William Butler Yeats,The Tower: A Facsimile Edition (Scribner)Jack FoleyI say to the musicians: ‘Lose my words in patterns of sound as the name of God is lost in Arabian arabesques. They are a secret between the singers, myself, yourselves....’ --W.B. Yeats, introduction to King of the Great Clock Tower, quoted in F.A.C. Wilson, W.B. Yeats and Tradition In 1928--the year he turned 63--the then-world-famous poet William Butler Yeats published a slim, beautifully-produced volume called The Tower. Yeats had received the Nobel Prize in 1923, and the book was awaited with considerable anticipation. The book’s title referred explicitly to “Thoor Ballylee,” a derelict Norman stone tower located near Coole Park, the estate owned by Yeats’ friend Lady Gregory. Yeats had purchased Thoor Ballylee in 1917. After the tower was restored, it became a summer home for himself and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees. T. Sturge-Moore’s beautiful image on the cover of The Tower shows Thoor Ballylee reflected in the still water below it. The image suggests both Yeats’ poetic self-reflection--the meditative quality of his verse--and the hermetic tag, “As above, so below.” The Tower contained some of what were to be the poet’s most famous, most explicated poems: “Sailing to Byzantium,” the title poem, “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan,” and--last but far from least--“Among School Children.” Yeats critic M.L. Rosenthal called The Tower “Yeats’ finest single volume,” and the book became, Brenda Maddox tells us, the poet’s “first best-seller.” Yeats himself was very pleased with The Tower’s reception. He wrote his friend Lady Gregory that “Tower is receiving great favour. Perhaps the reviewers know that I am so ill that I can be commended without future inconvenience...Even the Catholic Press is enthusiastic.” And he told Olivia Shakespear, “The Tower is a great success, two thousand copies in the first month, much the largest sale I have ever had....” Seventy-six years after the first publication of The Tower, Scribner’s has come out with a facsimile edition with an introduction and two sets of notes by Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. (There are notes to Yeats’ notes and notes to the poems themselves.) What can this new volume tell us about Yeats? Are any new insights even possible in the case of a poet who has been the subject of so much intense critical scrutiny? The book opens with the famous opening line of “Sailing to Byzantium”-- “That is no country for old men. The young...”--and those two terms, “old men,” “the young,” reverberate throughout the volume. In the very next poem, “The Tower,” the poet tells us that, though he is afflicted by “Decrepit age,” he is nevertheless in some sense “younger” than he has ever been: Never had I moreRecent biographers have pointed out Yeats’ none-too-circumspect, extremely problematical philandering as he aged. Is the combination of “Decrepit age” and violent youth- “Excited, passionate, fantastical / Imagination”--to some degree an indication, even an exploration, of that philandering? “With the easy chauvinism of his time,” Brenda Maddox writes in Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats, [Yeats] used his wife as business manager, nurse, real estate agent, hostess, editor, literary agent, and proofreader while allowing his sexual interests to drift elsewhere. One of his first affairs was with Dolly (Dorothy) Travers-Smith, an artist and scene-painter for the Abbey and the daughter of the automatic-writing medium Hester Travers-Smith. Yeats found Dolly “slim and red-lipped.” Friends were amused to watch him one day at a party at Lennox Robinson’s cottage try to put her in a trance. How does this philandering--this “faithlessness”--register in his poetry, if indeed it does at all? The Tower has one poem, “The Hero, The Girl, and the Fool,” which ends with the lines, When my days that haveand another, “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,” which seems like a transparent tribute to the poet’s wife George and her mediumistic abilities: was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?“The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” does not, however, suggest that Yeats has any sexual passion for his wife. “Margot”-- a poem written in 1934 but kept unseen until 1970, more than thirty years after the poet’s death--is addressed to Margot Ruddock, one of various “out-of-control” women (Brenda Maddox’s phrase) with whom Yeats had extra-marital affairs. It continues The Tower’s theme of “young” mind and “old” body: IThough the “tower,” the central image of Yeats’ book, surely has a number of meanings in the volume--including an invocation of the isolated contemplative--one of them is very obviously phallic. In addition, though Yeats and others have emphasized the historical implications of “Leda and the Swan,” not only does this frankly sexual poem depict the revelation of the divine (the so-called “marriage” of mind and matter) as a particularly violent rape: it depicts it as an extra-marital affair. The violent, history-making moment does not arise out of anything Zeus does with his wife; it arises out of his lust (however “indifferent” the god may finally be) for a young woman. Another poem, “Owen Ahern and His Dancers,” deals more or less explicitly with Yeats’ “mad” infatuation with Maud Gonne’s daughter, Iseult: I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.Both Leda and the swan are important images in The Tower. In “Among School Children” Yeats explicitly associates Maud Gonne with Leda’s daughter, Helen--a association he made in many poems: I dream of a Ledaean body...(Since Helen’s mother is mortal, Helen/Maud Gonne is only half divine--but in her beauty she takes after her mother: she has “a Ledaean body.”) The swan appears as well in the climactic third section of “The Tower”: the hourAnd in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”--another poem included in The Tower--Yeats writes, Some moralist or mythological poetIn both these latter passages, the swan is an emblem of the individual (or “solitary”) soul. From this point of view (swan as individual soul), the multi-leveled Leda story suggests the immensely problematical attraction of the soul to matter--an attraction Yeats refers to in “Among School Children” as a “drug” whose effects eventually cause the resulting child to “sleep, shriek, struggle to escape.” In “Leda and the Swan,” the encounter between soul and matter is presented in a primarily mythological/historical context rather than in an individualistic one, but the results are similarly disastrous: A shudder in the loins engenders thereSwans in the context of faithfulness/unfaithfulness suggest an earlier poem which also deals with old age , “The Wild Swans at Coole”--the title poem of a volume Yeats published in 1919. “The Wild Swans at Coole,” set at Lady Gregory’s estate, is at once descriptive and visionary. An aging Yeats, remembering his youth, sees the swans “Upon the brimming water among the stones.” “All’s changed,” he writes, I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,The swans’ “hearts,” he muses--as opposed to his own--“have not grown old”: Unwearied still, lover by lover,The swans present an image of “a faithful love,” one which maintains its allegiance to the divine. *1 Yeats himself, on the other hand, has become increasing involved in the beautiful “wood of matter” which surrounds him--“The trees are in their autumn beauty, / The woodland paths are dry”--and, as a consequence, has moved further away from the divine. Here too he is “faithless” to some degree. As Paul de Man was the first to notice, shining through Yeats’ naturalistic “imagery” is a notion expounded by the Neoplatonist Porphyry (232/3-ca. 305) in his De Antro Nympharum, a commentary on the Cave of the Nymphs episode in The Odyssey. Yeats knew Porphyry’s essay through Thomas Taylor’s widely-read translation, and he refers explicitly to it in the footnote about “the drug” in “Among School Children.” He quotes extensively from the essay in “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”-one of the essays collected in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903)-and there are unmistakable references to Porphyry in both Blake and Spenser as well as in Yeats’ own work. Though Thomas Taylor “was ridiculed, even persecuted, for bringing to the attention of his age a philosophy so subversive to established values,” writes Kathleen Raine in Blake and Antiquity, Coleridge delighted in Taylor’s works, Shelley possessed them, Keats too reflected their influence; crossing the Atlantic, they were all-important in the American Transcendentalist movement. To Emerson and Bronson Alcott Taylor was, as George Russell and his friends later called him, “the uncrowned king.” Appearing in The Witch of Atlas, The Book of Thel, and in the third Book of The Faerie Queene, the cluster of symbols discussed in Porphyry’s essay is one of the key items of literary Neoplatonism. As described by Porphyry, the Cave of the Nymphs is a kind of half-way house for all souls about to be born or about to ascend to heaven, and as such it is regarded as the source of all life, which is symbolized by “waters welling everywhere.” One of its gates--“the gate of generation”--leads to the earth, and the other--“the gate of ascent through death to the gods”--leads to heaven. The first is “the gate of cold and moisture”--for “cold...causes life in the world”--and the second is “the gate of heat and fire.” If we keep only these details in mind--and Porphyry goes on to add a great many others--we can see how the Cave of the Nymphs is relevant to “The Wild Swans at Coole.” The “brimming water among the stones,” for example, is Yeats’ equivalent to the water welling among the rocks of the cave, and the two activities of the swans--“They paddle in the cold / Companionable streams or climb the air”--represent respectively the descent of the soul into matter through the gate of cold and moisture and, since air is a purer element than water, the ascent to the divine. Yeats often imagines this ascent as proceeding in “rings” or “gyres” and as accompanied by the sound of a bell-here, “the bell-beat of their wings above my head.” (Cf. the bells in “Byzantium” and “All Souls’ Night.”) *2 Was the cluster of images in Porphyry’s essay a mere “source” for Yeats--something he transformed in the course of writing his poems--or was it something else? That question is another issue raised in The Tower. In “Among School Children” Yeats makes a careful distinction between two kinds of “images”: Both nuns and mother worship images,This distinction between different kinds of “images” is no new thing in Yeats’ thought. In “Symbolism in Painting,” from Ideas of Good and Evil, he writes that “All art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediaeval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.” If, he goes on, “you liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their actions, causes and their effects...it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence....” The use of metaphor is not sufficient, he argues in “Symbolism in Poetry” (also from Ideas of Good and Evil): “metaphors are not profound enough to be moving.” Symbols “call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions....” Even Shakespeare is criticized: Shakespeare is content with emotional symbols that he may come the nearer to our sympathy, but if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of Demeter, one is mixed into the shadow of God.“Shelley’s poetry,” Yeats insists in “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry,” “becomes the richer, and loses something of the appearance of idle phantasy, when I remember that its images are ancient symbols, and still come to visionaries in their dreams.” The “images” which “animate a mother’s reveries” are in the realm of “mere story-telling, or mere portraiture” or, at best, in the realm of metaphor. Images which “keep a marble or a bronze repose”--sacred images such as the golden bird invoked at the conclusion of “Sailing to Byzantium”--have another purpose altogether and “call down among us certain disembodied powers.” Yeats’ earlier poem, “The Dolls,” from Responsibilities (1914), deals with the two kinds of images in a comic way: A doll in the doll-maker’s houseThe “oldest of all the dolls” describes the baby as “a noisy and filthy thing”; its appearance in the shop brings “disgrace” upon the dolls. Finally, the doll-maker’s wife ends the poem with an apology: ‘My dear, my dear, O dear,“The Dolls” demonstrates that Yeats was capable of seeing the comic side of his dilemma, but it is precisely the notion of the sacred but nevertheless embodied (nonabstract) image which allows the poet to escape from the situation he describes at the beginning of “The Tower”: It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,At the conclusion of the poem, the “learned school” in which the soul studies is not the “school” of Plato and Plotinus, with their “abstract things,” but something closer to the “school” of Porphyry, with its insistence that Homer “has obscurely indicated the images of things of a more divine nature in the fiction of a fable”--its insistence that Homer was, in effect (in Yeats’ terms), a Symbolist poet. Porphyry’s term for Homer’s sacred imagery is in fact, in Taylor’s translation, “fabulous symbols”--a term which shows up in a horrific context when Yeats comes to write “Her Vision in the Wood.” (Yeats’ interest in finding a “school” is something to be kept in mind when we arrive at “Among School Children”: the title refers not only to the “children” the poet meets in Reverend Mother Philomena’s Montessori school but to the poet himself, who is still looking for a proper “school.” Cf. the line in “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,” the penultimate poem of The Tower: “She seemed the learned man and I the child....”) At the conclusion of “The Tower,” Yeats pours forth a number of what are for him “fabulous symbols”: Pride, like that of the morn,Nor is Porphyry absent from Yeats’ list. The lines, I choose upstanding men,refer back to an earlier, nostalgic passage in the poem, in boyhood when with rod and fly,but both the “fountain” and the “dripping stone” are details from Porphyry which show up often in Yeats. (The “dripping stone” is equivalent to “the brimming water among the stones” in “The Wild Swans at Coole.”) Here and elsewhere, Yeats is attempting, through the use of symbols, “to liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their actions, causes and their effects” and to allow the person or landscape to “change under your eyes.” “Among School Children” is the poem in The Tower which has been most explicated and, to my mind, most misunderstood. I wrote about the poem at some length in my essay, “Yeats’ Poetic Art” (available from the archives of my online column, “Foley’s Books,” in my book, Foley’s Books, and in The Yeats Eliot Review, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2002). The problem of the poem is not so much old age as it is the difficulty of distinguishing between kinds of “images.” Yeats’ intense infatuation with Maud Gonne’s beauty (her “Ledaean body”) led him to believe that she was an embodiment of the divine--a “fabulous symbol.” As she ages, however, she seems anything but such an “image”: Her present image floats into the mind-Indeed, the once beautiful, “Ledaean” woman now seems, like Yeats himself, a scarecrow: “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.” Not something to attract a bird but something to scare it away. In this context, the concluding lines of the poem take on a meaning which is very different from the one which is usually ascribed to them: O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are these lines the expression of “organic unity” that critics usually take them to be? Isn’t a chestnut-tree (like any tree) an expression of the ultimate unity of leaf, blossom and bole? Aren’t leaf, blossom and bole parts of the whole? Are the two aspects of Maud Gonne--her divinity and her humanity--in a state of harmony or are they in conflict with one another? Aren’t the dancer and the dance identical, since we can experience the dance only through the dancer? A bole is “the stem or trunk of a tree.” A leaf is “one of the expanded, usually green organs borne by the stem of a plant.” A blossom is “the flower of a plant, esp. of one producing an edible fruit...The apple tree is in blossom.” (Definitions from The Random House Dictionary.) As time passes, as the tree “grows,” we experience bole, leaf and blossom. But that is the point: as time passes. I think that the answer to Yeats’ first question is No: his “great-rooted blossomer” is precisely not “the leaf, the blossom or the bole”--not the tree that exists in time. Rather, it is a “fabulous symbol”--something existing outside of time, or in a different temporal order from the human and the natural. The elevated tone of “great-rooted blossomer” (as opposed to the mere “blossom” of the next line) suggests the difference. The “great-rooted blossomer” is, in effect, nothing but a “blossomer”: it is not a leaf, blossom or bole. Unlike Maud Gonne, it never ceases to manifest the divine; it never grows old, and it constantly points to what Yeats calls in “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” “Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths, / Those terrible implacable straight lines / Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream.”
The meaning of the chestnut image is suggested by a passage in Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North: “The chestnut is a holy tree, for the Chinese ideograph for chestnut is Tree placed directly below West, the direction of the holy land.” The “great-rooted blossomer” is like those images which “keep a marble or a bronze repose.” The organic tree, on the other hand, is an image like those worshiped by mothers-an image whose reflection of the divine is essentially mutable.
is a recurrent emblem for contact with the divine; the following early quotation describes it well: “Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change...had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imaged for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead”...The “dancer” on the other hand...is associated with the symbol of the “body” and appears as a real woman in the generated world of matter, capable of giving the “pleasure of generation.”Maud Gonne may well have functioned as Yeats’ Muse--and may well be to some degree responsible for some of his finest poetry. His “worship” of her physical beauty may have led him to a kind of “perfection.” At the same time, however, this very quest means that he has had to abandon something--and it is that “something” which is the great issue of his later poetry. Was Yeats’ interest in Maud Gonne spiritual or libidinous? What kind of “image” has been the constant subject of his work? “Her Vision in the Wood” (from The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933) contains the heart-rending admission that the poet’s attempt to become an archetype, to turn life into vision, ends in woeful failure; the poem even contains Porphyry’s telling, significant phrase, “fabulous symbol,” now not spoken in triumph but in despair: That thing all blood and mire, that beast-torn wreck,“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” is not a piece of rhetoric but a genuine, anguished question: the burden of the poem is that Yeats has failed to know the answer to that question, and it has cost him dearly. Despite his sixty years, Yeats remains at the end of “Among School Children” not a figure of wisdom but a learner--“among school children,” asking questions to which he has no real answer. His stance at the end of the poem is no different than it was at the beginning: “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning,” though it is true that our experience of the poem has deepened our sense of the importance of that questioning. Yeats himself remarked upon the “bitterness” he found in The Tower, and indeed bitterness is one of the volume’s themes: Death and life were not* Some violent bitter man, some powerful man* All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight thingsBut “bitterness” and “sweetness” are merely two examples of Yeats’ constantly oppositional thinking--what he calls his “continual oscillations” (quoted in F.A.C. Wilson, W.B. Yeats and Tradition); they correspond roughly to “this world” and “the next world.” Cf. The remarkable concluding lines to “Demon and Beast” from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921): O what a sweetness strayedThere is perhaps an even deeper “bitterness” at work in The Tower. Yeats’ language as he attempts to define the functioning of the symbol--the symbol “entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence,” symbols “call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions” (my italics)--suggests one of his primary themes: the descent of spirit into matter, often referred to in esoteric writing as “the fall of man”or “the tragedy.” The many oppositions which inhabit Yeats’ poetry are all versions of this primary opposition, this “tragedy,” which, Yeats argues in The Tower, is ultimately not worth it: *3 Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;* What youthful mother, a shape upon her lapYeats’ conception of “the symbol” was in effect Porphyry’s cave all over again. If the symbol could “attract” spirit to it--emulate in little the “fall of man”--it could also lead man back to the divine. But what if the symbol couldn’t accomplish this? What if all that happens is merely the fall? Worse, what if the poem achieves not revelation but only self-awareness? In this context, the lines, “the tragedy began / With Homer that was a blind man” (“The Tower”), take on an added dimension. If even the much-lauded “symbol” involves “the tragedy,” what hope is there for literature? The first stanza of “Two Songs From a Play” concludes, And then did all the Muses singIs “God’s death” not, as Yeats once hoped, a “symbolic talisman,” a genuinely magical event, but merely an esthetic matter-- “but a play”? With The Tower Yeats begins a passionate exploration of his entire career which brings him finally to the perception of an intense, monumental lack of unity, to the realization of a fundamental confusion among his impulses--a confusion which is at best masked by his doctrine of oppositions. “Why should not old men be mad?” he asks in Last Poems (1936-1939), No single story would they findIn the introduction to King of the Great Clock Tower (1935), Yeats wrote, “I say to the musicians: ‘Lose my words in patterns of sound as the name of God is lost in Arabian arabesques.’” The paradox of Yeats’ poetry, of which he was fully aware, was that it was conceived not as self-expression but as divine song--a celebration of those “powers” which he sensed operating “behind” nature--yet it was everywhere fueled by a transgressive impulse which he could not escape if he were to write the poetry at all. This paradox is constantly present in Yeats’ work, which remains tremendously exciting but which nowhere arrives at that “unity of being” for which some critics wish to praise him. If in Yeats’ early work the poet is imagined as a “priest”--“The arts are...about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests” (“The Autumn of the Body,” 1898), “We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith, and we must...take upon ourselves the method and the fervour of a priesthood” (“Ireland and the Arts,” 1901)--in his later work the poet is a “wild old wicked man.” Yeats’ late “affairs” (not to mention his delight in “dirty stories”) were, at least in part, an exploration on what might be called “the biographical level” of this lifelong spiritual paradox: The intellect of man is forced to choose* But Love has pitched his mansion in
1. In W.B. Yeats and Tradition F.A.C. Wilson writes, “the bird is the traditional symbol for the purified soul,...and Yeats employs it consistently in this sense. One thinks of his manuscript reference to the ‘birds that I shall be like when I get out of the body’....” In “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” the image of the “stare” is opposed to the image of the “honey bee.” (The word “stare,” which Yeats explains is the West of Ireland expression for “starling,” is echoed in “Two Songs From a Play”: “I saw a staring virgin stand....”) Cf. “As at the loophole there, / The daws chatter and scream....” See Footnote 2 for a suggestion about the meaning of honey bees in “Meditations.” 2. Yeats’ early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” isn’t usually taken to be one of the poet’s more esoteric pieces, but a number of its details--the water, the honey, the bee and its hive, the color purple, the number nine, the beans--come straight out of Porphyry. Indeed, in the context of Porphyry, the repeated lines in “Meditations in Time of Civil War”--“honey bees / Come build in the empty house of the stare”--may well be ironic, even mocking. “The sweetness of honey signifies, with theologists,” writes Porphyry, “the same thing as the pleasure arising from copulation, by which Saturn, being ensnared, was castrated.” 3. In W.B. Yeats and Tradition, F.A.C. Wilson points out that, according to Thomas Taylor, Dionysus--who shows up explicitly in The Tower in “Two Songs From a Play”-- “is a symbol for spirit in its descent into matter.” Wilson quotes Taylor: This fall...is very properly represented as a cruel dismemberment and a disaster, for life in the physical world is a curse. Dionysus could stand only to lose by abandoning his true nature....
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Jack Foley