Myself That I Remake Spiritual Renewal in the Life and Work of William Butler Yeats   section 3: Spiritual Renewal Through Unity of Being   Praising Yeats, T. S. Eliot wrote that “a man who is capable of experience finds himself in a very different world in every decade of his life; as he sees it with different eyes, the material of his art is continually renewed.” As a young symbolist Yeats had asked: When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like sparks blown out of a smithy, and die? Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows, Far-off, most secret, and inviolable Rose? Years later the aging poet had garrisoned himself not only in the security of honour and fame but also with real, tangible symbols: the tower with its winding stair, his wife and children. Amidst these trappings of age and accretion he remembered his life-long dream: An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower, A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall, An acre of stony ground, Where the symbolic rose can break in flower. . . . The poetry of Yeats’s later years shows the patterns he had set earlier coming to fruition. In “The Tower” he had vowed, “Now shall I make my soul” ; by the time he wrote “Tom O’Rahilly,” a ballad of his last years, the hours had run their gyre-like course: Because I helped to wind the clock I come to hear it strike. Spiritual renewal was still his central theme, but like his symbols the idea had gathered weight and resonance over the years through continual re-examination, re-appraisal. Most of the abstractions of the young and middle-aged poet dropped away, and Yeats’s attention was focused more on the pressing realities of old age and the nearness of death. His final work shows a preoccupation with his legacy as a man and as a poet.   Last Things Although Yeats had been calling himself “old” ever since he was in his forties, age finally did come to Yeats as something of a bitter shock: What shall I do with this absurdity — 0 heart, 0 troubled heart — this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail?   An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick. . . . It was time for a new mask, that of the “foolish, passionate man” who would reject the comforts due to age and rail at the world, through passion rekindling the fire of the spirit. In “An Acre of Grass” he demands to renew his mask yet again: Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.    Behind this frenzied mask stood a quieter Yeats, pondering the approach of death. At the age of fifty-four he had been able to assure himself that “in the grave all, all, shall be renewed,” but ten years later he was forced to Bid imagination run Much on the Great Questioner; What He can question, what if questioned I Can with fitting confidence reply. Ten years later still the sense of sober speculation was replaced a mood indulging in its very grimness: . . . Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.    As we would expect, though, thesis and antithesis were not without synthesis. Yeats the brooding poet and his anti-self Tom O’Roughley (“What’s dying but a second wind?” ) found a measure of resolution in Yeats the tragic hero. In his autobiography he had asserted that “we begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy,” and by this he meant that the bitterness of death exists only for those who have failed to accept it as the inevitable consequence of living, whereas the “doom-eager” hero embraces destiny with passionate joy. Only in melodrama is death sadness and sentiment; in tragedy a spirit is left redeemed and enduring: All perform their tragic play . . . They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transforming all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uppermost.   Timeless Things Surely the strongest influence in Yeats’s life was that of his father, John Butler Yeats, who had instilled in his son his challenging conception of “personality”: a man brought into unity by a mood, not a static unity, (that is character) but alive and glowing like a star, all in harmony with himself. Conscience at peace yet vigilant; spiritual and sensual desires at one; all of them in intense movement. W. B. Yeats developed this into his own theory of “Unity of Being,” of which “such masters” as Villon and Dante are the paradigms: The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation’s very self. We gaze at such men in awe, because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the re-creation of the man through that art . . . . Yeats always considered Dante to be his prototype; indeed, he assigned both Dante and himself to the seventeenth phase of the moon, the phase at which A Vision claims a man is most likely to achieve Unity of Being.    Yeats was certain that he could come to this unity by discovering in himself a timeless center. Towards this end Yeats set himself on a program of simplification, of lightening his spiritual load. He knew he had strong accumulative tendencies to overcome: I had set out on life with the thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood this as a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my imagination became full of decorative landscapes and of still life. His main hindrance, he was sure, was his acquisitive intellect, and he cried out, “I would be as ignorant as the dawn.” The Crazy Jane poems, the late ballads, and the assertion that “knowledge increases unreality” in “The Statues” show the theme very much alive until the very end of Yeats’s life, and like all his other themes and symbols it had acquired different shades of meaning. His wild old man persona vowed to rage and raven and uproot “into the desolation of reality” ; and took on a very real passion that could momentarily obliterate the reason and intellect.    This new passion for starkness and purity became an article of his poetics as well. In a letter of 1937 he told Ethyl Mannin, “I must lay aside the pleasant patter I have built up over the years, and seek the brutality, the ill breeding, the barbarism of truth.” Some of Yeats’s greatest late poetry is leaner and tighter than anything he had ever done before; “The Four Ages of Man,” for example, is a masterpiece after the manner of Blake’s “Songs of Experience”: He with body waged a fight, But body won; it walks upright. Then he struggled with the heart; Innocence and peace depart. Then he struggled with the mind; His proud heart he left behind. Now his wars on God begin; At stroke of midnight God shall win. In only eight short lines Yeats expresses all his major themes: the cyclic phases of human development, the struggles of existence, the individual as a mirror of the race, the yearning to meet God on equal terms. The craftsmanship of this miraculous little poem lies in the great momentum of feeling generated by the simplicity of the diction and rhythm, momentum that carries the logic of thought and emotion beyond the eight lines to a realm not of any verbal truth, but of Truth itself, Truth intuited and felt all the more strongly for being unexpressed and inexpressible. Yeats had pounded on the wall and Truth had answered.    In 1909 Yeats recalled a saying of his old guru, Mohini Chatterjee: “When I was young I was happy. I thought truth was something that could be conveyed from one man’s mind to another. I now know that it is a state of mind.” Yeats struggled all his life to come to the same realization, not simply to repeat thought-provoking phrases but, as in “The Four Ages of Man,” to understand that the meaning of life is the experience of struggling for meaning, the continual renewal of the process, not any final product. In a letter composed only days before his death, Yeats wrote: It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to pull it all into a phrase I say ’Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life.   Conclusion The most arresting quality in Yeats’s life and work is its spiritual fervor, the continual tumult in the soul, intensely personal but so unflinchingly depicted as to reveal universal antinomies: self and anti-self, man and mask, faith and doubt, will and destiny, man and God. A life-long obsession for Yeats was to discover a unity between maker and made, as in his imagined Byzantium where burn: Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame. . . .    In his later years he pared his poems down that simplicity might kindle the purifying, self-sustaining passions that would bring him to Unity of Being. This unity is like the Buddhist enlightenment — anyone who thinks he has achieved it has not by definition. The continuing passion to reach perfection is itself the perfection when wrought to the highest degree. This passion is the spiritual fecundity Yeats so admired in the ancient Greek writers with their assurance that “life overflows without ambitious pains”: Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung Had he not found it certain beyond dreams That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung The abounding glittering jet. . . .    In the late ballad “What Then?” Yeats is both the old man and the ghost of his youthful conscience: ’The work is done,’ grown old he thought, ’According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought’; But louder sang that ghost, ’What then?’   © Michael Fleming Oxford, England March, 1984   bibliography    Yeats contents page other biographies    Fox Paws home page    e-mail to Mike