[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
[ Music ]
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you live
from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
The leaders of the crowd, they must
keep their certainty, accuse all that are different
of a base intent.
Pull down established honor,
hawk for news, whatever their loose fantasy invent,
and murmur it with baited breath.
As though the abounding gutter had been
helicon or calimnaia song,
how can they know truth flourishes
where the students lamp has shown?
And they're alone who have no solitude.
So the crowd come, they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed,
and heartier loves.
That lamp is from the tomb.
[ Music ]
Did you hear that?
All your students out there?
Are there any students out there?
Just not if you can hear me.
How can they know truth flourishes
where the students lamp has shown and they're alone
who have no solitude?
This from the same poet W. B. Yates
who said the blood dimmed tide is loosed.
And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned,
the best lack all conviction while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
I don't want to rail against the leaders of the crowd here
in America.
I mean those who accuse all that are different
of a base intent or those who are full of passionate
intensity or even the best who lack all conviction.
I think you know who I'm referring to.
I don't want to do that because it would just add to the noise.
The title of this show's theme song after all is Silence Must Be Heard
by Enigma.
That's an enjoined or we take seriously here.
So let me say a word today about the students lamp.
The lamp is from the tomb.
It shines on what is most thoughtful,
pensive, poetic, and self-gathered in the books
that have been handed down to us from the dead.
Truth like the soul is shy and self-conceiling.
It's only by taking our distance from the immediacy of the world
by muffling the din and listening to the silence
that we can hear the quieter voices of the ceremony of innocence.
And that means first and foremost, the voices of the poets.
What do we have to learn from poets?
Chiefly this, that all hatred driven hence the soul recovers radical innocence
and learns that it is self-delighting,
self-appeasing, self-affriting.
And this, that since truth is most at home in the dark,
the students lamp shines on things,
hidden away from those who dance to the frenzied drum of the times.
Why should we belong to the times?
Poetry, study, learning, allow us to become untimely.
And it's invariably in the untimely that the deeper worthwhile truths lie buried.
In the gloom, the gold will gather the light about it.
It's the gold we're after.
We don't ask of poets if they lead the crowd
or take us through the abounding gutter.
We ask that they take up the liar of Orpheus and give music to the underworld.
Shine light on the underworld.
That underworld is in us, it's somewhere at the edge of the world, yes.
But in us nonetheless, and you don't gain access to it without a golden bow,
which is another word for the students lamp.
The last time we devoted a show to poetry on this program,
it was to talk about the American poet Ezra Pound.
My guest on that occasion was Professor Marjorie Pearloff,
who taught at Stanford for some 12 years and who now lives in Los Angeles.
I mentioned then that in my opinion and the opinion of many,
she is America's leading critic of modern poetry.
And from the responses I received to that show from various listeners,
I gather that most of you agree with me that Marjorie is the golden bow itself.
I promised last time around that as soon as she paid another visit to Stanford,
I would have her on the program again.
And here she is.
Marjorie, welcome back to entitled opinions.
Thank you Robert, I'm very happy to be here again.
Last time Marjorie, when we talked about Ezra Pound,
we ran through his life and career, we discussed his politics,
we provided an interpretative framework for his corpus and read a few passages from the condos.
Several people who listened to that show told me that while the whole discussion was fascinating,
they would have liked to have heard a bit more of the poetry and more commentary from us on specific poems.
Today we're going to talk mostly about the Irish poet W.B. Yates.
And this time we're going to try to read as many poems of his as we can and comment on them.
But we can't dispense with the bio altogether.
Yates was fond of saying, as for living our servants will do that for us,
by which he meant, I presume, that the artist is all about his art, not his life.
But clearly Yates's life was not all that uneventful.
What aspects of his biography would you point to as being important for understanding his poetry?
Well, Yates was born in 1865, died in 1939, a long lifespan,
and we do have to say a little bit about his life, and then I'm going to plunge right into one of his early poems,
who goes with Fargus.
What makes Yates unique among Irish poets is that he was really angle Irish.
She was from the Protestant ascendancy, and that's very important.
That's a very different group of people from the Irish Catholics.
And in fact, Yates lived half his life in England.
He went to school in England because his father was a poor, pre-Rafialite painter.
The pre-Rafialites called themselves that because they wanted to restore the art of the
painters, the Quattro Canto painters before Raphael, of course they're painting,
was nothing like that, but was a kind of escape from Victorianism.
And that was Yates's idea too.
Yates began as somebody who dreamed of Farryland.
He has a famous poem called The Man Who Dreamed Farryland.
The early poetry is very much an attempt in simple lyrics, in simple stanzas, is very
much an attempt to create a kind of escape world, an ideal world, and also bring back Irish
themes and Irish fairy tales in order to respond to a British audience, an English audience
that have been very unmindful of that.
So I want to read, first of all, and then we'll get back to the biography, The
poem Who Goes With Fargus.
That's an early-pud Fargus was the Red Branch King, one of the main kings in Irish mythology.
And this is a simple poem about escaping to a world with the fairies, but you'll see
it's not so simple, metrically, and as far as sound goes, and that's always Yates's
group.
This is an early poem, 1892, so fairly early.
Who will go drive with Fargus now, and pierce the deep woods woven shade, and dance upon
the level shore?
Young man lift up your russet brow, and lift your tender eyelids made, and brood on
hopes, and fears no more.
And no more turn aside and brood upon love's bit of mystery, for Fargus rules the brazen
cars, and rules the shadows of the wood, and the white breast of the dim sea, and all
disheveled wandering stars.
Now what makes this poem quite unusual, it's not just an escape poem, because you have
the feeling you can't escape.
Because Fargus, the king rules all those.
You have the four elements.
They have the brazen cars, the bronze cars, the shadows of the wood, air, and then the
dim sea, and then fire, the disheveled stars.
But notice they disheveled wandering stars, and you have the great line and the white
breast of the dim sea, which is always used in positive books to show you the difference
between going, the tah tah tah tah tah tah tah, the eye-ambicatramata, because you have two
unstressed, two-stressed, unstressed stress.
Let's repeat that line.
And the white breast of the dim sea, and the white breast, in standard, proz-metrics, that
would be a pyric foot followed by a spondy twice, and the white breast of the dim sea.
But I also like the part, and brood on hopes, and fears no more, and no more turn aside
and brood upon love's bit of mystery.
That became Stephen Dettles' one of Stephen Dettles' key motifs in Ulysses.
When Stephen is walking along the beach at Sandy Mountain, he's always thinking, and no more
turn aside and brood upon love's bit of mystery.
And he's thinking about his mother dying, and about his own longings for love.
And so, even though that's an early poem, it is not just let's go to fairyland, clap
your hands with a fairy on each side, because you feel there is no real escape.
And you get to that fairyland fergus is ruling the king, and there's a kind of principle
of order there that is opposed to perhaps what the poet wants to do.
And so everything flies apart, the shadows of the wood, and so on.
So that's Yeats' beginnings.
And yet Yeats had to get out of that kind of, perhaps, let's say, contemplative, meditative,
and short lyric by awakening to reality.
And he has many poems in the middle period where he talks about sleeping on a board in order
to understand the real world, and take off his coat.
I made my song a coat.
That's the famous poem.
And the last line is, "For There's More Enterprise in Walking Naked."
So he had to open himself up to the real world, and he did himself get caught up in the
Abbey Theatre.
He was the founder with Lady Gregory of the Abbey Theatre that produced some of the
great place still does in Ireland, and got caught up in political movements.
Let's go back to this line, or these two verses that you read.
I'm surprised that this is so early on in his career, and brewed on hopes and fear
no more, and no more turn aside and brewed.
Where he repeats the word brewed, and the phrase no more, almost as his like an ikayastic
relation one to the other, and Yeats is the poet who will have endless examples of this
when we read other poems, but he gets away with repeating the same words, almost in the
same line or successive lines, multiple times where most poets would avoid that kind of
repetition, but he doesn't not only avoid, not avoid it, but he turns it into one of
the great signatures of his poetry, and it has such an effect when Yeats, I think it's
indimitable, by the way.
I think if you tried to imitate it, you couldn't do it, but Yeats somehow makes that one
of the defining characteristics of his poetry.
Don't you agree with that?
Yes, because look what you have here.
You have a simple stance that with six finds, or I mean ABC, ABC.
This is a lot of stance used by Rosetti, used by Lionel Johnson, the poets of the yellow
90s, the so-called yellow 90s for the yellow gas lamps, and the yellow book that
creates his friends.
They all wrote little ballads and simple, I am picked to tram it, a four stresses per line,
poems, but what Yeats did that's already totally distinctive is to repeat that in a
kayastic structure, and brewed on hopes and fears no more, and no more turn aside and
brewed.
Why the repetition?
Because he later wrote to Dorothy Wellesley, never used a dish, Dorothy Wellesley was a poet
friend of his, who wrote something about harlot and horror, and he said, "Why are you
using two different words to mean the same thing?
If you have harlot, just use that word again.
Repetition is much more effective."
And so he used that same and brewed on hopes and fear no more, and no more turn aside and
brewed, so that it hits the mind and becomes closed in on the memory.
And well, there, I just like to read one of the short poem that is like that, which is
a deep sworn vowel, which has that same kind of structure, and is only great because
of its amazing, really amazing repetition.
I made a note of this.
Anyway, others, it starts, "Other is because you did not keep that deep sworn vowel have
been friends of mine, so you have keep deep already rhyming that way, and wait, I just
have to find it here."
I can read it for you.
Okay, yeah.
Others, because you did not keep that deep sworn vowel, have been friends of mine, yet
always, when I look death in the face, when I clamber to the heights of sleep, or when
I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
Now, do you realize that that poem totally enacts what it says in a way that I've really
seen a poet able to do?
Others because you did not keep that deep sworn vowel have been friends of mine.
And then, though, when the mood changes, the chant ends, as no matter what he can't escape
her image, suddenly I see your face, and it doesn't rhyme with anything, and there's
no repetition.
And there's that word, "face."
Suddenly, I see your face, and he is saying that he can't get away from her image despite
all these other women who have been friends of mine.
Sleep, deep, keep.
You have that rhyme.
It's very mesmerizing, but he can't escape that image.
It explodes into the poem, suddenly I see your face, no rhyme, no repetition.
Can we read another poem?
Margie may be the dialogue of self and soul.
We're going to jump ahead, I guess, a few years.
But this is like Yates at his best, would you agree?
One of these, this is one of his great songs.
And let me just say, we'll read it, it's actually in two voices, soul and soul and
self, and maybe you can read soul and I'll read the self, but it's a dialogue with these
two different voices that have also two completely different agendas.
One, the soul is calling on the self, which would be the mortal embodied self on earth.
To think about it's, you know, posthumous fate, it's after I could call it to the contemplation
of platonic universals or something in any case beyond this sub lunar world of the here
and now and of flux and the self then answers in a way that makes its allegiance to this
world and this life quite clear, no?
So that's a kind of minimal framework, so maybe we can read a dialogue and self and
you're the soul, I'm self.
I'll begin with the soul and just want to say to the audience also that this is a
day by it's a very traditional, it's a very traditionally traditional form where you
have a debate, a day by between two parts of oneself and Yates always thought of all
things as being in conflict, creates consciousness was conflict.
He always had two sides and he felt out of that Hegelian thesis and tittasis will come
some kind of truth and you can never man can make an embodied truth, but he cannot
know it is could be the epigraph comes from another one, but man can embody truth, but
he cannot know it.
So here we have the conflict where the soul wants to escape and Yates you always deal
with circles and straight lines here the soul wants to escape to have an in a straight line
and the self will move in a circle back to earth.
My soul I summoned to the winding ancient stair said all your mind upon the steep ascent
upon the broken crumbling bafflement upon the breathless starlet air upon the star that
marks the hidden pole.
Thanks every wandering thought upon that quarter were all thought as done, who can distinguish
darkness from the soul?
The consecrated blade upon my knees is Sato's ancient blade still as it was, still razor
keen, still like a looking glass, unspotted by the centuries.
That flowering silken, old embroidery, torn from some court lady's dress and round the
wooden scabbard bound and wound, can tattered, still protect, faded adorn.
Why should the imagination of a man long past his prime remember things that are emblematic
of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can if but imagination scorn the earth and intellect is wandering
to this and that and other thing deliver from the crime of death and birth.
Don't a shiggy third of his family fashioned it five hundred years ago about it lie flowers,
from I know not what embroidery, hearts purple, all these I set for emblems of the day,
against the tower, emblematical of the night, and claim as by a soldier's right a charter
to commit the crime once more.
Such fullness in that quarter overflows and falls into the basin of the mind that man
is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, for intellect no longer knows is from art or no
or from the known.
That is to say a sense to heaven.
Only the dead can be forgiven, but when I think of that my tongues are stone.
A living man is blind and drinks his drop, what matter if the ditches are impure, what
matter if I live at all once more, endure that toil of growing up?
The ignominy of boyhood, the distress of boyhood changing into man, the unfinished man
and his pain brought face to face with his own comsiness.
The finished man among his enemies, how in the name of heaven can he escape that defiling
and disfigured shape, the mirror of malicious eyes casts upon his eyes until at last, he
thinks that shape must be his shape.
And what's the good of an escape?
If honour find him in the wintry blast, I am content to live at all again and yet again,
if it be life to pitch into the frog spawn of a blind man's ditch, a blind man battering
blind man.
Or into that most fecund ditch of all, the folly that man does or must suffer if he
wooze a proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought, measure the
lot, forgive myself the lot.
When such as I cast out remorse, so great a sweetness flows into the breast, we must laugh
and we must sing, we are blessed by everything, everything we look upon is blessed.
You say circles and lines, can you elaborate on that?
It's really so wonderfully done when you are reading it now, at least that's last part,
everybody should notice by the way, of course the self gets the last word.
The self gets four stanzas of its own after the soul has disappeared, has nothing
further to say, because Yates in fact did opt, although it's supposed to be a dialogue,
he really did opt for life rather than the ascent to heaven.
He didn't, he believed in reincarnation and literally believed in reincarnation.
He was very influenced by Eastern philosophy and he liked the idea of being able to come
back, but that meant that you had to forgive yourself in this life, because in his book
a vision which is his cosmology, his philosophical book, he argues that in one of the sections,
the soul in judgment, he argues that you can't be forgiven, you'll have to stay forever
in a kind of purgatory, his sort of purgatory, if you don't cast out remorse, that there's
no use blaming yourself for things that have happened.
You try to do other things, but don't dwell on it.
He thought that was one of the worst vices to dwell on the things that you've done wrong
in his case, always being in love with that woman that he mentions here, the folly that
man does, a must suffer if he was a proud woman, not kindred to its soul, the famous
mod gun, a tall, beautiful woman, a radical politician who we'll talk about.
Nationalist who we'll talk about a little bit later, whom he knew he could never get,
and wants to give up on, but if you notice the circles, the circle is also the circle that
the rhythm here makes.
I am content to follow to its source.
Every event, there's an internal rhyme already, content event, in action or in thought, and
then the rhythm changes, very hard to do this, very few poets can do this, it is I am
to try to do this, it is so it should be, to, to, to, to, to, to, but then we change, measure the
lot, pause, forgive myself the lot, you really focus on those words.
When such is I cast out remorse, so great a sweetness flows into the breast, and now it
becomes almost like the nursery rhyme, it becomes very regular verse, we must laugh and we
must sing, we are blessed by everything, everything we look upon is blessed.
It's the child like--
It's the return of that child like sense that once you can straighten yourself out, you
will be blessed, but it's a secular, what has been called by critics, a secular blessedness.
Yates did not in fact, knew that he could not, in fact, escape, and so the soul is almost
made fun of here, and the sword plays a big part.
Robert Red the part of the self, the consecrated blade upon my knee, satoes, ancient blade.
Yates was in fact, he always took real life experiences, he was given a beautiful
Japanese sword, the sword of a samurai, and he loved that idea, still raised a king, still
like a looking glass, unspotted by the centuries, and then the flowering embroidery covers
the sword, you get sexual images there, the embroidery being the sword being the male sexual
symbol, and the embroidery covering it, but it's torn, male, female imagery here.
And once you have that, and the self just pays no attention to the soul, notice it's
not really a dialogue, the soul is talking of itself, just continues, Montesheg, the third
of his family, fashion, so the self uses sexual imagery, but ancient imagery to show the
repetition of cultures, the repetition of the possibility of reincarnation, and so you
get that wonderful passage that always makes me almost cry, we must dance and we must
sing, we're blessed by everything, everything we look upon is blessed when you can get
to that mood, and so that's just a great thing.
It raises questions for me thematically, the soul silences itself in the last line, the last
two verses of his speech, first speech I mean I took the self because the self is obviously
the most gendered, male gendered in the duet, only the dead can be forgiven, but when I think
of that, my tongues are stone, one of my favorite lines, only the dead can be forgiven,
I think of that, my tongues are stone, I can't talk anymore, somehow that the kind of forgiveness
that the dead get is not what you want.
It's not what you want, it's the living that have to forgive themselves, and that's what
the self wants to do, and you talked about cycles and repetition, but it's Nietzsche somewhere
in the background here with his theory of the eternal return of the same, because this is
not about the self looking forward to a reincarnation in another form, it's the self who
says to itself that I will will it all again over again just as it was.
Where's that line I'm looking for?
I claim as by a soldier's right, commit the crime, commit the crime once more.
It's this affirmary for Nietzsche, the hypothesis of the eternal return of the same was
a test between the life of farmers and the life deniers, and if you could say yes to the return
of repetition of life in all of its particularities, then first you were quite exceptional,
second you could say yes to life despite all his sufferings and miseries.
Nietzsche thought that most of us would say no if we were offered this chance to say yes
to doing it all over again, here the self has that strong Nietzsche and affirmation of life.
Was Nietzsche at all an influence on dates?
Absolutely, Yeats wrote a few essays on Nietzsche in the earlier years you'll find it
essays and introductions.
Many references to the idea of the eternal return and also laughed at tragic laughter, the
idea of gayity, something positive coming out that suffering had to be accepted, and had
to in fact be understood and lived through again exactly the way if you had to do it over
again exactly the same way, you would do it whereas often in earlier life Yeats felt guilty
and he'd be tormented and so many of his friends were always tormented, he wasn't.
And that's one of the things that may Gates be able to go on and become a great opponent
in old age, then he was as a young man.
Yeats was a very slow starter, but most people would agree that Gates is great decade,
doesn't come to least 52 when he gets married to a much younger woman and has two children,
and it's after the age of 52 in that decade.
And in fact the next two decades, maybe the very last poems are not quite as good, but
that's Yeats is great decade, that's very unusual.
So whereas most poets, like words wereth was one of his idols, many were dead were dead
by that age, the romantic poets, but others like words were not so good in old age,
Yeats came into his own precisely because he was able to practice this doctrine, but of
course there are people who feel that that's too shrill, too rhetorical, too, that there's
something, the people who don't like Yeats are make fun of Yeats.
We'll take a line like that first line of my dialogue of self and soul.
I summon to the winding ancient stair.
By the way, the winding ancient stair was one of his key symbols.
The winding stair is the name of the collection, a dialogue of self and soul is published
in, and it's a symbol of, again, a kind of a scent, but in his case, in his tower, it
was a round stairway.
And you can see that when you go to visit Yeats is the tower that he bought in Kool Park,
Tor Balilee.
And he believed that that you had to keep ascending, keep going up.
But the notion of ice summon, that funny use of the subjective, which is very peculiar,
and doesn't really work that way.
We have a microfut, because you keep motioning the intermicrofut.
That sometimes when you're reading, you look down.
No, it's only a question of your, at the same level, because when you're reading, sometimes,
I summon to the, so the notion of using an imperative that way, who are you summoning?
I summon to the winding ancient stair, that's a transit a verb.
Who is he summoning?
Summoning everybody, summoning his readers, and Yeats is always doing that.
I declare the tower is my symbol.
So many people feel that's too rhetorical, pound made, so we talked about pound in the
last, in our last program together, and pound was always making fun of Uncle William,
Uncle William, for doing this, you know, for being so rhetorical.
And he wrote in the cantas, "What's riches to him who's made a great peacock?"
That's a poem by answering the pride of his eye, and then pound stretched it out, pride
of the eye.
Well, it's, either you love it in all of its sort of, what would be the word, "preciosity,"
and untimeliness.
I think that this verse has deliberately, you could even say, militantly, at times, anti-modern,
it's idiom.
The gate isn't really a modernist.
I mean, people argue about, was he the last 19th century poet of the first modernist?
In early books on modernism, he always was grouped with Elliot and pound.
He liked pound, but he didn't like the cantas.
He said, "Yay, said not got all the wine into the bowl," and thought it was just a
mishmosh and fragments, and he hated Elliot.
He said, in the, in the preface to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, he says, "Then in
the third year of the war, came that man, who set poetry back by it in a how many
years wrote the waste and dry, grey, cold."
But you, of course, really isn't true at all.
But he really disliked Elliot, and we should add that Elliot disliked him.
Auden disliked him and said, "Yach, there was something so southern Californian about
Yachs.
He only liked spooks and liked all this."
But that's really very unfair.
And I think if we talk about some of his political poems, and talk about Easter 1916,
why don't you read that?
Before I read it, let me, I won't read all of it because too long.
Let me say something about that.
Yach often is considered one of the great political poets.
I certainly consider him that, of the period.
Not because his political views were always so good.
He begins as an Irish nationalist for Mod Gunse, but the fact his yachts was somewhat conservative.
He hated the crowd.
He didn't want the mob to win out in any way.
And he was skeptical about revolution.
And later he became an Irish senator, or one of the few people, whose a poet and was
also a senator of the Irish Free State, and his Senate speeches have all been published.
And Nary becomes more and more conservative, flirted with the so-called blue shirts and
Enoch Powell, who was the British proto-fascist leader.
And so at the end of his life, Yachts had become quite conservative.
Mod Gunse was disgusted with him.
Didn't like what he had done.
And earlier on, he managed to keep both those, just as he does in dialogue of self and
soul, managed to keep self and soul in a kind of balance and managed to try to see both
sides of the equation.
At the time of the Easter Rising, the Easter uprising happened in 1916.
As a result of the English refusing to keep faith during World War I, they had promised
home rule.
A home rule bill for Ireland had been passed as early as 1912 in the House of Commons.
The whole that had to happen was that the House of Lords would ratify it.
And when War broke out, and the war didn't interest Yachts at all, World War I, that was
just a distraction for him.
What did he care about the English versus the Germans?
What did he care about little Belgium?
He said that and led us to people all the time that he didn't care.
And we tried to pay his little attention to the war as possible.
Went off to the country with Pound, and they studied various myths and they studied the
Japanese no theater, and that resulted in a lot of work that Pound did and Yachts is great
for plays for dances at the Halkswell, which was performed at the Abbey, and it's closet drama,
but a very beautiful play done with masks.
Very much like what Pound was doing, they were very much in sync.
He tried to avoid what was going on in World War I, but then the Easter Rising broke out.
Patrick Perce and just some ordinary citizen schoolmasters Yachts knew every one of them.
So you see he was very much involved in it.
They marched on the post office on Easter Monday and took the post office and took all the
main buildings, and they were quite successful for a few days, and by Saturday the hoping
was over, Perce gave up and the English army cracked down and boarded they cracked down
and most of the Easter Patriots, the people who were in the Rising were executed.
Not so much the women because they got a stave for being female, but the men were executed.
And Yachts knew every one of them, and he was terribly upset by it.
He was upset for two reasons.
One is that Mod Gun, the woman he loved said tragic dignity, has returned to Ireland.
That's how she saw the Easter Rising.
She was thrilled.
Yachts in a way was thrilled because her ex-husband, Major McBride, was in the Easter Rising
and was one of the ones executed.
And Yachts calls him that drunk and vain glorious lout, but I number him in the song.
And of course in a way he was happy because then he thought he could propose to Mod Gun
again, and he didn't was again rejected.
He proposed to her daughter, who was only 17 or 19 or so, and was again rejected.
These are the kinds of things that Yachts did.
But he had very mixed views himself about the Rising, and that comes up in the poem.
Now what's remarkable in the poem is it's a naming poem.
I'm going to read the first stanza.
It's a naming poem where he doesn't mention the names till the end.
They're only referred to, always as that man and that woman and so on, which makes them
them when their name even much was striking.
Now listen to the first stanza.
In trimeter, three stresses per line, trimeter is a terribly difficult form to write well
for a serious poem because it sounds jaunty and funny.
It should be for a comic poem in a way.
But here it's very, it punches you.
It really comes very hard.
I have met them at close of day, coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among
gray 18th century houses.
I have passed with a knot of the head or polite meaningless words, or have lingered a while
and said polite meaningless words, and thought before I had done of a mocking tale or a
jive to please a companion around the fire at the club, being certain that they and I
but lived where muckly is worn.
All change changed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born and that's the refrain and the paradox of the poem.
A terrible beauty is born.
Now I have met them, yetch does that kind of thing all the time.
Who are they?
It forces the reader to enter the poem with you because you get the feeling it's all familiar
to you.
I have met them at close of day.
There are people you and I know coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among gray 18th
century houses in two lines, yeetstakes care of the shopkeepers, counter or desk or those
who work at office, blue collar workers.
Why 18th century houses?
Because those beautiful 18th century houses that stand for the Irish Protestant ascendancy,
the Ireland of swift, of Burke, of Gratten is now a place where there are shops and their
offices.
And he's thought all these people, it's just trivial, they're not bad, but they're just
trivial people.
They're school masters, they have little jobs, they work somewhere.
I have passed by the knot of the head or polite meaningless words and thought before I had
done of a mocking tale or a jive, he's going to go to the club and make fun of these
people.
But it's all change, change utterly.
And change is the key word of this poem, but it's change that's dramatic, all change,
change utterly.
And then in the third stanza, he's going to compare these specific people who mean discusses
in the second stanza and I won't go through that now to a different kind of change.
And the third stanza goes like this, hearts with one purpose alone, through summer and winter
seam and chatted to a stone, there's a stone again, dialogue and self and soul, to trouble
the living stream.
Now listen to the kinds of change that come now, the horse that comes from the road, the
ride of the birds that range from cloud to tumbling cloud, minute by minute, they change,
a shadow of cloud on the stream changes, minute by minute, a horse of slides on the brim
and a horse plashes within it, the long leg more hands dive and hands to more cocks call,
minute by minute, they live, the stones in the midst of all.
And now the stone that dramatic change is blocking natural change, which should be a good
thing.
You want things to change, minute by minute, naturally.
You want hens calling to more cocks, natural, sexual, animal change.
Don't you think the stone there is also the steadfastness of ideological conviction and purpose
and this refusal to have any sort of flexibility regarding your convictions?
Absolutely.
In Declan kibberd, the Irish critic has said very well, but if there were no stones in
the midst of all, there would be no eddies, there would be no water, you wouldn't have
this minute by minute change, it wouldn't be blocked and therefore you wouldn't have those
waves and reflecting the clouds and all that.
So when you get to the next lines, in the next stands, the two long the sacrifice can make
a stone of the heart, that upset Maude Gunn very much, he said, they never has been a sacrifice
that has been too long as it makes a stone of the heart.
So when you take those two lines out of context, you would think Yeats is attacking the
eye of the uprising, but now look what happens.
He starts to ask questions, Yeats is poems always full of questions, many of them end on a
question like among school children.
He always ends with that question because he doesn't really know the answer and he asks,
"Oh, when may it suffice?
What a line.
When does revolution suffice?
When does warfare suffice?
That is heaven's part.
Our part."
Remember, name upon name, as a mother names her child, when sleep at last has come on
limbs that had run wild.
Now comes another question, what is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death and then comes the crucial line.
Was it needless death after all?
For England making faith here it becomes very specific.
For England making faith for all that is done and said.
Then he decides it's not up to me to answer that question.
England may but maybe not.
And so he says, "We know they are dream enough to know they dreamed and are dead."
Another question, and what if excess of love bewildered them till they died?
But he's not going to answer that.
And now comes that great ending, I write it out in a verse, "McDonough and McBride and
Connolly and Perce."
Now and in time to be, wherever green is worn, not monthly the fools close, but green,
wherever green is worn, Ireland's color, are changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty
is born.
So that by the time you come to the end of the poem you have a celebration of the revolutionaries,
whether in the end it was the right thing or the wrong thing, we must celebrate them for
the amazing feet, for the daring, the boldness.
And so you come down that poem and that's just probably one of the great political poems
ever written.
I always give it to people who are now writing Iraqi war poems or whatever and they know
the answer.
The poet doesn't know the answer, the poet can only ask the question.
That's why it might be saying a little too strongly to say that at the end it's a celebration
or glorification of these victims.
Well it is for a moment.
Everything has changed utterly and it's still a terrible beauty that's born.
Yes.
Clearly this from other poems as well, Yates had a particular suspicion if not animus
against ideology, whatever form.
And any kind of fanaticism.
And I don't know why he loved Maude Gond, so hopelessly for so long when she was almost
like the allegory of the ideologically stubborn patriot or revolutionary antithetical
to his own sensibilities.
I quite agree with that.
It only in this sense that he did hate ideology but he didn't hate fanaticism.
Yet, he wrote a leg pub saying, "I study hatred with great diligence.
Hatred is, if you go through the concordances, one of the key words in Yates and he thought
hatred, there he's like Nietzsche, I think, tune away was very fruitful.
And it is a kind of fanaticism too."
So it isn't that he always, but he could always then get away from it again.
But it's by no means that he didn't, he actually thought out of Ireland have we come,
great hatred, little room, out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room.
So he feels that hatred actually could be quite fruitful, but you're right that of course
this isn't only a celebration.
On balance, he probably thought they were mostly wrong.
But for the moment, there was a sense that these ordinary people that drunken in the
stance of that I skipped when he says, "That other man I dreamed a drunken, vain, glorious
lout."
And in fact, McBride evidently wasn't alcoholic.
He had done most bit of wrong to some who are near my heart, that's Mark Gunn.
Yet, I number him in the song.
He too has resigned his part in the casual comedy.
He too has been changed in his turn, transformed utterly.
Terrible beauty is born.
So that there is a moment where people can rise above their ordinary, everyday sense.
And Yates had very little regard for ordinary, everyday life, the life of the shopkeepers
and the life of the ordinary people.
Yeah, servants will do that for us.
Yes, exactly.
So, you know, he isn't so horrible in that way.
He didn't like ordinary people.
There's a hatred, he's a very underestimated emotion.
But he did hate ideology.
He hated, well, put it this way, he wasn't against conviction.
The best lack of all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
And I think he would assume that passionate intensity just cannot be conjugated with the
best.
It's almost always the worst we're full of passionate intensity in these certain given
moments.
So we read, there's so many other poems we can read.
You wanted to read after long silence, but we could.
After long silence, yeah, that's a short one.
Yeah, and then there's another, yeah, sure probably might do.
Yeah, this poem appeals to me for various reasons.
Let me read it.
First, speech after long silence, it is right.
All other lovers being estranged or dead, unfriendly lamplight hit under its shade, the curtains
drawn upon unfriendly night, that we decant and yet again decant upon the supreme theme
of art and song, bodily decrepitude is wisdom, young, we love each other and we're ignorant.
Well, a few things I would point to in the poem.
One is the understatement or the indirection by which we know that we're dealing here with
two ex-lovers who are now in their old age.
How do we know that they're old?
Well, we know that the lamplight is unfriendly and there's also approaching death because
it's the unfriendly night.
All other lovers being estranged or dead, meaning that they've had other lovers in between,
and then they take up their speech after a long silence, so there's been a period of
a strange or non-contact and now they take up the speech in order to decant again upon
the supreme theme of art and song, bodily decrepitude is wisdom, young, we love each
other and we're ignorant.
You were mentioning at the beginning of the story about the way paradox is so much of
a yacian trope and here brought together this bodily decrepitude and young, we love each
other and we're ignorant.
Thematically I would want to point to the fact that it is one of the consolations of what
he calls bodily decrepitude to be able to decant upon the supreme theme of art and
song, in other words, to have conversation with your peers and one thing I try to always
when I've taught this poem once or twice with students, try to make it clear that if you
don't cultivate art and song, philosophy, ideas, poetry, literature, culture when you're
young, you're just not going to have anything to talk about when you're old.
You can't just at a certain point when you're old, sit down and say, "Now I'm going
to turn to speech about art and song."
No, it's something that has a lifetime of cultivation that comes with it so that you have
to prepare for that old age really in youth and the young here are ignorant, but not
ignorant in the sense that it's completely ignoring art and song.
No, but it's something that will flower much later in their life.
I think you also, that almost makes fun of upon the supreme theme, that rhyme is almost
silly, upon the supreme theme of art and song, and it comes in that way almost, and he
could have used a different word instead of supreme.
It's such an emphasis though, to that word theme.
It does, it gives such an emphasis, and in a certain way though, you feel you'd rather
still be young and be ignorant.
This poem was written, it's interesting, actually this poem was written for Olivia Shakespeare,
not for Mod Gun.
When Yates in the 1890s, back in the 1890s, when he couldn't, he was still a virgin
when he was 28, I believe.
He met a married woman, Olivia Shakespeare, who was the mother of the Dorothy Shakespeare
who married as her pounds, all in the family.
Anyway, and he was very close to Olivia Shakespeare, and she more or less seduced him.
She was the wife of a very dull barrister, many affairs, she was a writer, and so Yates
had met Olivia Shakespeare, and they had a brief affair, and he was never really interested
in her.
He then sought out Mod Gun again, now this is written 30 or more years later, then they became great
friends and wonderful correspondents, and they really were dear friends, and they understood
each other, and they could talk about everything.
My dear Olivia, dozens of letters to her, and I think this poem is so wonderfully moving,
because both sides are the equation.
You don't really want either about the other, of course, in a sense, but it's done so wonderfully.
That, again, the rhythm mimics what it says, speech after long silence.
Which is the guess of that word.
It's an aiambic meter, but here the first line is not at all.
Okay, you get a speech after long silence and a caesura, a pause.
It is right, all other lovers being estranged or dead, and you have then dead rhyming
with the word shade in approximate rhyme.
In the next line, this poem runs, A-B-B-A, and then C-D-D-C, but approximately in dead
shade, and the night is the right thing in a way.
The curtain's drawn upon unfriendly night, of course it's a friendly to us, and that we
discounting it again, to scan upon the supreme theme of art and song, and it's treated
as an abstraction.
And then, that bodily decrepit to look at rhythmically, and again, an act's what it says,
bodily decrepit to.
Sounds like falling apart, really.
Is wisdom, the line, there's a pause, and then the last word of the line, young, and
then the line is run on, young, we love each other, and we're ignorant, and when you
come to that word, ignorant, rhyming with the scan, it's just so amazing, because you think,
well, of course, that's what life is like.
It is like that, you know, and that, and you know, when we love each other, we didn't have
to talk about all these things, and so in a way, it's a tribute to this relationship,
which is blossomed into something else, which is rich in its own way.
So I don't think I'd take it so much as saying that even the young do have to learn
those things.
I'm not saying that the poem is saying, but just empirically speaking, you're not going
to get to that age and not have cultivated your mind in any way and have something to
say.
But another thing, it's a wonderful poem showing the difference between somebody's life
and art when you do know the biography.
Yates never got to this point.
Yates had what was called the Steinak operation to restore his virility when he was about
70, and whether it really worked or not who the world knows, but he went around claiming
that now he was totally restored and very sexy, and then he tried to write all these sexy
poems in the last five years or so of his life when he was already very ill.
I think it was mostly talk.
The various women say, well, nothing really happened, but he sure talked a lot about that
young girl.
How can I, my attention, pay attention to politics with that young girl standing there, and
so on.
So he never was willing to accept.
Finally, decrepitude was not wisdom for Yates, but he knew it should be.
So it's very interesting that once as soon as you have a poem like that, you have
the very next poem in this sequence, 18 Madison, the Missed and Snow.
This is the crazy Jane sequence called the Crazy Jane sequence words for music perhaps.
Both in bar the shutter for the foul winds blow.
Our minds are at their best this night, and I seem to know that everything outside
is as mad as the Missed and Snow.
I mean, Yates never got to bodily decrepit as wisdom, but of course for a moment he could,
and that's the great quality of the poetry, and that's why he can go on and on.
We'll do one mood and do the next mood in these really amazing ways.
It's time we have very little time.
Well, we have, we have for at least 10 minutes.
So we do.
Okay.
Choose one.
There's a poem I'd like to read that is not as well known as the famous Crazy Jane
poem.
Those are called Crazy Jane, because in his old age he adopted the persona of Crazy
Jane, the wise old woman who is also told all the time he was Crazy Jane, of course,
to give up sex and be wise and go into a mode appropriate for old age.
But he was such a late starter Yates, since he was still a virgin in his 28, that he
could not really buy that.
But side by side with the Crazy Jane poems, they are very simple poems that any reader
I think could appreciate you don't have to know a vision.
We talked in the canoes about, do you have to know all the illusions?
And in Yates, there's always the controversy.
Do you have to know a vision, which is his cosmology, which furnishes all the images and
symbols for all these poems?
And they certainly do read somewhat differently if you know a vision, but you don't really
have to know a vision for so many of his poems.
And there's a poem called Quarle in Old Age, which is in the winding stair written in 1931,
where it had a big fight with Mod Gun.
She came to his house and wanted asylum.
His wife, Georgie, was pregnant.
And that leads to prayer for my daughter, which Robert is going to read, which we're
going to look at if we haven't been it.
Well, we can at least talk about it a little bit.
And their Yates had to make in life a real decision was he going to let Mod Gun come in,
which would have led to all kinds of trouble because the police would have tried to come
in a rester and his house would not have been a safe haven and so forth.
His wife is eight months pregnant.
And so he didn't let Mod Gun in.
And she was furious.
She said, Willie has just gone over to the establishment and he wouldn't leave and let me
into the house and so on.
And then he thought it over and here is the poem, Quarle in Old Age.
Where had her sweetness gone?
He says a question again, where had her sweetness gone?
What fanatics invent in this blind, bitter town fantasy or incident, not word thinking
of, put her in a rage.
I had forgiven enough that had forgiven old age.
So wonderful.
I had forgiven enough that had forgiven old age.
Who her old age or my old age?
Anyway, and then the birthstands of breaks and then comes this platonic part of all lives
that has lived so much is certain.
Old sages were not deceived somewhere beyond the curtain of distorting days, lives that
lonely thing that's shown before these eyes targeted trot like spring.
So however angry I am at her, I can't, I had forgiven enough that had forgiven old
age.
I'm not going to forgive anymore.
Enough is enough.
But then all lives that has lived and so then he can look at her again and thinks the
behind the curtain of distorting age, behind the ugliness, she's not so beautiful anymore,
lives that lonely thing that's shown before these eyes targeted, riveted to her, shown
like spring.
Now you can say isn't that the romantic theme again of Sedonian spring, the spring that
lives, a basic classical theme and romantic theme, but it is a really wonderful kind of
poem, just a simple love poem that's very complicated about the conflict of love.
Yeah.
Should we say some general things about Yates or try to read a few more lines of his,
what do you think, Marjorie?
Is there a, let's assume that a number of our listeners are not very familiar with
Yates and having heard us read him, want to get to know him better.
Do you have any prescription about how to go about approaching him?
Yes, I would say that of course, most people tend to start with earlier this so much work.
It's like Pound had enormous ambition.
He wrote essays.
He wrote many plays.
He wrote prose works.
And he wrote his cosmology, a vision, aside from an enormous number of poems so that the
Yates corpus is huge.
He wrote journalism.
He was active in the Abbey Theatre.
He tried to get the Hugh Lane pictures back to the municipal gallery, Dublin.
So the Yates was a man of the people in the sense that he was a public figure, always
called up an actual events.
And at the same time wanting to write a poetry, remove from those actual events as we
saw with the leaders of the crowd.
And so in Yates, you can never stop at one poem and judge him by one poem because they
are so various.
And that's the great thing.
The early ones like who goes with Fargus are very charming.
But I call your attention to the poems in the green helmet and responsibilities.
Those two volumes.
Yates was very much, by the way, a maker of books.
He writes in volumes.
And he organized these volumes.
So poem would become at the beginning of the volume like dialogue of self and soul came
at the beginning of the winding stair.
And that you would read the whole book.
So and there are many good essays on that by Richard Elman and so on.
So I'd recommend to readers to take one of the books like the green helmet and do read
the whole volume because it's all one story.
And that particular book is a book of love poems, short love poems, where he alternately
blames mud gun and praises her and is crazy about her.
And the main thing about Yates that again, I would like readers to remember is that
he mythologizes everything he knows, both the landscapes and the people.
He mythologizes Ireland.
Many of these places when you go to them are not even pretty sli-go that beautiful word.
It's a really dumpy town.
And the mountain Ben Beuben where he's buried is not so beautiful.
And if Yates mythologizes these places so that cool park, that beautiful name, cool park,
it's not so pretty when you go there, but he makes it a beautiful place and he makes people.
He energizes places and people.
And perhaps the very greatest thing about Yates is that that he's an elegie pod.
We have had no great elegie poet since, I don't think, in English, in the English canon
and the American canon.
There's aaudens elegy for W.B. Yates, which is a very interesting poem, but not a great
poem in this way.
I don't know of any elegies that come later in English and other languages there's some
that can even hold a candle.
Pound did not write elegies.
Eliot did not write elegies.
Stevens didn't really write elegies.
So the elegies of form that Yates brought to its great height in the 20th century, and
that's an incredible accomplishment.
Well, we talked about Pound last time.
You mentioned that his political career put a blot on his literary legacy and reputation
that maybe he was not among the very first years, and even though we don't like those
classifications, would you care just to give a personal evaluation of Yates and Pound?
Yates's limitations in a funny way are very much like Pound's limitations.
And in a way you could say again that perhaps Buddha Lea was a great poet because
he was all of a piece, and everything works together.
In Yates there also there are blots on the escutcheon.
Francis, I really dislike.
I recently reread Lapis lazily, a poem that's in every anthology, I think the Northern
anthology of poetry, a late poem where--
You can forgive.
I'd pull it a bad poem.
No, no, no, no, but he wrote many late poems like that.
When he talks about the bombs flying, it's already the outbreak of World War II.
It's a very late poem, and he says, "What you can't get upset about that, because you just
have to accept it and accept suffering, and those who accepted the eyes or gay, gay was not
used in the sense it is now, just happy."
And those are annoying poems, and even earlier on Yates's danger is rhetoric, a kind of
overstating, a kind of self-dramatizing, a kind of self-importances if he owned all the country
houses.
Yates was very middle class and didn't own any country houses, and so his celebration
of some of those country houses get on ones and nerves.
And he has faults and was criticized for the same things.
Frank Carmode really gave Yates a great blow, having written in romantic images and praised
Yates in his treatment of the dancer and the tree and in among school children.
Frank Carmode then became very critical and said he was a paleo-modernist and too right-wing,
too conservative, and that hurt Yates's reputation for years, and younger people today
still coming from American poetry.
And therefore not studying much, you know, coming from an English or Irish, setting will
be very critical of Yates.
So I would say, like Pound, he's perhaps not of the very first rank he's not Dante.
He's not even Baudelaire in a sense, but a very great poet because technically something
you'd Yates wasn't even so aware of, although he rewrote every poem.
Twenty times, technically these poems, like Speech F, Along Silence, are absolutely
phenomenal, and nobody in the 20th century has really matched those.
So I love Yates very much, although he goes against so many of the things that I believe
about 20th century poetry of being open.
This is certainly not open form, as Roberto Echo defined it.
There's nothing here that is open form.
Yates did not write collages.
Yates goes against all the wisdom of what we think of as modernism, and yet is in his
own way, one of the great modernists.
The thing about poets is that their defects are really a constituent of their virtues,
and my great friend, the poet, that you also admire AR Ammons, whom I knew well, when
I was a graduate school, graduate school at Cornell, for five years used to tell his students
in his poetry classes that if you have a defect, exaggerate it.
Don't try to correct it, exaggerate it, because at least you'll get a style, and it's
true that Yates has these defects.
It tends to get too rhetorical or it's closed, and yet at his best he takes those defects
and really turns them into virtues, I think.
Marguerite, unfortunately we're kind of out of time here again, it's terrible, but as
I promised last time it wouldn't be, it's not going to be our last on there.
It's very difficult, but it's really almost more than with Pound, because it's very hard
to get at Yates through certain poems.
There's so many others, but I think once readers get started and look, not worry about
the symbolism, although he is one of the great symbolists, not worry so much about
what does this mean, what is wands, what is the tower, what do all these things mean,
what is the eternal return to what in Yates's scheme of things, what is the primary,
what is the antithetical, and read these, I think they can't help thinking the amazing
dramatization, dramatic, the drama of conflict that you have in Yates.
Marguerite, thanks for coming on again, I enjoyed that.
Thank you Robert, thank you, it was a pleasure as the last time.
Thank you.
[Music]