Selected Poems And Two Plays – William Butler Yeats, 1962 ★★★★

Perning in the Gyres with W. B.

I have always loved reading. I have never cared for poetry. It is like spinach or broccoli on my reading plate, except I actually love spinach and broccoli. May I add I’m not keen on metaphors, either?

With poetry, it comes down to being a born skimmer. I find myself reading at angles, grasping at words like Tarzan swinging from vines, never working line-by-line and seldom methodically. Scansion might as well be a Swedish engineering firm for all I care. For reader as well as composer, poetry demands fine concentration. Ruined perhaps by decades of television, I find such concentration unpleasant.

Add to that I distrust poetry from a bad experience of being dormed with a poet in college, a fellow who would tape his loose-leaf pensées to the rafters of our loft frames. “Either these hang on them, or I do,” was the explanation. That was a tough semester; thank God for “Miami Vice.”

In college, I couldn’t escape poetry by switching dorms. As an English major, I had to study it. My favorite poetry-heavy course was “England During The Enlightenment,” with “The Rape Of The Lock,” John Gay, Joseph Addison, and lots of clever rhymes. My least favorite: Modern Poetry, with suicide-watch candidates like my ex-roomie and no rhymes.

Then there was Irish Literature, and the poet featured in today’s review: the furiously opaque yet captivatingly lyrical W. B. Yeats:

Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,

I find under the boughs of love and hate,

In all poor foolish things that live a day,

Eternal beauty wandering on her way. (from “To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time,” 1892)

Published fairly early in Yeats’ long career, one marked by frustrated love, civil war, and bitter artistic feuds, this poem employs simple, poignant images and an easy-to-follow rhyme scheme. His art evolved over time, but a pleasure aesthetic and a spiritual yearning often associated with the Celtic identity remained constants.

In his introduction to this 1962 collection of 195 poems and two plays Yeats published during his life, editor M. L. Rosenthal leans heavily on this idea of Yeats’ accessibility. “William Butler Yeats is the most widely admired, by common reader and sophisticate alike, of all modern poets who have written in English,” Rosenthal begins. “Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear.”

Rosenthal’s slim volume covers early, late, and inbetween. Through the years, one sees Yeats as foppish romantic with a lush, descriptive style; a rejected suitor; a defiant aristocrat; a reshaper of Celtic iconography; a passionate if wary Irish nationalist; and finally a grand old man of letters employing a sparer style, content to celebrate life, mourn age, and urge passersby to “cast a cold eye/on life, on death…”

Yeats is buried at Drumcliff Cemetery in County Sligo, land of some of his most beloved poems. The quote is from the last lines of his final poem, "Under Ben Bulben;" the years of his birth and death eerily bridge the close and start of two non-Irish wars that nevertheless killed many of Yeats' countrymen. Image from http://www.ifcurious.com/ie/r/wb-yeats-grave-at-drumcliff-cemetery/?c=things-to-do&sc=tourist-attractions

Yeats went through many phases. If his work comes across at times as overly self-referential, well, he led an impressively full, active life.

For a long time, he worshipped at the altar of a woman, Maud Gonne. Among Irish muses, she might be more famous even than Harriet Smithson or Nora Barnacle, but for the inconvenient fact Gonne was born in England. A radical Irish nationalist nonetheless, Gonne refused Yeats’ marriage proposals numerous times on the grounds he was neither radical enough for her nor would convert to Catholicism.

Her refusal to give her love tore Yeats apart. Gonne was unrepentant:

“You make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”

The world has, by remembering her as literature’s greatest minx since Cleopatra. Yeats made his annoyance both clear and beautiful, as with one poem in this collection, “When You Are Old,” when he calls upon her to recall in time that “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.”

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. (1892)

Rosenthal makes the point in his introduction that you don’t have to be an Irish nationalist, or holding a torch for Maud, to appreciate Yeats’ verses in their service. What his poesy for her lacks in clarity (see for example “The Cap And Bells”), it more than makes up for in style.

The real test for this assertion involves the other major woman in Yeats’ literary life: Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory. Here you get a good helping of Yeats at his most recondite and aristocratic, at times insufferably so. See for example “Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation,” his mourning of Lady Gregory’s troubles at the hands of, as she would have put it, “those who don’t use toothbrushes:”

How should the world be luckier if this house,

Where passion and precision have been one

Time out of mind, became too ruinous

To breed the listless eye that loves the sun?

Basically, Yeats’ concern here is with his principal benefactress being discomfited by the demands of those who were not, like her, landed gentry. Yet this elitist strain in Yeats was, as Rosenthal points out, a critical taproot for his art. He would famously inveigh in much the same way, and to better purpose, with lines from one of his most famous poems, 1920’s “The Second Coming,” inspired by the Irish Civil War:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

You don’t have to know Parnell, de Valera, or other Erin luminaries to appreciate Yeats on Ireland, any more than you need to know what “perne in a gyre” means to appreciate his later poems like “Sailing To Byzantium” (1927). For Yeats, something of a zen spiritualist limned with an quirky kind of pre-Christian Celtic mysticism, eternity moved in gyre-like wheels and to perne was to wind around and between them:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

That “Sailing To Byzantium” plays with such cosmic abstraction doesn’t make it any less great; just less easy to agree on why it is great.

Yeats later in life. When Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, unlike many laureates he still had yet to produce some of his greatest works, e. g. "Sailing To Byzantium," "Lapis Lazuli," and "The Wild Old Wicked Man." Image from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-butler-yeats.

At times, Yeats does make it difficult to enjoy him. He incorporates not only many classical allusions but made-up characters of his own – with names like Michael Robartes, Crazy Jane, and Ribh – to express ideas through alternate personas. Rosenthal’s introduction acknowledges this challenge to some extent: “Yeats sometimes made the assumption, flattering both to himself and to his readers, that because he had something intensely felt to say it must somehow be understood.”

Even Rosenthal waves a white flag with one early poem he includes in this collection, “Cuchulain’s Fight With The Sea” (1892), which he describes as “well-nigh unbearable.” Less schooled in the art of appreciating poetry, I could add other poems to that list, not just other early ones like “He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge” but more mature efforts like “The Saint And The Hunchback” that deals with phases of the moon, a favorite metaphor of Yeats for life, or something.

But Yeats is magnetic when he is on, often the case with this best-of collection. The subjects follow familiar tangents, such as time’s passage (“When You Are Old,” “Wild Swans Of Coole,” “Among School Children,”) love and regret (“Down By The Salley Gardens,” “Young Man’s Song”), and death and the spirit (“Running To Paradise” “Tom O’Roughley.”) Yeats’ insights on the subjects may not always be fresh, but his manner of delivery feels like turning over a rock to uncover creation’s great mechanism beneath.

Contrary to my expectations for 20^th-century verse, complex rhyme schemes are often observed, lending extra pleasure and a sense of order. “An Image From A Past Life” is another Maud Gonne poem, written in the wake of Yeats’ marriage to another woman and connected to a theme of romantic ambiguity. As Rosenthal notes, you don’t have to know the Gonne back story to appreciate its Poe-like craft and delicacy of line:

A sweetheart from another life floats there

As though she had been forced to linger

From vague distress

Or arrogant loveliness,

Merely to loosen out a tress

Among the starry eddies of her hair

Upon the paleness of a finger. (1920)

There are times also when his ascents into the higher firmament of his imagination can be equally intoxicating, as in “The Stolen Child” where dark faeries bid a young boy leave his family to join them in marshy pools “that scarce can bathe a star.” It’s a race as to which pulls more at the heart here, the mastery of expression or the unsettlingly poignant ideas, of familial loss and dreamy adventure, being expressed.

Yeats may not be for everyone, contrary to Rosenthal’s contention. But his ability to plumb recesses of the human experiences, and do so in a way that feels inherently right even if you don’t quite know what he’s on about, makes him a struggle worth the having.