“The Artifice of Eternity”—Reading Yeats

Or reading, at least, some major poems of his, and others in the light of those. The reading I have in mind is not a scholarly one in the sense of being a professional study of Yeats; it is instead a reading from the point of view of someone who finds Yeats’s poetry fulfilling, acute, and pleasurable, one who would immediately make readable sense of it (to the extent that that is possible) and do so partly through extensive quotation from the poems. This is not the only way of reading Yeats. It is personal, derived from a prolonged acquaintance with the poetry, much of it got by heart—which getting, it seems to me, is the due of a good poem. I shall be concerned particularly with a large view, rather than with Yeats’s obvious more immediate and appealing gift for imagery, as in the case of the “marvellous empty sea-shell flung / Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams” in “Ancestral Houses” from Meditations In Time of Civil War (1923), or with his use of abstraction as though it were imagery, as in the case of the “magnanimities of sound” of the linnet in “A Prayer For My Daughter.”

The mind of a poet, certainly of such a thoroughgoing poet as Yeats, is bigger than any particular development. To repeat, I should like to dwell here and there on this or that point, being content to follow the single thread of what I have to say in a labyrinthine way so that the effects of the poetry are not sacrificed to mere scholarly forward progress. From this point of view we shall see that some of the earlier work, poem or play, is created in much the same way as some of the later work.

The peculiar unity of Yeats’s poetry emerges out of diversity: the contrast between the physical life, both necessary and beloved, and the transcendent vision of art. Often, as is well known, Yeats will complain about, even denounce physical circumstance, especially that of growing old; he will hold up instead the vision of art as eternal. This eternity, it should be emphasized, is the orthodox traditional one; not the infinite time of Shakespeare’s sonnets—“When in eternal lines to time thou growest”—but the single, simple timeless moment of Parmenides, Plato, and Boethius.

The obvious poem to begin with is “Sailing to Byzantium” from The Tower (1928). Yeats declares in A Vision—a prose meditation (which grew out of his experiments with automatic writing with his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees) on the intersections of philosophy, history, the occult, and the life of the imagination—that were he given a chance to visit a place in antiquity, Byzantium, “a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato,” would be that place. “I think I could find in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even.” For poetic insight the supernatural is the essential thing. In “Sailing” Yeats quits Ireland, in some symbolic sense, as “no country for old men,” and sails the seas to “the holy city of Byzantium.” Ireland is too much a place where “whatever is begotten, born and dies,” is commended by “fish, flesh, or fowl,” the latter being “birds in the trees / —Those dying generations—at their song.” Such a mere stream of life inhabits a quite different world from the eternal, supernatural, transcendent one of art: “Caught in that sensual music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”

Here we turn aside a little from the labyrinth. The mere stream of life, as opposed to the simple, singular, eternal beauty, is depicted in “Easter 1916.” The leaders of the rebellion, executed by the British, had in life been thought by Yeats to have, like himself, “lived where motley is worn.” They were good for “polite meaningless words” or a joke aimed at them “around the fire at the club,” but their deaths changed all that: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible...