william butler yeats—irish (1865-1939)

William Butler Yeats—Irish (1865-1939)

ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

William Butler Yeats ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

"Ultimately," Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "there is only one poet, that infinite one who makes himself felt, here and there through the ages in a mind that can surrender to him." The Irish poet William Butler Yeats was one who surrendered. Through the mediation of his wife, Yeats was the beneficiary of an inexplicable dictation.

Beginning in 1917, soon after his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Leeds, Yeats' wife began the automatic writing that eventually culminated in A Vision. Though originally intended only as a feigned diversion for her husband, Mrs. Yeats soon discovered that her stunt had actually connected her to what Yeats liked to call the "Communicators," spiritual beings, teachers, who, over the next seven years offered instruction into the mysteries of soul and world, cosmos and history which would give shape to much of Yeats' later work.

William Butler Yeats


This gift enabled Yeats, in the words of biographer Richard Ellmann, to "slowly [weld] himself and his surroundings into his myth," Though Yeats had been tempted at first to give up the writing of verse in response to the wisdom literature he had been granted, the voices rejected such an intention, insisting instead that they had come to bring him "metaphors for poetry." Without A Vision, Ellmann writes, Yeats "would have been remembered as a remarkable minor poet who achieved a diction more powerful than that of his contemporaries but who, except in a handful of poems, did not have much to say with it." With it, Yeats became "not merely a poet, but the symbol of a poet" (220). Ellmann offers the following summary of the actual method of dictation:

William Butler YeatsENGL 2030—Summer 2013

| Lavery

In the excitement of marriage, Mrs. Yeats discovered that she possessed [the] ability to suspend her conscious faculties and would sit down for two or three hours a day with her tireless husband, he putting the questions and she replying to them in automatic script in a notebook. (222)

William Butler Yeats

Leda and the SwanA sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?And how can body, laid in that white rush,But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air,Did she put on his knowledge with his powerBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop?


William Butler YeatsLeda and the SwanA sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?And how can body, laid in that white rush,But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air,Did she put on his knowledge with his powerBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Nikolai Kalmakov: Leda and the Swan (1917)



II sought a theme and sought for it in vain,I sought it daily for six weeks or so.Maybe at last, being but a broken man,I must be satisfied with my heart, althoughWinter and summer till old age beganMy circus animals were all on show,Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.


From The Circus Animals' Desertion Those masterful images because completeGrew in pure mind, but out of what began?A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slutWho keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,I must lie down where all the ladders startIn the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.


From A Prayer for my Daughter

“all hatred driven hence, / The soul recovers radical innocence / And learns at last that it is self-delighting, / Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, / And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will. . . . .


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN II walk through the long schoolroom questioning;A kind old nun in a white hood replies;The children learn to cipher and to sing,To study reading-books and histories,To cut and sew, be neat in everythingIn the best modern way — the children’s eyesIn momentary wonder stare uponA sixty-year-old smiling public man.


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN III dream of a Ledaean body, bentAbove a sinking fire, a tale that sheTold of a harsh reproof, or trivial eventThat changed some childish day to tragedy —Told, and it seemed that our two natures blentInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,Into the yolk and white of the one shell.


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN IIIAnd thinking of that fit of grief or rageI look upon one child or t’other thereAnd wonder if she stood so at that age —For even daughters of the swan can shareSomething of every paddler’s heritage —And had that colour upon cheek or hair,And thereupon my heart is driven wild:She stands before me as a living child.


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN IVHer present image floats into the mind —Did Quattrocento finger fashion itHollow of cheek as though it drank the windAnd took a mess of shadows for its meat?And I though never of Ledaean kindHad pretty plumage once — enough of that,Better to smile on all that smile, and showThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN VWhat youthful mother, a shape upon her lapHoney of generation had betrayed,And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escapeAs recollection or the drug decide,Would think her Son, did she but see that shapeWith sixty or more winters on its head,A compensation for the pang of his birth,Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN VIPlato thought nature but a spume that playsUpon a ghostly paradigm of things;Solider Aristotle played the tawsUpon the bottom of a king of kings;World-famous golden-thighed PythagorasFingered upon a fiddle-stick or stringsWhat a star sang and careless Muses heard:Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN VIIBoth nuns and mothers worship images,But those the candles light are not as thoseThat animate a mother’s reveries,But keep a marble or a bronze repose.And yet they too break hearts — O presencesThat passion, piety or affection knows,And that all heavenly glory symbolise —O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;


AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN VIIILabour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul.Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?

william butler yeats—irish (1865-1939)

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