The Columbia History of British Poetry (142 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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Page 560
Again: "And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?"
So Yeats the sublime poet converts himself into Yeats the voice of reason, the proponent of the most gradual, the gentlest, change, in order to keep his heart from melting and pouring into the shock-sentiment of the aftermath of the rebellionas if afraid that it would never to be recovered, never to be his very own again. This is the effect of sacred sacrifice: to transfer the responsibility for continuity and intimacy onto the survivors. The rebels have conscripted all the Irish to continue what they started. Yeats resiststhen, again, cannot.
What keeps the poem ever living is precisely its honest (if not perfectly honest) division of heart. It is not one of those political poems that dies with its ideological moment. "The Statues," which came over twenty years later but is in effect a sequel, is less successful, but is saved by its status as a classical meditation on the interaction between abstraction and eroticism, or the provocatively underspecified ideal and the detail-adding imagination. Precisely because Greek statuary "lacked character," and especially when midnight obscured whatever features its careful measures allowed, "boys and girls pale from the imagined love / Of solitary beds . . . pressed at midnight in some public place / Live lips upon a plummet-measured face."
Likewise, the ethnic imagination of the Irish has been quickened by the gloriously indefinite movement that began when Pearse "summoned Cuchulain to his side," by a nationalism itself somehow marked by "intellect" and "measurement" (a reference, perhaps, to certain eighteenth-century Irish intellectuals, Yeats's favorite minds). With seeming contradiction the poet casts this movement (after asking, "What stalked through the Post Office?") in the form of a stationary statuea sort of colossus of Irishness. Because this last is deep in shadow, in the ''proper dark" of an intuitive rather than explicit sense of what is Irish, it incites movement: "We Irish . . . / Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace / The lineaments of a plummet-measured face." Here Yeats recovers the substance and momentum of the Easter Rebellion for a more nearly Protestant "sect." The note of sacred intimacy dies down into a whisper (as of a colossal mother's encouraging love), but is still present in the image of a tactile intimacy.
"News for the Delphic Oracle" (1939) is Yeats's last great poem on sacred animality. Its three boldly divided sections offer a changing topography of joys: those of mind, soul, and body. The news Yeats has for the Delphic Oracle is that Paradise is the home of all three. If he is
 
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nonetheless ironic toward the first two, however, it may be partly because they have had their champions for over two thousand years, and at the expense of the flesh, of sacred eros. In any case, the third sectionthe most powerfully and beautifully writtensupplies what is missing in the first two: youth, erotic love, and Dionysian ecstasy.
Here Peleus, a mortal, and Thetis, a sea goddess, represent amorous idealization, and the accompanying nymphs and satyrs the exorbitance native to lust. What is netted in the named loversout of respect for the human subject in the otheris unleashed in thrashing fury in the beings who are far more proximate to animal immediacy. In fact, Peleus is but a trembling boy (Yeats based the stanza on a Poussin painting of Acis and Galatea in the National Gallery of Ireland, when it was stiff mislabeled
Peleus and Thetis
; unlike the virile Peleus, Acis was a lad pursued by the older river nymph, Galatea). Peleus wants Thetis to look upon him with a mother's tender absorption; her limbs are even said to be "delicate as an eyelid." But the impersonal, animal destiny of reproduction already has her in thrall: her "belly listens" to Pan's "Intolerable music." ("Belly" is deliberately jarring after the sweet lines on Peleus.) And how alarmingly proximate Peleus is to what might serve as an illustration of the ferocious parents of the primal scene, castrative in relation not only to their as-yet unconceived child but even to each other, indeed apparently dismembering:
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
Yeats does not disguise the repugnance of such "animality"in fact, there are no foul goat heads in Poussin's painting, nor is there anything flashing "fishlike." Such horror of animality is precisely the baseline of our humanness, as of the valorization of the holy order over a sacred disorder. But to rejoin the all, one must overcome the fear of abjection, and orgasm is the very type of ceasing to be outside, of an animality at the brink of the totality of being. So the nymphs and satyrs fascinate as well as repel. Yeats's presentation of Peleus's idealization of Thetis may be free of irony and extraordinarily delicate, but it is less than a protective seal: the poet deliberately places the Peleus in himself next to the satyrs, as if out of a dare to expose him to Dionysian disinhibitions. His writing insists on the awesome bestiality of the scenean immolative
 
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bestiality that is itself an uncontrollable mystery, the rites of the sacred god eros.
Yeats, then, displays a religious courage of a kind long absent from English literature. It is Romantic in its embrace of nonhuman forces, but its hunger for a ferocious turbulence surpasses that of the English Romantics (Emily Brontë comes nearest to it). It is offered as the harshest of cures to a humanity gone rigid from adherence to principles, rather than freed for a disorderly immediacy. It is also the rediscovery of the divine as a terrifying powerthe burden of Rudolph Otto's book of 1917,
Das Heilige
. By the second decade of the century it was apparently time "at last" for the sacred to re-present itself to, if not altogether to win over, the Western psyche.
Lawrence
A more consistent and explicit radical of life than Yeats was, Lawrence, too, opposed "an assertive newspaper-parcel of ego," social dolls that squeak "when you squeeze them." He respected only what he called "the true self," one not held "according to a picture" but, instead, like a bird that, "as it sings, sings itself'' yet "has no idea of itself." This "original individuality" has many enemies: Socrates, Christ, love, democracy, Bolshevism . . .
Lawrence dreamed the return of the human to the verge of a "royal" animality. Connected and in the flow: that, for him, was "life." Desire itself is purity"a pure thing, like sunshine, or fire, or rain. It is desire that makes the whole world living to me, keeps me in the flow connected . . . not shut outside of the natural paradise." "The element of wonder," he said when noting the power of "rather banal Nonconformist hymns" to penetrate his childhood, is "fundamental to life":
Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense.
Religion is the capacity to be openthe Pan spirit. Pan is the All in every sentient thing.
Lawrence, too, wants wonder's burn, its utter transformations. Yet, like Yeats, he's ambivalent; the practical advantages of being human check his devotion to the sacred. In fact, far more than Yeats, Lawrence
 
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looked closely at objects, studied them like a naturalist, even if one whose bifocals are half rainbow of metaphor. Usually he was pagan on the Apollonian, not the Dionysian, side.
Lawrence's contribution to English poetry lay in his religious redirection of vision and sympathy toward actual things and in devising a form of flow and connectionhe was the first English poet to catch off of Whitman a bright limberness of voice. He even sought, as Whitman did, the rapport of the colloquial and the sacred, Sunday skirts held at the hip by a safety pin.
As a young man, Lawrence wrote a lot of young man's poetry in conscientious rhyme and meter. He was still down beside his mother's "small, poised feet," as in his poem "Piano," still "A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings" at Sunday hymn-singing time in the parlor. In contrast to Yeats's distant-seeming mother, who fostered in him the crypto-nothing that his apocalyptic fervor tests, pursues, loves, hates, Lydia Lawrence supersaturated her son David's wick; she was both origin and end. With her by his side, what need for the world? The early poems are, in partial consequence, overfelt and underobserved. Even after Mrs. Lawrence died, her son's sense of her closeness muffles the poems like perfumed cotton. Studied, self-conscious, the rhymes fold the damp mood in on itself.
Lawrence became modern when he learned to make each stanza like the skip of a flat rock across water. To be modern, a poem must have attack. It must not emote, it must leap and lead the reader on. Speed is essential to it, a gappy movement. That Lawrence would discover a direct speaking voice for such poetry is no small part of his distinction.
In the first poem of his transition volume,
Look! We Have Come Through
! (1918), "Bei Hennef," Lawrence is almost there. But even this charmingly lyrical, arresting poem is secretly mother-scotched as well as slightly slick (verbal and emotional soapstone). As for the volume itself, it is oddly pied between familiar "verse" and lines new to the art. Some of the first is enchanting (as, occasionally, it was earlier, not least in the lovable "Piano"). Conversely, some of the free verse in the book is as facile as some of the rhymes. But already the new beauty Lawrence was to bring into English poetry is testing itself For instance, a section of "She Said as Well to Me" presses toward the rapt, prodigal detail of
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
(1923):

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