The Columbia History of British Poetry (131 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Sometimes a horrible Marionette
Came out and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.
When the speaker says to his love, "The dead are dancing with the dead," she leaves the speaker's side: "Love passed into the house of Lust." If this allegorical trope, after the vivid scene preceding it, is weak, Wilde weakens the poem further with the final simile: "And down the long and silent street, / The dawn with silver-sandalled feet, / Crept like a frightened girl."
In a graceful lyric that Yeats admired, "Villanelle of Sunset," Dowson expresses the weariness associated with the Decadent pose of languor (an affront to Victorian activism) in the highly artificial form of the villanelle (consisting of only two rhymes throughout): "Come hither, child! and rest: / This is the end of day, / Behold the weary West!" Managing the rhythms with such great skill that the fixed form of the poem is not intrusive, Dowson concludes: "Tired flower! upon my breast, / I would wear thee, alway" (the imagery probably influenced by Wilde's remark in "The Decay of Lying'' concerning the "Tired Hedonists," whoas the "elect"wear faded roses).
Although the disturbed Lionel Johnson, whose chronic alcoholism intensified by the mid-1890s, wrote religiously inspired poems and parodied Decadence, he was nevertheless touched deeply by the fantasy of self-annihilation. In "Nihilism the vision of "Man's life, my life" under the Heavens and upon the Earth leads to the confessional: "of life I am afraid." The speaker welcomes the figure of Death, who will confer "calm" upon him: "the eternal tomb / Brings me peace, which life has never brought." The lyric ends with the "hollow music of a bell, / That times the slow approach of perfect death." Only twenty-one when this was written, Johnson had already immersed himself in the Decadent motif of the
fin du monde
.
The Symbolists and Occultists
The effects of nineteenth-century science, industrialism, positivism, and the higher criticism of the Bible on many fin-de-siècle poets resulted, as we have seen, in a variety of artistic strategies that reasserted the primacy of the imagination in the service of the human spirit. (Earlier, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones had announced: "The more materialistic Science becomes, the more angels shall I paint.") In
 
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one of his characteristic early poems, "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," Yeats rejects scientific "truth" as inferior to subjective vision:
                               There is no truth,
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass.
In the final two decades of the century, as artists and intellectuals sought escape from the materialism of their time, a new interest in the occult arose that promised confirmation of an eternal realm beyond that of the senses. Access to such a world lay in the study of correspondences between earthly and transcendental realities, magic rituals, and arcane symbolsknowledge of which had been accumulated and codified over the centuries. Occult doctrine offered poets new sources of aesthetic theory, subject matter, and images revealing cosmic unityas Yeats said, "Unity of Being"a fusion of physical and spiritual worlds as well as of past and present. In the mid-1880s Yeats and the visionary poet-painter George Russell (using the pseudonym of "AE") were among the founders of the Dublin Hermetic Society (the first of several such groups that Yeats joined), its members devoted to the quest for occult knowledge, which Yeats called his "secret fanaticism.'' The close connection between the "ancient doctrine" and symbolism is suggested by AE in his poem "Symbolism": "Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods, / Filled with home yearnings, drowsily there rise / From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods." The speaker concludes: "We rise but by the symbol charioted."
Yeats asserted that the poet's imaginationable to fuse sound, rhythm, and image into a magical structurecan evoke symbols from the cosmic "Great Memory." Such a transcendent reality, he said, was not merely in the "other world" but discernible in this world to one adept at vision (a significant influence on the Symbolists was Baudelaire's "Correspondances" in
Les Fleurs du mal
, which envisioned the world as a "forest of symbols" awaiting interpretation). Moreover, Yeats believed, dreams were repositories of eternal truthsin "Wisdom and Dreams," he writes: "Wisdom and dreams are one." But when in "Fergus and the Druid," Fergus craves of the semimythical Druid "the dreaming wisdom that is yours," he laments when he receives it: "But now I have grown nothing, knowing all. / Ah! Druid, Druid, how great
 
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webs of sorrow / Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!" Richard Ellmann remarks in
The Identity of Yeats
that instead of "yielding to another world of the spirit," Yeats, possessed of an imagination that dramatized opposition to itself, "is always demonstrating that we had better cling to this one.''
Acknowledging the influence of William Blake, who revealed the means by which myth and symbol could be forged to express private vision, Yeats called him "the first great
symboliste
of modern times, and the first of any time to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol." In Yeats's first long narrative poem, "The Wanderings of Oisin," Celtic myth and elaborate Theosophical correspondences are employed in the quest for a unified realitythat of self, matter, and spirit as well as the Celtic heroic age and the modern world.
The traditional Christian symbol of the roseused by Pre-Raphaelite artists and poetsacquired occult significance in Yeats's rose poems, such as "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," which employs the Rosicrucian image of the mystical rose of love blossoming from the sacrificial cross, here associated with the heroes of Irish mythology:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold.
In "The Rose of the World," Yeats associates Helen of Troy with the Irish actress Maud Gonne (though unnamed) and the mythic Deirdre, suggesting that beauty, in its various forms and occult meanings, has transformed these figures into spiritual emanations uniting past and present.
The widespread use of the traditional rose symbolassociated with occult and Symbolist visionattracted other poets, such as the Scotsman William Sharp, who published under the pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod." Like Yeats, he, too, immersed himself in the Celtic Twilight in search of an ancient reality, as his poem "The Rose of Flame" reveals: "Oh, fair immaculate rose of the world, rose of my dream, my Rose! / Beyond the ultimate gates of dream I have heard thy mystical call." John Davidson, Yeats's associate in the Rhymers' Club, envisions a spiritual rose in "The Last Rose" ("The wonderful vast rose / That filled all the world") blossoming miraculously as the "traitor" winter, representing the figure of Death, claims not only the century but the world itself.
 
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Arthur Symons, Yeats's closest friend in the late 1890s, was so touched by occult possibilities for poetry that he wrote "Rosa Mundi" (the original title of Yeats's "The Rose of the World"). In Symons's poem an "angel of pale desire" urges the speaker to "live / In ease, in indolent mirth" and choose ''a delicate Lust" in the rose garden, but the speaker has a vision of "the mystical rose" and rejects its earthly counterpart. (Yeats, however, emphasized unity, not rejection). In "The Loom of Dreams" Symons demonstrates the Symbolist conviction that the poet, like the magus, has occult powers: "I am master of earth and sea, / And the planets come to me. . . . / And the only world is the world of my dreams."
While Symons was writing
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1900)on such French Symbolists as Mallarmé, Verlaine, Laforgue, and Rimbaudhe acquainted Yeats with their work, which confirmed occult belief that the poet could summon "other worlds" and that, by means of symbol and imagination, could bring about cosmic unity. In his dedication Symons calls Yeats "the chief representative of [the Symbolist] movement in our country" and the Irish Literary Renaissance as one of its expressions."
Yeats, however, differed from the French Symbolists in his use of traditional symbols, such as the rose and the island, which he infused with personal meaning. In Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," for example, biblical and Thoreauvian echoes are prominent ("I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build there"), the rhythms suitable for chanting, a device that increasingly interested Yeats. The isolated and secluded "lake isle" acquires symbolic meaning from the speaker's need to return to the source of his spiritual being as he stands on London's "pavements gray" (like Housman's Shropshire lad in exile) and hears the lake water in his "deep heart's core"suggesting correspondences between matter and spirit.
In the first version of "A Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland" Yeats draws closer to ancient Celtic realities when the dreamer hears fish sing "how day a Druid twilight sheds / Upon a dim, green, well-beloved isle." Other intimations of a transcendent world occur when a lugworm sings of "a gay, exulting, gentle race" and of "blessed skies," finally of "how God leans His hands out of the sky, / To bless that isle with honey in His tones." Yet the man who dreams of fairyland can find no peace (even in the grave) because, throughout his life, the world of spirit has beckoned him from the world of matterYeats's warning to himself.
Yeats's final volume of verse in the nineties,
The Wind among the Reeds
(1899), contains much of the best Symbolist verse of the 1890s, such as

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