This is the text of a lecture the poet and literary critic James Longenbach (1959-2022) gave over Zoom on January 28, 2022, the 83rd anniversary of W.B. Yeats’s death, as part of Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies 2021-22 lecture series. It is the final essay he completed.
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In the London drawing room of Lady Cunard, on a Sunday afternoon in 1916, a handful of guests gathered for the premiere of At the Hawk’s Well. The musicians’ faces were made to appear sunburned, as if they’d wandered in after a long journey; the few actors wore masks. A square of blue cloth, positioned on the carpet, suggested the well to which the play’s title refers, but also refused to be anything but cloth: it existed side by side with Lady Cunard’s Louis XV coffee table.
At the Hawk’s Well was the first of Yeats’s plays for dancers, plays modeled on the Japanese Noh plays newly adapted by Ezra Pound. Neither poet knew much about Japanese theater, and neither did Michio Itō, the play’s dancer, who modeled his movements on Nijinsky’s.
The withered leaves of the hazel
Half choke the dry bed of the well;
The guardian of the well is sitting
Upon the old grey stone at its side,
Worn out from raking its dry bed,
Worn out from gathering up the leaves.
Yeats’s rhythmically delicate lines initially bear little significance: the leaves fall into the well, they are raked, gathered, blown by the wind. But as the leaves recur throughout the play, they feel drenched with significance. They accumulate coherence, but never stop feeling strange. “I but see / A hollow among stones half-full of leaves,” says the Young Man, but Yeats’s audience could see only a square of blue cloth.
Seated in that audience were Pound and his new friend T. S. Eliot, who hadn’t yet paid much attention to Yeats. “The self,” Eliot had proclaimed in his Ph.D. dissertation, written at the time Yeats wrote the play, “is a construction.” The unfolding dramatic utterance of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” written prior to that dissertation, embodies this contention, for there seems to be neither a stable self nor a stable world to which the utterance points. “The soul,” Eliot continued, “is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.” Eliot’s contention is not that human beings do not possess what we call souls or that the self is an illusion; his point is that these notions are useful and also compromised. How, the question remained for English-language poetry at large, could a poem embody that contention structurally without falling back of the conventions of an unfolding dramatic utterance, an utterance like “Prufrock” coherent in what initially seems like incoherence?
When Yeats wrote At the Hawk’s Well, he was tired of what he called theater business; he wanted to create an intimate theater that did not require an audience to pay its bills. During rehearsals, Yeats asked his masked actors to move as if they were marionettes; he instructed them to declaim their lines hieratically, rather than interpreting them. Reducing the prominence of character and motivation presented Yeats with a challenge, however, and Pound’s English versions of the Noh plays foregrounded different tools. These plays are structured around a central metaphor that, repeated in new contexts over time, creates what Yeats called a “rhythm of metaphor”—a way of organizing a dramatic action while “neglecting character” in the way a painter might for expressive purposes neglect the illusion of space.
Imagine Yeats, Pound and Eliot discussing this “rhythm of metaphor” around a square of blue cloth. For after the premiere of At the Hawk’s Well, Eliot would write that the Noh plays are organized by “a unity of the image” that reminded him of certain cantos of Dante. Pound was inspired to imagine larger poetic structures. And Yeats would write “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” (as “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” was called when it appeared in a magazine), whose disparate poems are conjoined, in lieu of an overarching narrative or consistently dramatized psychology, through the repetition of particular words. But rather than appearing at the outset to be the poem’s foundation, this principle accrues as the series progresses—as if the foundation were being constructed beneath a house already partially built.
Coherence is something that happens as we read a lot of poems, maybe most of them; but in the twentieth century, poems tend to give up other more prominent ways of establishing coherence, becoming the vessel of themselves over time. In the second movement of The Waste Land, for instance, a line from Ariel’s song in The Tempest (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) reappears in a new context.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
These lines seem driven by language rather than individual speakers: they echo not only The Tempest but Hamlet (“What noise is that?), King Lear (“Nothing will come of nothing”), and Othello (“You have seen nothing then?”). Most importantly, they invoke the poem’s earlier quotation of Ariel’s song, and though we don’t yet know why it’s important to do so, we feel enticed by the possibility of an increasing coherence, an expanding web of associations both within and without the poem.
Is the phrase “know nothing” quoted from At the Hawk’s Well (“Her heavy eyes / Know nothing”)? Our growing sense of the poem’s coherence feels both reassuring and unsettling, and had Eliot retained an earlier version of The Waste Land—“I remember / The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes!”—the continuity with his earlier reference to Ariel’s song would be made on the ground of narrative: we would be far more certain that the “I” speaking these lines is the same “I” as in the earlier hyacinth garden, and The Waste Land would feel more like “Prufrock.” We’d be more liable to find a unified speaker.
Eliot saw how to provoke and to dismantle such connections in Yeats’s “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World,” for which I’m using the earlier title, common until Yeats republished the poem in 1928 in The Tower. Part I (“Many ingenious lovely things are gone”) consists of six stanzas of ottava rima (eight iambic pentameter lines rhymed abababcc), which in The Tower would echo “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children” and two sections of “Meditations in a Time of Civil War.” Parts II (“When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound”) and III (“Some moralist or mythological poet”) consist of one and of three stanzas respectively of what I call Yeats’s mummy stanza, ten lines rhymed abcabcdeed, used also in The Tower in “All Souls’ Night” and in part of “Meditations”: this stanza’s rhyme scheme stands provocatively at odds with its metrical scheme—two pentameters followed by a trimeter, two more pentameters, four more trimeters and a final pentameter; that is, lines of different scansion may rhyme with each other, suggesting a unity that, according on the scansion, isn’t there. Why do they do that?
Little time to wonder. Part IV of “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” (“We, who seven years ago”) is a simple quatrain of trochaic tetrameter lines, rhymed abab, while part V (“Come let us mock at the great”) consists of four stanzas of five lines rhymed ababb, these five lines alternating (the metrical scheme again at odds with the rhyme scheme) between iambic trimeters and tetrameters. Finally, part VI (“Violence upon the roads: violence of horses”) is a single stanza consisting of three iterations of the first half of the mummy stanza’s rhyme scheme, though not its metrical scheme, the iambic pentameter lines rhymed abcabc.
Have we got all that? I think readers feel this formal disparity even before they have time to register a thematic disparity; they also also hear the poem’s whispers of formal continuity. Like At the Hawk’s Well, this series registers not only its equivocation but also an opacity about it. Who is speaking, as we move from one section to the next, despite or even because of the repetitions of the words (like Eliot’s repetition of Ariel’s song) dragon, weasel, solitude, traffic and labyrinth from section to section? Why do we even speak of the speaker of a lyric poem in English, while we don’t when reading French or Italian poetry?
As my quotations of the first lines of each part of “Thoughts” suggest, Yeats liked metrical lines that, despite their sometimes wicked enjambments, seem syntactically complete (“O what fine thought we had because we thought” doesn’t disappear when we read “O what fine thought we had because we thought / That the worst rogues and rascals had died out”). He also liked stanzas that, whatever their more jagged surroundings, consist of one sentence, the syntax limpidly perspicuous.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked—and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
Consider that last stanza: Yeats’s diction is here as elsewhere dramatically perfected, the stanza’s single sentence, made of 23 monosyllabic Germanic words, ending with its one three-syllable Latinate word, the final line beginning with one of four two-syllable words, the expected iamb flipped into a trochee (“Traffic”). The enticing work of any reader of Yeats’s “Thoughts” is to do something with the poem’s immediately audible disparities and also its quizzical continuities.
Today, we expect such disparity. Eliot’s long poem contains sonnets, quatrains, couplets, free-verse lines and also unpunctuated lines of several varieties, lines that use line endings as a kind of punctuation and lines that dramatically run together the poem’s syntax. The prominent long English poems of the nineteenth century were, as Poe said they must be, also made of lots of shorter poems; but the poems of Tennyson’s In Memoriam or of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass maintain a formal continuity, registered in their lines, also in what we English speakers have learned to call their speakers. Yeats forgoes that kind of continuity, and the result will be important for a growing variety of poems written even today.
“I am writing a series of poems (‘thoughts suggested by the present state of the world’ or some such name),” Yeats told a friend in 1921. “I have written two and there may be many more. They are not philosophical but simple and passionate, a lamentation over lost peace and lost hope.” Yeats had no plan, and he pointed out that he was formulating not a sequence (which, mathematically speaking, might be the even numbers, in which we depend on the order and predictability of the terms) but a series (which is the sum of those terms, regardless of their order); the difference between sequence and series was codified in nineteenth-century Germany by Carl Friedrich Gauss, and in 21st century an amateur mathematician might say that the World Series be more accurately called the World Sequence.
In the twentieth century Yeats was living in England and thinking about Ireland, thinking about the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War. The Great War and then the Russian Revolution were also raging, and initially Yeats had said in “A Reason for Keeping Silent” (written in 1914 for a book Edith Wharton compiled for the Belgians, the lines later to be chastened in “On Being Asked for a War Poem”), that it’s better that “We poets keep our mouths shut.” But by the time he began writing “Thoughts” a few years later, he would not keep silent, beginning with Phidias’s ivories but immediately referencing the 1920 unprosecuted murder in Kiltartan, County Galway, of Eileen Quinn by British troops.
a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.
Yeats would revisit this scene in “Reprisals,” his last poem commemorating the death of Robert Gregory in the Great War; but here, unlike in the more famous “The Second Coming,” in which Yeats referenced current events in the drafts (“The Germans are [ ] now to Russia come”) but mythologized them in the final poem, Yeats wants to be a documentary historian. He does fold the murder of an Irish woman into his groping account of (to adapt the title of George Dangerfield’s now classic book) the strange death of British liberalism (“We pieced our thoughts into philosophy”), but that death is happening now, in the present world.
“We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, / And planned to bring the world under a rule, / Who are but weasels fighting in a hole”: Sound like anyone we know? So far I’ve emphasized the form of “Thoughts,” the various rhyme and metrical schemes of its pieces, but also important is its incrementally developing structure, manifested most clearly in the English syntax extruded through those various forms. I’ve emphasized that Yeats wrote this series without any sense of how many parts it might include, but these three lines occupy what over time we recognize, at least mathematically, as the poem’s center.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics.
Should that be art and politics? Does one lead to the other? Does violence in art lead to violence in politics? Inevitably? These are the crucial questions for the entire series; Yeats begins by making his readers grope for them, as he needed to grope, too.
“Thoughts” itself begins with a poem that, like so many of Yeats’s poems, is self-questioning, not in spite but because of its ottava rima. While it begins in the present tense, it moves quickly to the ancient past (“We too had many pretty toys when young”), calling Phidias’s ivories “pretty toys,” and it suddenly culminates (due to the stanza) in the jarringly powerful lines “O what fine thought we had because we thought / That the worst rogues and rascals had died out”—the making of art, the making of pretty things, already associated with a failed politics. Art and politics, or art or politics? English only has one word for or, and is that or like the Latin word aut, an or registering a mutual exclusivity, or like the Latin words sive or vel, the or registering an amplification?
There’s no time yet to consider these questions: the poem’s syntax turns back to the present (“Now days are dragon-ridden”), the tone suddenly desperate or descriptive, now bitter, now eloquent—“Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?” Yet this single poem, which becomes the first part of the series, ends with the bitter tone: we break ivories, we traffic in pieces and, though no one may admit to doing so, a capitalist may be found in us all.
The we is crucial, all the more so because of the already bewildering disparity of syntax and tone. The second poem of “Thoughts” begins, despite its complicated stanza, with a welcome narrative placidity (“When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound”), Fuller performing then with Japanese (not Chinese) dancers; Yeats says her veils create “a dragon of air,” immediately recalling the first poem’s metaphor of “dragon-ridden” days in which soldiers kill mothers. Is that connection, riding on the word dragon, between art and politics a coincidence? May the murder be said to be connected to the dancing of Loie Fuller? What about the words of this very poem, especially as it accumulates?
While the next part of the series continues with the convoluted mummy stanza, the tone changes again to the flatly colloquial (“I am satisfied with that”) as it describes a swan (like the dancer a common symbolist emblem); it also includes the lines about being lost in a “labyrinth” made in “art or politics.” How troubling that little or. The swan leaps “into the desolate heaven,” and the lines are also leaping from the colloquial to the hieratic, Yeats suggesting equivocally that this image “can bring wildness, bring a rage / To end all things.” Does it? Should it? Is this the end of art, the end of “even” the “half-written page”? The resulting bitterness seems here to apply to a world at large, not just to dancing or to swans.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we crack-pated when we dreamed.
What is mended? What exactly is dreaming, especially as it’s shared by a we?
New section.
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.
This one-sentence poem, the simplest quatrain, its trochaic rhythm invoking Blake’s tyger, follows immediately on two poems written in Yeats’s most elaborate stanza, and the increasingly queasy syntactical continuity of that we speaks more loudly, the bitterness reinforced by the uncanny repetition of the word weasel, the poem itself swiftly followed by another stating with unexpected confidence that we also mock at the great (who like Yeats himself once strove to leave behind “monuments”), at the wise (who once gazed at “calendars”), and finally at trafficking mockers themselves: “we / Traffic in mockery.” These are all Yeats’s special words—monument, calendar, even gay: Is there at this point a bleaker poem, a poem more determinedly written against poetry?
At least since the time of Plato poets have distrusted poems; often they’ve done so more viciously than readers. Callimachus did, Horace did, the English literary critic George Puttenham spoke in the seventeenth century of “the scorne and ordinarie disgrace offered unto Poets at these days,” and John Keats said in the nineteenth, speaking of poetry, that “the marvel is to me how people read so much of it.” A beleaguered Thomas Hardy wondered in the twentieth if the inquisition would have bothered Galileo if he’d written in verse that the earth revolves around the sun.
This tradition of self-indictment drives Yeats the maker of poems, and the series called “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” ends with these lines.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
Turning to this sixth and final part of the series, I don’t feel a need to know about Robert Artisson or Lady Kyteler or about her peacock feathers and cock’s combs; they’re gruesome to think about, and they all sound bad, though they don’t maybe feel as bad as Yeats’s repetition right here of the word labyrinth. Loie Fuller’s troupe has become Herodias’s wildly dancing daughters, and they move in “the labyrinth of the wind,” a labyrinth which previously existed in the mind, made of meditation on “art or politics.” Here, that or has become an and, and the chilling beauty of this series is that it accepts its own indictment while also becoming a poem.
Who foresaw any of this while sitting around a square of blue cloth? Become may be the crucial word: a series of poems becomes at its end something different, something unforeseen, the word labyrinth meaning at the end something different than at the beginning, and the meaning at the beginning also standing. The series is driven by or: a doubleness prevails, driven itself by time, like life and death. Even when Yeats’s play was written the Great War was on, Ireland was a mess, Russia, too, and England was messier than people wanted to admit. Was Lady Cunard’s drawing room a retreat, an immunity? Was it the problem?
Near the end of his life Yeats asked out loud, again writing in trochaic tetrameters, if his early play Cathleen ni Houlihan did “send out / Certain men the English shot”—a question about the relationship of art and politics that Paul Muldoon deflatingly rephrases as “If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead / would certain men have stayed in bed?” The answer to Yeats’s question in Yeats’s “The Man and the Echo” is “Lie down and die.” Which Yeats soon did. Yet the question remains, it will always remain.
“Yeats is never finer as a poet,” observed Harold Bloom years ago, “than when he … severely doubts his own mythologies.” That doubt is important, both for the structure of poems and for their arranger; today, it’s what allows a poet to learn from Yeats. But simultaneously we’re discomfited by liking Yeats’s (or modernism’s) doubts too much. When Michael Wood first read “The Second Coming” he felt certain the poem was referring to Hitler and Fascism, to Chamberlain and appeasement: “When I learned its date,” he admits ruefully, “I was baffled.” The mistake, if we should call it that, is salutary, for Wood’s meditation on Yeats and violence is as much provoked by the collapse of the Twin Towers in September 2001 as it is by Yeats. My own thinking about Yeats’s “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” has taken place during our 21st century pandemic, and lately, as apocalyptic stories have tumbled out of the New York Times, as if we craved the mortality by which we also felt threatened, six words shot out at me at as they had never before—“what fine thought we had because we thought”—the first-person plural pronoun we used twice, the titular word thought appearing first as a noun and five syllables later as a verb. Did the problem as well as the solution lay in thinking itself, in the way we think, in the way we’ve come to recognize thinking?
I understand why Yeats needed to rename his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” locating it in the past, but “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” remains a poem of thought happening now, not so much a poem of observation, a word favored by both T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. Yeats is a poet of thought: along with Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” his “The Second Coming,” quoted equally often, may be one of the most wonderfully misread poems of the century: here, the apocalyptic Yeats diagnoses the need for apocalypticism, refusing to suggest that end-games are just for other people: after eight lines of blank verse, the second stanza begins this way: “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!” Surely? All poems are moving quickly forward, riding the rails of their own syntax, but Yeats’s poem shows no evidence even of considering a second coming until “those words” are “out.” Off we go! We move from the messy vagueness of “some revelation” (the Latin word “revelation” translates the Greek word “apocalypse,” meaning uncovered) to a visionary confidence in five syllables. This poem is more about a process of thinking, weasels fighting elegantly in a hole. So is the series once called “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World,” about which I’ve been thinking.
This is the text of a lecture the poet and literary critic James Longenbach (1959-2022) gave over Zoom on January 28, 2022, the 83rd anniversary of W.B. Yeats’s death, as part of Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies 2021-22 lecture series. It is the final essay he completed.
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In the London drawing room of Lady Cunard, on a Sunday afternoon in 1916, a handful of guests gathered for the premiere of At the Hawk’s Well. The musicians’ faces were made to appear sunburned, as if they’d wandered in after a long journey; the few actors wore masks. A square of blue cloth, positioned on the carpet, suggested the well to which the play’s title refers, but also refused to be anything but cloth: it existed side by side with Lady Cunard’s Louis XV coffee table.
At the Hawk’s Well was the first of Yeats’s plays for dancers, plays modeled on the Japanese Noh plays newly adapted by Ezra Pound. Neither poet knew much about Japanese theater, and neither did Michio Itō, the play’s dancer, who modeled his movements on Nijinsky’s.
Yeats’s rhythmically delicate lines initially bear little significance: the leaves fall into the well, they are raked, gathered, blown by the wind. But as the leaves recur throughout the play, they feel drenched with significance. They accumulate coherence, but never stop feeling strange. “I but see / A hollow among stones half-full of leaves,” says the Young Man, but Yeats’s audience could see only a square of blue cloth.
Seated in that audience were Pound and his new friend T. S. Eliot, who hadn’t yet paid much attention to Yeats. “The self,” Eliot had proclaimed in his Ph.D. dissertation, written at the time Yeats wrote the play, “is a construction.” The unfolding dramatic utterance of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” written prior to that dissertation, embodies this contention, for there seems to be neither a stable self nor a stable world to which the utterance points. “The soul,” Eliot continued, “is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.” Eliot’s contention is not that human beings do not possess what we call souls or that the self is an illusion; his point is that these notions are useful and also compromised. How, the question remained for English-language poetry at large, could a poem embody that contention structurally without falling back of the conventions of an unfolding dramatic utterance, an utterance like “Prufrock” coherent in what initially seems like incoherence?
When Yeats wrote At the Hawk’s Well, he was tired of what he called theater business; he wanted to create an intimate theater that did not require an audience to pay its bills. During rehearsals, Yeats asked his masked actors to move as if they were marionettes; he instructed them to declaim their lines hieratically, rather than interpreting them. Reducing the prominence of character and motivation presented Yeats with a challenge, however, and Pound’s English versions of the Noh plays foregrounded different tools. These plays are structured around a central metaphor that, repeated in new contexts over time, creates what Yeats called a “rhythm of metaphor”—a way of organizing a dramatic action while “neglecting character” in the way a painter might for expressive purposes neglect the illusion of space.
Imagine Yeats, Pound and Eliot discussing this “rhythm of metaphor” around a square of blue cloth. For after the premiere of At the Hawk’s Well, Eliot would write that the Noh plays are organized by “a unity of the image” that reminded him of certain cantos of Dante. Pound was inspired to imagine larger poetic structures. And Yeats would write “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” (as “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” was called when it appeared in a magazine), whose disparate poems are conjoined, in lieu of an overarching narrative or consistently dramatized psychology, through the repetition of particular words. But rather than appearing at the outset to be the poem’s foundation, this principle accrues as the series progresses—as if the foundation were being constructed beneath a house already partially built.
Coherence is something that happens as we read a lot of poems, maybe most of them; but in the twentieth century, poems tend to give up other more prominent ways of establishing coherence, becoming the vessel of themselves over time. In the second movement of The Waste Land, for instance, a line from Ariel’s song in The Tempest (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) reappears in a new context.
These lines seem driven by language rather than individual speakers: they echo not only The Tempest but Hamlet (“What noise is that?), King Lear (“Nothing will come of nothing”), and Othello (“You have seen nothing then?”). Most importantly, they invoke the poem’s earlier quotation of Ariel’s song, and though we don’t yet know why it’s important to do so, we feel enticed by the possibility of an increasing coherence, an expanding web of associations both within and without the poem.
Is the phrase “know nothing” quoted from At the Hawk’s Well (“Her heavy eyes / Know nothing”)? Our growing sense of the poem’s coherence feels both reassuring and unsettling, and had Eliot retained an earlier version of The Waste Land—“I remember / The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes!”—the continuity with his earlier reference to Ariel’s song would be made on the ground of narrative: we would be far more certain that the “I” speaking these lines is the same “I” as in the earlier hyacinth garden, and The Waste Land would feel more like “Prufrock.” We’d be more liable to find a unified speaker.
Eliot saw how to provoke and to dismantle such connections in Yeats’s “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World,” for which I’m using the earlier title, common until Yeats republished the poem in 1928 in The Tower. Part I (“Many ingenious lovely things are gone”) consists of six stanzas of ottava rima (eight iambic pentameter lines rhymed abababcc), which in The Tower would echo “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children” and two sections of “Meditations in a Time of Civil War.” Parts II (“When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound”) and III (“Some moralist or mythological poet”) consist of one and of three stanzas respectively of what I call Yeats’s mummy stanza, ten lines rhymed abcabcdeed, used also in The Tower in “All Souls’ Night” and in part of “Meditations”: this stanza’s rhyme scheme stands provocatively at odds with its metrical scheme—two pentameters followed by a trimeter, two more pentameters, four more trimeters and a final pentameter; that is, lines of different scansion may rhyme with each other, suggesting a unity that, according on the scansion, isn’t there. Why do they do that?
Little time to wonder. Part IV of “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” (“We, who seven years ago”) is a simple quatrain of trochaic tetrameter lines, rhymed abab, while part V (“Come let us mock at the great”) consists of four stanzas of five lines rhymed ababb, these five lines alternating (the metrical scheme again at odds with the rhyme scheme) between iambic trimeters and tetrameters. Finally, part VI (“Violence upon the roads: violence of horses”) is a single stanza consisting of three iterations of the first half of the mummy stanza’s rhyme scheme, though not its metrical scheme, the iambic pentameter lines rhymed abcabc.
Have we got all that? I think readers feel this formal disparity even before they have time to register a thematic disparity; they also also hear the poem’s whispers of formal continuity. Like At the Hawk’s Well, this series registers not only its equivocation but also an opacity about it. Who is speaking, as we move from one section to the next, despite or even because of the repetitions of the words (like Eliot’s repetition of Ariel’s song) dragon, weasel, solitude, traffic and labyrinth from section to section? Why do we even speak of the speaker of a lyric poem in English, while we don’t when reading French or Italian poetry?
As my quotations of the first lines of each part of “Thoughts” suggest, Yeats liked metrical lines that, despite their sometimes wicked enjambments, seem syntactically complete (“O what fine thought we had because we thought” doesn’t disappear when we read “O what fine thought we had because we thought / That the worst rogues and rascals had died out”). He also liked stanzas that, whatever their more jagged surroundings, consist of one sentence, the syntax limpidly perspicuous.
Consider that last stanza: Yeats’s diction is here as elsewhere dramatically perfected, the stanza’s single sentence, made of 23 monosyllabic Germanic words, ending with its one three-syllable Latinate word, the final line beginning with one of four two-syllable words, the expected iamb flipped into a trochee (“Traffic”). The enticing work of any reader of Yeats’s “Thoughts” is to do something with the poem’s immediately audible disparities and also its quizzical continuities.
Today, we expect such disparity. Eliot’s long poem contains sonnets, quatrains, couplets, free-verse lines and also unpunctuated lines of several varieties, lines that use line endings as a kind of punctuation and lines that dramatically run together the poem’s syntax. The prominent long English poems of the nineteenth century were, as Poe said they must be, also made of lots of shorter poems; but the poems of Tennyson’s In Memoriam or of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass maintain a formal continuity, registered in their lines, also in what we English speakers have learned to call their speakers. Yeats forgoes that kind of continuity, and the result will be important for a growing variety of poems written even today.
“I am writing a series of poems (‘thoughts suggested by the present state of the world’ or some such name),” Yeats told a friend in 1921. “I have written two and there may be many more. They are not philosophical but simple and passionate, a lamentation over lost peace and lost hope.” Yeats had no plan, and he pointed out that he was formulating not a sequence (which, mathematically speaking, might be the even numbers, in which we depend on the order and predictability of the terms) but a series (which is the sum of those terms, regardless of their order); the difference between sequence and series was codified in nineteenth-century Germany by Carl Friedrich Gauss, and in 21st century an amateur mathematician might say that the World Series be more accurately called the World Sequence.
In the twentieth century Yeats was living in England and thinking about Ireland, thinking about the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War. The Great War and then the Russian Revolution were also raging, and initially Yeats had said in “A Reason for Keeping Silent” (written in 1914 for a book Edith Wharton compiled for the Belgians, the lines later to be chastened in “On Being Asked for a War Poem”), that it’s better that “We poets keep our mouths shut.” But by the time he began writing “Thoughts” a few years later, he would not keep silent, beginning with Phidias’s ivories but immediately referencing the 1920 unprosecuted murder in Kiltartan, County Galway, of Eileen Quinn by British troops.
Yeats would revisit this scene in “Reprisals,” his last poem commemorating the death of Robert Gregory in the Great War; but here, unlike in the more famous “The Second Coming,” in which Yeats referenced current events in the drafts (“The Germans are [ ] now to Russia come”) but mythologized them in the final poem, Yeats wants to be a documentary historian. He does fold the murder of an Irish woman into his groping account of (to adapt the title of George Dangerfield’s now classic book) the strange death of British liberalism (“We pieced our thoughts into philosophy”), but that death is happening now, in the present world.
“We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, / And planned to bring the world under a rule, / Who are but weasels fighting in a hole”: Sound like anyone we know? So far I’ve emphasized the form of “Thoughts,” the various rhyme and metrical schemes of its pieces, but also important is its incrementally developing structure, manifested most clearly in the English syntax extruded through those various forms. I’ve emphasized that Yeats wrote this series without any sense of how many parts it might include, but these three lines occupy what over time we recognize, at least mathematically, as the poem’s center.
Should that be art and politics? Does one lead to the other? Does violence in art lead to violence in politics? Inevitably? These are the crucial questions for the entire series; Yeats begins by making his readers grope for them, as he needed to grope, too.
“Thoughts” itself begins with a poem that, like so many of Yeats’s poems, is self-questioning, not in spite but because of its ottava rima. While it begins in the present tense, it moves quickly to the ancient past (“We too had many pretty toys when young”), calling Phidias’s ivories “pretty toys,” and it suddenly culminates (due to the stanza) in the jarringly powerful lines “O what fine thought we had because we thought / That the worst rogues and rascals had died out”—the making of art, the making of pretty things, already associated with a failed politics. Art and politics, or art or politics? English only has one word for or, and is that or like the Latin word aut, an or registering a mutual exclusivity, or like the Latin words sive or vel, the or registering an amplification?
There’s no time yet to consider these questions: the poem’s syntax turns back to the present (“Now days are dragon-ridden”), the tone suddenly desperate or descriptive, now bitter, now eloquent—“Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?” Yet this single poem, which becomes the first part of the series, ends with the bitter tone: we break ivories, we traffic in pieces and, though no one may admit to doing so, a capitalist may be found in us all.
The we is crucial, all the more so because of the already bewildering disparity of syntax and tone. The second poem of “Thoughts” begins, despite its complicated stanza, with a welcome narrative placidity (“When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound”), Fuller performing then with Japanese (not Chinese) dancers; Yeats says her veils create “a dragon of air,” immediately recalling the first poem’s metaphor of “dragon-ridden” days in which soldiers kill mothers. Is that connection, riding on the word dragon, between art and politics a coincidence? May the murder be said to be connected to the dancing of Loie Fuller? What about the words of this very poem, especially as it accumulates?
While the next part of the series continues with the convoluted mummy stanza, the tone changes again to the flatly colloquial (“I am satisfied with that”) as it describes a swan (like the dancer a common symbolist emblem); it also includes the lines about being lost in a “labyrinth” made in “art or politics.” How troubling that little or. The swan leaps “into the desolate heaven,” and the lines are also leaping from the colloquial to the hieratic, Yeats suggesting equivocally that this image “can bring wildness, bring a rage / To end all things.” Does it? Should it? Is this the end of art, the end of “even” the “half-written page”? The resulting bitterness seems here to apply to a world at large, not just to dancing or to swans.
What is mended? What exactly is dreaming, especially as it’s shared by a we?
New section.
This one-sentence poem, the simplest quatrain, its trochaic rhythm invoking Blake’s tyger, follows immediately on two poems written in Yeats’s most elaborate stanza, and the increasingly queasy syntactical continuity of that we speaks more loudly, the bitterness reinforced by the uncanny repetition of the word weasel, the poem itself swiftly followed by another stating with unexpected confidence that we also mock at the great (who like Yeats himself once strove to leave behind “monuments”), at the wise (who once gazed at “calendars”), and finally at trafficking mockers themselves: “we / Traffic in mockery.” These are all Yeats’s special words—monument, calendar, even gay: Is there at this point a bleaker poem, a poem more determinedly written against poetry?
At least since the time of Plato poets have distrusted poems; often they’ve done so more viciously than readers. Callimachus did, Horace did, the English literary critic George Puttenham spoke in the seventeenth century of “the scorne and ordinarie disgrace offered unto Poets at these days,” and John Keats said in the nineteenth, speaking of poetry, that “the marvel is to me how people read so much of it.” A beleaguered Thomas Hardy wondered in the twentieth if the inquisition would have bothered Galileo if he’d written in verse that the earth revolves around the sun.
This tradition of self-indictment drives Yeats the maker of poems, and the series called “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” ends with these lines.
Turning to this sixth and final part of the series, I don’t feel a need to know about Robert Artisson or Lady Kyteler or about her peacock feathers and cock’s combs; they’re gruesome to think about, and they all sound bad, though they don’t maybe feel as bad as Yeats’s repetition right here of the word labyrinth. Loie Fuller’s troupe has become Herodias’s wildly dancing daughters, and they move in “the labyrinth of the wind,” a labyrinth which previously existed in the mind, made of meditation on “art or politics.” Here, that or has become an and, and the chilling beauty of this series is that it accepts its own indictment while also becoming a poem.
Who foresaw any of this while sitting around a square of blue cloth? Become may be the crucial word: a series of poems becomes at its end something different, something unforeseen, the word labyrinth meaning at the end something different than at the beginning, and the meaning at the beginning also standing. The series is driven by or: a doubleness prevails, driven itself by time, like life and death. Even when Yeats’s play was written the Great War was on, Ireland was a mess, Russia, too, and England was messier than people wanted to admit. Was Lady Cunard’s drawing room a retreat, an immunity? Was it the problem?
Near the end of his life Yeats asked out loud, again writing in trochaic tetrameters, if his early play Cathleen ni Houlihan did “send out / Certain men the English shot”—a question about the relationship of art and politics that Paul Muldoon deflatingly rephrases as “If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead / would certain men have stayed in bed?” The answer to Yeats’s question in Yeats’s “The Man and the Echo” is “Lie down and die.” Which Yeats soon did. Yet the question remains, it will always remain.
“Yeats is never finer as a poet,” observed Harold Bloom years ago, “than when he … severely doubts his own mythologies.” That doubt is important, both for the structure of poems and for their arranger; today, it’s what allows a poet to learn from Yeats. But simultaneously we’re discomfited by liking Yeats’s (or modernism’s) doubts too much. When Michael Wood first read “The Second Coming” he felt certain the poem was referring to Hitler and Fascism, to Chamberlain and appeasement: “When I learned its date,” he admits ruefully, “I was baffled.” The mistake, if we should call it that, is salutary, for Wood’s meditation on Yeats and violence is as much provoked by the collapse of the Twin Towers in September 2001 as it is by Yeats. My own thinking about Yeats’s “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” has taken place during our 21st century pandemic, and lately, as apocalyptic stories have tumbled out of the New York Times, as if we craved the mortality by which we also felt threatened, six words shot out at me at as they had never before—“what fine thought we had because we thought”—the first-person plural pronoun we used twice, the titular word thought appearing first as a noun and five syllables later as a verb. Did the problem as well as the solution lay in thinking itself, in the way we think, in the way we’ve come to recognize thinking?
I understand why Yeats needed to rename his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” locating it in the past, but “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World” remains a poem of thought happening now, not so much a poem of observation, a word favored by both T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. Yeats is a poet of thought: along with Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” his “The Second Coming,” quoted equally often, may be one of the most wonderfully misread poems of the century: here, the apocalyptic Yeats diagnoses the need for apocalypticism, refusing to suggest that end-games are just for other people: after eight lines of blank verse, the second stanza begins this way: “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!” Surely? All poems are moving quickly forward, riding the rails of their own syntax, but Yeats’s poem shows no evidence even of considering a second coming until “those words” are “out.” Off we go! We move from the messy vagueness of “some revelation” (the Latin word “revelation” translates the Greek word “apocalypse,” meaning uncovered) to a visionary confidence in five syllables. This poem is more about a process of thinking, weasels fighting elegantly in a hole. So is the series once called “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World,” about which I’ve been thinking.
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