Yeats and Women

171 poet, whose hinge is precisely that piece of Aberglaube about the wife's jealousy, the love potion and the subsequent madness. Dr. Harris then enquires : why no gloss on Munster: 1534, but 0, my Harris, there is! on page 329 and I even furnish the titles of two books for those who might be amused by those hideous theocrats. Dr. Harris was fooled because the note relating to the Anabaptists was part of a general note on Johnson's three sonnets about various antinomians and did not appear under the actual head of the poem. While one does not expect notes to be read with a Fundamentalist ferocity of attention, one may reasonably expect them not to be eyed like the flier for a more than dubious used car dealer. But Dr. Harris is correct in saying I should have glossed Julian at Eleusis, which depends very largely on Julian's revival of Pagan Mysteries in a hostile Christian context. I do furnish local allusions, but not a general note on that interesting Emperor. Towards the end of his review Dr. Harris observes that the first line of the King Charles poem,"Sombre and rich the skies," is an oxymoron. But the line is surely a pretty piece of antithesis as the next line makes clear: "Great glooms and starry plains": Funeral velvet rich with star shapes. The more violent figure tends to melt the copula, anyway. Some errors of commission I have already amended for a purely Platonic third edition. Perhaps the "Chaldea" of line 8 of Bagley Wood might have been located geographically and culturally. The title of Deslderia might have been glossed as "Longings"; and in that same poem untravelled readers might like to know that the Hill of Howth lies at the mouth of the Liffey, fronting Dublin Bay. And there are some typos. On page 362 I suspect that an overconscientious copy editor changed my original Letters to the New Island to the plausible and perfectly incorrect Letters to the New Ireland and on page lxxxi of the Introduction "G. A. Brooke" should read "S. A. Brooke" while two items that only recently became known to me may be added to the manuscript and bibliography sections. There are Johnson letters at Princeton and The Ballade of the Caxton Head published by James Tregaskis of Holborn in 1925 gives us a facsimile of Johnson's holograph. Other errors of omission and commissions will be gratefully received by postcard or elephant folio. Ian Fletcher Arizona State University 7. YEATS AND WOMEN Herbert J. Levine, Yeats's Daimonic Renewal. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983. $44.95; Gloria C. Kline, The Last Courtly Lover: Yeats and the Idea of Woman. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983. $39.95 Studies in Modern Literature is a series chosen from the doctoral dissertations sent to University Microfilms International. The general editor is A. Walton Litz, and more than twenty titles have been published on the classical modern writers, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Faulkner, Joyce, Lawrence et al. Richard J. Finneran acts as consulting editor for titles on Yeats. The two books under review are united by their relevance to Yeats's relation to women. Herbert J. Levine's Yeats Daimonic Renewal offers a comprehensive study of the role played by the Daimon in Yeats's poetic theory 172 and practice. In many ways this is an admirable book, clearly argued and stressing the importance of Per Arnica Silentia Lunae. Per Arnica is a very Important text that has been treated by others but, with the exception of Robert Langbaum's work in The Mysteries of Identity, never very fully. Levine treats the text and the related poems and plays so that he provides a fine context for the ideas of Per Arnica which both tests and enriches the work. He also makes use of the recent Harper and Hood critical edition of the 1925 version of A Vision, so that he can see the biographical as well as theoretical references of The Only Jealousy of Emer. Levine reads dramatic and lyric poetry with extremely good sense. In treating the Daimon, Levine makes one dubious assumption. He takes the valid...