Dance and Rhythm: Their Meaning in Yeats and Noh

DANCE AND RHYTHM: THEIR MEANING IN YEATS AND NOH IN YEATS AND THE NOH POETRY emerges primarily through symbols and ideas. Yet their poetry truly exists when they are elevated into the dimension of a static art where transcendent calm and repose lend an atmosphere of dreamy torpor. This is stasis or yugen of poetry, the supreme moment of aesthetic suspension that brings the mind into harmony with the ways of the universe as well as with its own inner self. The harmony is a musical one, orchestrated toward, an epiphany and vision, sustained by a poetic image powerfully symbolizing its deep spiritual import. As Yeats himself tells us, this is a condition of chimera , an experience that imparts the maiden truth that "art is art, because it is not nature." Being remote from nature and reality, their poetry is necessarily "strange." This strangeness and tranquility in Yeats and the Noh is primarily derived from the ambience of dance and rhythm, a matter not too clearly understood now despite the fact that dance and rhythm frequently constitute the whole meaning of their drama. As suggested by Frank Kermode, dance is a poetic "image" in Yeats and the Noh and may very well belong to a romantic tradition.1 Yet its poetry is an example of a much more esoteric and musically profound synthesis with a common principle of art and philosophy underlying both dramas to characterize their spiritual affinity. Essentially, their dance and music are a device of Gesormtkunstwerke and an exigency of single poetic image. They serve a specific aesthetic purpose by producing a bunched, deeply inward emotion through the coordinated measures of tempo and silence. Structurally, they are an important axis of the play, as much as they are, aesthetically, the emotional focus of the poetry. In Yeats, the idea of dance is the result of a palpable imitation of the Noh. In the Noh, dance is the external and physical substitute for the internal, invisible realities of the consummate beauty and spirituality. All of Yeats's plays modeled after the Noh, except Purgatory, may well be called the "dance plays" because in them, as in most Noh plays, dance occurs in the most crucial or climactic mo1 Frank Kermode draws attention to Yeats's discovery of the Noh drama around 1916 and to several of the dance plays he wrote since on the central image of the dancer and the "woman's beauty." He uses the terms "flower" and "yugen" but neither explains their meaning nor cites parallels from the Japanese plays. See Frank Kermode. Romantic Image (New York. 1964). pp. 77-91. 195 196 MODERN DRAMA September ment of the drama. In fact, in 192t" Yeats grouped four of his visionary plays (At the Hawk's WeU, The OnVy Jealousy of Em.er, The DrcMning of the Bones, and Calvary) in a separate cover and published them under the title Four Plays for Dancers, in which the musicians were to "accompany [the dancer's] movement with drum and .gong, or deepen the emotion of the words with zither or flute." In the Yeatsian and the Noh tradition, dance is a parable of the whirling circle. It literally betokens the turning motions of the spires and the gyres. Yeats is presenting the image of dance, wheel, and the double cone when he says, in his mystical moments, that "The resolved antinomy appears not in a lofty source but in the whirlpool's motionless center, or beyond its edge." Embracing in its synthetic gesture an antinomian philosophy of circle and center, the dance allegorizes the tempo of life and the silence of the universe. It ritualizes a communication between man and memory, between this life and the spiritual one beyond. There is in it a sense of finality, of total extinction into the Self, of fading into "possession" of eternity, like the still posture of the fast-spinning top. Through dance we fix our tranced vision, and the vision, says the poet, "prolongs its powers by rhythm and pattern." Yeats goes a step further, and sees dance as a ceremonious expression of the beauty of the body. The whirlwind of the body is an embodiment of beauty because...