruptly from the end:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

But the alternation of the stanzas is the dance of the poem, and without them,—without detecting their movement—the question loses a part of its meaning.

The poem comments sardonically on modern education before turning around and grimacing at the poet:

The children learn to cipher and to sing
To study reading books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

The second stanza breaks out of this order violently with "I dream of a Ledean body, bent. . ." Part of the sudden tempest in the language overrides the lines, bending them out of hte neat cadence they had assumed as they walked through the long schoolroom. The second stanza in fact introduces the "image" into the schoolroom—more generally, the poetic image, in a tradition which Yeats lets slip back into Plato,—but in particular the image of a "Ledean body, bent/Above a sinking fire. . .," a "she" whose tale blends "our two

natures . . . /Into a sphere from youthful sympathy . . ." It introduces the image of Maud Gonne—a poetic image of love momentarily fired into completion by "that fit of grief or rage." That image is recreated before him across the features of the schoolchildren, so that suddenly, separate from the poet, "She stands before me as a living child." The image seems suddenly to have taken on an immediacy which drives the poet's heart "wild;" the image has been projected from dream into the semblance of reality. Although it is the "modern" children who have called forth this image, initiating a process of sudden recollection, this image comes to dominate the poet's perception of them.

His thoughts slip back once again to himself from the "Sixty year old smiling public man" to "a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. . ." That image is repeated in "Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird," and its attitude is recalled by "O self-born mockers of man's enterprise. . ." There is a constant undercurrent of self-imaging. He extends this process from the vivid creation of the immediate image (". . .thinking of that fit of grief or rage. . .") as if he himself begot the image as child, to mothers who, having begotten a child that "must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape. . ." might think of their children when they had aged. Would she think him

A compensation for the pang of his birth
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Yeats' emphasis falls on think rather than on the son, on the image rather than the shape. He confronts the image with time and with change, with pain, with uncertainty, and his tone changes to a sorrowful tone, a tone of resignation, which seems to enter the poem here, displacing the sardonic voice which takes its distance. It is this voice then which asks the final question, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

But that question is already prepared by the confrontation of the image with time. in the preparation of the image, which is never given here as either present or final (as it was in "Leda and the Swan"), there is a constant effort to make it take precedence over time and change, to let it establish the system of values which will be compensation for sorrow and suffering. But the image does not stand up against historical time; the philosophers knew it—Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras: they knew an image was but "Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. . . ."

The seventh stanza arrives at the definition of image, religious and historical, which binds the two (endurance and change) into the voice of resignation which speaks the end. "Resignation," is concerned with processes in reconciling emotion with knowledge, and therefore life with image. Resignation then overcomes irony which disposes of image by "knowledge."

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

The nun's images (". . . those the candles light") "keep a marble or a bronze repose . . ." and are unchanging, "yet they too break hearts." The root of disappointment is not change, but the discontinuity between image and thing. The change brought about by aging is like the separation of the unchanging image from the moments of "passion, piety or affection. . ." from life. The syntax, by making "Presences" the object of "knows" shows that the Presences don't know; "passion, piety or affection" knows. Emotion seems to weight the image with the authority of feeling.

The images which symbolize are addressed as "O Presences" and "O self-born mockers of man's enterprise": these phrases indicate a definition of "image" which leans most heavily on the words "Presences" and "self-born." Images lie at the boundary of the intersection of "man's enter-prise" with heavenly glory: they symbolize heavenly glory; they do not participate in man's enterprise "and yet they too break hearts." What is their status, between body and soul; what is it that calls them into being ?

". . .self-born mockers of man's enterprises" is followed by a semi-colon; the eight stanza negates the mockery. But, to affirm it, what mocks? Why do these lines follow that statement of irony, not as coda but as complement? "Labour is blossoming or dancing" becomes the basis for the triumphant final couplets. But, retaining the voice of mockery, where "the body is bruised to pleasure soul. . .;" where "beauty is born out of its own despair. . . ;" where "blear-eyed wisdom is born out of midnight oil. . .," images take precedence over object. These are the self-born images; here you know the dancer from the dance.

These poems are by no means the only two in the "Tower" concerned with image or imaging. They are particularly effective not as much in their discussion as in their use of imaging in language (—of imaging distinct from imagery). Their extraordinary effectiveness lies at the center of Yeats' idea of "image." The challenge that these poems pose to reader and to poet seems significantly present in other of Yeats' poems and forms the basis for my discussion of them and of their development.

Yeats' poetry is crafted from sharp moments of insight — prepared, dissembled, doubted, — without which his poetry might have remained unacclaimed. These successful moments form the center of his poetry toward which his other statements gravitate; they are, in that sense, the subject of his poetry as much as of this essay.

I do not want to distort a reading of the poems by this approach, and yet it is for these moments that his poems are read by the public. These are the moments that must direct the judgment of a scholar or critic, to the extent that they indicate the center of the author's effort.

"Sailing to Byzantium" gives voice to the process of forming images. The title implies a voyage, a 'here' and a 'there,' a changing and an unchanging world. The 'there,' ("that") unchanging world hymns the world of change—Caught in their music, they have no need to create an unchanging monument to this changing world. The sequence of change, of "Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. . .," is reiterated at the end of the poem in, "What is past, or passing, or to come. . ."

The poet, in the world of change, regrets that there is no music of change within the changing world:

. . . Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence.

Men try to hold onto their own image of achievement. In Byzantium, change is celebrated as change; men, becoming old, are afraid of the process of change. Yeats wishes to discard the "self-born" images and set forth for the land of song.

An aged man, the poet, seeks "The singing-masters of my soul. . . " They are holy sages, "standing. . . /As in the gold mosaic of the wall. . ."—half art themselves. The poet asks them for inspiration, to be gathered "into the artifice of eternity. . ." But is his craft one of artifice? Must it be, that, outside of the "holy city of Byzantium" where "bodily form" is derived "from any natural thing" change can not be sung; but lest it be plagued with decay is "gathered into artifice," given "such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make"?

The poem reconciles the changing and the unchanging in its form and in its song. To find a form which might express the soul, it journeys from the inadequate and decaying body, to the images "of hammered gold and gold enamelling," which, unchanging, yet contain the dimension of change. The source of the form is in artifice; the poem finds its audience not among the aged men, fearful of decay, but among the lords and ladies of Byzantium: its message is their song, and not the tendentious and inflexible monuments which men build to themselves. The split, between change and the unchanging, between body and soul, form and content, directs the poet in the crafting of his art.

But this direction does not lie without the context of a place in time or of a specific point in history. Its placement or displacement is transformed into image and the form of images. The six sections of the poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" are not directly bound to political commentary. In this context the poet revives the image of the swan. But as an image of the soul, the swan is like a troubled mirror which shows "an image of its state"(the soul's) before it is gone from life. That image "can bring wildness, bring a rage/ To end all

things . . . " overcoming even the poetry, the dreams of the poet — dreams which have cracked like an old mask. The men — the great, the wise and the good — who work to construct monuments, become oblivious to the levelling, shrieking wind, and changing seasons. The poet mocks them, and mocks himself in turn "for we/Traffic in mockery." Violence is the spirit of the age ("upon the roads: violence of horses;/ But wearied running round and round. . ."); violence and mockery.

Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind. . .;
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.

The violence, the mockery, the blindness and the tumult, have all come to be characteristic of modernity. Against them, images are impotent; Yeats mocks the feeble, former images, the empty tokens of love ("Bronze peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks. . ."), by contrasting them with the "insolent fiend," Robert Artisson, who "lurches past, his great eyes without thought. . ." He, as an image, is stronger than the images which his image mocks. images thrown up against him are without power; but those which speak his fury, have recognised their source of power, the source which empowers their form. The poem of "Byzantium," so far removed from the determination of a particular age, is nevertheless bound up in the same process. The singing of "Byzantium" does not resist but expresses change; and understanding of that process as source, subject and essential content is what has brought Yeats to maturity as a poet.

The poems I have chosen to discuss first are among the more successful in their achievement of an image through language. The remainder of the poems may be read, relative to them, as a questioning of this achievement, a deconstruction of the expression ; either, in the earlier and preparatory poems, as a working through of its means and possibilities, or, later, as it becomes challenged by the experience of aging — the imminence of death which negates life. Deconstruction of an image is a more gradual process than its achievement.

This awareness of change, not only in the processes of life, but in the consciousness of the writer, is a concern central, even on the syntactical level, to Yeats' poetry. The volume of his poetry published in 1921, slightly before the "Tower" (1923), betrays its concern with the creation of images. Michael Robartes and the Dancer is poetry which deals with the problem of its own imagery in a time of crisis and trouble. That, as a problem, is one of self-criticism. Its process is not simple; from the many modes of reality within which the poet writes, different modes of imaging evolve. What is important, then, is considering the poet's solution and sense of discovery.

The poem, "Image from a Past Life," starts "Never until this night have I been stirred . . . " It comes at the beginning of "Michael Robartes and the Dancer," which is the first of Yeats' more mature volumes of poetry. But why mature; what "discovery" has he made? A Vision , written about this time in the poet's career, reflects his search for a complete mythology to restore the imminence of spirituality to a world from which images as presences are dead. These images have taken on a static quality in his poetry: they would cease to speak outside of the context of the Vision if the descriptive process of allegory were focussed only on its symbols had not on their meaning or enaction. Robartes fascinates Yeats; in the poetry, the 'vision' he has learned from Robartes takes on form not in an isolated context but in the repeated images that the poetry creates. They convey, without interpreting, the process of living, and the experience of good and evil.

The dancer in "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" is taken from a girl whom Robartes fell violently in love and who had "not an idea in his head." She is introduced into his "Double Vision" between a "Sphinx and a Buddha" in the second section, a girl "/That, it may be, had danced her life away,/For not being dead it seemed/ That she of dancing dreamed. . . ." The dual quality of the vision is centered on the conflict between the two perceptions: of the girl, dancing, and the images

Obedient to some hidden magical breath,
They do not feel, so abstract are they,
So dead beyond our death,
Triumph that we obey.

The poem starts each of its first two sections, "On the grey rock of Cashel. . .," once with "I" and once with "the mind's eye." The first perception silences man:

Under blank eyes and fingers never still
The particular is pounded till it is man.
When had I my own?
O not since life began.

The first half of the vision displays the dehumanizing nature of abstraction which is the tendency of literature on the verge of a modern world. Abstraction, with "blank eyes" and "fingers never still" pounds out the form of man from the particular, denying him his nature and his will. The experience of death, obedience, and triumph, separates man from these disconnected images which are "beyond good and evil." Man, obedient to death, suffers a life which these images do not know. Yeats seems to have come to a realization of the incapacity of these images to express and above all to unite man with their "hidden magical breath." He indicates a change in his poetic imagery with the rejection of symbols whose source is distanced from the world.

The second half of the vision is a revelation of the image which he wishes to pursue, which makes clear to him the form of the image which he seeks throughout the two collections which follow.

In contemplation had these three so wrought
Upon a moment, and so stretched it out
That they, time overthrown,
Were dead yet flesh and bone.

The image of the dancer dominates the other two images of Sphinx (intellect) and Buddha (heart), since by "outdancing thought" and bringing "bodily perfection" she stills desire. The achievement of a moment made eternal, of an image fully present, overcomes the abstraction of the first vision, on the "grey rock" of the "cold spirits" under the "old moon" and acts upon the poet with the force of emotion. The poet himself is caught between participation in two worlds; within a ruined hosse—the grey rock or modern world—the vision is not sustained but left a vision; and a double vision, because although now the poet knows the vision that he seeks ("I knew that I had seen, had seen at last. . ."), he is caught in "the commonness of thought," and cannot ignore, as Helen did, the burning of Troy, the modern world. This poem prefigures the argument in the poem "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" which separates the "Buddha" and the "Sphinx" into their most extreme opposition. "An Image from a Past Life" contributes, also through a dialogue whose participants are "he" and "she," to the formulation of an affective image, one which evokes fear. The image is not powerfully present in the poem, except in its origin: a scream "from terrified, invisible beast or bird" which creates the "Image of poignant recollection." Yeats weaves it into the poem by the effect it has upon the two lovers, rather than by the success of the image itself, which does not create but is created by the poem's mood. What is most startling and effective, is the sudden emergence of an image, only half recognized, from memory , and its impact on the voices which speak within the poem, but do not seem to carry outside of it.

The rest of the opens in this volume pick up the subdued voice of this image and take account of it, bringing it to self-consciousness and to reality, so that it is not only the voice of the poet who, as if reflecting the unconscious of the age, speaks for the poem's consciousness rather than for his own. The imagery is sparse in this poem. It is the first which has used poetry to speak for a political situation, for the death of "MacDonagh and MacBride/ And Connolly and Pearse. . . ." Since the Irish movement for political identity was founded on reclaiming the native tradition of language and literature, the poet is expected to give significance to these deaths. "Change" is expressed in rhythm, which he has shortened from the free flow of a ballad to these bound and breathless lines which prevent the easing of sorrow. The refrain, "All changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born. . ." contains the only extended metaphor in the poem, that of birth. The threat of this change, for and beyond which the poet speaks, has forced each man to assume responsibility, but has turned their hearts to stone. Within the metaphor of birth that the poet creates and the event of the deaths which he commemorates, he defines

. . .our part

To murmur name upon name
As mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;

The naming of the birth calls upon the strength in imagery that is finally realized in "The Second Coming." "A Prayer for My Daughter" recreates the situation of naming and of calling to life against a political stage. Birth, drawing on subconscious formation of imagery, is linked with fear in the face of change. unnamed, birth promises utter destruction and the domination of inhuman, abstract thought. This threat, like a cruel mark reflects and mocks the project of the poet in some of his later poems. These self-estranged symbols have their origin in the embittered love that Yeats felt toward Maud Gonne whose mind, turned to political concern, was so estranged from her heart that it suggested the uncontrolled duality which he saw in the age.

The former, non-political position of "innocence" allowed for the calling forth of natural images. The poet wonders whether the hull of "On a Political Prisoner" might be the emblem of her youth, and whether, even then, it contained the symptoms of her discontent:

Sea-borne, or balanced on the air
When first it sprang out of the nest
Upon some lofty rock to stare
Upon the cloudy canopy,
While under its storm-beaten breast
Cried out the hollows of the sea. . . .

That "crying out" requires a more complex image, one that does contain its discontent. This image becomes a projected symbol of man, one that represents his reality and not his dreams; his self-imaging which, in the distance it takes from him, the control it takes over him—like the power of abstract thought—becomes self-estranging. The situation at the beginning of the "Second Coming" expresses this estrangment of man from his own self-image or mask; the symbol of the rough beast slouching is born out of it.

That "rough beast,"
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs. . .

combines the images of the "Demon" (intellect) and the "Beast" (desire) which have been cast as protagonists on the stage of the modern world ("The Leaders of the Crowd"). The metaphor of birth reappears to betray the generation of the beast in a world oblivious to it. The blank gaze of the intellect, unseeing (as in "The Double Vision. . .") is both mirror and blindness; the movement expresses the union of Sphinx and Buddha in the dancer of the same poem.

This image is drawn from a mythology ("a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi "). It relies on the mythology to empower the poetry with a reality separate from the image —a projected fantasy—of the poet. Unlike the "Image from a past Life" (which remains image—is no dancer and has no claim to context) it is drawn from revelation, from a collective memory and not from simple recollection. Called forth from the modern world, it is its destiny, its fated cataclysm, its hidden reality. This presence overpowers the poet's active voice, is created from the same conflict of mind and body, word and object, self and projected self, that creates the poem of Leda and the Swan. Locked in the context of the world, it becomes its antithetical self, forcing it to consciousness and to reality.

"A Prayer for my Daughter" projects the qualities which most contain lust and "the bitter, . . . abstract" mind onto the stormy world to defend another birth—that of the poet's daughter. Written as simply as a lullaby, it expresses the most personal voice of the poet, the most sincere, the most distressed, trying to recapture "radical innocence": to create in her a living image which is "self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting . . . ." This image is radically opposed to the self-born, self-mocking, self-estranging imagery of fearfulness in the poetry that directs itself to the external and political world. The poet's concern here overrides the shrieking of the wind, creates an "eye," a stillness in the storm:

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower. . .
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum.
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

These elements—the sea, the wind, the tower; scream, imagine, dance; the future, the reverie; the "murderous innocence of the sea"—recalled from the landscape and from symbols of Yeats' imagination, are held together in the poet's deepest wish for his child, and for himself as poet: "How but in custom and in ceremony/ Are innocence and beauty born?" The poet's clean-hewn, deep-rooted language retains his power of creation and of affirmation, within which he confesses that

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late. . . .

Possessed by fear still, although that fear may be contained by ceremony, his mind does not accede to hatred but takes on the burden of imaging his untamed time, of bringing to consciousness forces which shape man's destiny.

The linking of "image" with history in a non-mythological dimension has forced the poet to shed the innocence of his former imagery. Poetry has emerged for Yeats as a two-faced reality, joining images from "Animus Mundi" and from the world itself in a moment of self-realization. Possession of consciousness has opened up awareness of unconscious which through a process of identification with the age projects itself as its "antithetical self," its savage being. This division, which has begun to be addressed in the poems of 1921 ("Michael Robartes and the Dancer"), poems which possess a constant integrity and power, has been explored in the form and subject matter (less in the language and more in the use of "innocent" imagery (emblem) and theme (mask) of the earlier poetry. This poetry seems still to be hiding from itself, although "Responsibilities" (1914), even in its title, is a call to "poetic" power.

Yeats is beginning to realize that his vocation as poet is a vocation to life and not only to words or images; the dedicatory phrases he has chosen ("In dreams begin responsibility," "how I am fallen from myself; for a long time now/ I have not seen the Prince of Change in my dreams. . .") betray a reaction to his earlier poetry as mere irresponsible dreaming: dreaming that has been in some sense "true," but less capable of arousing grief, or representing life, of realizing an imaginative insight.

The dedication is addressed to his ancestors with an awareness that his writing is action; that while they have traded, taught and died, he asks their pardon because

Although I am close on forty-nine
I have no child. I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine. . . .

"Prayer for my Daughter" will be a poem for his child; "Easter 1916" a poem built on blood; but even without this experience at his back, this final line reveals Yeats' awareness of the broader function of writing which, if more than a wasteful virtue or barren passion, can speak not only for himself but for others — for his fathers. Responsibilities , as a series of poems, becomes a bridge between his youth and maturity as a poet, between his dreams and commitment to life in language.

What needs to be bridged is not , however, bridged by a simple assuming of responsibility. In each line, in each word of these poems, the gap between language and life poses the same challenge of "construction"—of a bridge. The poet struggles to bring his poems to reality; later, the poems take on that struggle. Particularly in Ireland, "reality" includes political strife.

But from this context, the reader may be tempted to laugh at the central situation of the first poem, "Grey Rock." Its situation is far removed from "life": a dinner of the gods, enclosed within a dinner of Yeats and his fellow men, ". . . Poets with whom I learned my trade. . . ." The apology in the first stanza ("Though you may think I waste my breath. . .") emphasizes the split between image and a situation where there is room for the poet to doubt himself. The scene of the gods operates as an analogue to the situation of the poet. This situation takes on a dimension of crisis—in the outside (the poet's dinner) for the poet and in the inside (among the gods) for the poetry. (The divided form separates the problems of the poet in writing the poem from the problems of the poem in expressing itself, in finding its identity in its own language.) In the context of Responsibilities , the man's choice is between action and poetry; Yeats justifies his choice of poetry.

I have kept my faith, though faith was tried,
To that rock-born, rock-wandering foot,
And the world's altered since you died,
And I am in no good repute
With the loud host before the sea,
That think sword-strokes were better meant
Than lover's music—let that be,
So that the wandering foot's content.

"[L]over's music" which Yeats uses to gently denigrate his own poetry (and yet defend it) becomes, in defense, a trope for all reaching for perfection of the soul, the quality which remains lyric throughout the most shaken of Yeats' poems. He turns to "Rock-Nurtured Aoife" as audience rather than to the gods who mock her love for man, which brings on her suffering. The poet speaks as the dead man whose "faith was tried" in choosing whether to cause sorrow but keep his promise to Aoife or to take action and ensure his life. This form of allegory, of story translated through situation into a figure for the poet's pledge, retains a division in the text which Yeats' later work resolves, a division in form and in intention, between its language and its identity. An earlier poem, "To a Child Dancing in the Wind," suggests images which will be developed later: the dancer, the loose hair and "monstrous crying of the wind," the dancer's innocence. Yet the second half of the poem, "Two Years Later," shows the poet incapable of communicating with this child: "I could have warned you; but you are young,/ So we speak a different tongue. . . ." The poet is bearer of a truth that he does not want to reveal to the child. But he is still the child here and has not fully faced the truth that he is bearer of:

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

His resolution to "walk naked" can be seen by contrasting some later poems with the last three poems of this volume, "An Appointment," "The Magi," and "The Dolls," each in some sense a naive image. In the first, the squirrel, an unappointed official, mocks the poet who is out of humor with government more effectively than would the "tame will, timid brain, and heavy knitting of the brow. . ." of some man-made image. This early poem acknowledges two sides of the argument between politics and nature (history and mythology) which turns the poet to a search for natural symbols among the more overtly political ones. "The Magi" ironically captures the moment of birth in the "Second Coming" without reaching its climax, either in language or in image. The image of "the pale unsatisfied ones" seeking another birth which is more a crucifixion ("The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. . ."), succeeds particularly in creating an audience, like an army ("faces like rain-beaten stones" and with "eyes still fixed. . ."), which becomes the subject and not the image of later poems. Metaphor, or a single image or scene used to point to another image or scene—poetry dealing in ideas and not in objects, — is ejected from Yeats' poetic language. A story like "The Dolls" used to tell another, hides the story of its telling, a story which Yeats wants finally to face. These images have no experience of evil: they lie outside of Yeats; later, active symbol. The difference lies in the non-referentiality of the later poetry, which is linked to its image as substance and not as expression awkwardly separate, which contains the leap of analogy expected of the reader of figurative language. Yeats moves from figurative and allegorical to symbolic language to language that acts to unify itself as sign with referent and to embody the challenge which defeated the order of his earlier poetry.