
The Rise of the Gothic Novel
'It was a question of suspense versus horror'. Stephen Carver compares the works of the two giants
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Mar
13
Mar
20
William Butler Yeats is indeed one of the finest poets in
the English language. Rightly, his works are cited and praised again and again.
He has a splendid knack of coining resonantly memorable aphorisms; and repeatedly
the reader relishes his defiant rhetoric, his lapidary definitions, and his fine
ability to render concepts in images and to interweave the abstract and the concrete,
the sensuously rich and the conceptually challenging.
Nevertheless,
even when he is producing his very best poetry, there are times when the reader
should pause and say, ‘Wait a moment: this is not true. You may believe this,
Yeats, but you are wrong.’ It is hard to do this. So often, the splendour of
the great poem is so dazzling that we slither over the problematic passage,
perhaps offering a gloss that simplifies or makes congenial what is actually
uncongenial and rebarbative.
One of his
most glorious successes is ‘Among School Children’. It is splendid and
memorable, with cunning and subtle linkages between its parts, and a mastery of
euphony in its use of alliteration, rhyme and assonance. But, after many
classes in which I have discussed the poem with students, I remain convinced
that the penultimate stanza, stanza VII, is simply wrong, and there’s no way
round it. Commentators have done their best to rescue it, but I submit that
their glosses are attempts to hide what is at fault here. Furthermore, I
believe that other major poems of Yeats are similarly flawed.
What
prompted ‘Among School Children’ is well known, In 1926, the 60-year-old W. B.
Yeats was a Senator in the parliament of the Irish Free State, and one day in
February he inspected a school run by nuns of the Order of Mercy, St Otteran’s
School in Waterford. The subsequent poem deals with education, love, the
progress from infancy to old age, and the ideal state of being. (I assume that
you have a text at hand. You can find ‘Among School Children’ on pp. 183-5 of
the Wordsworth volume, The Collected
Poems of W. B. Yeats.)
I’ll concisely paraphrase
the poem; then, when we reach that problematic stanza, I’ll pause to see what an
eminent commentator says; and then I’ll offer my own comments on it. See which
you agree with.
Stanza I tells how the ‘sixty-year-old smiling
public man’, guided by a ‘kind old nun’, walks through the school where the
children are assiduously studying and sewing, ‘neat in everything / In the best
modern way’. Stanza II says that the poet imagines ‘a Ledaean body’ who told
him of times in her childhood when some reproof or trivial event made the day
seem tragic; and his sympathy with her seemed to blend their two natures together,
so that they resembled one sphere or the yolk and white of one egg. We know
from numerous poems by Yeats that the ‘Ledaean body’ is that of Maud Gonne, the
beautiful Irish nationalist whom Yeats loved: he repeatedly proposed marriage
to her and was repeatedly rejected. Why ‘Ledaean’? Because in one version of the
ancient Greek legend, Leda, ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan, produced two
eggs, from one of which the beautiful Helen of Troy was born. Yeats associates
Maud with Helen not only because she was beautiful but also because, as a militant
nationalist, she was dangerous. (Helen, in Yeats’s view, caused the destruction
of Troy, by eloping with the Trojan prince Paris, which brought the vengeful
Greeks in pursuit.)
Prompted by
the children around him, the poet imagines Maud as a child, then as she is now,
old and ‘hollow of cheek’. (Stanzas III and IV.) As for himself, though he was once
quite handsome, he must now behave as a smiling ‘comfortable old scarecrow’.
Would any young mother, he reflects (in stanza V), think her son ample
compensation for the pain of birth or the worries of his infancy if she could
see him as sixty or more years old?
In stanza VI, he muses that the philosopher Aristotle was
once in a position to thrash ‘a king of kings’, for he was tutor to Alexander
the Great; and the poet recalls the philosophical ideas of Plato and Pythagoras
– but these, he says, are merely specious: ‘old clothes upon old sticks to
scare a bird’: the trappings of a scarecrow.
(Already the poet’s assertions may prompt in us the stirrings of dissent.)
Then comes stanza VII:
Both nuns and
mothers worship images,
But those the
candle lights are not as those
That animate a
mother’s reveries,
But keep a
marble or a bronze repose,
And yet they
too break hearts – O Presences
That passion,
piety or affection knows,
And that all
heavenly glory symbolise –
O self-born
mockers of man’s enterprise [...]
Let’s see how the eminent scholar and critic, Richard Ellmann,
glosses this stanza. In his acclaimed study, The Identity of Yeats (London: Faber & Faber, 1964, p. 229),
Ellmann renders it thus:
Yet there is one escape from
mortality: when our eyes are blinded by affection, passion, or piety, like
those of a mother, of a lover, or of a nun, we see images which are independent
of life or fact. Such images... are changeless, and heaven can be nothing else
but the state to which they seem to allude. Because they do not depend upon
observation, and in fact flout the evidence of the senses to which decay and
mortality are real, they are ‘self-born’... In such images at such moments time and
appearance are destroyed. Nevertheless there is grief at the moment of triumph.
I submit
that Richard Ellmann is fluently smoothing over, and attempting to justify,
what actually is provocative and wrong.
The poet
tells us that nuns and mothers worship images. Do they? A nun who worshipped an
image would be an idolator, for nuns know that they should worship not an image
but the transcendent entity (God, Jesus or Mary, for example) evoked by the
image. A mother may well have in mind an idealised notion of what her child may
eventually become, but few mothers would be so deranged as to ‘worship’ that
idealised notion. The poet says that the sculpted image and the image seen in
reveries can both break hearts, presumably because reality does not live up to
the ideal evoked by the image. (But would any nun expect to find a counterpart
to almighty God in mundane reality?) These images are now addressed by the poet
as ‘Presences’ (a capitalised term which craftily seeks to give them autonomy) which,
evoked by passion, piety or affection, symbolise ‘all heavenly glory’. Religious
images may conceivably do that; but the image of a loved person is highly
unlikely to evoke such intense religious ecstasy. Furthermore, this is a
hyperbolic way of referring to a mother’s imagining of a child’s future: such
imagining would be deranged. The images mock human enterprise, the poet
declares; again, presumably, because all realities fall short of what they
represent. But do imagined ideals really
mock enterprise? The answer is surely, ‘Not necessarily: they may inspire human enterprise: charitable
works or loving devotion, perhaps.’ They are ‘self-born’, says the poet. To
which the honest response is, obviously, ‘No, they are not’ – how could they be? The marble or bronze statues are made by
human beings. The loved person, even when idealised, is not ‘self-born’ either,
but is a product of the loving person and the object of that love. Things don’t
just spring into existence spontaneously out of nothing. That’s impossible. A
mystical notion (perhaps Platonic in origin) of the autonomy of ideal images
has prevailed, in the poet’s imagination, over the common sense which
recognises human agency.
I submit
that this is an honest response which reacts truthfully to what the poet
offers. Stanza VII is, in short, a failure. It makes false assertions. Critics
should admit the fact. ‘Test every work of intellect or faith’, says Yeats in his
poem ‘Vacillation’. Very well: I’ve done so in the case of this stanza, and it
fails.
All the
more splendid, therefore, seems stanza VIII, the glorious conclusion to the
poem, which offers two superb images to represent the ideal of education and,
indeed, the ideal state of being: an image of a beautiful organic unity, the
chestnut-tree, and an image which reconciles the abstract and the concrete, the
dancer – for without the dance, there could be no dancer, and without the
dancer, we would see no dance. I end with that magnificent stanza. This is
Yeats at his best.
Labour is blossoming or dancing
where
The body is not bruised to pleasure
soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own
despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of
midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted
blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the
bole?
O body swayed to music, O
brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
___
Professor Cedric Watts wrote the Introduction to The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats in
the Wordsworth Poetry Library (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2008).