Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 Part 3

To take one final well-known example of the kind of work I am thinking of: O rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

These eight lines of Blake's are like four loaves and four fishes that shoal and crumble as we try to consume their meaning. A rose is a rose is a rose but not when it's sick. Then it becomes a canker, a corruption, a tainted cosmos. The poem drops petal after petal of suggestion without ever revealing its stripped core: it is an open invitation into its meaning rather than an a.s.sertion of it.

Now I wonder if we can say the same of this poem, also short, also living off the life of its images: Heaven-Haven A nun takes the veil I have desired to go Where springs not fail To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb And out of the swing of the sea.

In each case the verse lives by its music and suggestiveness, but with one important difference: the suggestiveness here condenses on a stated theme, 'a nun takes the veil', and the heavenpuritycold idea equates with the havennunneryquiet images in a relations.h.i.+p that is essentially allegorical rather than symbolic. The Hopkins poem is fretted rather than fecund. In the Blake poem the rose might be a girl but it remains a rose. Yet it is also a rose window, bloodshot with the light of other possible meanings. The rose and the sickness are not ill.u.s.trative in the way the lilies and the haven are. In 'Heaven-Haven' it is the way things are exquisitely wrought, the way a crystal is sharp and sided and knowable rather than the way a rose is deep and unknowable that counts. Hopkins's art here is the discovery of verbal equivalents, in mingling the purity of images with the idea of a vow of chast.i.ty. The words are crafted together more than they are coaxed out of one another, and they are crafted in the service of an idea that precedes the poem, is independent of it and to which the poem is perhaps ultimately subservient. So much for the dark embryo. We are now in the realm of flint-spark rather than marshlight. 'Heaven-Haven' is consonantal fire struck by idea off language. The current of its idea does not fly the bound it chafes but confines itself within delightful ornamental channels.

To take another comparison with a poet whose nervous apprehension of phenomena and ability to translate this nervous energy into phrases reminds us also of Hopkins: take this line by Keats, describing autumn as the season of fulfilment: Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun and compare it with a Hopkins line that also realizes a sense of burgeoning and parturition, imagining Jesus in Mary's womb: Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey.

Both lines rely on the amplitude of vowels for their dream of benign, blood-warm growth, but where Keats's vowels seem like nubs, buds off a single uh or oo, yeasty growths that are ready at any moment to relapse back into the original mother sound, Hopkins's are defined, held apart, and in relation to one another rather than in relation to the original nub: if they are full they are also faceted. Hopkins's consonants alliterate to maintain a design whereas Keats's release a flow. I am reminded of something T. S. Eliot wrote comparing Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. In Jonson, Eliot remarked in The Sacred Wood: unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verse but in the design of the whole.

We must say much the same of the Keats and Hopkins lines. Keats has the life of a swarm, fluent and merged; Hopkins has the design of the honeycomb, definite and loaded. In Keats, the rhythm is narcotic, in Hopkins it is a stimulant to the mind. Keats woos us to receive, Hopkins alerts us to perceive.

I think that what is true of this single Hopkins line is generally true of the kind of poetry he writes. For in spite of the astounding richness of his music and the mimetic power of his vocabulary, his use of language is disciplined by a philological and rhetorical pa.s.sion. There is a conscious push of the deliberating intelligence, a siring strain rather than a birth-push in his poetic act. Like Jonson, he is poeta doctus; like Jonson's, his verse is 'rammed with life', b.u.t.ting ahead instead of hanging back into its own centre. As opposed to the symbolist poetic, it is concerned with statement instead of states of feeling. Indeed, at this point it is interesting to recall Ben Jonson's strictures on the Shakespearian fluency, rejecting linguistic mothering in favour of rhetorical mastery. Jonson, you remember, was not impressed by the way Shakespeare's current flies each bound it chafes: I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand.'... He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped ... His wit was in his own power: would the rule of it had been so too.

Jonson believed that energy should not be slipped but kept leashed. He values control, rule, revision, how things are fit, how they are fitted. And the same is true of Hopkins: the rule of his own 'wit' was Hopkins's study both as priest and poet. He valued what he called 'the masculine powers' in poetry, the presence of 'powerful and active thought'-it was typical that when he realized his 'new rhythm' he had to schematize it into a metric. The following extracts from a letter to Coventry Pat-more in which Hopkins discusses Keats are illuminating: It is impossible not to feel with weariness how his verse is at every turn abandoning itself to an unmanly and enervating luxury. It appears too that he said something like 'O for a life of impressions rather than thoughts'... Nevertheless, I feel and see in him the beginnings of something opposite to this, of an interest in higher things, and of powerful and active thought ... His mind had, as it seems to me, the distinctly masculine powers in abundance, his character the manly virtues, but while he gave himself up to dreaming and self-indulgence, of course, they were in abeyance ... but ... his genius would have taken to an austere utterance in art. Reason, thought, what he did not want to live by, would have a.s.serted itself presently.

As is so often the case when a poet is diagnosing the condition of another poet, Hopkins is here offering us something of a self-portrait. The development he divined for Keats was one which he had already undergone himself. For Hopkins, as a schoolboy and undergraduate, had aspired to the life of sensations rather than thoughts, had luxuriated poetically and had been touched by the gem-like flame of Walter Pater's influence at Oxford. His masculine powers of powerful and active thought were consciously developed, as consciously as his theories of sprung rhythm and his private language of instress and inscape: behind the one was a directed effort in Welsh and cla.s.sical versification, behind the other a scholastic appet.i.te for Scotism. We have only to look at his early poem 'A Vision of Mermaids' to realize that when he spoke of 'an unmanly and enervating luxury', he was speaking from experience.

From their white waists a silver skirt was spread To mantle o'er the tail, such as is shed Around the Water Nymphs in fretted falls, At red Pompeii on medallion'd walls.

A tainted fin on either shoulder hung; Their pansy-dark or bronzen locks were strung With coral, sh.e.l.ls, thick-pearled cords, whate'er The abysmal Ocean h.o.a.rds of strange and rare.

This is gum oozing from whence 'tis nourished all right, from that enervating, luxurious Keats whom the mature Hopkins rounded on. In spite of the felicity of 'pansy-dark' and the resonance of the fourth line, what we miss here is what Hopkins described in his own mature poetry: But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape' is what above all I aim at in poetry.

In fact, he might have been speaking as his own ideal reader when he expressed his reaction to the music of Henry Purcell: It is the forged feature finds me; it is the rehearsal Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.

In this earliest work there is no sense of the poetic emotion distinguis.h.i.+ng itself. His posture here is one of surrender to experience whereas in his maturer work it is one of mastery, of penetration. His own music thrusts and throngs and it is forged. It is the way words strike off one another, the way they are drilled, marched, and countermarched, rather than the way they philander and linger among themselves, that const.i.tutes his proper music. Hopkins's sound and sense always aim to complement each other in a perfectly filled-in outline: his poems are closer to being verbal relief-work than to being a receding, imploding vortex of symbol.

I wish to make one final comparison with another poet in order to clarify this 'masculine' element in his approach. W. B. Yeats is also a poet in whom we are offered the arched back of English in place of its copious lap; and again in Yeats we are constantly aware of the intentness on structure, and the affirmative drive of thought running under the music, of which the music is the clear-tongued pealing. Like Hopkins, he was impatient of 'poetical literature, that is monotonous in its structure and effeminate in its insistence upon certain moments of strained lyricism' and he was possessed of 'the certainty that all the old writers, the masculine writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung, and in a later age to be read aloud for hearers who had to understand quickly or not at all.' These sentiments not only re-echo Hopkins's strictures upon Keats, but they also recall Hopkins's famous, impatient directions on how to get the best out of his work, for he too wrote to be spoken or to be sung: 'Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.' And in another context: 'Declaimed, the strange constructions would be dramatic and effective.' So I am setting up two modes and calling them masculine and feminine-but without the Victorian s.e.xist overtones to be found in Hopkins's and Yeats's employment of the terms. In the masculine mode, the language functions as a form of address, of a.s.sertion or command, and the poetic effort has to do with conscious quelling and control of the materials, a labour of shaping; words are not music before they are anything else, nor are they drowsy from their slumber in the unconscious, but athletic, capable, displaying the muscle of sense. Whereas in the feminine mode the language functions more as evocation than as address, and the poetic effort is not so much a labour of design as it is an act of divination and revelation; words in the feminine mode behave with the lover's come-hither instead of the athlete's display, they const.i.tute a poetry that is delicious as texture before it is recognized as architectonic.

Yet Hopkins's poetry is immediately appealing or repellent, depending on the reader's taste, just because of its texture: is its immediate appeal not to the nervous system? It has worked its pa.s.sage as modern rather than Victorian poetry not because it was published in 1918 but because, as Geoffrey Hartmann has written in his introduction to his Twentieth-Century Views collection of essays: I. A. Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis championed Hopkins as the cla.s.sic example of the modern poet. They agreed that his strength was immediately bound up with the immediacy of his relation to words: he seemed to fulfil the dream that poetry was language speaking about itself, language uttering complex words that were meanings as words.

He seemed, in other words, to possess those characteristics that I have made typical of the feminine mode; yet I still believe that he is essentially closer to the masculine, rhetorical mode.

Let us take a celebrated example of Hopkins's modern imagist technique-taking imagist in Pound's sense of 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in a moment of time'. This is the famous fourth stanza of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' where the protagonist has emerged from the experience, at once terrible and renovating, of Christ's sudden irruption into his life: I am soft sift In an hourgla.s.s-at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift.

Here Hopkins's procedures and eccentricities almost insist on being appreciated. His interest in dialect and archaism, in the use of the Welsh 'voel', meaning a small hill; his tendency to invert the functions of parts of speech, making 'proffer' a noun instead of a verb; and his incredible precision in making the gospel a 'proffer', with its suggestion of urgency and obligation to accept, so much more alive than 'offer'-all of this invites comment. As does the fact that 'proffer' alliterates with 'pressure' and 'principle', three piston-strokes heightening the pressure down the line. Moreover, Hopkins's total possession of the silent contradictory motions of sand in the neck of an hourgla.s.s and water in the bowl of the hills, his completely exciting apprehension of these things in sound and sense allows one to comprehend easily what 'inscape' meant, and what he meant when he once wrote in his journal: 'I saw the inscape freshly, as if my eye were still growing.'

Now all this has the status of an imagist poem in its verbal life, but it has the status of a.n.a.logy within the argument and structure of the whole poem. It works like this. The streaming of sand is faded into the downpour of streams on the fells or flanks of a hill, and what had been at the bottom a sinking becomes a source, because this downing motion from above sustains, and rises as, a spring. So that suddenly the downing motion of Christ, his dark descending, becomes not something to make the soul sink in a quicksand of terror but to steady and be sustained by descending graces-Hopkins could well cry here, 'See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament.' Once more, as in 'Heaven-Haven', but in a much more complex manner, the whole figurative life of the piece is a.n.a.logous and diagrammatic; what is mimetic in the words is completely guaranteed by what is theological behind them, expressing the mystery of Christ's efficacy and action in human life: Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

If one still needed convincing about how designed and intended all this was, how it lives not only in its linguistic elements but in the poet's pre-verbal intention and intellection, one might compare it with another stanza of linguistic virtuosity, of considerable imaginative force, written by another poet with a sacramental apprehension of the world. Dylan Thomas's lines in 'The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower' also concern water and quicksand: The hand that swirls the water in the pool Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind Hauls my shroud sail.

And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

This is much more the 'logic of imagination' than the 'logic of concepts', more the yeasty burgeoning of images from a dark embryo than the delighted and precise realization or incarnation of a mystery. It is not so much the word made flesh as the flesh made word. If we ask the question, whose hand swirls the quicksand, or who is the hanging man, we cannot and perhaps should not expect a precise answer. It is not that kind of poem. It is incantation, it deploys heraldic images-admittedly with excitement-but it does not aspire to spell an exact proposition. Whatever truth the poem proposes it is only co-extensive with the poem itself.

Whereas 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', of course, is the utterance of Hopkins's whole reality, of his myth, if you like, and this reality or myth has been lived as the truth by generations before and since Hopkins. Yeats had to write his own holy book, A Vision, before he could embody its truths in poems, and those truths were finally 'a superhuman/Mirror-resembling dream', the creation of a Romantic fiat. But Hopkins's holy book was the New Testament, its commentary was the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, its reality was in his own experience of conversion and vocation to the Jesuit rule. His intellect was not forced to choose between perfection of the life or of the work but was compelled to bring them into congruence.

I wish to suggest that Hopkins did indeed embody this congruence, that his understanding of the Christian mystery and the poetic mystery were structured in the same way; and in this respect, a remark by Ted Hughes in his Afterword to A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse is very pertinent. Hughes writes: Poetic imagination is determined finally by the state of negotiation-in a person or in a people-between man and his idea of the Creator. This is natural enough, and everything else is naturally enough subordinate to it. How things are between man and his idea of the Divinity determines everything in his life, the quality and connectedness of every feeling and thought, and the meaning of every action.

Whether or not this holds generally, it is particularly true of Hopkins. His journals are scrupulous and slightly shocking evidence of the way his imagination was in constant, almost neurotic negotiation with his idea of the Creator, as on 24 September 1870 when he saw the Northern Lights and in the entry immediately following that: At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear ... This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgement was like a new witness to G.o.d and filled me with delightful fear.

Oct 20-Laus Deo-the river to-day and yesterday.

Again, the intimate negotiation was in progress-as abnegation-the previous year, in the entry beginning under 24 January 1869: The elms have long been in red bloom and yesterday (the 11th) I saw small leaves on the brushwood at their roots. Some primroses out. But a penance which I was doing from Jan. 25 to July 25 prevented my seeing much that half-year.

But perhaps the most succinct and celebrated intimacy is his remark about the bluebell: 'I know the beauty of Our Lord by it.'

His relations.h.i.+p with the idea of the Divinity not only determined the quality and connectedness of every feeling and thought, but it underlay his poetic imagination and provided, in Hughes's word, the groundplan of the poetic act as he conceived it. For Hopkins, this act was closer to having fire struck from him than it was to oozing gum; and the striking of flame, 'the stroke dealt' from above is how he images G.o.d's intervention in his life in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. G.o.d appears in the opening stanza in powerful aspect, as much Thor as Jehovah, ready to deal blows with his hammer: Thou mastering me G.o.d! Giver of breath and bread; World's strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

This is a far more mature and demanding vision of the religious vocation than that which we saw in 'Heaven-Haven': not quiet retreat, not the religious life viewed from the outside but uttered from the quick centre. The bronze notes of the verse only serve to reinforce Hopkins's declaration to a bewildered Bridges: 'What refers to myself in the poem is all strictly and literally true and did all occur; nothing is added for poetical padding.' It would be possible to read the first ten stanzas of the poem and relate the poetic mode, the psychological states, and the theological implications line by line, but I will confine myself to quotation and commentary relevant to my particular purpose.

Christ's storming of the soul is presented in images of lightning and fire: I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

It is as if the 'sweep and hurl' fanned him into a glow, a glow which ignites his heart into a leaping flame of recognition and love: My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

After this refining fire, he is soft sift that steadies and is sustained by the gospel proffer. He perceives Christ instressed in creation and stresses Christ's reality by imitation: stanzas 5, 6, 7 and 8 are an orthodox meditation on and affirmation of the mystery of Christ's incarnation, its redemptive effect on all nature and the consequent sacramental efficacy of natural phenomena. Then in stanza 8 he returns to the moment of personal crisis, the realization of Christ in his own life, when 'the stress felt', 'the stroke dealt' bursts like a sloe on the tongue, 'brim, in a flash, full'. And there follows the clearest statement of the paradox of the religious vocation, of the Christian relations.h.i.+p with a master who demands all obedience from his creature in order that the creature may be perfectly himself: Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still.

This act of mastery is an act of love: the creature was 'trod' and now he is 'melted but mastered'. A sceptical critic might be forgiven, indeed, for thinking of Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan' rather than George Herbert's 'The Collar'.

But what I want to note is the striking correspondence between the imagery used to describe this central event in Hopkins's religious life and the central action in his life as a poet, that is, the experience of the poetic act itself. In each case a bolt from the blue, a fire that strikes, a masculine touch, initiates the action. The sonnet 'To R.B.' is worth quoting in full: The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame, Breathes once and, quenched faster than it came, Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.

Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long Within her wears, bears, cares and combs the same: The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim Now known and hand at work now never wrong.

Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this; I want the one rapture of an inspiration.

O then if in my lagging lines you miss The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.

Obviously Hopkins cannot escape, in this figure, the mothering function of his imagination, but what is important is that this is not in his case parthenogenetic but comes about through the union of distinct s.e.xual elements, and the crucial element is the penetrative, masculine spur of flame, 'sweet fire the sire of muse'. The mastering G.o.d who came with lightning and lashed rod and 'the strong/Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame', partake of the same nature. The fire in his heart only shows when it is struck.

There can be no more explicit ill.u.s.tration of the interconnectedness of Hopkins's poetic and religious vocations than his account of the origins of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. The pa.s.sage from his letter to R. W. Dixon in October 1878 is well known but worth recalling at some length: You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper.... After writing this I held myself free to compose but cannot find it in my conscience to spend time upon it; so I have done little and shall do less.

Composition, in other words, was not just a matter of natural volition and personal appeas.e.m.e.nt but had to be a compliance with and an enactment of the will of G.o.d, and the will of G.o.d was the rule of his order, and the rule of his wit, in Jonson's term, was as much in the mastering grip of his rector as it was in the grip of his rhetoric. So much is explicit here, but implicit is the siring figure we find in his sonnet to Bridges. The new rhythm that was haunting his ear had the status of dark embryo, but it needed to be penetrated, fertilized by the dark descending will; the rector's suggestion had the status of an annunciation in what Stephen Dedalus, that other scholastic artist, called 'the virgin womb of the imagination'.

Moreover, since Hopkins's poems were conceived as the crossing of masculine strain on feminine potential, it is natural that they are most fully achieved when siring vision is most rapturously united with a sensuous apprehension of natural life. United, and not simply in attendance upon each other. The sonnet 'Spring', for example, while being a delightful piece of inscaping, with its thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing, is nevertheless structurally a broken arch, with an octave of description aspiring towards a conjunction with a sestet of doctrine. Doctrine and description only hold hands, as it were, in 'Spring' but in 'The Windhover' they are in intense communion, the spirit holding intercourse (the Wordsworthian locution is entirely appropriate) with beauty. In fact, 'The Windhover' is an extended mime of the process described in the sonnet to Bridges, an anatomy of the moment of inspiration and illumination, when the blowpipe flame of delight and insight lances the sensibility: I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy!

The octave of the sonnet const.i.tutes 'the fine delight that fathers thought' and the thought is delivered in the moment of appeas.e.m.e.nt-'the achieve of, the mastery of the thing'. There follows the much interpreted sestet where Hopkins's imagination is luminously determined by his idea of the Creator, 'with aim/Now known and hand at work now never wrong'. Human perfection in the Christian sphere is not just a matter of dealing out physical being, or of flas.h.i.+ng 'honour ... off exploit', as in the case of the animal and secular worlds: all the panoply of such mastery must be downed when Christ is master, must buckle under the 'anvil ding' and be tempered to a new brilliance. The final lines do indeed vault into the consciousness with the lift of symbol, and yet, despite the gleam and deliquescence and intense sufficiency of the verbal art, they are still intent on telling a truth independent of themselves, that the fire in the flint of nature shows not till it be struck, and that nature's 'bonniest ... her clearest selved spark/Man' is only completely selved and achieved in a selfless imitation of Christ. And this conclusion is not rhetoric in the pejorative sense, not the will doing the work of the imagination: not a mustered hurrah for asceticism in face of full-blooded exultation, but a whole man's 'wincing and singing': No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion s.h.i.+ne, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

When I settled on 'the fire i' the flint' as the dark embryo for what I have been developing here, I wanted to explore the notion that the artist's idea of the artistic act, conscious or unconscious, affected certain intrinsic qualities of the artefact. I hope I have clarified my sense of the artistic act in Hopkins as a masculine forging rather than a feminine incubation, with a consequent intentness rather than allure in his style. His idea of the Creator himself as father and fondler is central to the mastering, design-making rhetoric and fondling of detail in his work. And just as Christ's mastering descent into the soul is an act of love, a treading and a melting, so the poetic act itself is a love-act initiated by the masculine spur of delight. But Hopkins was no doubt aware that even the act of love could be read as a faithful imitation of Christ, a sign of grace, insofar as the Church fathers perceived the sign of the cross in the figure of a man and woman splayed.

The Chatterton Lecture on an English Poet given at the British Academy, December 1974

Yeats as an Example?

A writer's dedication to his art can often entail some kind of hurt for those who live near and dear to him. Robert Lowell in the final poem of The Dolphin used the word 'plotting' to describe something that is questionable in the artistic enterprise: I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself- to ask compa.s.sion ... this book, half-fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting- my eyes have seen what my hand did.

If there is more than a hint of self-accusation in that last line, there is a strong ring of triumph in it as well, and when Robert Lowell died I remember some of us toyed with it as a possible epitaph for him: it seemed to catch the combination of pride and vulnerability that lay at the roots of his poetic voice.

It would have made a much more rueful tombstone verse than Yeats's: Cast a cold eye On life, on death.

Horseman, pa.s.s by.

Where Yeats's eye is cold, Lowell's is warm though by no means wet, sympathetic to the imperfections of living, the eye of a pedestrian rather than the eye of an equestrian. Where Yeats's last poems sang their faith in art and turned in scorn from 'the sort now growing up', Lowell's final work hesitated, and his trust in fictions seemed to waver:

Epilogue.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?...

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor pa.s.sing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

'Accuracy' seems a modest aim, even when it is as richly managed as it is here. Lowell abjures the sublime, that realm where his rhetoric often penetrated, and seeks instead the low-key consolations of the quotidian. He is almost, in Yeats's words, 'content to live'.

Yeats would never have been 'content to live' merely, because that would have meant throwing words away, throwing gesture away, throwing away possibilities for drama and transcendence. From the beginning of his career he emphasized and realized the otherness of art from life, dream from action, and by the end he moved within his mode of vision as within some invisible ring of influence and defence, some bullet-proof gla.s.s of the spirit, exclusive as Caesar in his tent, absorbed as a long-legged fly on the stream.

Whatever Yeats intends us to understand by 'Long-legged Fly', we cannot miss the confidence that drives it forward and the energy that underlies it, an energy that exhilarates in the faith that artistic process has some kind of absolute validity. There is a kind of vitreous finish on the work itself that deflects all other truths except its own. Art can outface history, the imagination can disdain happenings once it has incubated and mastered the secret behind happenings. In fact, we can sense a violence, an implacable element in the artistic drive as Yeats envisages and embodies it. The 'yellow eyed hawk of the mind' and the 'ancient, glittering eyes' of the Chinamen in 'Lapis Lazuli' and the 'cold eye' of the tomb-inspecting horseman are all suggestive of sinister appet.i.tes. If the act of mind in the artist has all the intentness and amorousness and every bit as much of the submerged aggression of the act of love, then it can be maintained that Yeats's artistic imagination was often in a condition that only be properly described as priapic.

Is this, then, exemplary? Do we altogether a.s.sent to the samurai stare and certainty of 'Cast a cold eye/On life, on death'? Do we say yes to this high-stepping tread? Can we afford to disdain the life that goes on messily and cantankerously? How, in other words, do we regard Yeats's affirmation that the man who sits down to breakfast is a 'bundle of accident and incoherence' and that the man reborn in his poem is 'something intended, complete'?

Personally, I find much to admire in the intransigence of the stance, as I find much to commend and imitate in the two things that Yeats was so often determined to set at loggerheads, his life and his work: The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

What is finally admirable is the way his life and his work are not separate but make a continuum, the way the courage of his vision did not confine itself to rhetorics but issued in actions. Unlike Wallace Stevens, for example, that other great apologist of the imagination, Yeats bore the implications of his romanticism into action: he propagandized, speechified, fund-raised, administered and politicked in the world of telegrams and anger, all on behalf of the world of vision. His poetry was not just a matter of printed books making their way in a world of literate readers and critics; it was rather the fine flower of his efforts to live as forthrightly as he could in the world of illiterates and politicians. Beside the ringing ant.i.thesis of 'The Choice' we must set this other recognition: A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather, the better his poetry, the more sincere his life. His life is an experiment in living and those who come after him have a right to know it. Above all, it is necessary that the lyric poet's life be known, that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man; that it is no little thing to achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one's own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it ... to give one's own life as well as one's words (which are so much nearer to one's soul) to the criticism of the world.

I admire the way that Yeats took on the world on his own terms, defined the areas where he would negotiate and where he would not; the way he never accepted the terms of another's argument but propounded his own. I a.s.sume that this peremptoriness, this apparent arrogance, is exemplary in an artist, that it is proper and even necessary for him to insist on his own language, his own vision, his own terms of reference. This will often seem like irresponsibility or affectation, sometimes like callousness, but from the artist's point of view it is an act of integrity, or an act of cunning to protect the integrity.

All through his life, of course, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his terms of reference. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance courts in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this sn.o.bbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying the feudal facts of the cla.s.s system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolomaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer on the reliable citizen's terms, let him call the tune and begin to make excuses for Yeats.

'Well,' we might say, 'when he was a youngster in Sligo he heard these stories about fairies from the servants in his grandparents' house; and then when, as a young poet, he sought a badge of ident.i.ty for his own culture, something that would mark it off from the rest of the English-speaking world, he found this distinctive and sympathetic thing in the magical world view of the country people. It was a conscious counter-culture act against the rationalism and materialism of late Victorian England.' To which the citizen replies, 'Anybody who believes in fairies is mad.'

Yeats would not have thanked us for explaining him apologetically. He would want us to affirm him with all the elaborate obstinacy with which he affirmed himself. So for entertainment and instruction, I wish to observe him in action as a young poet, and then as an established poet and public figure; and in each case I hope to make clear what I consider to have been exemplary in his bearing.

The Irish Theosophist, a magazine whose very t.i.tle is enough to raise the ghosts of the nineties, carried an interview with Mr. W. B. Yeats in its issue for 15 October 1893. It had been conducted by the editor, one D. N. Dunlop, who set the scene in his opening paragraphs: A few evenings ago I called on my friend, Mr. W. B. Yeats, and found him alone, seated in his armchair, smoking his cigarette, with a volume of Homer before him. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genius. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well-known symbolic artists; everywhere books and papers in apparently endless confusion.

In his usual genial way he invited me to have a cup of tea with him. During this pleasant ceremony little was said, but sufficient to impress me more than ever with the fact that my host was supremely an artist, much in love with his art.

Yeats was then twenty-eight, and could deploy that elaborate style he had learned from Pater with as much indolent calculation on a sofa as in a sentence. If he had not yet formulated his theory of the mask, he had an instinctive grasp of the potency of his image; and if he does not altogether ruffle here in a manly pose, there is nevertheless a bit of a peac.o.c.k display going on. The Homer volume was a good touch, and so was the cigarette and the 'ceremony' of the tea.

The young man whose concern for appearances had led him, a few years earlier, to ink his heels in order to disguise the holes in his socks had obviously mastered more complex and sure-footed strategies for holding the line between himself and the world around him. He had not, to be sure, acquired the peremptory authority which Frank O'Connor was to see in action decades later, when the poet could silence an argument or b.u.t.tress a proposition with a remark such as 'Ah, but that was before the peac.o.c.k screamed', but he had about him already a definite atmosphere, a style that declared allegiance to disciplines and sources of strength not shared by his contemporaries. He was an artist, devoted to the beautiful; he was a magician, adept among hidden powers; he was a Celt, with a lifeline to the mythological depths; he was a propagandist, with a firm line for journalists. He was all these things, self-consciously and deliberately, yet they did not const.i.tute a dispersal or a confusion of his powers or of his personality; on the contrary, they concentrated one another, grew from a single root, and if they were deliberate, the deliberation sprang from an inner compulsion, an energy discovering itself as vision. Yeats's performances, we might say, then and for the rest of his life, manifested themselves in the service of creative action. The longer we think of Yeats, the more he narrows the gap which etymology has forced between mystery and mastery.

Aspects of the mysterious and the masterful reveal themselves in one of his coolest strokes during the interview, which was essentially a conversation about Yeats's connection with the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society. He had been expelled by Madame Blavatsky, or at least had been asked to resign about three years earlier. Dunlop asked him: 'Can you remember anything in the nature of a prophecy, Mr. Yeats, made by Madame Blavatsky, that might be of interest to record, notwithstanding the fact that you are yet awaiting your prophesied illness?'

'The only thing of that nature,' replied Mr. Yeats, 'was a reference to England'. '"The Master told me," said she, "that the power of England would not outlast the century, and the Master never deceived me."'

It seems to me that Yeats cut a sly swathe with that answer, enlisting the esoteric fringe to serve the nationalistic heartland, hiding the cultural agitator behind the po-faced dreamer, making a cast across the sleeping pool of historical enmity with a line as neutral as theosophy itself, the calm surface of his speech depth-charged with potential rebellion. The remark leaves a broadening wake in the imagination and operates by the perfect camouflaging of judged intention in an aftermath of overlapping effects; and in this way it rehea.r.s.es in miniature the more complex orchestration of intention and effect which he was to achieve in The Wind Among the Reeds, a book whose t.i.tle was already haunting his mind.

'And what about your present work?' I asked.

'Celtic Twilight, a work dealing with ghosts, goblins and fairies, will be out shortly, also a short volume of Blake's poems,' he replied. 'Then I am getting ready for publication, next spring, a book of poems, which I intend calling The Wind Among the Reeds and, as soon afterwards as possible, a collection of essays and lectures dealing with Irish nationality and literature, which will probably appear under the t.i.tle of the Watch Fire.'

In the event Watch Fire was never published. His essay on nationality and literature had appeared, however, five months earlier in the United Irishman and work on similar themes had been published all through the late eighties and continued to be published throughout the nineties. He began with his famous champions.h.i.+p of Sir Samuel Ferguson's poetry-'the greatest poet Ireland has produced, because the most central and most Celtic'-and went on to praise James Clarence Mangan, William Allingham and the ballad poets; to sponsor new voices like Katherine Tynan's and AE's; to write for English and Irish magazines bibliographies and reader's guides to the best Irish books; to affirm the validity of that magical world-view implicit in Irish country customs and beliefs, and to rehea.r.s.e those beliefs and customs in the book he mentions which gave its name to an era, The Celtic Twilight.

It was all part of a campaign and the various suggestions in the word campaign are apposite. It was sustained over a long period and was pursued on a number of fronts: journalistic, political, poetic, dramatic, amatory even, if we think of Maud Gonne as leading lady in The Countess Cathleen; it was pursued with the idea of conquest, not of territory perhaps but of imagination-though a successful awakening of the people's imagination would allow them to repossess their territory with a new conviction. As he comes to the end of that part of his autobiography dealing with the years 18871891, the note swells as he recollects his purpose: I could not endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or Colmcille, Oisin or Finn in Prometheus's stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated cla.s.ses knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated cla.s.ses, rediscovering what I have called 'the applied arts of literature', the a.s.sociation of literature, that is, with music, speech and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political pa.s.sion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design?

If there is something plangent in this proud recollection, there was nothing of the dying fall in the notes struck by the journalism and controversy of the eighties and nineties as he pursued that 'common design'. For example, after declaring in his 1886 Dublin Magazine article on Sir Samuel Ferguson that of all things the past bequeaths the future, the greatest are great legends and that it was therefore the duty of every Irish reader to study those of his own country, he went on to make clear that this appeal was directed to the selfless and idealistic young: I do not appeal to the professional cla.s.ses, who, in Ireland, at least, appear at no time to have thought of the affairs of their country till they first feared for their emoluments-nor do I appeal to the shoddy society of 'West Britonism'....

That pugnacious thrust never deserted him, although he was to develop a less bare-fisted style, abandoning the short jab in the face in favour of a long reach for the side of the head.

The point is, however, that no matter how much we have been led to think of the young Yeats as a dreamer, we must not forget the practical, driving side of him, driving forward towards his ideal goal. The founding of libraries, the a.s.sociation with political activists, all this was not undertaken without some resoluteness, some ambition, some expense of spirit. And all of this was by no means the whole story. There were his love affairs, first with Maud Gonne and then with Olivia Shakespeare, those enhancing and disturbing events in his emotional life that gave him power in other spheres. There were his more serious literary projects, such as the stories of Red Hanrahan, and those other strange stories, at once robust and remote, which formed the substance of The Secret Rose; and there was above all his own secret rose, the poetry itself.

It is easy to admire this young Yeats: his artistic ambitions, his national fervour, his great desire to attach himself to a tradition and a corpus of belief that was communal. For all the activity and push of the enterprise, the aim of the poet and of the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole, and the spirit of our age is sympathetic to that democratic urge.

It is less than sympathetic, however, to the next stance we find the poet adopting. Twenty years after the Irish Theosophist interview in October 1893, in his poem 'September 1913', Yeats's style had evolved a tone for detaching rather than attaching himself, for saying 'I' rather than 'we'. By then, Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. We are in the presence of a poet in his late forties, the Abbey Theatre manager, scorner of middle-cla.s.s piety and philistinism, mythologizer of aristocratic ceremony and grace. We are in the presence of a man who believes that the redistribution of the Coole Park estate among its tenants would be a step back, not a step forward, in the life of the country. A man stung into superb att.i.tudes by the rude handling meted out to J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and by the refusal of Dublin Corporation to provide a gallery for Hugh Lane's collection of Impressionist pictures. All that. An Anglo-Irish Protestant deeply at odds with the mind of Irish Catholic society. A man who is remaking himself, finding a style for resisting his environment rather than a style that would co-opt it, at that thrilling stage of development which he calls, in 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul', 'the finished man among his enemies'. And that poem goes on to ask about this man among his enemies: How in the name of heaven can he escape That defiling and disfiguring shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes, until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape?

So I want our next image of Yeats to be one that the malicious eyes of George Moore cast into shape when he came to write his cla.s.sic autobiographical account of the Irish Literary Revival in Hail and Farewell. Though 'malicious' is perhaps too severe an adjective. Many of Moore's most quotable jabs at the romantic figure of the poet are more suggestive of affection than of a desire to afflict, as when he describes his laugh as a caw, 'the most melancholy thing in the world', or when he presents a bedraggled Yeats on the margins of Coole Lake looking like an old umbrella left behind after a picnic. Moore's book is finally more of a testimony to Yeats's genius than a worrier of it, sustained and elaborate in its ironies, corrective, accurate in its own way. The following pa.s.sage occurs after Moore has given his account of the Lane controversy and has reported the text of his own lecture on the Impressionists, a lecture delivered for the edification of the reluctant burghers: As soon as the applause died away, Yeats who had lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak. We were surprised at the change in his appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when, instead of talking to us as he used to do about the old stories come down from generation to generation he began to thunder like Ben Tillett against the middle cla.s.ses, stamping his feet, working himself into a temper, and all because the middle cla.s.ses did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition. When he spoke the words, the middle cla.s.ses, one would have thought that he was speaking against a personal foe, and we looked round asking each other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up the strange belief that none but t.i.tled and carriage-folk could appreciate pictures ...

We have sacrificed our lives for Art; but you, what have you done? What sacrifices have you made? he asked, and everybody began to search his memory for the sacrifices that Yeats had made, asking himself in what prison Yeats had languished, what rags he had worn, what broken victuals he had eaten. As far as anybody could remember, he had always lived very comfortably, sitting down invariably to regular meals, and the old green cloak that was in keeping with his profession of romantic poet he had exchanged for the magnificent fur coat which distracted our attention from what he was saying, so opulently did it cover the back of the chair out of which he had risen ...

The conscious theatricality of this Yeats, the studied haughtiness, the affectation-this kind of thing has often put people off. This is the Willie Yeats whom his contemporaries could not altogether take seriously because he was getting out of their reach, the Yeats whom Maud Gonne called 'Silly Willie' and whom W. H. Auden also called 'silly', in his 1939 elegy: 'You were silly like us, your gift survived it all.' But in setting the silliness in relation to the gift, Auden went to the heart of the matter-survival. What Moore presents us with is a picture of Yeats exercising that intransigence which I praised earlier, that protectiveness of his imaginative springs, so that the gift would survive. He donned the mantle-or perhaps one should say the fur coat-of the aristocrat so that he might express a vision of a communal and personal life that was ample, generous, harmonious, fulfilled and enhancing. The reactionary politics implied by Yeats's admiration of the Coole Park milieu are innocent in the original sense of that word, not nocent, not hurtful. What is more to the point is the way his experience of that benign, paternalistic regime and of Lady Gregory's personal strengths as conserver of folk culture and ch.o.r.eographer of artistic talent issued in a poetry whose very music is a guarantee of its humane munificence. The silliness of the behaviour is continuous with the sumptuousness of the poetry of the middle period. Yeats's attack upon his own middle cla.s.s really springs out of disappointment: why aren't they taking the lead culturally now that they are in the lead economically? Of course Moore is right to say he belongs to them, and of course Yeats's pretensions looked ridiculous to his contemporaries. But this was his method of signifying his refusal to 'serve that in which he no longer believed'.

When Joyce rebelled, he left by the Holyhead boat and created his drama by making a fictional character called Stephen Dedalus point up and repeat the terms of his revolt. When Yeats rebelled, he remained-Joyce scorned such 'a treacherous instinct for adaptability'-but he still made a new W. B. Yeats to tread the streets and stage of Dublin, a character who was almost as much a work of imagination as Stephen Dedalus. In order to fly the philistinism of his own cla.s.s and the pious ignorance of another creed, Yeats remade himself, a.s.sociated himself with cold, disdainful figures of whom Charles Stewart Parnell was the archetype and 'The Fisherman' was a pattern. The solitude, the will towards excellence, the courage, the self-conscious turning away from that in which he no longer believes, which is Dublin life, and turning towards that which he trusts, which is an image or dream-all the drama and integrity of his poem 'The Fisherman' depend to a large extent upon that other drama which George Moore so delightedly observed and reported: Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down-turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream; A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, 'Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And pa.s.sionate as the dawn.'