Counter-Components in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well

Counter-,Components in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well KATHLEEN M. VOGT .. BY NOW MANY HAVE GNEN ATTENTION to At the Hawk's Well as a turning point in Yeats's drama and as a peculiar sort of play. But much remains to be said about its exact nature and the point in Yeats's development it represents. Allegorical readings, equally contrary pronouncements about tone, considerations of dramatic influences and resemblances - are interesting and do seem to have been invited by the play itself. 1 For, to a degree unusual in Yeats, At the Hawk's Well is enigmatic and unfinished. It hints at themes it fails to express clearly or develop fully; it is composed of structural elements that are novel and contradictory. The work seems to need further shaping, but it is rich in shapes. Most significantly, it gives images suggestive of man's physical and emotional being the place in Yeats's theatre which he had previously granted only the ratiocinative mind and the rhetoric expressive of it. Yeats's first plays were admittedly not rhetorical, but the rhetorical ones appear an advance into reality in relation to them. Otherworldly landscapes and dramatic situations derived from the intrusion of otherworldly agents in the human scene provided the centers for The Wanderings of Oisin and The Land of Heart's Desire, and the early versions of The Countess Cathleen as well. As Forgael sailed the Shadowy Waters, the Wise Man debated in The Hour-Glass, or Seanchan resisted the king in The King's Threshold, however, humans initiated and sustained the drama, through their thoughts and their talk. The intellectual character of these major protagonists and the plays they dominated made these works more dynamically human than the early drama, in which man seemed more pawn than agent, but it left the plays weak in physical or emotional reality too. Yeats appeared to enjoy the promise and threat of perfecting a kind of rhetorical drama or discussion play - a mode which At the Hawk's Well was to interrupt and which the discussion plays 319 320 KATHLEEN M. VOGT themselves suggest, in retrospect at least, would be interrupted. In the works dominated by the rhetoric of intellectual major protagonists , there were frequently two indications of Yeats's interest in a plane of reality different than that represented by abstract thought. His major characters Forgael and Seanchan, of The Shadowy Waters and The King's Threshold, respectively, hoped, for example, to realize their search for the ideal by embedding or discovering it in a world. Moreover, these plays and others contained secondary elements and patterns of a less abstract kind than the intellectual characters and their discourse represented. Secondary characters who had little gift for dream or thought opposed Forgael and Seanchan, for example, and helped to bring into view the dimension of circumstantial reality which suggested that poets, along with more ordinary men, were subject to external opposition and part of a naturalistic movement from life to death. Yeats was unable to suggest this dimension very convincingly in these plays, however. His apparent recognition of the place of body and world in the reality of the human condition was at odds with his means of representing life. He allowed his dreamers and thinkers to exist apart from, although adjacent to their apparent opposites, to the extent that when he attempted to convict his major characters of bodiliness and subject them to circumstances apart from those expressive of their own choices and wills, they escaped him or the sad fates he attempted to impose upon them. What matter, for example, that Forgael and Seanchan died or appeared doomed to die? They, as much as the Wise Man of The Hour-Glass, were but the vessels of theories or ambitions. And, although their plays seemed designed to expose or explore the limitations of their ambitions, the characters themselves existed on the level of thought, relatively untouched and untouchable by mundane or naturalistic forces. In plays such as The Shadowy Waters, The King's Threshold, and The Hour-Glass then, Yeats circumscribed the mind with hints of the flesh, but he did no more than that. Possibly he was himself...