The Young Cunning Of W.B. Yeats
Until well into middle age, William Butler Yeats seems to have lived in a waking dream. His early poetry depends on artful haziness for its effect. "The silver apples of the moon" are not to be found in any earthly orchard. But if the youthful Yeats cherished indistinctness in his choice of words, it was deliberate; the dreaminess was strategic. As he put it, "everything that's lovely is / But a brief, dreamy, kind delight." He loved the shadows around things, not the things themselves. A rose wasn't the momentary flower on its actual stem but the "far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose," a rose with a capital "R." When he wrote "The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland," another early poem, he was describing himself. Yeats believed in fairies, or convinced himself he did; they too enjoyed the shadowy prestige of the intangible.
During this protracted phase of his career, which lasted until he was almost 50, Yeats wrote many essays, as well as some of his best-loved poems and plays. Forty-nine of these now appear, in definitive form, in "Early Essays" (Scribner, 556 pages, $50), edited by George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran (this is the fourth volume of "The Collected Works" and the 10th volume of the complete 14 scheduled to appear). Like all the preceding volumes, it is not only meticulously edited but beautifully produced. The two collections of essays that Yeats himself assembled in 1924 for the Macmillan edition are included "Ideas of Good and Evil" of 1903 and "The Cutting of an Agate" of 1919 both accompanied by extensive and detailed annotations. "Early" these essays may be, but they are not merely of antiquarian interest. Despite their recurrent dreaminess and the occasional fey note they strike sometimes quite literally they speak to us still, often magnificently so.
This immediacy has much to do with the unusual beauty of Yeats's prose. Most poets become clumsy in prose, but Yeats crafted sentences as passionate and calculated as his verse. His cadences charm, even when he sounds silly. Here he is, for example, on moon-gazing:
If I watch a rushy pool in the moonlight, my emotion at its beauty is mixed with memories of the man that I have seen ploughing by its margin, or of the lovers I saw there a night ago; but if I look at the moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining cup full of dreams.
This starts innocently enough with the pool, the plowman, and the lovers by moonlight but before we know it, we have been ushered into a lofty, fantastical fairyland of high symbol. We may not believe in it, but something in us responds. We don't want the world to consist of nothing but that rushy pool and the memory of a plowman; we want the shining stag, or a hint of him, as well. It's blarney but blarney at its most sublime.
In his essays, Yeats employs the cunning of poetry its manipulation of sounds, its timing, its rhythms without becoming too annoyingly "poetic." When he teeters on the verge, an instinctive shrewdness usually draws him back. He lulls us with the suppleness of his prose only to administer a sting, as when he speaks of the "straightforward logic" of the popular press only to note dryly that it merely "tickles an ignorant ear." The little phrase, almost poetry but not quite, tickles our ears, too. He follows this up with a sudden aphorism, noting that "the line of Nature is crooked." We dredge canals, but "the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness." This may be sophistry so much for logic! but it's got a teasing edge of truth.
The essays range from studies of individual poets (Blake, Shelley, Spenser) to painting and the theater, symbolism and magic, and music and poetry. His classic essay of 1916 on the Japanese Noh theater, which lays out his own dramatic principles, displays the breadth of his imaginative engagement. Here, as elsewhere, Yeats's snobbish disdain for "realism" looms large. Realism, he says, was "created for the common people" and is "the delight today of all those whose minds are without the memory of beauty and emotional subtlety." After 1914, and especially after the Easter Uprising of 1916, Yeats would become more "realistic." His tormented and hopeless love for Maud Gonne Ireland in all its "terrible beauty" personified played a large part, too.
Yeats remained doggedly transcendental to the end. It would be a mistake to think that Crazy Jane dislodged the Rose. It was just that rose, dipped in "the fury and the mire of human veins," which drove her crazy in the first place.
