 First, Yates' lecture. I was talking about Yates' early development and stylistic transformation over the course of roughly a 20-25-year period. Yates has a long career, really beginning in the late nineteenth century. The poems that matter the most to us today are those that he starts publishing around 1915 or 1914 and later, but he's in really the middle of his literary career at that point. I suggested in looking at that early development that Yates is seen as a kind of representative figure who somehow moves out of symbolism, out of a kind of ornate aestheticism towards a kind of heroic realism. But I insisted instead that in fact the way to understand that development is really a transition from one set of symbols to another, as exemplified by the movement between Angus and the Fishermen in Yates' early work. The little poem, A Coat, that poem about that stylistic transformation, about the enterprise of walking naked, well, it's a poem that reminds us that Yates' development was, as he understood it, conditioned by his relationship to his audience. Yates, I said, wanted to speak for and to the Irish people as well as to explain Ireland and Irishness to an English-speaking world abroad. At the same time, even as he has a kind of intense identification with the Irish people, he also, in that little poem and in other poems, fears being betrayed by the crowd, fears being sold cheap, complains of his reception. Last time I alluded to Yates' involvement in the Abbey Theatre, beginning in 1904, this is an important phase of his career, when with the help of Lady Augusta Gregory and John Sing, Yates tries to establish an Irish national drama. Sing's play, The Playboy of the Western World, which you may know, it was set in the Aaron Islands in Western Ireland. This was a kind of turning point in the movement. Misunderstood as a satire on the Irish peasantry, Yates' production of the play led to riots in 1909. This is one of the events, I think, that Yates is thinking about in The Fisherman, when he speaks of great art beaten down. The audience that Yates disdains and turns away from in the teens is, importantly, a middle-class, urban audience. And that attitude of Yates is, it's a motif we find in other poets that we'll read. I'd like you to note it, an attitude that we'll see in Pound, in Eliot, in different ways. The displacement of aristocratic and peasant cultures by an urban bourgeoisie, by the Dublin theater-going audience, the people at the center of a new mongrel modern culture. Well, these are the people that Joyce depicts so memorably in the daily life of Leopold Bloom. Yates is a very different writer and has a different relation to the world of Joyce's Ulysses, for example. Yates has a kind of hostility towards this ascendant middle-class world and a hostility that you can view as a kind of anti-modernism, or anti-modernness, that is, again, an important component in Yates. Or maybe the right way to say it would be that Yates' sense of his own modernity, which is what it means for him to be modern, emerges in defiance of certain new social formations, and also through a fantasy, I say, identification with the aristocracy and with the peasantry, with these cultures rooted in rural Irish society of the past, like Pound, like Eliot, from a political and social point of view you could say that Yates is a reactionary modernist, turning away from the ascendant social forms of the present towards an idealized past. Or, rather, you could say Yates seems to want to do this, seems to want to turn away from the present, expresses the desire to. In fact, however, Yates' eyes remain really fixed in the kind of horror and fascination on the cataclysmic events of his time, on the political life of his time in which he is himself very much involved. Yates is, in fact, a far less nostalgic thinker than either Eliot or Pound, at least as I understand him. The stance that I'm trying to describe, which is an ambivalent and complicated one, emerges powerfully in the poem, Easter 1916, on page 105 in this book, and I'd like to spend some time with that, with you. Easter 1916. The subject of this poem is the Easter Uprising, the Irish Republican Challenge to English Domination, that briefly established an Irish state led by Patrick Pierce, who, along with, in fact, all but one of the leaders of the insurrection, was executed. These events still have a kind of central and powerful place in modern Irish consciousness. If you go to Dublin and you enter the post office, one of the important scenes of the rebellion, you find great wall paintings of scenes from the rising, almost like, you know, Stations of the Cross. Dublin is an interesting place to be with this poem in mind, partly because you realize when you are there, that the city center is a small one, and that, well, Yates's house was not far from the post office. And the world that he's writing about is something very intimate and familiar, of which he is a part. And that is, in fact, one of the important points of departure for this poem. He says, I have met them at close of day, coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among grey eighteenth-century houses, Dublin, them being the revolutionaries. I have passed with a nod of the head, or polite meaningless words. Or I've lingered a while and said, polite meaningless words. And thought before I had done of a mocking tail or a jib to please a companion around the fire at the club, being certain that they and I, but lived where motley is worn, all changed, changed utterly. Terrible beauty is born, motley signifying their Irishness as if Yates and these men and women he speaks of shared only their Irishness. In the second strophe of this poem he proceeds to talk about and to isolate individuals, particular figures of the revolt which your editor identifies at the bottom of the page. That woman's days were spent in ignorant goodwill, her nights in argument until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers when young and beautiful are harriers? This man had kept a school and rode our winged horse. This other, his helper and friend, was coming into his force. He might have won fame in the end, so sensitive his nature seemed, so daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed drunk and vain, glorious, lout. One most bitter wrong to some who were near my heart, mud-gun. 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. A terrible beauty is born. Yates is describing his interaction and his distance and the others in that first stanza and then in the second. He's saying something like, I used to see these people all the time. I was proud, however. I kept myself apart from them. I felt we had nothing in common but motley, our Irishness. But all that has changed by events. They have become political martyrs to the future Irish state and I am obliged to remember and honor them in my poetry, even those I disdained. My poetry, which, well, the dedication to which had defined Yates' difference from them, up till now. The poem's extraordinary refrain, A Terrible Beauty Is Born, it returns in the poem like a chorus, like the voice of some kind of abstract and impersonal chorus. And it suggests almost a strangely impersonal event, something that happens without agents making it happen. A terrible beauty is born, a passive construction. Take the first part of the refrain first. All changed, changed utterly. I think there are really three strong, metrical accents in a row there. By all that three-letter word, a highly Yatesian word, a word Yates loves to use. You'll see him use it often. Yates means all of them, all of those people, all the people I've been describing. He also means my relation to them, the way I kept myself apart from them. He also means all, everything, plain and simple, all in the sense of everyone and everything, all conveying a kind of apocalyptic, epical event. That wonderful pile-up of stress in that line, all changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Another two strong three-beat lines in a row. They become a kind of well-what? Bell ringing in the poem, peeling and announcing. The coming, the birth of a new and terrible age. How can something be changed utterly? How can something be changed utterly? Doesn't that mean destroyed, to be entirely changed? Yates is talking about an event that has brought forth destruction. Destruction of the world before the Easter uprising, and Easter is an important resonance here, obviously, Easter, another moment of death and transfiguration, transformation. Here this destruction brings forth a new order, a new form of life that Yates calls terrible beauty. This may be the most memorable sentence in modern poetry. A terrible beauty is born. He said that Yates looks on the modern with a sense of both horror and a fascination of compulsion, almost. Well, it's a terrible beauty he sees that draws him in this way. He sees specifically the passion of the Revolutionary's Act, and he finds it beautiful. Yates aestheticizes their political action. He finds beauty in it. It seems even or especially because it is terror filled when the change that it enacts is utter, which is to say a change that means blood. To find bloody events beautiful, what do you think about that? How do you describe the politics, if you like, of such a position? Well, how does Yates stand in relation to the events he's describing? Easter 1916 equivocates. Like that phrase, terrible beauty, the poem is full of contradictions, of contradictory feelings. It takes the side of the nationalists. It also makes the anti-nationalists, the English or pro-English or Unionist case. It sees the dead as heroic martyrs. It also sees them as ideologues, as stony-hearted political activists. It sees the dead as lovers too. It sees them as dreamers. Yates looks at them with pity, with admiration, with scorn. He speaks of them as a mother would of her children. All of these attitudes, and others too, are held in suspension in the poem, and you can hear them together. Yates moving from one to another with incredible speed and agility in that final strophe of the poem on the next page. Listen to how quickly Yates modulates from one feeling, one image to another in these really very short, quick, three-beat lines. Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Oh, when may it suffice? That is heaven's part. Our part to murmur name upon name, as a mother names her child, when sleep at last has come on limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, no. Not night, but death. Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith for all that is done and said. We know their dream enough to know they dreamed and are dead. And what if excess of love bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse, McDonough and McBride and Connolly and Purse, now and in time to be, wherever a green is worn, or changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. This is really moving poetry. Remarkably so. And that may be the most important fact about it. When Yates aestheticizes the political, he makes it moving. Moving in the literal sense of, I think, emotionally engaging and cathartic, he can specifically converts the political into tragic action. Tragic action, which as spectators, the poet and the reader, ourselves, are meant to be passionately and imaginatively engaged, which is also to say, implicated. Through Yates' poem, Easter 1916 goes on happening, happening in a sense, in and even to us. The poem makes us see the political as a space of passion and of contradictions like art. And it requires us to understand history, not in moral terms, such as good and evil, but rather in aesthetic terms. Pity and terror, these become crucial terms, the terms that Aristotle, in his poetics, used to define tragedy. When the bombs went off in London last year, I thought about Yates and what he might have thought or written about this. As I said last time when I showed you that letter to Pound, Yates' London apartment is essentially across the street from where the number 30 bus blew up. And, interestingly, strangely, make of it what you will, the man who detonated that bomb, as I understand it, had studied Yates at school in Leeds. There's a way in which Yates' poetry of this period goes on resonating in the world we're living in. Yates' sense of his own implication in history, well, it's something that we see in the intensive stylistic transformations that his writing undergoes. Part of the resonance and power of that famous refrain, A Terrible Beauty is Born, is that this beauty is being born not only in the world but in Yates' poetry, something remarkable is happening to the poet and to his language at the same time. Yates is saying, even simply on one level, I will write differently, henceforth. I must. Yates' stylistic changes in this way are coordinated with respond to the historical changes he witnesses and participates in, in particular, coordinated with the violent emergence of, through civil war of the Irish state, which Yates would serve as a senator in the 1920s. Yates, in this period, makes and remakes his work out of passion, a sort of, as he images it, in the breast, a tumult from which new modes of poetry, new modes of self-knowledge emerge for Yates. Yates' poetry is full of images of birth, and he tends to represent birth as an explosion, a bursting forth, a bursting forth of energy or presence in some sense that can't be contained or constrained in existing forms. I'll say more about this next time with reference to Yates' late poetry. What I want to stress now is that Yates sees passion at in the same way in history. Powerful superhuman forces emerge from or invade human actors and change them. One consequence of this view is that for Yates, history starts to look like a poem, or it starts to conform to laws of poetic imagination or of tragedy, if you like, of myth. It, well, in the Easter Rising, Purse and the Others for Yates invoke, as they, the revolutionaries themselves, deliberately and rhetorically did, invoke ancient Irish heroes. Purse is seen as in Yates' poetry and in popular lore as Cahulin, as a kind of avatar of the mythic Irish hero. At the same time as the superhuman enters these historical characters in this way, there's also, well, an energy that you would have to call subhuman, bestial, that does as well. In his late poem, The Statues, which you don't have, Yates says, when Purse summoned Cahulin to his side, what stalked through the post office as if the revolutionaries' action brought forth at once the presence of a legendary hero and a beast that might be stalking through his embodiment and his presence. Yates saw history in symbolic and mystical terms. This is a poet who, with his wife, practiced automatic writing, who believed that the dead spoke through the living. This occult, Yates, is a genuinely and wonderfully thoughtful thinker. He elaborated a systematic account of mind and history. As I said last time, talking about the song of wandering Angus and Yates' interest in alchemy, which was developed, it isn't, in fact, necessary for you to grasp Yates' system, which you'd have to go to his book called A Vision to Begin to Do. It isn't necessary for you to grasp his occultism in order to read his poetry well. Yates said that the voices that he communicated with on the other side gave him metaphors for poetry. This is what they deliver him. They also gave him, as he put it, stylistic arrangements of experience. The occult gives Yates aesthetic forms for understanding individual psychology and historical event. This is, I think, how we need to understand the various occult symbols in another great poem from this phase in his career, a little bit further on the second coming on page 111. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 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. Surely some revelation is at hand, surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight, somewhere in sands of the desert a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it real shadows of the indignant desert birds, the darkness drops again. But now I know the twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. Another poem of birth. Notice how very casual Yates is in that second strophe, how self-consciously fantastic and speculative he is. He doesn't insist that the apocalypse is at hand, only that some revelation is. In fact, this poem's power lies, I think, in its, not only its inability but its unwillingness to specify the content of that revelation. Yates suggests that we think of this historical moment as the second coming, but this is not the return of Jesus that Christianity prophesies. Yates sees the second coming as an image, as a myth, an idea, a metaphor, a certain stylistic arrangement of experience. It comes out of what he calls Spiritus Mundi, a semi-technical term. Yates' name for something like the concept of unconscious of all peoples, a kind of repertoire of archetypes from which the symbols that we use to understand the world derive. It is, well, this is really, I think, a radical, if not heretical, idea for the national poet of a Christian people. Yates is saying that Christianity is only one symbolic order among others. It has a history. It is now passing away as it once came into being. He's also saying that the birth of Christ in Bethlehem was a nightmare for the world it altered, the world that it changed utterly, a change that Yates sees as the end now of the Christian era and not its fulfillment. Isn't there, too, the disturbing suggestion that Christ himself was a rough beast? Yates develops this idea or develops another version of it in a somewhat earlier poem that's interesting in relation to this one, and let's turn back and look at it on page 103. That's the Magi. Again, a visionary poem where Yates is saying, I see, I see in my mind's eye. This is the action of the poem takes place in Yates's imagination. Now, as at all times, I can see in the mind's eye in their stiff painted clothes the pale unsatisfied ones appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky with all their ancient faces like rain beaten stones and all their helms of silver hovering side by side and all their eyes still fixed hoping to find once more being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. The Magi here are again an image, a kind of visionary symbol, an image available in the mind's eye at all times. They are unsatisfied by Calvary's turbulence, Calvary's turbulence, a remarkable phrase, unsatisfied by the scene of Christian martyrdom, because they recognize that history is cyclical and that the cycle that they saw come into being can only be completed by another such birth, not by Christ's death and resurrection. Notice here how Yates images what is at the core of Christ's birth. It is an uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor, on the floor, on the bottom, on the ground where the animals dwell. The second coming, it seems, as Yates imagines it, a kind of similarly uncontrollable mystery and the energy, the new presence that it releases into the world, is bestial, is that of a beast. The divine enters the human in these poems of Yates through the bestial. It's a powerful and disturbing idea. There's another very powerful and disturbing poem that literalizes this idea, and that is laid in the Quran on page 118, a poem that is a sonnet, though it doesn't quite look like it at first, a mythological poem that seeks to give a mythological image to or for the kinds of epical and apocalyptic historical change that Yates is living through in the 1920s in Ireland. In certain ways it's a beautiful poem and a grotesque one at the same time. A sudden blow, the great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body laid in that white rush but feel the heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air, did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her stop? History, what makes history happen, is imaged here in the form of the rape of the human by the divine in the form of a beast, the form of a swan. The myth that Yates takes up is of Zeus's rape of the maiden whom he attacks as a swan. The offspring that the rape engender includes Helen, the terrible beauty for whom the Trojan war was fought. Also, Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek lord Agamemnon, whom Clytemnestra murders on his return from Troy. Those future events are glimpsed in the cestate of this poem and the final six lines. They are, in a sense, compressed and imaged and contained in the rape itself. There's a kind of radical foreshortening of temporal experience at what Yates imaged as the orgasmic union of the divine and human, a shutter in the lines, bringing about the sack of Troy, the murder of the king. All that future contained in this generative, ambiguous violence in the presence that the poem describes, the present that the poem describes. In effect, in that middle part of the poem, Yates collapses creation and destruction, suggesting that the same bestial energy flows through both of these acts. Here, divine force reduces to brute power in somewhat the same way as it does in the Magi and the Second Coming. One result of this is Yates, and this is interesting, his lack of interest in the God. This isn't a poem about Zeus. It's not a poem about the swan. He doesn't name the swan, just as he doesn't name the rough beast in the Second Coming. What the swan thinks or feels or intends doesn't matter. The swan is really only a force, and Yates' concern is rather with the human experience of that force, which is, again, another manifestation of terrible beauty. Yates explores that experience, which is an experience of suffering here and a violation through a series of rhetorical questions, which are a crucial poetic device for Yates. Yates is a poet who asks questions. Questions, well, they're different. Even rhetorical questions are different, aren't they, from statements of fact. They're more like propositions, like speculations, that we're asked to test to empathic identification with, in this case, the poem's subject, Lita. This is what the form of the question invites, I think. In Eastern 1916, I talked about Yates' partial, complicated identification with the suffering martyrs of that poem. Well, that identification here is reimagined, and we're invited into it too, troublingly, I think. The frightening experience that Yates evokes here is the imposition of the divine on the human, helpless breast on breast. That's a wonderful phrase. The repetition of breast links them, makes us see them together side by side, one on top of the other. It even, I think, identifies the divine and the human, makes them hard to tell apart, binds them, even while we are being confronted with their difference. Lita feels the beating of the swan's heart, is strange to her, that simple, powerful word. The poem's great final question concerns that perception. Did she put on his knowledge with his power? Did she know the heart she felt, or could she only feel it? What difference would it make between those two things? Between knowing that heart and merely feeling it? It's the difference between knowing history, understanding its patterns and motivating forces, its causes, intentions, and merely feeling it, merely suffering it, serving as its instrument or vessel, an object to be dropped when it's no longer useful. To know history, to be able to put on the God's knowledge with his power, would be to have access to history's meaning, and therefore to be more than merely subject to it, subject to its capricious and violating forces. Beyates doesn't answer that question, does he? Well, why not? Probably because there isn't an answer. The further implication is, I think, that whether or not we can have access to historical knowledge, the only path to such knowledge is through submission to its bestial or brute power, which is a kind of shattering experience in this poem. Well, on Monday we'll look at some of the figures in Yates's late poems who represent a kind of knowledge to be had through an experience of, well, violation or of shattering power. Characters such as the mad old men or crazy Jane, in Yates's late poems.