14. ‘A Bronze Head’ and Beyond
© 2021 Patrick Keane, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0275.15
Since the death’s-head image of ‘A Deep-sworn Vow’ culminates in the last and most somberly impressive of the Maud Gonne poems, ‘A Bronze Head’ (1938), I will move directly to that poem, deferring comment on two Maud-related poems (‘An Image from a Past Life’ and ‘Under Saturn’) from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), the volume that follows The Wild Swans at Coole. I have already noted the presence of Maud in the 1921 volume’s ‘A Prayer for my Daughter.’
‘A Bronze Head’ is curiously related to ‘Among School Children.’ Just as the late play Purgatory is the nightmare twin of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ animating the terror implicit in Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence (the enactment ‘again, and yet again,’ ultimately embraced in the ‘Dialogue’), so ‘A Bronze Head’ seems a darker re-examination of the relationships explored in ‘Among School Children’ between unity and division, the One and the Many, underlying substance and its various manifestations. The crucial philosophic question and speculation in the later poem is restricted to Maud, ever a shape-shifter: ‘who can tell/ Which of her forms has shown her substance right?/ Or maybe substance can be composite.’ In a poem riddled with Shakespearean echoes, Yeats is here recalling Sonnet 53, where Shakespeare wonders about the beloved’s Platonic essence and its relationship to her accidental attributes, her external appearances: ‘What is your substance, whereof are you made,/ That millions of strange shadows on you tend?’ Such speculations would be no less at home in the poem in which the Yeatsian old man walks through the long schoolroom ‘questioning,’ dreaming of a ‘Ledaean body,’ Maud’s, and what came before and after: the beloved as ‘child’ and in her ‘present’ form, feeding on the insubstantial, her image (visually Dantesque, verbally Shakespearean and Miltonic) ‘Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind/ And took a mess of shadows for its meat.’1
That is the image, though even further time-ravaged, sculpted in the plaster of Lawrence Campbell’s bronze-painted bust in the Municipal Gallery. Though that bust is at the right of the entrance, Yeats chose not to mention it in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited,’ written shortly after an emotional visit to the Gallery in August 1937. The many artworks he describes in that poem were all paintings, and all stirred memories of lost friends and co-workers. Was the bust of Maud, her beauty now a magnificent ruin, too painful to contemplate? Or was it that, as usual, she was not to be included among ‘others,’ and had to have a poem devoted to herself alone? ‘A Bronze Head’ is certainly unique in its form: Yeats’s sole venture in rime royal, a seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc.
The hysterica passio Yeats, borrowing from King Lear, attributes to Maud Gonne in ‘A Bronze Head’ anticipates a 2003 ekphrastic poem on Edvard Munch’s famous 1910 painting ‘The Scream.’ In ‘Stealing the Scream,’ Monica Youn emphasizes ‘the figure’s fixed hysteria.’ But not even the titular sculpture in the Municipal Gallery could permanently fix the protean image of his beloved for Yeats. She is an artifact, but also something ‘Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye,/ Everything else withered and mummy-dead.’ Though now a ‘great tomb-haunter’ sweeping the ‘distant sky’ and terrified by the ‘hysterica passio’ of her ‘own emptiness,’ she was ‘once’ a ‘form all full/ As though with magnanimity of light.’ Yet she is also ‘a most gentle woman.’ And there is more. As the poet first saw her, she was an unmanageable filly—‘even at the starting post, all sleek and new,/ I saw the wildness in her’—and a vulnerable human creature, her animal wildness transferred by empathy to the protective poet-lover, who ‘had grown wild/ And wandered murmuring everywhere, “My child, my child!”’ Finally, returning to the ‘bird’s round eye’ of the opening stanza, Yeats describes her in her anything but vulnerable aspect, possessing a supernatural ‘sterner eye.’
Dispensing round his magnanimity of images, Yeats goes beyond the triads of ‘Among School Children’—though there too Maud had been evoked as child, beautiful woman, and aged crone, even as bird (a Ledaean ‘daughter of the swan’) and animal (a wind-drinking chameleon). The poet of ‘Among School Children’ questions the chestnut tree of the final stanza: ‘Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?’ It is of course all three since we can no more break down the organic unity of that ‘great rooted blossomer’ than we can ‘know the dancer from the dance,’ or isolate Maud as child from Maud as ‘Ledaean body,’ or from her ‘present image’ as hollow-cheeked but still voracious crone. Yet it is as a crone that Yeats compels us to envisage Maud Gonne in ‘A Bronze Head’—compels us by ending his poem in a repetition and intensification of that ‘present image.’ In the final eugenically tainted movement, he imagines her as if ‘a sterner eye looked through her eye/ On this foul world in its decline and fall,/ On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,/ Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty.’
The bird-like ‘sterner eye’ looking through Maud’s eye—that ‘mysterious eye’ that, Yeats reports with fascination and dread, at least one British journalist felt, at the height of her anti-British activism, ‘contained the shadow of battles yet to come’ (Mem, 60)—seems both a projection of Yeats’s own clairvoyant and apocalyptic eye, and that of the Morrigu, the one-eyed ‘woman with the head of a crow.’ It seems to be that Celtic war-goddess who presides here, her ‘sterner eye’ looking through the ‘eye’ of Maud, that ‘dark tomb-haunter,’ on a corrupt world in decline, and wondering ‘what was left for massacre to save.’
The Morrigu, the Celtic demoniac bird of the dead who haunts corpse-strewn battlefields, is the dark side of the Old Woman who demands ‘all’ of her devotees in the 1902 play, written for Maud’s nationalist organization, The Daughters of Ireland, in which Maud herself, playing Cathleen ni Houlihan, personified the oppression and resurrection of Ireland: the old crone transfigured into ‘a young girl’ with ‘the walk of a queen,’ rejuvenated by blood sacrifice.
That climax was anticipated, reports Stephen Gwynn, present on opening night, when Maud’s Cathleen rose, ‘still bent and weighed down with years or centuries; but for one instant, before she went out at the half-door, she drew herself up to her superb height; change was manifest; patuit dea.’2 Written twenty years after Easter 1916, Gwynn’s description of the electrifying impact of the play’s climax, ‘Change was manifest,’ echoes Yeats’s ‘all changed, changed utterly.’ Gwynn is also echoing the passage of the Aeneid Yeats had cited in recalling his first glimpse of Maud. Both of their Virgilian allusions are apt; though she is disguised as a Spartan huntress, Venus was revealed to Aeneus as she walked away, ‘vera incessu patuit dea,’ [the true goddess revealed in her step] (Aeneid 1.405). But Gwynn, like Yeats a Protestant constitutional nationalist, also ‘went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot.’ As we will see, echoing his echoer, Yeats asked himself that very question preparing for his own death. Maud, too, comes full circle: from the beautiful woman bent and hidden under the rags of the Old Woman of Cathleen ni Houlihan, to an actual old woman: the literal terrible beauty of ‘A Bronze Head.’
§
No wonder there were ‘others,’ pre- and post-marital minor Muses, even the poet’s wife: important but none of them as magnetic as Maud, who intrudes even into those relationships and the poems celebrating them. Thanks to the work of Joseph Hassett there is no need to deal with these women in more than a peripheral way. In his lucid study of Yeats and his Muses, Hassett captures the essence of the poet’s relationships with, not only Maud and her daughter Iseult, but with seven other inspiring women, beginning with Olivia Shakespear and Florence Farr; including the poet’s wife, George Hyde-Lees; and ending with Margot Ruddock, Ethel Mannin, Dorothy Wellesley, and Edith Shackleton Heald. I will limit myself to saying a few things about the poetry involving the lovely Olivia, and about poems having to do, essentially, with the occult interests of the poet’s wife, with whom he collaborated.
Olivia Shakespear introduced Yeats to sexual love in 1896, and they shared ‘many days of happiness.’ Olivia took his virginity, but could not uproot Maud, who remained an obsession. ‘I had a beautiful friend,’ he mourns in an 1898 poem addressed to Maud, ‘And dreamed that the old despair/ Would end in love in the end:/ She looked in my heart one day,/ And saw your image was there.’ Despite the tearful parting that followed, Olivia remained his lifelong friend and most intimate correspondent. In December 1929, Yeats, who wrote to her of their love as a ‘cup left half tasted,’ sent her the poignant ‘After Long Silence,’ a meeting of minds rather than of now-decrepit bodies, love’s heartache distilled in the single word ‘young,’ hovering at the end of the penultimate line. The poem is an abbacddc octave, a semi-Petrarchan sonnet truncated because there was no more to say:
Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.3
The late marriage to his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, in 1917 (he was 52, she half his age) ushered in Yeats’s most creative period. Her interest in the occult matched his: her gift co-creating A Vision. While the ‘learning’ they share is stressed in ‘Solomon to Sheba’ (the third and final ‘Solomon and Sheba’ poem), the playful but serious ‘Solomon and the Witch’ fuses the erotic and occult in almost world-ending sexual ecstasy. But since ‘the world stays,’ Sheba cries out in the final lines: ‘the moon is wilder every minute./ O! Solomon! Let us try again.’ Yet the poem also acknowledges that the ‘bride-bed’ can bring ‘despair,/ For each an imagined image brings/ And finds a real image there.’ This candid reflection of biography—the couple’s Maud- and Iseult-haunted honeymoon—is fleshed out in the two poems that immediately follow (though written a year later).
In the second, ‘Under Saturn,’ the poet asks how he should ‘forget the wisdom that you brought,/ The comfort that you made?’ But he has to ask the question in the first place because, having ‘grown saturnine,’ he fears she might ‘Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought/ Because I have no other youth, can make me pine.’ Like Olivia, George saw Maud’s image there. In ‘An Image from a Past Life,’ the immediately preceding dialogue-poem, She, possessed like George of occult powers, senses that
A sweetheart from another life floats there
As though she had been forced to linger
From vague distress
Or arrogant loveliness,
Merely to loosen out a tress
Among the starry eddies of her hair
Upon the paleness of a finger.
He reassures her that any such image, ‘even to eyes that beauty had driven mad,’ can only make him ‘fonder.’ Unconvinced, She does not know whether the uplifted arms of the spectral figure intend to ‘flout’ her, or (in another hauntingly exquisite tress-centered tercet) ‘to find,/ Now that no fingers bind,/ That her hair streams upon the wind.’ Given these glimpses of Pre-Raphaelite beauty, what She definitely does know is: ‘I am afraid/ Of the hovering thing night brought me.’
Given the mysterious wisdom brought to the poet as the wedding gift of his wife’s occult ‘Communicators,’ it is less surprising than it might otherwise be that Yeats’s most direct love poem to George should occur in the Browningesque dramatic monologue, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ (1924). The ‘gift’ the great caliph gives to his friend and learned treasurer Kusta Ben Luka is a woman who shares his ‘thirst’ for ‘old crabbed mysteries,’ yet ‘herself can seem youth’s very fountain,/ Being all brimmed with life’ (85–90). Whatever the source of the ‘Voice’ of the Djinn she heard, Kusta comes to realize that his young wife is not simply a conduit. He now knows, instead, that that mysterious voice has drawn ‘A quality of wisdom from her love’s/ Particular quality.’ The signs, shapes, and abstractions, ‘All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things/ Are but a new expression of her body/ Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth./ And now my utmost mystery is out’ (179–87).
But this ‘embodied’ revelation is followed immediately by the poem’s concluding lines, in which Kusta-Yeats insists that, while ‘A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner,’ he is neither ‘dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost/ In the confusion of its night-dark folds.’ This imagery echoes the poem’s opening ‘banners of the Caliphs,’ hanging ‘night-coloured/ But brilliant as the night’s embroidery’ (6–7); but in the full context of Yeats’s love poetry, the image inevitably recalls ‘the heaven’s embroidered cloths’—‘Enwrought with golden and silver light,/ The blue and the dim and the dark cloths/ Of night and light and the half-light’—the young, Maud-dazzled poet wished to ‘spread’ under her ‘feet.’ Now, a quarter-century later, he is no longer ‘dazzled’ by the storm-tossed and night-dark but brilliant embroidery because, ostensibly, he is choosing wisdom over beauty—autobiographically, George over Maud. That is what he had actually done a decade earlier when he turned Maud, illegally in Ireland to celebrate the December 1918 Sinn Fein victory, away from the door of her own house (which she had made available to the Yeatses) in order to protect his wife—pregnant and ill with the influenza that would take far more lives than the Great War itself—from a potential police raid. This literal ‘turning aside’ from the ‘great labyrinth’ was the cause of much gossip in Dublin, and created a wound between Yeats and Maud that took long to heal.
§
‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ is the penultimate poem in The Tower, preceded by ‘A Man Young and Old.’ In this eleven-poem sequence, Yeats, masked as Everyman, gives us symbolic autobiography, with anonymous appearances by Maud and Iseult. The emotional / erotic tensions involving Yeats, George (his new wife), Maud, and Iseult, also play out in The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), the most lyrical of the Cuchulain plays. That play opens with the First Musician’s ‘Song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth,’ in which the ‘loveliness’ of ‘a woman’s beauty’ is compared to that of a ‘white sea-bird alone/ At daybreak after a stormy night,’ and to an ‘exquisite’ seashell the ‘vast troubled waters bring/ To the loud sands before day has broken’: a beauty-producing violence ‘imagined within/ The labyrinth of the mind,’ an autobiographical maze intricate enough to enfold three women barely detectable beneath the otherworldly mythology.
In ‘First Love,’ the opening poem of ‘A Man Young and Old,’ Yeats’s mask as Everyman slips from the outset, and the lunar figure is clearly based on Maud. ‘Though nurtured like the sailing moon/ In beauty’s murderous brood,’ she walked and blushed awhile and ‘on my pathway stood/ Until I thought her body bore/ A heart of flesh and blood.’ But since he ‘laid a hand thereon,/ And found a heart of stone,’ he realizes that ‘every hand is lunatic./ That travels on the moon.’ She ‘smiled and that transfigured me/ And left me but a lout,’ wandering aimlessly, ‘Emptier of thought/ Than the heavenly circuit of its stars/ When the moon sails out.’ And this painful but lyrically beautiful final stanza of the first poem leads directly to the lunar opening of the next in the sequence: ‘Like the moon her kindness is/ If kindness I may call’ what has no ‘comprehension’ in it, ‘But is the same for all/ As though my sorrow were a scene/ Upon a painted wall.’
It should be mentioned that, in contrast to this otherwise man-centered sequence, poem IV, ‘The Death of the Hare,’ expresses unexpected empathy for the female in the love-hunt. The Man’s ‘heart is wrung,’ when he remembers her ‘wildness lost.’ He empathetically feels the ‘yelling pack’ (a likely echo of the hostile mob that turned on Maud after her separation from MacBride), and, finally, the death of the pursued animal. ‘The Death of the Hare,’ looking back to Maud as ‘mountain hare’ in ‘Memory,’ anticipates the ‘stricken rabbit’ whose death cry ‘distracts’ Yeats’s ‘thought’ in ‘Man and the Echo.’ It also anticipates the empathy with Maud in ‘A Bronze Head’ (‘my child, my child’), as well as the female perspective expressed throughout ‘A Woman Young and Old’—the sequence that ends The Winding Stair, just as the ‘Man’ sequence ends The Tower.
The poems that follow in the Man sequence emphasize the ecstasy and tragedy at the heart of the Yeats–Gonne relationship, especially in Poem VI, ‘His Memories,’ and VIII, ‘Summer and Spring.’ In the former, in the guise of an anonymous old man, his body ‘broken,’ Yeats claims, even more graphically than in the poem addressed to Maud’s daughter, ‘To a Young Girl,’ that the relationship with his Helen, the ‘first of all the tribe,’ was sexually, and triumphantly, consummated. His ‘arms’ may be ‘like twisted thorn/ And yet there beauty lay,’
And did such pleasure take—
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck—
That she cried into this ear,
‘Strike me if I shriek.’
Two decades later, that night in December 1908, no matter how fleeting, remains paramount among the ‘memories’ of Yeats’s ‘Man Old.’ Since Maud was, ultimately, ‘not kindred of his soul,’ Yeats sought complete union, if only in memory, in poetry, and, specifically, masked as ‘A Man Young and Old.’ In ‘Summer and Spring,’ poem VIII of the sequence, two lovers grown old reminisce ‘under an old thorn-tree.’ Talking of growing up, they ‘Knew that we’d halved a soul/ And fell the one in ‘tother’s arms/ That we might make it whole.’ We recall, as we are meant to, ‘Among School Children,’ written in the same year. In that great poem, transitioning from the first to the second stanza, we shift abruptly from Yeats’s persona as senator and school inspector, ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man,’ to the private, inner man: the poet himself reporting an incident Maud, that ‘daughter of the swan’ and of Leda, once related from her childhood:
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
The blending is poignant, but the tragedy lies in the need ‘to alter Plato’s parable,’ since the merging here is empathetic and partial (there remains a separation between yolk and white even within the unity of the ‘one shell’) rather than the full sexual-emotional union of Aristophanes’ haunting fable in Plato’s Symposium. It is a ‘whole’ union the old man claims in ‘His Memories’ and in ‘Summer and Spring,’ which concludes with a sexual variation on the unity of being symbolized in ‘Among School Children’ by the dancer and ‘great rooted blossomer’: ‘O what a bursting out there was,/ And what a blossoming,/ When we had all the summer-time/ And she had all the spring!’
Even here, however fecund the bursting out and blossoming, it is all memory and heartache. As in most of the Maud poems, ‘Love,’ mingling strength and sweetness, is at once vulnerable—that ‘bitter sweetness,/ Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl’—and immensely powerful. I am quoting ‘From the Antigone,’ the finale of ‘A Woman Young and Old,’ the concluding poem of The Winding Stair. Adapting Sophocles’ fourth choral ode (the Eros chorus and its anapestic coda) and expanding on ‘No Second Troy,’ where Maud would have ‘hurled the little streets upon the great,’ Yeats, mingling Sappho with Sophocles, calls on Love, ‘O bitter sweetness’ (Sappho’s famous oxymoron), to ‘Overcome the Empyrean; hurl/ Heaven and Earth out of their places,’ that in ‘the Same calamity,’ brothers, friends, and families, even ‘City and city may contend,/ By that great glory driven wild.’4
In ‘No Second Troy,’ Yeats tells us that Maud could not have ‘done’ otherwise, ‘being what she is.’ That is her quintessence, as political firebrand and as Muse. And, from ‘No Second Troy’ to ‘A Bronze Head,’ what she is, under all her myriad ‘forms,’ is a Helen reborn. As Yeats reminds us in ‘The Tower,’ II (where he also alludes to Maud as ‘a woman lost’ and the ‘great labyrinth’ from which he admits he ‘turned aside’), the ‘tragedy began/ With Homer that was a blind man,/ And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.’ That establishes the pattern for both Maud and Yeats, whose Self in ‘Dialogue’ is ‘a blind man,’ plunging into ‘a blind man’s ditch,’ especially ‘that most fecund ditch of all,’ the folly one does or ‘must suffer’ if one falls hopelessly in love with a woman fated to re-enact the role of Homer’s Helen. ‘No Second Troy’ and, even more, ‘From the Antigone’ (altered with the help of his friend Ezra Pound) suggest that, like Pound in Canto II, Yeats was aware of the punning epithets on her ‘fatal’ name in the choral ode in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon where she is called (line 689) helénaus, hélandros, heléptolis: deadly destroyer of ships, of men, of cities. Mythologized by Yeats as a reincarnation of the Greek Helen, Maud Gonne is not only the paragon of beauty, but of a terrible beauty at once inspiring and, inevitably, destructive. Yet she is also ‘a most gentle woman,’ vulnerable and evoking protective feelings even in ‘A Bronze Head’ and, in displaced form, in ‘The Death of the Hare.’ At the end of this chapter, I will suggest a connection with Maud Gonne even in ‘Man and the Echo,’ which ends with the stricken cry of a rabbit.
§
In another late, great summing-up poem, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1938), Maud emerges once again as the poet’s inspiring Muse, the source of his painful but creative heartbreak. ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ in three parts and five ottava rima stanzas, begins with the poet-playwright, like Coleridge in the ‘Dejection’ ode, at the end of his imaginative tether: ‘I sought a theme and sought for it in vain.’ Forced to ‘enumerate old themes,’ the aged poet-playwright admits that his formative dramatic works, though they eventually ‘took all’ his ‘love,’ were sublimations: ‘emblems of’ the ‘Heart mysteries’ associated with his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, a painful but productive obsession.
He omits the play actually featuring Maud in the title role, Cathleen ni Houlihan (which he had addressed in the immediately preceding poem, ‘Man and the Echo’), to focus on still earlier and less overt dramatic works. Even the epic The Wanderings of Oisin, his first major work and the poem that brought him to Maud’s attention, anticipates her coming into his life. The poem’s hero, Oisin, is a ‘sea-rider […] led by the nose’ by the goddess Niamh, who—as Hazard Adams points out, breaking his own anti-biographical critical creed—’exceeds her false world’ of Fairyland, ‘and threatens already (though we can’t know this quite yet) to break into real life as the beloved of the later poems, finally named Maud Gonne.’5 In ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ Yeats asks and answers his own question: ‘But what cared I that set him on to ride,/ I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride?’
That epic’s ‘counter-truth,’ his play The Countess Cathleen, dealt with physical starvation. The mythical Countess’s benignly Faustian sacrifice of her own soul to save her starving people (a theme defended by young James Joyce alone among scandalized University College Dublin students) reflected the actual efforts of Maud, originally scheduled to play the title role, to feed the populace in famine-struck Donegal. But, intensifying Maud Gonne’s bartering of the Horn of Plenty for an ‘old bellows full of angry wind’ (in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’), Yeats cries out: ‘I thought my dear must her own soul destroy/ So did fanaticism and hate enslave it.’ These ‘Heart mysteries’ were transformed into ‘masterful’ images, ‘complete’ because they ‘grew in pure mind but out of what began?’
Having deconstructed his early work, including the first of his Cuchulain plays, to reveal its partial genesis in the unrequited love of Maud Gonne, Yeats audaciously gives us, as his mature genetic material, the lowest, most profanely debased matrix-forms of the central icons of his greatest poetry: the ‘moonlit or starlit’ dome of Byzantium generated out of, or reduced to, a squalid ‘mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,’ lines echoing the ‘Sweepings from Butcher’s Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood’ of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Description of a City Shower,’ precisely the sort of ‘clutter’ in which Richard Ellmann says Joyce ‘revels,’ but by which ‘Yeats, conceiving of art as purgation, was repelled.’6 Similarly, the ancestral sword of his canon- and life-defining poem, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ that Japanese sword whose scabbard is bound and wound in ‘flowering, silken, old embroidery,/Torn from some court lady’s dress,’ embroidery of ‘Heart’s purple,’ which Yeats, fusing sword and silk, sets up as his life-affirming ‘emblems of the day against the tower/ Emblematical of the night,’ is reduced to a junkyard’s ‘old iron […] old rags.’ The Muse herself, tallying up the loss and gain in the transformation of pain into poetry, is degraded, beneath the old Paudeen who ‘fumbles in a greasy till’ in ‘September 1913,’ lower down in the social register: ‘that raving slut/ Who keeps the till’ in a transactional enterprise Yeats literally labelled (in an early draft of ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’) ‘Heart and Company.’
Though the drafts of the poem reveal that all references to the ‘heart’ were added late in the process of composition,7 the Maud-inspired creativity that rose from Yeats’s ‘heart’s root’ and ‘aching heart’ was always already implicit. (In another belated addition, to ‘Two Songs from a Play,’ the play being The Resurrection, we are told that ‘Whatever flames upon the night/ Man’s own resinous heart has fed.’8) The silk-wound sword of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ and of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War,’ III, though ‘Curved like new moon,’ is itself ‘changeless‘; yet, ‘if no change appears/ No moon; only an aching heart/ Conceives a changeless work of art.’
Fulfilling his opening premonition that, ‘Maybe at last being but a broken man/ I must be satisfied with my heart,’ a submissive yet triumphant Yeats—now that his Platonic ‘ladder’s gone,’ and acknowledging (like Crazy Jane) that ‘fair and foul are near of kin,/ And fair needs foul’—concludes that the source of his ‘masterful images,’ which ‘grew in pure mind,’ is to be found at the corrupt but creatively fecund ‘lower-most step’ (as Pietro Bembo called it in The Courtier) of the Platonic scala coeli; ‘I must lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.’
In the end, the old man, deprived of his means of ascent—seemingly imaginative, perhaps phallic—must return to the foul but fertile place of origin at the foot of the ladder, where he ‘must lie down.’ The auxiliary verb ‘must,’ intentionally Janus-faced, implies less a final act of abasement, a defeat, and a passive acceptance of Fate than a chosen Destiny, a paradoxically necessary yet courageously autonomous imperative, even something of a triumph. Many of the Maud Gonne poems seem acts of abasement, and, in actual life, may have been ‘the way to lose a woman’—as he said of the famous poem in which, being ‘poor’ and unable to afford ‘the heaven’s embroidered cloths,’ he had spread his dreams ’under your feet;/ Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ Whether or not they were the way to lose a woman, and Maud was never, really, a woman to be won, the poems themselves were triumphant.
Only an aching heart ‘conceives’ a ‘changeless work of art,’ and, as Maud herself claimed, the poems they birthed together would outlive them. Those changeless poems were conceived in the heart—not in what Alexander Pope, describing the Sylph-taught ‘varying vanities’ of his inconstant society coquettes, called, ‘the moving Toyshop of their heart,’ but in that grounded ‘foul rag and bone shop of the heart,’ the matrix of a far more profound suffering and creativity. Though, as Maud said, the poems written for her sake ‘had wings,’ their heart-mysteries were far removed from Pope’s flighty Sylphs who ‘sport and flutter in the Fields of Air.’9
The play omitted in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ Cathleen ni Houlihan, features in the confessional masterpiece written thirty-six years later, ‘Man and the Echo,’ which borrows the self-questioning (and the tetrameters) of Coleridge’s confessional, ‘The Pains of Sleep.’ In ‘Man and the Echo,’ a Man (nameless but manifestly Yeats) halted in a rock cleft on the side of Knocknarea, ‘shouts a secret to the stone,’ a confession that ‘All seems evil until I/ Sleepless would lie down and die.’ He is in the same sleepless perplexity and anguish as Coleridge: ‘All confused I could not know/ Whether I suffered or I did:/ For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe.’ Whatever demons, some of them laudanum-induced, kept Coleridge awake at night, the cause of Yeats’s guilt and remorse is made clear at the outset, in paradoxically shouting his ‘secret’ to the echoing stone:
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Two other queries follow (in which Yeats wonders if ‘words of mine’ could have helped ‘save’ Lady Gregory’s Coole Park or Margot Ruddock’s crazed mind), but the primary question, about ‘that play of mine,’ refers to Cathleen ni Houlihan, that ostensible celebration of blood-sacrifice written for and starring Maud Gonne as Ireland herself. Considered a ‘sacrament’ by nationalists like Con Markiewicz, the play did send out men that were shot in the Easter Rising; in fact, the first to die was an actor cast in a revival of the play. The ‘terrible beauty’ born that Easter had many causes, but Yeats, fingering the chain of responsibility, wondered ‘if any link’ was forged ‘in my workshop.’ Along with pride at its popular success, he felt guilt in having produced a patriotic but propagandistic play that was, at heart, a love-offering to his own terrible beauty, Maud Gone, and a betrayal of his own better judgment.
This would be an even weightier consideration if there is truth in the persistent rumor that Arthur Griffith—smitten with and politically allied with Maud Gonne (who funded his newspaper The United Irishman, and to whom he sometimes referred as ‘my Queen’)—may have contributed to the final electrifying image in which the Old Woman, Ireland herself, is transformed into ‘a young girl with the walk of a queen.’ We may never know for sure; but we do know that Maud introduced Yeats to Griffith in the hope that the Sinn Fein leader might help to induce Yeats to turn the Irish literary movement and the Abbey Theatre in a more politically nationalist direction. In 1914, Griffith wrote that Yeats ‘added the present ending’ of his ‘very beautiful little allegory’ at the ‘suggestion of the present writer to emphasize its propaganda,’ a claim he repeated to his fellow internee, Robert Brennan, in the immediate aftermath of the Easter Rising.10
Though we cannot simply dismiss the recklessness and penchant for violence in some of the late poems and in the rantings of his pamphlet On the Boiler, at his double-minded best, Yeats was as opposed as Joyce to the blinkered, rabid nationalism most memorably embodied in the crude and violent Citizen in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. A reincarnation of Homer’s Polyphemus, the one-eyed Citizen may also be a male equivalent of Ireland’s one-eyed Morrigu, the sinister aspect of Cathleen ni Houlihan. I suspect Yeats thought ‘that play of mine’ not really his (quite aside from the mystery about the famous curtain line, most of the dialogue was written by Lady Gregory), and that, when he wasn’t basking in what Lady Gregory couldn’t help noting was ‘his one real popular success,’ regretted his submission to the blood-sacrifice mythology and politics of Maud Gonne. In ‘Man and the Echo,’ his responsibility for its lethal impact is the first ‘question’ that keeps him ‘awake night after night.’ In retrospect, Yeats may have wished that, on this occasion, he had ‘turned aside’ from the labyrinthine activist Maud.
There may be a hint of melodrama in the question Yeats asked himself: ‘Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?’ No, it didn’t, according to the irreverent Paul Muldoon, who has W. H. Auden respond (in the ‘Wystan’ section of ‘7, Middagh Street’): ‘Certainly not./ If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead/ would certain men have stayed in bed?’ The point, placed in the mouth of Auden (who had declared in his elegy for Yeats that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’), is that history is the ‘twisted root,’ and poetry, or ‘art,’ its ‘small, translucent fruit/ and never the other way round.’11 Muldoon is not alone in thinking that Yeats was over-dramatizing. Perhaps he was; but, on balance, I think the question Yeats posed to himself in ‘Man and the Echo’ was sincere.
Significantly, in one of the great moments in Yeats, ‘Man and the Echo’ ends with a violent intervention from the mountainside. Though his central hero is the Celtic Achilles, Cuchulain, ‘that clean hawk out of the air,’ Yeats’s timid heart in hiding, though it ‘ruffled in a manly pose’ (‘Coole Park, 1929’), here goes out, not to owl or ‘heroic’ hawk, but to its victim: ‘A stricken rabbit is crying out/ And its cry distracts my thought.’ The immediacy is vivid and deeply moving; but unless we imagine Yeats, ‘old and ill,’ actually composing in a rocky cleft on a mountainside, the scene is imaginary. Just as he was earlier thinking of men shot by the British, some of them victims impelled to action and to their deaths by ‘that play of mine,’ here he empathizes with the rabbit struck down by a violent predator, perhaps echoing Blake’s couplet: ‘Each outcry of the hunted Hare/ A fibre from the Brain does tear’ (‘Auguries of Innocence,’ lines 13–14).
Both pouncing hawk and stricken rabbit have Yeatsian contexts. In the next and final chapter, I follow Yeats in associating the rabbit with Maud Gonne. But, given my emphasis throughout on Yeats’s celebration of the intuitive and instinctive and his dread of abstract thought (mechanistic rather than organic), as well as his condemnation of political hatred, it is worth mentioning here that the hawk, despite its association with Cuchulain, is, in Yeats’s symbology, emblematic of both abstract intellect and political hatred, making Maud symbolic hawk as well as rabbit—just to add to the menagerie of ‘forms’ she assumes in ‘A Bronze Head.’
There is a cryptic poem titled ‘The Hawk,’ incongruously roosting amid a cluster of Maud Gonne poems in The Wild Swans at Coole. Its reference to the ‘yellow-eyed hawk of the mind’ is clarified by another poem from that volume, ‘Tom O’Roughley,’ in which the hawk is specifically identified with ‘logic-choppers’ and abstract intellect. Tom, a wise fool for whom ‘An aimless joy is a pure joy,’ has a mantra: ‘Wisdom is a butterfly/ And not a gloomy bird of prey,’ a contrast reflecting the symbolism on the ring Yeats had commissioned from Edmund Dulac, and which had arrived the very month, February 1918, Yeats wrote the poem. As he explained ten years later, glossing the ‘brazen hawks’ of abstract ‘hatred’ without ‘pity’ in the final movement of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War,’ he had ‘a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it, to symbolize the straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of intuition: “For wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey.”’ (VP, 827).12
In ‘Man and the Echo,’ the death-cry of the owl- or hawk- stricken rabbit ‘distracts’ the thoughts of the Yeatsian Man contemplating his own life, imminent death, and what may follow. In ‘Politics,’ intended as his final word, Yeats is again distracted, this time from discussion of the titular subject, ‘war and war’s alarms,’ by ‘that girl standing there.’ My proposal in the next and concluding chapter, the boldest I advance in this book, is that ‘that girl’ is yet another ‘form’ of Maud Gonne, making her final appearance in the little poem Yeats wanted to be received as his poetic farewell. That argument may require an initial Coleridgean ‘momentary suspension of disbelief.’ But I hope to show that it is a plausible speculation. And not only is ‘Politics’ Maud-related, I suggest; it is also an affirmation of life related to the similar affirmation to be found, as Seamus Heaney has rightly insisted, in the seemingly grim and death-haunted ‘Man and the Echo.’
1 Yeats is fusing images from Hamlet, King Lear, and Milton’s ‘Lycidas.’ ‘How fares our cousin Hamlet?’ asks Claudius. ‘Excellent, i’ faith, of the chameleon’s dish,’ quips Hamlet; ‘I eat the air, promise crammed. You cannot feed capons so.’ In ‘Lycidas,’ St. Peter refers to ‘hungry sheep […] not fed,/ But swoln with wind’ (125–26). In addition to imbibing air and wind, the voracious image of Maud ‘took a mess of shadows for its meat.’ When he foolishly casts Cordelia from him, Lear makes his ‘sometime daughter’ as alien to him as ‘he that makes his generations messes/ To gorge his appetite.’ The ‘propinquity’ disclaimed by Lear, is echoed in ‘A Bronze Head,’ which not only borrows from Lear that rare word, but, obviously, transfers to Maud Lear’s ‘hysterica passio.’
2 For Gwynn’s description of the impact of Cathleen ni Houlihan, see his Irish Literature and Drama, 158–60.
3 The end of their love affair was publicly, though anonymously, recorded in ‘The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love’ (1898), in The Wind Among the Reeds. Privately, Yeats quoted Olivia directly: ‘There is someone else in your heart” (Mem, 88–89). In December 1926, thirty years after their love affair, Yeats wrote to Olivia, with whom he maintained a deep friendship until her death in 1938, a death that devastated him: ‘One looks back to one’s youth as to a cup that a mad man dying of thirst left half tasted. I wonder if you feel like that’ (L, 721; cf. ‘The Empty Cup,’ poem V in ‘A Man Young and Old’). She may well have; if so, it was a shared feeling movingly expressed in the final heartbreaking lines of ‘After Long Silence.’
4 Poet-scholar Anne Carson’s now classic 1986 book Eros the Bittersweet has enhanced the fame of Sappho’s Fragment 130: ‘Once again limb-loosening love makes me spin, the bittersweet [glukupikron], irresistible creature.’
5 Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems, 37.
6 Eminent Domain, 55. Seamus Heaney, though he described the ‘carrying power’ and ‘music’ of the Byzantium poems as ‘phenomenal,’ relocated Yeats’s Byzantium to his own more Patrick Kavanagh-like roots in a Derry farmhouse: ‘my starlight came in over the half-door of a house with a clay floor, not over the dome of a Byzantine palace; and in a hollowed-out part of the floor, there was a cat licking up the starlit milk.’ Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 318.
7 A point made by the same scholar who had discovered the handwritten note indicating Yeats’s desired ordering of his final volume. See Curtis Bradford, ‘The Order of Yeats’s Last Poems’, 515–16; and his Yeats at Work, 164.
8 The rest of the two-part, four-stanza poem, songs to open and close the curtain of the play The Resurrection, was written in 1926; this final stanza was added in 1931.
9 Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Canto I: 65–66, 99–100.
10 Unfairly depicted in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ as ‘staring in hysterical pride,’ Griffith, who (with Michael Collins) negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, was not a man given to braggadocio. Brennan (who believed him) later became Ireland’s ambassador to Washington, then Director of Broadcasting at Radio Éireann. See Colum Kenny, ‘Friend or Foe?: How W. B. Yeats Damaged the Legacy of Arthur Griffith,’ Irish Times (26 January 2021).
11 This long poem concludes Muldoon’s 1987 collection, Meeting the British. The townhouse at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights was, in 1940–41, the rotating home of artists and writers, including Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, composer Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, and (as Muldoon reminds us) W. H. Auden.
12 Yeats, who often inscribed the butterfly portion of the aphorism in book dedications, elaborated on the full symbolism in a September 1934 letter to William Force Stead, an Oxford friend. ‘The Butterfly’ was the ‘main symbol’ on the ring ‘I always wear’: ‘the other symbol is the hawk. The hawk is the straight road of logic, the butterfly the crooked road of intuition—the hawk pounces, the butterfly flutters.’ (Robert Graves also identified, in his poem, ‘Flying Crooked,’ with the aerobatics of the butterfly.) Yeats did ‘always’ wear the ring, removed by George ‘upon Yeats’s death in 1939.’ For this detail, and the letter to Stead, see Hassett, Yeats Now: Echoing into Life, 107–8.