A dual nature. The intertwined carnality and nobility. William Butler Yeats. With age, his imagery turned sensual and direct. A wild wicked old man he would call himself, who regretted the celibacy of his youth and for whom the act of love was now chosen as a “second best”
You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attendance upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?
Yeats was the last of the Homeric succession of poets who wrote more for the ear than the eye. Yeats poetry, whether the vague verse of his youth or the taut lines of his age, has the singing quality that cannot be defined: it is the music of incantation. The melody that he gave to his lines he evolved by muttering aloud, chanting, singing to himself. Even in the delirium of his dying, his lips still formed words.
Edward Steichen photo. 1932. ---...Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. Bloom charged that Yeats “abused the Romantic tradition” in these lines. But Yeats would have shown Bloom the contempt he deserves; in one of Yeats’s letters we can read: “I am full of life and not too disturbed by the enemies I must make. This is the proposition on which I write: There is now overwhelming evidence that man stands between eternities, that of his family and that of his soul. I apply those beliefs to literature and politics and show the change they must make. . . . My belief must go into what I write, even if I estrange friends; some when they see my meaning set out in plain print will hate me for poems which they have thought meant nothing.”--- Read More:http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/william-butler-yeats/
Somewhere he had wrote that when he was a young man he had made old men’s verses but when he was old his verse became young. It became not so much young as timeless. Yeats lived a succession of poses- romantic, nationalist, and mystic. Even the aloof archpoet was a pose. He liked to think of himself as concealed by succession of masks, until the mask image became an obsession with him. Yet, at the end in his noble poem, The Circus Animals Desertion, he had the courage to drop all his poses, put off all his masks. His themes, his concealments, his pretensions became for him toys; circus animals he called them.
I 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, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what….
until finally he was left
…Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
portrait, charcoal, John Singer Sargent---“Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses,” W. B. Yeats wrote in his Autobiography. “I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem ‘Innisfree,’ my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.”--- Read More:http://flipsideflorida.wordpress.com/category/john-singer-sargent/
The later Yeats was often enigmatic and it was never certain what he meant at all times, but always, there was an extraordinary melody of line that carried one along:
I lie awake night
r night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman’s reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
And all seems evil until I
Sleepless would lie down and die.
Yeats, Ben Bulben:
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
It is a question whether Yeats intended his cryptic epitaph for his dead self or whether he saw himself as the rider passing by- or both. There is an equal enigma about his reburial from France to Ireland in 1948. The coffin exhumed by the sexton for Roquebrune cemetery was not opened for identification. When it was first seen in the chapel at Sligo, the Drumcliff church, there was no mark of earth on it.
The polished wood looked unstained after nine years underground, and the brass fittings glistened. It was carried down the steep rock path to the town square, where it lay in state for a day.There it was seen by many. And yet there were some who said it did not contain Yeat’s body at all.
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