To get in the mood for this set of readings, why not stop off first at the Virtual Irish Pub? There, you'll find things about Wilde, Yeats, and James Joyce (an Irish writer we probably should be studying here too). You could also check out some more contemporary Irish poets on the Irish Poetry Page.
For general notes on Synge and the context of "The Playboy of the Western World" (1907), see the relevant "Background Readings."
In your readings, you were exposed to a range of critical responses to Synge's play, beginning with the riotously vocal (visceral?) response that it received from its first few audiences. (The play went on every night, on schedule, under police protection. It wasn't until about five nights into it that it was performed all the way through without incident--but it finally was a success. Synge, like Wilde, concluded that it was better to be talked about than not to be talked about [see Ann Saddlemeyer, ed., J. M. Synge: Collected Works, vol. 4.]) Synge trained himself on Pater, and then he turned to his native Irish culture for subject matter, and he did so at a time, and arguably in a way, that made his plays political--despite Yeats' saying that he "seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought." For Synge's own idea of what kind of work he was doing in the play, see his "Preface."
Inherent in the play is a tension between romantic nostalgia for a time in Ireland that (never) was, and political critique. And this tension has been reflected in the criticism--a phenomenon that should remind you of The Picture of Dorian Gray. There are those who concentrate on the sheer force of language by which Christy seems to win over his audience, especially Pegeen; these "romantic" critics tend to celebrate the play--especially the ending, in which Pegeen is still connecting herself to Christy and his "playboy" charm and inventiveness--as a mythic "triumph of the imagination over reason." In other words, the story is not to be taken literally at all, but rather as a metaphor for, perhaps, the force of human will to persevere. (Such a reading is vulnerable to the charge of "escapism"--that's a common charge against romanticism. As Noah found out, however, escape is sometimes valuable--as it can be in any culture where the everyday realities are overwhelmingly bad.) These critics are likely to point out that the origin of the word "poet" is the same as "maker"--in other words, poets (or here, a dramatist with a poetic sensibility) have a way of creating a reality for us that is not literally true but rather is somehow truer than literal truth. These critics will also tend to see Christy as a romantic figure, a poet-type, a self-made mythmaker who grows in stature steadily to the end. (They will focus on the bildungsroman aspect of the story.)
The other type of criticism connects the story closely to social and political realities of the time--the passages by Seamus Deane and Declan Kiberd in your readings are good examples. They see the same romantic patterning to the story, but they suggest that the strong comic element signals Synge's critique of a particularly Irish romanticism that had been an ineffective substitute for badly needed political action. It's interesting that both Deane and Kiberd are Irish; they themselves are involved, as critics, in the continuing project of claiming for Ireland a positive national identity, in the face of centuries of British oppression.
But neither of these critics ignores the aesthetic quality of the play. Deane, for example, points out the structural elements of repetition--say, the notion of "the western world" that keeps coming up, and more generally the lyrical flow of the language. You could also draw a kind of structural diagram of the play, or several, depending on how you wanted to divide it . . . the point is that the play has a structure that is artful.
What is the play's structure, in your reading, and why is it important to talk about?
On another front, did Christy think he killed his "da"? . . . What I think is interesting is to look at the very moment when he claims he killed his father (p. 10): he is backed into it when Pegeen challenges him by saying he's not telling the truth. She says, "Would you have me knock the head of you with the butt of a broom?" That image--the hitting on the head with the broom--is what prompts Christy to say, "I killed my poor father . . . for doing the like of that." Notice the way his language, even the very concept of the murder, springs straight out of what Pegeen has said! If you pay close attention to the language of the play, you'll be rewarded by finding other interesting reverberations. Are Pegeen and Christy brought together in the act of creating each other's stories, and thus identities? And what about the Widow Quinn's part in it all?
One possibility that is not foreclosed is that both Christy and his "Da" are playing a hoax on these people. Maybe they go around the country, working people over tag-team style in a very elaborate game? This may sound far-fetched unless you are acquainted with one subculture in Ireland called the "travellers." The travellers are kind of like gypsies; they just live on the road, they have no fixed residence. They have been around for hundreds of years. (And they are still around.) Their history is also part of British oppression--they began as people who were dispossess of their land (see your "Background Readings"). The fact of Christy's obvious loneliness, which I think the play makes clear, would support such a reading. But don't take my word for this one. It's a pretty wild idea.
Here's what Synge said in the Irish Times of 31 Jan. 1907:
"`The Playboy of the Western World' is not a play with `a purpose' in the modern sense of the word, but although parts of it are, or are meant to be, extravagant comedy, still a great deal that is in it, and a great deal more that is behind it, is perfectly serious, when looked at in a certain light. That is often the case, I think, with comedy, and no one is quite sure today whether `Shylock' and `Alceste' [leading figures in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" and Moliere's "Le Misanthrope"] should be played seriously or not. There, are, it may be hinted, several sides to `The Playboy.' . . . There may be still others if anyone cares to look for them."
The plot of "The Playboy" has its origin in a story Synge heard about a man who did kill his father with a spade and, helped by the people of Inishmaan, escaped to America. Synge was taken by this story; from his own research in the West of Ireland, the part of the country that still retained the most of the old Gaelic culture, he was able to incorporate some sense of the loneliness of life there, along with the rebellious temperament of their people. If they were willing to shelter a murderer from the law, remember that for them "the law" was enforced by a conquering nation! They did not have complete respect for the British police. But of course, they also didn't have a realistic political alternative.
The suggestions of alcoholism in the play, together with the combination of fear and disrespect with which "Father Reilley" seems to be treated, are all fairly taken from life. This may be part of what the original audiences didn't want to see--"the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass," as Wilde would say. (When I was in Ireland, someone told me that they have three religions: Catholicism, alcoholism, and AA!) But before we are quick to judge these people, it's important to understand the tremendous weight of history that they were up against.
I wish the video had been available. Note that this play can be acted in very different ways--the peasant culture can be made to look more or less wild and crazy, more or less stylized and serious. Look for it sometime when you're not in Charlottesville.
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)--Drama (1/31). It's not the common way to begin studying Yeats by starting with his drama, but it's an interesting and instructive one for our line of inquiry. First, let's talk about his part in creating the drama scene in Ireland, as part of a broader literary/nationalist revival.
The Irish Literary Theatre was founded by Yeats, together with his good friend the dramatist and Gaelic scholar/translator Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn, in 1899, with the aim of encouraging Irish drama. In 1903 it became the Irish National Theatre Society, with Yeats as president; it moved to the Abbey Theatre in 1904.
Their mission was to build an Irish school of drama that would "bring upon the state the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland," and that would enjoy "freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed." They hoped to show that "Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism." The acting at the Abbey earned critical praise for the way it lacked histrionic and excessive mannerisms of the popular style of the day, and for its decision to be spare and suggestive with its stage props rather than going for the usual cluttered kind of "realism." One critic wrote, "The Irish actors from the Abbey Theatre have found means to come at . . . spiritual austerity. More than others they leave undone the things that ought not to be done."
Synge's plays--"The Playboy" and others--were produced by this company, as of course were Yeats' (he wrote 26 plays in all).
"Cathleen ni Houlihan" (1902). For notes and comments about this play, see the related "Background Reading." For your own appreciation, focus on your emotional reaction to this play. Where are your sympathies by the time it is over? What is Yeats suggesting about the cause of Irish independence?
Think also about the issue of aesthetics versus politics in this play. Remember, always, that Yeats said he was not writing "propaganda." Yeats is, first and foremost, an artist. But if that is true, what do we make of the fact that the play is so "political"? Is there some way to resolve this tension, or does it simply have to exist?
Speaking of political, here's a remarkable fact: although this play was written and first performed in 1902, it was playing again at the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin, on Easter Weekend of 1916! That alone would have given Yeats plenty of cause to ask, as he did in a poem,
Did that play of mine
Send out certain men the English shot?
Yeats--Drama cont'd (2/5). "The Dreaming of the Bones" (1919). Again, Yeats is questioning the wisdom of the Irish cause--perhaps here even more strongly than in "Cathleen ni Houlihan"? See the relevant "Background Reading" for a fuller discussion of the play's context. Here, let's consider some of the details of the way the play works, as art.
Most obvious, of course, is the spare, stylized, ritualistic atmosphere of the play--the three dancers dancing in a circle, for example, which is just one of Yeats' many invocations of the idea of cycles--emblematic of a mythic world, outside of linear time. But there's another use of time embedded in the play, too: the movement from nighttime to daylight, signaled by the crow of the red March cock ("Up with the neck and clap the wing, / Red cock, and crow!"--chanted by the three dancers, in a circle). One critic has called the cock a "clinching symbol, a device which will weld together aesthetically . . . Yeats' two themes of politics and ghosts." Its purposes, in this reading, are several--it's an "emblem of consciousness and sanity" and also, being a cock of the springtime, "a more powerful defence against the supernatural than any other"; it is also a reincarnation emblem; and "the red symbolic bird of Mars, regent of war and in Yeats' system . . . of the first bloody phases of a new historical cycle. We know from many poems and plays that Yeats expected the `cycle of freedom' to begin with world-wide wars--involving among other things the liberation of Ireland--at a full moon in March, exactly at this time." Finally, it's "the symbol of heroic martial endeavour and of that universal anarchy that he thought would usher in the collapse of the present `objective' age; which the Dublin rebellion seemed to him at this time to presage."
That reading clearly depends on knowing a lot more about Yeats' personal, highly idiosyncratic belief system than you would be expected to know on a first reading. But there is a simpler, more obvious way to think about the red cock, about the transition from night to morning. As one other critic has observed, "dawn defeats the ghosts and releases the Young Man. The subjectivity of the ghosts has been presented through the darkness, the calls of night birds, the blinding of clouds, the wind . . . blowing out the lantern, the dim path to the ruined abbey and on up to the ridge where the grave of the lovers is. All these are symbols of the dizzy dreams that spring from the dry bones of the dead, the consciousness of tragic guilt in the past." In contrast, the Young Man's objectivity is presented "through the dawn and sunlight, the crowing of the cocks and the panorama of the landscape ruined by civil war.:
This is a kind of interesting twist, isn't it? Don't we usually associate the coming of the light with enlightenment, the dawning of a new day and all of that? Maybe Yeats is questioning the whole concept of the rationalistic Enlightenment? If you pay attention to his mysticism, such a reading is not out of the question.
Now, one other point we didn't get to in class: what about these masks? Why do the ghosts wear them, and the Young Man does not? (Notice that the musicians have faces--like the Young Man--but their faces are painted, like masks.) Here is one place where we see Yeats putting his own imprint on the aesthetic idea off "masking" that Wilde played around with (by splitting his paradoxical views among many different voices). We'll see more and more of this in Yeats. But what is the function here?
For one critic, Harold Bloom, the masks represent no less than the imaginative spirit itself, which in a Yeatsian world is always privileged over the merely "objective." Bloom writes, "Though the young revolutionary has fought in the Post Office, it is the ghostly lovers who wear heroic masks, for the soldier lacks imagination, dismissing the dead as those who `fill waste mountains with the invisible tumult / of the fantastic conscience,' a presage of his later failure to forgive, which is a failure of vision. When the lovers dance before him, they offer the soldier his supreme chance to cast out fanaticism and hatred, but though he almost yields, he ends in an ugly obduracy, cursing the temptation. To forgive would be to cast out remorse, for hatred is a kind of inverted remorse, and is the soldier's own `dark idolatry of self.'"
Bloom goes on to say that "Yeats had seen that hatred disfigure Maud Gonne, and other women of surpassing excellence, and in his more visionary and redemptive moods he understood such hatred as a blight upon Ireland." We'll learn more about that angle in the next couple of classes.
Yeats--Poetry (2/7). Let's back up and get some biographical information. Yeats was born in Dublin; his father was the son of a once-prosperous family that Oscar Wilde's father called "the cleverest, most spirited people I ever met." Yeats' father was an artist; he had a great impact on his son's aesthetics. His mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a successful merchant from Sligo; the Pollexfens were known for their eccentricity as manifest by, for example, interest in astrology and (yes) fairies. From his mother's side, Yeats got his love of the countryside around Sligo and his interest in folklore.
Although his personal take on Irish politics and his visionary mysticism put him somewhat at odds with the main intellectual currents of his day, Yeats' poetic achievement was and remains great. Interpretations of his work range from M. L. Rosenthal's view (which you have read by now in the introduction to your collection of Yeats), in which the aesthetic side is proclaimed to be what is valuable--reread Rosenthal and you'll find that he is constantly trying to apologize for Yeats' politics--to the views of contemporary third-world cultural critics who claim him as one of their own post-colonialist revolutionaries. (An example is Edward Said's essay "Yeats and Decolonization," in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. 1990].)
Yeats' poetry evolved over five decades from a kind of precious, Pater-inspired lyrical, romantic-imagistic style of writing to a harder, more ironic, ultimately much more forceful style. One mark of his great talent is that he seemed to be getting better and better, right up until his death at age 74.
As we've already discovered, Yeats was devoted to Irish nationalism and played a key role in the Celtic Revival movement. He also promoted the literary heritage of Ireland by using material from ancient legends. Wishing to recapture the Ireland of heroic times, he believed that only by "expressing primary truths in ways appropriate to this country" could artists hope to restore to modern Ireland the cultural unity that he felt was needed to end the country's internal divisions. Magic and the occult were also important to his work--he was very interested in spiritualism and various occult systems. Many of the images in the poems come from Rosicrucianism and his own researches as described in his prose work A Vision.
In 1885, Yeats met Irish nationalist John O'Leary, who arranged for the publication of Yeats' first poems. Influenced by O'Leary as well as by his friend Lady Gregory, Yeats undertook to preserve as much native Irish literature and lore as possible--while the efforts of the British government were moving in the other direction to Anglicize the culture (this included a ban on the native language, Gaelic).
Most everyone agrees that it was a "fateful day" when Yeats met actress and political activist Maude Gonne (in 1889), whose "great beauty and reckless destructiveness in pursuit of her political goals both intrigued and dismayed him" (according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography). Although Yeats shared her goal of Irish self-determination, he quarreled with her means of getting there, which were often extreme. "Cathleen ni Houlihan" was written for Gonne (see the "Background Reading"); for Yeats the play symbolized the work for which Gonne had dedicated her own life--she and "Cathleen ni Houlihan" might be seen to merge into one identity. She refused to marry Yeats, choosing instead to marry the revolutionary John MacBride (a marriage that did not really work out--she sued for divorce, a very hard thing to do then--an issue rendered moot when he died in the Easter Rising). Nevertheless, nearly all of Yeats' love poetry is addressed to her: for him she represented virtually every great mythological or historical woman, including Helen of Troy.
Another important woman in his life was Lady Augusta Gregory, who was part of the landed Protestant Ascendancy, also a writer herself and a strong advocate of native Irish literature. They met in 1896, and she invited him to spend the next summer at Coole Park, her country estate, near Galway. Yeats spent many such holidays there and became charmed by the "country house ideal," seeing in its aristocratic elegance a desirable way of imposing order on the contemporary chaos. This view emerges in his poetry (see, e.g., "A Prayer for My Daughter"). An aristocrat of the spirit (some would say worse about him), he scorned the middle classes for their seeming crass commercialism--for ideals he looked either downward to the peasant class, or upward to the aristocracy. The reactions of the middle classes to the theater produced by him and Lady Gregory--think of "The Playboy"--did nothing to encourage his faith in them.
By the time of the Easter Rising, Yeats had left Ireland (in self-exile, perhaps) for England--it was in London that he wrote the famous poem. But as a result of this event, persuaded by Maud Gonne (whose estranged husband, MacBride, was one of the martyrs of the GPO) that "tragic dignity had returned to Ireland," Yeats returned. To symbolize his new commitment, he bought and refurbished for his living quarters an old Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land (it became an important symbol in his later poetry).
At age 52, Yeats married a young woman named Georgiana (he would call her "George") Hyde-Lees . . . who discovered she had the talent for automatic writing from the spirit world! (They had two children, a son and a daughter.) Through her efforts over a period of months, Yeats wrote A Vision--his working out of theories of historical cycles based on phases of the moon.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. At the declaration of the Irish Free State in 1922 he became a senator; he left the senate in 1928 for health reasons. From then until his death in 1939 he devoted his energies to his poetry. He died in France, but because of the impending war his body was not returned for burial at Sligo, "under Ben Bulben," until 1948. Later in the semester, we'll study W. H. Auden's memorable elegy for him ("Earth receive an honored guest; / William Yeats is laid to rest . . .").
The Yeats Society, in Sligo, is in the process of developing a web page, but as you'll see, there's not much to it yet. There's also a page for the Yeats Society of New York, which has all sorts of interesting links from there.
"The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900). In this essay written at the turn of a new century, Yeats is staking a large claim about the use and value of art. Here are some questions for you to think about: How do his views reflect Pater's? Wilde's? Where does he go from there? How does he distinguish between "useless" and "useful" things? What is the significance of "emotion"? What is the difference between an "emotional" symbol and an "intellectual" one? How does Yeats view the art of the previous generation?
For a hint to the answer to the last question, compare what Harriet Monroe (editor of the influential Chicago-based Poetry magazine) said in her introduction to a poetry anthology published in 1917 called The New Poetry:
"What is the new poetry? and wherein does it differ from the old? The difference is not in mere details of form, for much poetry infused with the new spirit conforms to the old measures and rhyme-schemes. It is not merely in diction, though the truly modern poet rejects the so-called `poetic' shifts of language--the deems, 'neaths, forsooths, etc., the inversions and high-sounding rotundities, familiar to his predecessors: all the rhetorical excesses through which most Victorian poetry now seems `over-appareled,' as a speaker at a Poetry dinner--a lawyer, not a poet--put it in pointing out what the new movement is aiming at. These things are important, but the difference goes deeper than details of form, strikes through them to fundamental integrities.
"The new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods. It has set before itself an ideal of absolute simplicity and sincerity--an ideal which implies an individual, unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. Thus inspired, it becomes intensive rather than diffuse. It looks out more eagerly than in; it becomes objective. The term `exteriority' has been applied to it, but this is incomplete. In presenting the concrete object or the concrete environment, whether these be beautiful or ugly, it seeks to give more precisely the emotion arising from them, and thus widens immeasurably the scope of the art.
"All this implies no disrespect for tradition. The poets of today do not discard tradition because the follow the speech of today rather than that of Shakespeare's time, or strive for organic rhythm rather than use a mold which has been perfected by others. On the contrary, they follow the great tradition when they seek a vehicle suited to their own epoch and their own creative mood, and resolutely reject all others."
To return to Yeats, how do his thoughts in "The Symbolism of Poetry" fit in with his politics?
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree." See Yeats' own note in your "Background
Readings." Questions to ask include whether--and to what
extent--this lyrical poem, written in ballad meter, is a
Romantic poem. And once you get a broader sense of Yeats' career, it's
relevant to ask why he later seemed apologetic about this beautiful poem. Click on the image of the Lake Isle
to see the poem.
"Adam's Curse." This poem makes an even sharper turn away from Romanticism--how? What is sprezzatura, and how does Yeats use it to connect a modern technique of writing with an older, aristocratic style of living?
"On Being Asked for a War Poem." Let's reserve this one till we get to the poetry of World War I. For a discussion of the context that led Yeats to write this poem, click here.
"Easter 1916." For the immediate context, see the "Background Reading" that discusses the Easter Rebellion. For a recent critical reflection on the poem, see Judith Kitchen's essay.
Yeats' attitude toward the Revolutionaries is difficult to puzzle out. Remember, he was not even in Ireland when the Rebellion occurred--he was in London making his career as a poet. The conflict inherent in the oxymoron of the refrain, the "terrible beauty," seems to reflect Yeats' own internal conflict. But in the end, there is something of great, and beautiful, power that the poem acknowledges. (This poem can be read as a companion poem to one that I did not assign, "September 1913," in which Yeats' attitude toward the radical nationalists is not nearly so generous: he mocks them, and then concludes, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, / It's with O'Leary in the grave.")
Note the formal structure of the poem. What is the meter, the rhyme? How is the imagery balanced across the four long stanzas? In particular, what is the "stone" that seems to "trouble the living stream"? What connections can you see between this poem and "The Dreaming of the Bones"? Are there perhaps any connections to "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"? (I'm thinking of the contrast between the stone and the water).
The larger questions that this poem presents for us have to do with the central question of our course: to what extent does the poem's impact--call it "message" if you will, although nailing down a poem's message is always risky--transcend the context in which it was written? The question of the aesthetic versus the ethical/political can also be stated as the question of the universal versus the particular. As readers, by the time we get to college we have been trained to think of literature as something that "transmits universal values" to us across time and space. And yet all works of literature are rooted in particularities. To speak of Yeats, the particulars were obviously very important, weren't they? There is no "right" or "wrong" answer to this issue--whether to privilege the universal or the particular--but as readers you should be thinking through the choices you make from one reading experience to the other, and thinking about some of the implications.
Yeats--Poetry cont'd (2/12)."The Wild Swans at Coole" (1917). This poem is set at Lady Gregory's estate, Coole Park, some time after the Easter Rising. Here Yeats recalls earlier visit to the same place before "all" was "changed." A romantic poet--or even the Yeats of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"--could count on nature, and especially certain birds like swans or nightingales (see Keats' ode), for consolation in a time of loss or uncertainty. But Yeats can no longer trust this experience. Note how he (typically) ends on a question (in earlier drafts, the poem had ended with the fourth stanza, ". . . Attend upon them still"). Note also how the form of the poem reflects the idea that something has gone wrong. It is in ballad meter, but a deliberately fractured and disguised one.
"The Second Coming" (1920). This poem is one of the most widely read and admired in our culture's canon of literature. Why? What is it in its dark terror that speaks to us as inhabitants of the twentieth century?
There seems to be a deeply ironic reversion of Christian imagery here--a new "rough beast" who "[s]louches towards Bethlehem to be born." The departure point might be Matthew 24, in which Christ predicts "the coming of the Son of man" after a disastrous period of warfare and other tribulations. Within Yeats' personal mythology, the cycles of history reverse themselves about every 2,000 years. The "widening gyre" represents, in most critics' views, the cycle that began with Christ finally spinning out of control. "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." (Note: the word "mere" has an archaic meaning--it used to mean "pure," unadulterated, the real thing. Think of the difference between "pure (unpolluted) snow" and "pure (simple, dismissable) nonsense"--that's the kind of slippage that "mere" has undergone, only more thoroughly. During the Renaissance the word clearly had both meanings: the English would talk about the "mere Irish" and they would be making a double entendre.)
Note that there is also an inversion of the Romantic trope of the mental journey to someplace else, followed by an enlightened return to reality: "a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight" and then it disappears from his line of vision, "The darkness drops again," and leaves him with the knowledge of the imminent arrival of the "rough beast."
Note also the mourning for the "ceremony of innocence," which "is drowned." What does this mean? I think it is another illustration of Yeats' belief in the value of manners, courtliness, aristocratic behavior as manifestations of deeper values. (Compare another poem that you were not assigned but that's a wonderful poem, "A Prayer for My Daughter": "How but in custom and ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?")
A note about the prosody: unfortunately you can't really tell from your book that there is a stanza break after the line "Are full of passionate intensity." This poem is not a sonnet, but like a sonnet it has a first statement (the first eight lines) and a responding statement or amplification (the stanza on p. 90). The meter is blank verse (with occasional rhymes, for emphasis).
"Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium." Unfortunately we don't have time to do these poems, as I had planned. If you want to think about them, I found a pretty good student essay to look at.
"Leda and the Swan" (1924). The
essay by
Cullingford in your Critique of "Leda and the
Swan">"Background
Readings" reflects the current generation's debate over this poem--a
debate on feminist terms. In this course, what we need to realize is
that there is a much longer view on this poem than that. As we ask of
this poem whether its "use" is aesthetic or ethical, we should first
consider Cullingford's discussion of the immediate context in which Yeats
published it (or tried to). The fact that he was intervening in a
censorship debate that took place during the first years of the Irish
Free State is something to consider, as is the fact that Yeats was
inspired by a specific Hellenistic bas-relief as reproduced in Elie
Faure's History of Art (reproduced at right).
But these facts were for a long time lost to critical history. For most of the twentieth century, "Leda and the Swan" has been read most often as a work of great art (which it surely is), detached from its immediate context. When the context is considered, it is usually that of Yeats' own personal mythology--which is worth considering also.
Whether we agree that this poem is "beautiful" or not, our class discussions confirm that it is "powerful," with all the various meanings that that word can have. For the feminist argument, I leave you with Cullingford. Meanwhile, here are some other angles to consider.
One is the unspoken link between Leda, her daughter Helen, and Maude
Gonne; we don't have to go very far (see "Among School Children") to
discover that for Yeats, Gonne
Another thing we need to pay attention to is the story behind this
poem. If you remember your Greek mythology, you'll recall that Helen,
who was conceived in this union of Zeus/swan and Leda, is "the face that
launched a thousand ships" (as Marlowe, in the Renaissance, put it) and
thus caused the Trojan War, which the Greeks ultimately won.
Leda had four children (and the mythology tells us different stories
about whether the were all born at the same time, or had the same
fathers): Castor and Pollux (who were twin boys), Clytemnestra, and
Helen. They were Greeks. They grew up, and Clytemnestra married
Agamemnon, and Helen married Menelaus.
Meanwhile over in Troy is a handsome young man named Paris. He is asked
by three goddesses to judge which of them is the most beautiful (they are
having a terrible argument about this). He picks Aphrodite, and as a
reward, Aphrodite says, You may have the most beautiful (mortal) woman in
the world, who is Helen, over in Greece, but the catch is that you have
to go and get her.
So he goes and steals Helen from Menelaus. (Sound familiar from "The
Dreaming of the Bones"? The exchange of women among powerful men is an
old, old story.) And that is what starts the whole, long, sordid, war.
In the end, the Greeks vanquish Troy. Agamemnon, who has been a
key military leader, returns to his wife Clytemnestra. But
wait, she has had another lover, and she has been enjoying a lot of power
over the home place while he was gone! So she murders him, in his bath.
But the big picture as a result of the war is that Greece has come into
its own as the dominant culture. This originary myth, the long
complicated story of the war, which is full of supernatural (therefore
religious) significance, is the equivalent in Greek culture to what the
story of the birth and life of Christ is to Christianity.
So now, let's put "Leda and the Swan" in context within Yeats' work as
one of a trilogy:
1. "Leda and the Swan" depicts the beginning of Greek culture,
approximately 2,000 years B.C. (Yeats was not very careful about the
exact dates when it came to working things into his 2,000-year cycle.)
2. "The Mother of God" (see this poem on p. 140 of your text) deals,
from Mary's viewpoint, with the conception of Christ, the next event
in the cycle. Judge for yourself whether Mary is treated similarly to or
differently from Leda--but in either case, there is a strong parallel in
their positions.
3. "The Second Coming" looks forward to the next cataclysmic birth, at
approximately the year 2000.
We should also be drawing a
series of three inverted cone-shaped figures, such as I drew the other
day. Each of these events ushers in an age that is the exact opposite of
the one before it.
Yeats, remember, is not writing the story of Leda from scratch. It was
embedded in western culture long, long before he came on the scene! For
some readers, that may not get him totally off the hook for what the
imagery seems to do to women, but I hope it puts it in a different kind
of perspective. It can be argued that he was using this myth--which,
again, represents a pivotal point in the history of our civilization--as
a way of raising large philosophical questions about the
intersection of
the divine and the human (again, the tension between the
eternal and the
mortal, the universal and the particular).
Now, let's look more closely at the form of the poem--the way
it works
as a construction of language.
I mentioned that it is a sonnet--you've probably studied
sonnets of one
kind or another before. But what's different about Yeats'
sonnet is that
it is a hybrid of two different forms that aren't really
supposed to be
mixed up.
The first two stanzas, which make up eight lines and so are
called the
sonnet's "octave," rhyme "abab cdcd." That's the way an
English sonnet
starts. Shakespeare's sonnets go like this: "abab cdcd efef
gg." In
other words, there are three stanzas of alternating rhymes,
followed by a
final two lines that rhyme; that's called the "couplet." In an
English
stanza, the couplet there at the end usually poses a question
or a
complicating thought, as against the previous three stanzas. So, those
who study the sonnet form tell us that there is a "turn" in thought
between the first three stanzas and the final couplet. (Sonnets are
traditionally fourteen lines.)
Yeats' sonnet goes "abab cdcd" for the first two stanzas, but after that,
it does something else.
The last six lines (and notice that one of those lines is typographically
"broken" on the page, representing the violence of the war) go
"cde cde." That's one of the several ways that an Italian (or
Petrarchan) sonnet can end. That form goes: "abba abba cde cde" (in the
Italian sonnet, the "turn" in thought occurs at the end of the octave,
before the las six lines).
Did Yeats just get mixed up here? Critics think not. Critics tend to
agree that he deliberately mixed the forms up to reflect the thematic
ways in which the divine is "hybridized" here with the human, the way the
Trojan culture clashes with the Greek. (One hybridization is sex, the
other the violence of war. What did I tell you? All poetry is about sex
and death.) Scholars who study poetry praise this as a masterful
blending of form and function--or as Hessam has quoted Laurence Perrine
to the Literary Trends group (Hessam, you might not know that Mr.
Perrine died last year), the sound is an echo to the sense.
After reading the Cullingford essay, it strikes me that this
"hybridization" is another, subtle, way in which Yeats is challenging the
"purity" imposed by the Irish censorship laws.
Another aspect of form that critics talk about is the conciseness and
allusiveness of the language--especially the lines
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The whole Trojan War, compressed to that!
Of course, the compression of the language is part of what makes us
uncertain about the speaker's tone, about what is really going on between
the bird-god and the woman. But then, one claim that critics can make is
that this uncertainty is what makes the poem continue to speak to us,
what draws us in and thus draws us out as readers. Right? No?
"Among School Children" (1927). As a senator of the Irish Free State,
Yeats had the official duty of inspecting some grammar schools. This
poem springs from one of those visits. After visiting a Montessori
school in Waterford (which stressed neatness, in the "best modern way"),
he wrote a note to himself: "School children and the thought that life
will waste them--perhaps that no possible life can fulfill our dreams or
even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares
for what never happens." But as usual for Yeats, the poem turned into a
love poem to Maude Gonne. And more: Or, as the critic John Frederick
Nims writes, "A routine schoolroom visit . . . projects him beyond outer
space."
What's the connection between nuns and schoolchildren, between
religious icons and babies? Who are the "self-born mockers of man's
enterprise"? What is ottava rima? And how can we know the
dancer from the dance?
"Modern Poetry: A Broadcast" (a radio program over the BBC in
London in 1936). Three topics for you to think about.
1. This is a radio broadcast in London. Thus, Yeats, is speaking here
as an English poet, or at least a a poet writing within the
English tradition. The names of all the people he mentions are not
important to us, except to help us realize that he is talking about the
London poetry scene of the early 1900s.
2. Try to identify places where Yeats is echoing Pater's ideas of the
aesthetic sensibility and its value. Note, additionally, that he is
speaking at some distance in time from his earlier self that was strongly
identified with Pater. How is the older Yeats critiquing the younger?
3. The main thing to get from the essay is what Yeats says about World
War I, and about Eliot. How did the war, and the arrival (at about the
same time) of Eliot on the poetry scene, change things for Yeats? This
is the transitional point in our study; we're moving on to Eliot now, and
then the literature that arises out of the war.
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.