William Butler Yeats - The First Yeats

This early Yeats is late-Romantic in matter and manner, whereas middle and late Yeats are thought to be modernist, despite the continuation of certain Romantic themes and techniques. There is, in fact, much to be said for this oft-repeated account. Yeats was born in 1865, and thus his formative years as a poet necessarily passed in a context where the Romantics were living influences, still capable of suggesting new creative ideas. One, in particular, was still being discovered: namely, William Blake. Yeats himself, with his friend Edwin Ellis, brought out the first serious edition of Blake, the three-volume Works of William Blake (1893). His thought is clearly indebted to Blakes, perhaps most obviously in his deployment of the principle of contrary states, and in the related matter of exploiting esoteric symbolism for poetic purposes.

But Shelley, with his yearning for Intellectual Beauty, and his rarefied blend of symbolism and mental association, was perhaps a more potent influence on Yeatss style. Alongside these figures, we must not forget the intervening years: Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites (in particular William Morris) all leave their mark, in one way or another, on the early Yeats. So do a number of Irish poets who attempted to give new and living shape to the matter of Ireland through the medium of the English language, and in forms influenced by British Romanticism. Yeats himself, in his Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days (later to be renamed as To Ireland in the Coming Times), identifies the Irish poets Thomas Davis (181445), James Clarence Mangan (180349) and Sir Samuel Ferguson (181086) as having particular significance for him. Then there is the question of French symbolism, which certainly must not be divorced from its origins in Romanticism. Baudelaire, for instance, thought of himself as a Romantic poet, though he is usually nowadays classified as a symbolist poet.

It was Yeatss friend Arthur Symons who was responsible for introducing Yeats to the work of the French symbolist poets, from 1893 or thereabouts, the year when Symons himself brought Verlaine to London. Verlaines prescription, in Art potique, for musical suggestiveness in poetry is probably an influence on the poems Yeats wrote from the mid-nineties onwards. After 1900, and certainly from In the Seven Woods (1907), Yeatss style begins to change. The directness, as of a person addressing the reader, albeit with considerable artifice, has few precedents in the earlier verse. The tone and subject-matter also change. A neat way of gauging these developments is to compare and contrast Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (as it was entitled in the first edition of The Wind Among the Reeds) with A Coat, from Responsibilities (1914).

In the former, the speaker spreads his embroidered cloths of dreams under the mistresss feet. In the latter he speaks of how he made his song a coat Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies: it fares ill in the worlds hands. In the last lines, the bitter contempt, born of disillusionment, is not uncharacteristic of middle and later Yeats: Song, let them take it, / For theres more enterprise / In walking naked. The nakedness is that of an unadorned style and outlook, free of illusions. There is only one problem with the account given so far, and it is perhaps not an insuperable one. It arises out of the contemporary realisation that Romanticism is by no means the unified phenomenon that word might seem to imply.

If one only considers poetry, one should note that this word has to comprise the Romantic neoclassicism of Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn, as well as the satirical point, sceptical humour and neoclassical style of Byrons Don Juan. If it can include these things, can it not include the later Yeats, as well as the earlier? In particular, can it not also include the Yeats who reflects, at the end of Among School Children, on the power of images in our lives, most of all those images where the life and the form are one: images such as those of the tree or the dancer? Are these not images in the Romantic tradition of organic form? Frank Kermode, in his classic critical work Romantic Image, certainly thought so. But to let these considerations cause anxiety about terms is probably a waste of energy when the terms are so large and inexact in any case. For that matter, modernism is as diverse as Romanticism. Nevertheless, to realise that Yeatss Romanticism does not disappear in 1899 is also to realise that there are likely to be important continuities, and that the early work is clearly essential for an understanding of the later. Yet it would be doing the early work a grave disservice to reduce it to ancillary status in relation to the later.

It is still possible to come across readers who deride the supposedly vague dreaminess of early Yeats as if this were a given of critical discourse. Presumably they have never analysed the techniques of a poem such as The Song of Wandering Aengus. Here the speaker goes out to a hazel wood, a mysterious place full of trees which in Irish tradition were beneficently magical. He does so at twilight, and he is beside a stream. Symbolically he is close to both temporal and spatial boundaries, and these might operate like cracks in the fabric of the universe through which the supernatural might intervene. When he cuts and peels a hazel wand, to turn it into a fishing rod, that wand does indeed have magical associations, so that when the fish he catches turns into a glimmering girl we should not be entirely surprised.

In any case, she is one of the Sidhe (the fairies), and a woman of the Sidhe might well be able to turn herself into a fish and back again. Appropriately enough, she is associated with the element of water, whose mutability might figure the feminine, and the speaker is associated with the masculine element of fire, which burns as the desire in his head. When she calls him by his name, this in itself is an act of magical power, for no one has revealed it to her. She turns the tables on his evocation of her, and now he must pursue her forever. When he finds her, they will, he thinks, pluck till time and times are done, / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun. The elements of water and fire, which seemed so irreconcilable , are here transformed by the alchemy of love into silver and golden apples.

The great lights of moon and sun represent the two major aspects of the world of time transfigured. This would be the consummation of a first meeting that occurred at a point where those aspects meet: at twilight. The poem embodies these ideas by the suggestive combination of images, and through a complex network of related sounds, and it enacts the desire of the speaker by means of an insistent, driving rhythm. To mention some of the ways in which images and sounds work together: for example, white moths are out in the twilight of the morning, while almost next to them, you might think, moth-like stars are flickering out. The combination intensifies the visual impression, and helps to convey more forcefully the important notion of uncertain apprehension. This flickering, so redolent of the Celtic Twilight, a time and a state for supernatural occurrences, is reinforced by the glimmering that qualifies the girl, and the brightening of the air.