Focus: William Butler Yeats 1865-1939

by : Don Taylor

In his early Pre-Raphaelite days, William Butler Yeats "hid his face amid a crowd of stars." As he matured, his work was all blood, bone, intellect, -- the whole man, not the Theosophical, dreamy, ascetic, intuitive man who believed the way to reality was through secret and ancient wisdom, fairy tales and folklore, and a return to the cultural life of Eire ( Ireland ). These beliefs came to be known as the Celtic revival. The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 to promote the study of ancient Irish literature and the preservation of Gaelic as the racial language.

Yeats wrote poem after poem, in these early days, blazoned with pale fire, mystic and mistry music, dreamworks, and romantic symbolism. But he was not senti- mental, not concerned with self. He wrote, "Sentimentality is deceiving one's self." Again, we have a poet who writes with objective emotion. His was "as cold and as passionate as the dawn."

Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature says, "Symbolism ... is seen under one disquise or another in every great imaginative writer." Symbolism is the brick and mortar that is the poem and that holds the poem together. Consider Burns', " The white moon is setting behind the white wave/ and Time is setting with me, O! " "The whiteness, the moon and the wave, taken together-- and the last melancholy cry-- evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colors and sounds and forms," said Yeats, responding to the poem.

Compatriot to symbols are allusions. If I name Odysseus, I reference wandering and the faithfulness of his wife; Pluto, a hard man weeping at sweet music; Helen, beauty; purple, royalty; roof-leveling wind, the end of aristocracy.

Yeats owes his eternal greatness to his use of symbols and allusions.
Symbols work to intensify and to the avoidance of direct naming.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap his hands and sing, ...
(from Sailing to Byzantium)

Her present image floats into the mind --
Did Quattrocentro finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
(from Among School Children)

Maude Gonne, his early love, has grown old and the Quattrocentro allusion shows her as the 15th century artist painted. Hollowness, wind, and shadows are symbols of the time they, perhaps, walked the hills in their youth in sunshine and now sit by old fires in their old, shadowy, hollow age.

Notice how objective Yeats is! No direct statement of his emotional state! He allows his symbols and allusions to do that for him. If there is one thing I hope to accomplish in this column it is to urge the poets who write here to abandon their direct statement of emotion and to cast about for symbols which will rep-present it.

Yeats wrote of the rose, which symbolized the conjunction of the real and the ideal; the stone, sterility; trees, life and fertility; birds ( swans ), man's soul; the sea, the unknown; the dancer, balance of body and soul; horsemen, strength and pride of the aristocracy; houses, grace of established tradition; the moon, man's destiny; the tower and winding stair, the soul's spiritual journey; the sword and sheath, the changelessness of the soul and the precarious physical life.

Yeats was introduced to the doctrines of Symbolism by his friend, Arthur Symons. This instruction gave elaborate form to Yeats' verse. Symbols come to stand for the poet's emotion and, in every way, serves to richen and make more complex the poems written.

" ... stood among a crowd at Drumahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress.
... and when a man poured fish into a pile
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang how day a Druid twilight sheds
Upon a dim, green, well-beloved isle,
Where people love beside star-laden seas ..

Now, the man dreams of fairyland, but, throughout the poem is awakened to the sad realities of the world. This is how a great poet writes about the wrongs the common people must suffer and how the vision makes him doubt the goodness of life.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by a roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mold,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the depths of my heart.

Objects, concrete nouns, people doing things, names, symbols, verbs, action, behavior, references, allusions -- this is what makes poetry universal and not just an ego-centric, self-centered plaint.