Yeats Annual V

31:4 Book Reviews Joyce's Use of Colors is highly readable, with a fluency that is surprising for a commentary on impossible text. It enriches one's sense of Joyce without radically altering it, and it treats its task with considerable intelligence, even caginess. Joseph Voelker Franklin & Marshall College YEATS ANNUAL V Richard J. Finneran, ed. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, V. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987. $49.95 The latest Yeats annual, edited by Richard Finneran, once again demonstrates the liveliness and diversity that characterize recent Yeats studies. A wide range of subjects, methods, and aims is found in the seven articles and ten reviews that comprise the chief part of this annual, but this range is echoed in other inclusions, such as K.P.S. Jochum's bibliography for 1985-86, and the 1986 dissertation abstracts compiled by Gwenn de Mauriac. It is difficult to imagine another poet who could, in one year, inspire dissertations on topics as various as the Irish peasant, the female image, Indian art and philosophy, passionate syntax, ironic deflation, the metaphor of silence, poetry as epistemology , poetry as meditation, and poetry as prophecy. The first, and longest, article in the annual, "Sailing from Avalon: Yeats's First Play, Vivien and Time," is a valuable addition to the library of anybody interested in Yeats's work. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark have carefully prepared an edition of a play that Yeats wrote when he was only eighteen or nineteen, using two unpublished manuscripts from the National Library of Ireland . The article also provides some of the biographical background to the play, identifying Yeats's first love-interest, the tantalizing Laura Armstrong, as the model for the witch Vivien. Yeats himself acknowledged that "Laura is to me always a pleasant memory she woke me from the metallic sleep of science and set me writing my first play" (8). But, as the Clarks point out, the play sprang from Yeats's love for literature as much as from his love for a girl, and therefore reveals his early reading habits. The images, settings and themes of the play have much in common with other late Victorian art, and perhaps most noticeably in its fascination with Arthurian material. The Clarks demonstrate that the most likely literary model for Yeats's Vivien is Tennyson 's Vivien from the Idylls of the King, and in doing so they point to a literary connection that has not been much explored before. The Clarks also situate Vivien and Time in the context of Yeats's later work, noting how some of his life-long themes and concerns show up even in this first play. For instance, the "theme of endless search is one of the most important in Yeats's canon" (39), and it is this theme that organizes Vivien and Time. The witch Vivien takes her revenge on her poet, Clarin, by tormenting him with "souls of unrest," and his sweetheart, Asphodel, who inherits his enchantment 507 31:4 Book Reviews when he dies, says: "Now all is fading and I feel alone,/ My whole soul bitterly athirst for peace" (36). Even at the very beginning of his career, then, Yeats treated "glamour" or "enchantment," not as a form of mild hypnosis or a dumbfounding trance, but as a goad that tosses its subject into a world of constant craving and restless wandering, that makes him, like the Ancient Mariner, a victim of his own perpetually unsatisfied desires. Edward Lense offers a new perspective on a familiar poem in "Sailing the Seas to Nowhere: Inversions of Yeats's Symbolism in 'Sailing to Byzantium.'" His thesis is that, given Yeats's system, the symbols and imagery of "Sailing to Byzantium" are intended to underscore the scornful bittemess of the old man who speaks the poem, and the ultimate unattainability of a restful or consummate paradise. Lense claims that the old man's longing for perfection is essentially a parody of Yeats's belief that beauty inheres in that which is incarnate and subject to continual change. The article is convincingly written , but Lense concentrates primarily on the poem's images, which, as has...