Technically, the later style is almost lacking in adverbs—built on the noun,
verb, and adjective. Its structure is kept clear and level, so that emotionally
weighted words, when they appear, stand out with poignant emphasis. The Wild
Swans at Coole (1919) opens:—
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
Equipped with this instrument, Yeats could put down, with full scorn, his
irritation with the middle-class ideals he had hated from youth:—
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this that Edward Fitzgerald died
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
On the other hand he could celebrate Irish salus, virtus, as in the poem "An
Irish Airman Foresees His Death," and in the fine elegies on the leaders of the
1916 Easter Rebellion.
And Yeats came to be expert at the dramatic presentation of thoughts concerning
love, death, the transience and hidden meaning of all things, not only in the
form of a philosopher's speculation, a mystic's speech, or a scholar's lonely
brooding, but also (and this has come to be a major Yeatsian effect) in the
cracked and rowdy measures of a fool's, an old man's, an old woman's song. The
Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1929) contain long meditations—
some "in
time of civil war"—upon his life, his times, his ancestors, his descendants;
upon the friends and enemies of his youth.
The short plays, composed on the pattern of the Japanese No drama, which Ezra
Pound had brought to Yeats's attention,—Four Plays for Dancers (1921), Wheels
and Butterflies (1934), The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935),—Yeats made
the vehicle for the loveliest of his later songs, for all his later development
of pure music:—
Come to me, human faces,
Familiar memories; I have found hateful eyes
Among the desolate places,
Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes.
Folly alone I cherish
I choose it for my share,
Being but a mouthful of air I am content to perish.
I am but a mouthful of sweet air.
The opening song in the play Fighting the Waves illustrates the
variety of stress, the subtlety of meaning, of which Yeats became a
master:—
A woman's beauty is like a white
Frail bird, like a sea-bird alone
At day-break after a stormy night
Between two furrows of the ploughed land;
A sudden storm and it was thrown
Between dark furrows of the ploughed land.
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle and mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?
A strange unserviceable thing,
A fragile, exquisite pale shell,
That the vast troubled waters bring
To the loud sands before day has broken.
The storm arose and suddenly fell
Amid the dark before day has broken.
What death? what discipline?
What bonds no man could unbind,
Being imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind,
What pursuing or fleeing
What wounds, what bloody press
Dragged into being
This loveliness?
From youth on, Yeats has thought to build a religion for
himself. Early "bored
with an Irish Protestant point of view that suggested, by its blank
abstraction, chlorate of lime," he eagerly welcomed any teaching which attested
supersensual experience, or gave him a background for those thoughts which came
to him "from beyond the mind." "Yeats likes parlor magic," George Moore
maliciously remarked, in the '90s. At that time, when religious belief and
man's awe before natural mysteries were rapidly breaking up, the wreckage of
the supernatural had been swept into mediums' shabby parlors and into the hands
of quacks of all kinds. Many men of Yeats's generation took refuge in the
Catholic Church. But Yeats kept to his own researches. He had experimented,
when an adolescent, with telepathy and clairvoyance, in the company of his
uncle, George Pollexfen, a student of the occult. He later studied the
Christian Cabala and gradually built up, from his own findings and from the
works of Blake, Swedenborg, and Boehme, his theories of visionary and spiritual
truth. But he was never, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, a gullible pupil. He
invariably tried to verify phenomena. And to-day, when we know more than we
once knew concerning the meaning of man-made symbols, the needs of the psyche,
and the workings of the subconscious, Yeats's theories sound remarkably
instructed and modernly relevant. His Anima Mundi closely resembles Jung's
universal or racial unconscious, and even his conceptions of Image and
Anti-Image, the Mask and its opposite, are closely related to psychological
truth.