Yeats's Changing Metaphors for the Otherworld

YEATS'S CHANGING METAPHORS FOR THE OTHERWORLD YEATS'S FATHER ONCE TOLD HIM that poetry concerns itself with the creation of Paradises, and it is certain that the Otherworlds invented or adapted by a poet, whether demonic, purgatorial, or paradisal, are one index to the bias of his imagination. Yeats's multiple Otherworlds , critiques of "this world" both personal and social, are found throughout his prose and poetry, although I confine myself here only to the plays: even those alone, however, are enough to indicate the range of the Yeatsian Otherworld, alternately somber and gay, languorous and active, visionary and bitter. And Yeats's metaphors for the Otherworld provide for some reflections, as I read them, on changes in Yeats's view of the function of art. The Otherworlds Yeats created he also, for the most part, inherited: there appear fitfully throughout his works almost all the notions of Paradise, Fairy Land, the Elysian Fields, and so on, that are common stock in folk tale, myth, and religion, and even the more eccentric Swedenborgian Otherworld is given houseroom. But as in all drawings from ample mythologies, the selection is determined by the characteristic impulse of the poet, and Yeats's Fairyland is neither Spenser's nor Shelley's, but his own, just as his Purgatory, whatever it owes to Dante or Swedenborg, is a mixture uniquely compounded. In the early plays, the divorce between this world and the Otherworld is complete and tragic. The Countess Cathleen1 (1892) distinguishes the "objective" female figure, Cathleen, embodying the social virtues of self-sacrifice and care of the poor, from a "subjective " male figure, the poet, who has commerce with the world of the Sidhe, or fairy host, a world he offers to Cathleen if she will submit to the individual "destiny" of sexual love rather than the communal destiny of social "love." Although the play is phrased in Christian terms, the tru~ conflict lies not between eros and agape 1 All parenthetical page references are to the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York, 19'53). Dates given (taken from George Brandon Saul's invaluable Prolegomena to the Study of Yeats's Plays, Philadephia, 1958), are those of first publication, followed in some cases by a second date indicating the revised version being used here; the dating in the Collected Plays is deceptive. I must pass over many questions of interpretation in this paper; since these difficult plays are still being debated, I use provisionally my own conclusions, aware that the obscurity of ,the texts invites others. For further exposition of my own readings, see my Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). 1964 YEATS'S CHANGING METAPHORS 309 but between poetry (bound to the Sidhe) and social action.2 The tragedy is unequivocal: the Yeatsian Otherworld cannot intersect at all with the world of the poor, and though Cathleen is translated to heaven in a Pre-Raphaelite apotheosis, the poet is left wishing for death, his songs unsingable without their object. On the other hand, no attempt is made to deny the chilly brevity of the Otherworld: the poet says of the Sidhe that "there is nothing that will stop in their heads,/ They've such poor memories." (p. 12) Maeve, the Queen of the Sidhe, has even forgotten the name of the man who died of love for her: CATHLEEN. Is it because they have short memories They live so long? ALEEL. What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink? And they've a dizzy, everlasting fire. (p. 12) The domestic, the human, exacts vows and memory; the Sidhe, though their hard, gem-like flame is intense, expend it on successive objects and know nothing of fidelity. Thirty years later, in The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), Yeats raises the same problem: in the land of the Sidhe, Noone speaks of broken troth, For all have washed out of their eyes Wind-blown dirt of their memories To improve their sight. (p. 192) Aleel, the poet, has tried to have both worlds, the human love of Cathleen and the visionary love of the Sidhe, and ends with neither. The Shadowy...