 Let's see. On your handout I have Yates on the subject of magic. This goes back in time from the text we were discussing last time in the teens and twenties to 1901, and I wanted to introduce it to you as some of Yates's reflections on the general question of the occult and of symbolic in his poetry, kind of preparation in his thinking for some of the poems we discussed last time, such as The Second Coming. He says, I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are. That's important. Remember, Yates, in The Second Coming, there's a beast that's coming. He doesn't know what it is, and here he's saying something similar. He also speaks of his belief in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth, in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed. I believe in three doctrines, which he will conveniently put forward for us. One, that the borders of our mind, and he has that in the singular there, are ever-shifting and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were. That's probably an important qualification. And create or reveal a single mind, a single energy, in effect at work in our common imaginations, that the borders of our minds are shifting and that our memories are part of one great mind, because the memory of nature herself, and this is the most important thing, that this great mind and great memory, this kind of unitary repertoire of spirits and memories, can be evoked by symbols. Is this something poetry can activate and draw upon? That spiritus mundi that Yeats refers to in the second coming. Well, this is Yeats talking about that idea here. It is something, as he stresses, that can be evoked by symbols, by poetic symbols, and this he intends to do in his poetry. In fact, Yeats sees his poems as a kind of summoning of spirits, or evocation of spirits, as he refers to it. Last time I talked just briefly about Yeats' interest in automatic writing, a practice that he engaged in with his wife. Well, his poems themselves have an occult dimension of evoking this great mind and the spirits contained therein through symbols. He also stresses that the presence of our minds and of individual identity are ever shifting and unstable. And that, well, behind all these ideas, I think, is a sense of the poet as a figure who channels in his life as well as in his writing channels spirits and presences and voices, certainly. And this is related to Yeats' idea that the poet, and this is something he wrote about in the prose I asked you to read for today, that the poet is more type than man, on 884, late in his life, writing a kind of summary comment on his work for the collected edition being produced by the publisher Scribner's. He writes certain important summary propositions about his work, but about poetry in general. And he says on 884, a poet writes always of his personal life in his finest work out of its tragedies, whatever it may be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness. He never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table. There is always a fantasmagoria. Dante and Milton had mythologies, Shakespeare, the characters of English history, of traditional romance, and so on. He says the writer is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lyre, Romeo, Oedipus, Tiresias. He has stepped out of a play, and even the woman he loves is Rosalyn Cleopatra, never the dark lady. Well, he is part of his own fantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by doing so we apprehend a part of our creative power. In the poet and in his work, nature grows intelligible. This is an important idea for Yeats. And it suggests that though life is rooted, or excuse me, that work is always a life transformed, fed through this fantasmagoria that he's discussing, which is important because at once Yeats is insisting on the personal nature of his poetry and of the experience it offers. And yet he's also interestingly a curiously impersonal figure, impersonal poet. On 887 he says, towards the top of the page, he says, talk to me of originality, and I will turn on you with rage. I am a crowd. I am a lonely man. I am nothing. Ancient salt is best packing. The heroes of Shakespeare convey to us through their looks or through their metaphorical patterns of speech, the sudden enlargement of their vision, their ecstasy at the approach of death, and so on. And this is the kind of channeling of emotion that Yeats, himself a kind of actor in his poetry, wishes to convey. On your handout there's another quotation from late in Yeats's life that I wanted to emphasize. He says, and here's that Yeatsian word all again. He says, when I try to put all into a phrase I say, man can embody truth, but he cannot know it. Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it. I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life, and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel, but not the saint, or the song of experience. That's a wonderful claim. You can refute Hegel, but not the saint, or the song of experience. Man can embody truth, but cannot know it. This is an important formulation. I think of it as a kind of reply to that famous question in Leda and the Swan that is, did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop? The answer that Yeats is giving here is different from saying either yes or no to that question. It's more like saying yes and no, I think. Truth is something to be embodied in Yeats, embodied rather than known, embodied in the sense of lived, not merely understood but experienced, but also I think embodied because it is specifically a thing of the body, it involves an experience of the body as much as or more than the mind. What kind of knowledge, if any, can be had from the shattering experiences of revolution or rape, those models of history that I chose last time? Remember how Yeats represents history as rape in Leda and the Swan? He sees it there as an experience of violence, of sexual violence involving the intercourse of opposites, of God and man, eternity and time, male and female, the will and patterning force of the one thing against the other imposed on it by brute force. What kind of knowledge can be had from that experience? Leda and the Swan seems to say a knowledge of the body, of the necessity of embodiment in the late Yeats and the poems that I'll be discussing today. There's no knowledge apart from the body. This is something to contrast with the early Yeats and its high idealism and its drive to exist in an abstract and ideal world. The late Yeats, this is a poetry written in age and written about age and age seen and experienced as the failure and corruption of the body to which the soul is bound. In Sailing to Byzantium, a kind of transitional poem to later Yeats on 123 in your book, Yeats says, An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, Unless soul clap its hands and sing, And louder sing, For every tatter in its mortal dress. Poet speaks of his soul there as sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, that is, the body. And yet, for all of the complaints about the body here in this poem and in other late Yeats, the poet doesn't reject it, doesn't reject that dying animal, doesn't scorn it. Instead, Yeats affirms it, affirms the body in its corrupt state. He, in fact, sings and sings louder for it in this late poetry, sings louder as he puts it, For every tatter in the soul's mortal dress. This is the extraordinary energy of Yeats' late poetry, what he calls the word he has for the energy of this poetry and of this attitude towards life is joy or gaiety, words that recur throughout these poems. Joy, gaiety, or sometimes madness. Joy and gaiety are both states of mind associated with madness in these poems. The body's truth, felt as an experience of joy or of gaiety, is arrived at through a kind of shattering of the body and of the rational mind and its working. Gaiety for Yeats seems to represent some reconstitution of mind and body, some experience of their unity out beyond an experience of tragedy and grief. This is a point of view specifically associated in Yeats' late poetry with old men and with women, particularly but not only old women. He says on 886 back in that general introduction for my work. This is interesting. He's talking here about the kind of style he wishes to create in poetry which involves for him making the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate normal speech. He says, I wanted to write in this version of Frost's Ambition, though conducted differently. I want to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquize, as I do all day long, upon the events of our own lives or of any life where we live, for the moment. I sometimes compare myself with myself with the mad old slumwomen I hear denouncing and remembering. How dare you? I heard one of them say to an imaginary suitor, and you without health are home. If I spoke my thoughts aloud they might be as angry and as wild. So this is a kind of model for the late Yates in poetry, the voice of the angry and wild slumwomen. Well, in order to get at this style in action in Yates' late poems I want to look back a little bit at a poem that looks back on Easter 1916, the poem I discussed last time, as well as Yates' own earlier poetry. And that is the poem called In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markowitz on page 126. It's a kind of post-script to Easter 1916 written in 1929. Con Markowitz was the only surviving leader of the Easter Rising, condemned to death, but then her sentence was transmute-trans... What is it done? Yeah, thank you, commuted, not transmuted. Well, Con Markowitz is in a sense a figure like Leda. She is someone who has suffered the traumatic events that engenders history. Yates' elegy here recalls her youth and that of her sister, both friends of the younger Yates, Eva Gore Booth. A youth spent in the Sligo Mansion, Lissadelle, where Yates visited in 1894. At that point Yates was 1894, Yates was 29, and the two women were slightly younger. Let me read the beginning of it. The light of evening, Lissadelle, great windows open to the south, two girls in silt kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle, but a raving autumn shears blossom from the summer's wreath. The older is condemned to death, pardoned, drags out lonely years conspiring among the ignorant. I know not what the younger dreams, some vague utopia, and she seems, when withered old and skeleton-gaunt, an image of such politics. Many a time I think to seek one or the other out and speak of that old Georgian mansion, mix pictures of the mind, all that table in the talk of youth, two girls in silt kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle. Here, female beauty, nineteenth-century manners, and aristocratic culture are all held together, as if expressing each other and associated with each other. Yeats's nostalgic vision of them is charmed and static, interestingly static. See how the verb is withheld in the first sentence of the poem, and then in the closing lines of that first strophe that, well, in order to give us that image, two girls in silt kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle which he returns to. It's as if the action itself were being withheld from this charmed world, and time slowed down or even stopped, making a picture, an image, a haiku. But all of this is overthrown, changed utterly by the radical politics that altered Ireland during Yeats's reign, that announced the coming of modernity, and that these two women themselves participated in centrally. Politics makes them ugly to Yeats. It's as if they might have maintained their beauty had they only refrained from it. You could look at a similar attitude in A Prayer for My Daughter, another important big Yeats poem from a slightly earlier where Yeats says, an intellectual hatred is the worst, so let her think, his daughter, that opinions are accursed. Women shouldn't have them. This is not an attractive side of Yeats, at least for people of our moment in sensibility. There's a kind of, well, masculinism in Yeats, and it's part of what I mentioned last time when I spoke of Yeats's anti-modernism or his reactionary modernism, and it's here too in this poem. But the attitude here, as in Eastern 1916, and Yeats's other great poems, is complicated. For all of Yeats's reactionary moods, even for his indulgence and nostalgia here, he's not a nostalgic poet. This poem, I think, shows us what I mean by that. Look at how the poem changes as it develops, as it moves to this second strophe, and Yeats turns from the frozen image of the past to address those two sisters directly, saying, Dear Shadows, now you know it all, all the folly of a fight with a common wrong or right, the innocent and the evil have no enemy but time. Arise and bid me strike a match, and strike another till time catch. Should the conflagration climb, run till all the sages know, we built the great gazebo, they convicted us of guilt. Bid me strike a match and blow. The poet and the woman together become we in the poem's last sentence. They, the they who convicted us of guilt, well that's hard to identify, who is that? I think it's possible to see that they as the sort of general forces of modernity, of everything at odds with the aristocratic culture Yeats and these women shared inhabited. We, the great gazebo built, I stumbled and put built in the wrong place when I read it. It's a strange line. I am told that it plays on a slang phrase then current to make a gazebo of yourself, meaning to make a spectacle of yourself and a fool of yourself publicly. The footnote to your Norton here suggests that the gazebo is a summer house and by extension, it's quite an extension, the nationalist movement, and then even the whole temporal world. Those are several extensions, aren't they? It's a little hard to know what to do with this gazebo. Does it in fact represent the nationalist movement that culminated, or one form of which culminated in the Easter Rebellion? Does it represent Yeats' own early cultural nationalism and his work represented in The Wind Among the Reeds and other early poems? Well, it's a little hard to say. I tend to see that gazebo or summer house as a version of Lisadel itself, this home that the poem evokes, and that is representative of a nineteenth-century world of art, of pleasure, of rarefied and delicate and ideal beauty, a world very important to Yeats. As Yeats, as his thought develops in the course of this poem, he turns from nostalgia to affirmation and seems to join the sisters in the actions that they chose through some kind of poetic identification. Yeats, who had seemed to stand apart from and against them in the first part of the poem, the women represent for Yeats a kind of self-destructive energy, and it's something he too, I think, is willing to share and enter into. He speaks of the destruction of the world that they shared, of the house that they had and of the one that he mocks as this great gazebo, as something noble and beautiful, perhaps but also fragile and a spectacle and unable to stand up to history. Time is the enemy in the poem. It Yeats joins forces with the women at the end, and in doing so joins forces with the women and sets a match to it, as if time itself were tinder. Yeats imagines a kind of act of arson in this poem. Fire is symbolically important throughout his poetry. In the song of Wandering Angus, I talked about the kind of flickering passion and the fire in the head that sends Angus out on his quest. Fire reappears with increasing frequency in the late poetry. In your RIS packet I gave you the short poem Two Songs from a Play. The first stanza of that interesting poem repeats themes from the Magi in the second coming. You can look at it with those poems in mind where Yeats imagines a new world coming into being ushered in through the blood of the old. This idea leads him to the meditation that's in the second stanza there. Everything that man esteems endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away. The painter's brush assumes his dreams. The herald's cry, the soldier's tread, exhausts his glory and his might. Whatever flames upon the night, man's own resinous heart has fed. Man's heart in Yeats is resinous. It's a sticky filth that flames. The longing heart accumulates desires that become in time a kind of volatile waste which can't be contained. The heart is combustible, like the energy that insists on birth in the Magi or the second coming. And this is our glory, Yeats says. Again, notice how bodily, how material and physical Yeats's images of human energy are. Let's turn back to the anthology and look at the poem Vassilation on 131. This is a meditation that comes in several parts. As Yeats's work develops, he creates a kind of poem that comes in parts, that is, we might think of as a kind of sequence poem in which with increasing daring, Yeats explores contending viewpoints, seeking some kind of synthesis. That's what's going on here. That's a similar kind of structure in other late Yeats poems. This is at first thought to call this poem What Is Joy? It takes up his lifelong quest to reconcile extremities, opposites, in his thought, in his experience, and to achieve some kind of unity of being. What is the goal of Wandering Angus? Between extremities, man runs his course, a brand or flaming breath comes to destroy all those antinomies of day and night, the body calls it death, the heart remorse. But if these be right, what is joy? Here in the first part of the poem, Yeats talks about death and remorse as the end of all debate. The last word. We're all going to die and we're all going to regret what we did. But this understanding of the end of things is only the cancellation of all those antinomies in a kind of failure to reconcile them, and it doesn't satisfy Yeats. He's asking, in effect, how can we be joyful in the face of death and in the face of certain remorse? Or how is it that somehow we are? He wants to explain this. He wants to find a way to not so much redeem as affirm time and age and understand them, not simply as a cause of despair or as a cause of defeat. The poem then tries out different answers, answers that alternately explore transcendental and secular solutions, and the poem vacillates, as it were, between them. In section three below, Yeats says, get all the gold and silver that you can, provide, provide. But just as in frost, this strategy isn't going to work, so therefore we must take up, he suggests, an ascetic path engaging only, as he says, in those works that are fit for such men as come proud and open-eyed and laughing to the tomb. In section four then, on the next page, blessing is not, on the other hand, something to work for. Rather, it's a potential fire that flashes up momentarily within us. My fiftieth year had come and gone, when I first read this poem, that seemed a really long way in my future, as perhaps it does to you. My fiftieth year had come and gone. I sat a solitary man in a crowded London shop, an open book and empty cup on the marble tabletop. While on the shop and street I gazed, my body of a sudden blazed, in twenty minutes, more or less, it seemed so great, my happiness, that I was blessed with it. It's a serendipitous and moving momentary experience, Yeats describes, and notice that it's the body that blazes, soul and body or soul and heart. These are our antinomies that the poem is exploring. Yeats insists that the heart is an organ of the body and located in it. This is important. In the sixth section down below he speaks of man's blood-sodden heart. It's another turn on that image of man's resinous heart. In section seven, soul and heart argue. The vacillation and debate becomes quickest here as one point of view gets one line and the other, the rhyming next line. Well, they're not in couplets but you'll hear the rhymes when they come. Seek out reality, leave things that seem, that's what the soul instructs us. The heart responds, what, be a singer born and lack a theme? Isaiah's coal, what more can man desire? Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire. Look on that fire, salvation walks within. What theme had Homer but original sin? It's a wonderfully compressed argument in which the soul and the heart make competing claims for Christianity and classical and literary wisdom. Yeats counterposes Isaiah's prophetic coal to the blazing body of section four, where fire is spontaneous, imminent, something that arises from the body. There then follows in that last section a kind of comic conclusion where the poet chooses to side with Homer and implicitly with poetry against the theologian Von Hügel, who's a kind of comic figure at the end there. Vacillation, the poem was written following a series of poems called the Crazy Jane Poems, written as a kind of summary of them, a kind of resolution of the debates that go on in them. You have just one of them in your anthology, but it is one of the greatest. It is back on 130. In the Crazy Jane Poems, the bishop, who is Crazy Jane's antagonist, the part of Von Hügel, the position of the church authority, and Jane speaks for Yeats and for poetry, for Homer too, I suppose. Crazy Jane is one of Yeats's masks or roles. She is a mad peasant woman. She speaks from the point of view of a cracked or shattered in the tradition of a Shakespearean fool. She speaks what Yeats calls, in his general title for this group of poems, Words for Music, perhaps. The poem's connection to music signifies the difference in point of view in these poems from reasoned speech. It also seems to relate these poems to folk forms and to the wisdom of the folk. Jane speaks in praise of love, in praise of satisfaction. She speaks of the necessary unity of body and soul, which for her entails a defense of the body, defending as she does its knowledge and its goodness. And as a character she is sour, she's rank, ill-tempered, pungent in all senses. Well, let's look at this debate. I met the bishop on the road and much said he and I, those breasts are flat and fallen now, those veins must soon be dry. This is the bishop speaking to her of her body. I live in a heavenly mansion, not in some foul sty, to which Jane replies, fair and foul are near of kin, and fair needs foul, I cried. My friends are gone, but that's the truth, nor grave, nor bed denied, learned in bodily lowliness, and in the heart's pride. And she continues, a woman can be proud and stiff when on love intent, but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement, for nothing can be soul or whole that has not been rent. The points of view, again, are those of the sacred and profane, the soul and the body, the promise of a heavenly mansion and the reality of a life sti. The bishop claims one side of the bait, Jane claims the other, but unlike the bishop she doesn't want to reject the other, and this is important. Speaking for the body, she speaks for the potential unity of body and soul. In answer to the promise of the bishop's heavenly mansion in another life, she claims another sort of house, what she calls love's mansion, which is noble itself and which is to be lived here on earth. Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. This is an outrageous claim. What does it mean? Look at the claim it's paired with, for nothing can be soul or whole that has not been rent. Why is it necessary to rend something, to make it soul or whole? Is it necessary? Only that which is broken, Jane claims, is unified. That which appears whole is not. Yates seems to be insisting to Jane on the necessity of shattering experience to achieve unity of being, which Yates imagines, again, as the union of opposites. Again, think of the rape of Leda. This is the type of the violent union that Yates imagines, in which the divine enters the human and the human finds access to the divine through the beastial, and the beastial is identified in Yates with the heart and with the irrational and with the uncontrollable. Yates' late poems speak from the point of view of Jane, more often than not, and yet powerfully we do see him vacillating from different points of view. We have really no time left to explore them, but I want to just point you to two important late poems that seem to represent different attitudes in late Yates that contrast the kinds of claim that can be made for art. One of them is the moving valedictory to his work that is called the Circus Animal's Desertion, where the poet imagines, his imagination is having arisen on ladders, if you will, out of what he calls the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, and in conclusion he imagines giving up that terrific drive towards imagination and idealization and a return to the rag and bone shop of the heart. That's an image of art ultimately leading out of art to a kind of state of de-sublimation. Contrast this poem to Lapis Lazuli, a beautiful and moving late poem on 135 that is full of echoes from that general introduction to his work that I quoted from earlier. Here, Yates presents us with an image of art in the form of a Lapis Lazuli Chinese carving, and he describes the figures on that carving who are in some sense representatives of an attitude, again, beyond tragedy, beyond the kinds of social and political apocalypse that Yates faced in his career, and that he describes also in his poem. And Yates concludes, well, with an image of the artwork that I'll read for you, that is fascinating in itself, but is also, as I suggest, an image of Yates' late ideal for what art should be like. He says, every discoloration of the stone, this is on page 136, every accidental crack, or dent, seems a water course or an avalanche, or lofty slope where it still snows, though doubtless plum or cherry branch sweetens the little halfway house those Chinaman climb towards. And I delight to imagine them in their at their altitude, looking at the world from within the perspective of art, there on the mountain and the sky, on all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies, accomplished fingers begin to play, their eyes, mid many wrinkles, their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes are gay. And there is finally, again, an affirmation of this joy and gaiety here seen as a property of the artwork itself.