Rosemarie Rowley

YEATS and ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS IN A TIME OF APOCALYPSE

Posted by Rosemarie Rowley on Jul 07 2009

Rosemarie Rowley: YEATS AND ENVIROMENTAL ETHICS IN A TIME OF APOCALYPSE – a paper presented to the Association for Studies in Literature and the Environment, at the University of Edinburgh, 2008

Once out of Nature I shall never take
My body form from any natural thing
The rise of secular materialism, and the ascendancy of reason since the Enlightenment, caused poets to react with apocalyptic fervour to the crisis in culture. It is no coincidence that the greatest poets of the two and a half centuries following the Enlightenment eschewed reason, and are celebrated by the almost cultic Romanticism which was the emotional reaction to an over-cerebral philosophy.
It would be a mistake to think that they abandoned the philosophic project of the study of the mind, however, since the bearers of the apocalyptic vision sought both to re-establish and re-make those processes of those minds whose greatest achievement is the creation of poetry. In fact, what the great proponents of Romanticism undertook was not to ignore the mind, but to establish more securely the role of the mind and imagination in the materialist culture surrounding them: to this end, they remade and recreated in their works the symbolic order of the ancients which has been the origin and vehicle of what is recognised as great poetry since the earliest times
In the modern era, Yeats, in keeping with the new accelerated developments and inventions, found new juxtapositions, incorporating the imagistic traditions of Romanticism and he can be classed therefore, as Bloom and other critics have done, as a late Romantic.
Yeats, who saw, qua Brown , in mere Nature a cold and alien otherness could depend for his faith in transformative possibilities for consciousness on the complex doctrines and practices of magic, which in turn depend on symbolism.
Kathleen Raine in her essay on “Poetry and Traditional Wisdom” makes a useful distinction between symbol and image. She describes the symbol as forming a bridge from one order of things to another. A simile and sign is merely, she states, words which are alike and belong to the same order of being, in this case, a materialist order. A word, and another word, can describe things which are perfectly similar, and therefore no faculty of the imagination needs to possess or understand them.
Yeats perhaps more than any other poet has written extensively of symbols and images – images are that which are present only to the mind. The mind, or imagination, is for Yeats, the greatest, and at times, the only reality .

Plato was his exemplar here. Plato, in the Timaeus, wrote:

When, therefore, an artificer, in the fabrication of any work, looks to that which always subsists according to the same, and employing a paradigm of this kind, expresses the idea and power in his work, it is then necessary that the whole of his production should be beautiful.

Plato contrasted this with Nature, the physical world was of secondary importance to his philosophy:
But when he beholds that which is in generation, and uses the generated paradigm, it is alike necessary that his work should be far from beautiful .

Throughout his work, from the beginning, Yeats accepted this antimony, and saw as the poet’s function to find those images, which must be remembered in every generation. This takes on the appearance and aspect of a beautiful artefact. The power of the image in Yeats’ work is to create a new meaning out of decayed or forgotten symbols of the past, because like Plato, he believed that we forget the language of archetypes and our soul, and his dedication as a poet was to give them a new energy and authenticity. Those created images function as symbols, that is, as a pathway or door to the mind, which, with the soul, is eternal.
Very early on, Yeats chose the idea of the antithesis of the self, or antithecal self as both the creator and vehicle for poetry. This was opposed to the Primary, the word he used for Nature. The poetic mind, or imagination, had to be constructed through the images that played on it, however, in nearly all these images, he preferred those of artifice and artefact to any word describing nature – for example, the words Yeats chooses for the sea are wrought in artifice, such as the “enamelled sea” in The Indian to his Love in his first volume.
Therefore, in constructing the antithecal self, Yeats, like Plato, undervalued nature. Many of his poems, which contain the signs and symbols of nature, are scored to an emotional note and tone far removed from nature, that is, to artifice itself. This was the means by which civilisations were born and were nurtured, in the images of the poetry that celebrated the imagination as primary. In this way, the imagination was the precursor and forerunner of mighty deeds and noble sentiments, which might make a nation such as Ireland a great one.
However, despite Yeats’ dedication to the task of recreating mythology for a nation and its people, he himself was aware, living in what he called the filthy tide of modernism, that apocalyptic revelation was the proper response to the conditions of life surrounding him. In spite of his desire to recreate a vital past into a new civilisation, what prevailed in Yeats’ mind was that we were coming to the end of civilisation, that we were cast on the blood-dimmed tide. His most famous apocalyptic poem is “The Second Coming”, and in this his fears, at their most grotesque, are realised. As Harold Bloom points out in his study of Yeats there is a certain wilful misattribution to the title of the poem, since it is in fact about a second rebirth, which being entirely physical, is takes on a materialist character. This gives the poem a certain horror, which vindicates but does not explain the first verse, that the falcon and the falconer are torn apart, that anarchy is loose upon the world. Indeed, qua Bloom, the first image of a bird that came to Yeats’ mind was that of the eagle, but in the succeeding drafts he chose the falcon, as it belonged to a more arcane tradition, Egypt, the falconer loosing that mastery of Nature in the revolutions that were to come. Yeats’ fear of anarchy is in a sense more prophetic that either Blake’s or Shelley’s in that he foresaw in the rise of science the mastery of nature which was to crumble and take all in the dissolution of its power. The means he chose to do so was through a highly symbolic, intellectual, apocalyptic poetry, in which fear of the physical self was prefigured.
Yeats’ language is that of the “adept.” To talk about the “ceremony of innocence” has provoked much commentary – can we ask if the nature of innocence is to do without ceremony? With the power of apocalypse, the poem with its dreadful concluding image creates more than anything, a horror and fear of animal nature, particular in its symbolic form is Egyptian, which is far removed from the redemptive apocalypse foretold in Christianity. It is this physical dread, which haunts the reader and has made the poem one of the best known of modern poems.
In privileging the mind above all else, particularly over Nature, a certain distance from physicality is necessary. This distance is not the reductionism of the secular materialists which found its apogee in the Oxford philosophy of the mid-twentieth century: rather it is a form of animism, of nature inhabited by a demonic spirit, which the mind fears and tries to overcome.
In Yeats’ pursuit of the antithecal self he abjured Nature, hoping to erect more permanent symbols than those provided for in an endless flux and rebirth and reconstitution, to provide “monuments of un-ageing intellect,” perhaps forgetting that physical monuments of wood and stone, do, in time, perish. However, by aligning the physical with gnomic properties, by not elucidating our dependence on nature for survival, the cost of this imagination is high, when it comes to terms and times of survival like the age we live in at present.
Yeats, like Plato, finds no ideallic beauty in Nature, writing:
Nature has no outline, but imagination has, Nature has no tune, but imagination has. Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves. Imagination is eternity:
while Kathleen Raine writes:
Whatever beauty we see in Nature is the reflected image of the soul.
It is true that the mind, soul and intellect seek order, but that this order exists beyond mind is more difficult to prove, since modern philosophy denies the reality of anything outside the mind, to the point that even the mind itself cannot be verified, or its contents. In the Johnsonian sense, of kicking a stone so that you can feel it, the outer world of nature does exist. One way we can experience this is through observation, creation and recreation of art.
In quoting Plato, that Nature has no tune, we might counter with what we hear in bird-song, and perhaps note its harmonic perfection. We can listen to the sound of rain falling on earth and stone, and note how it affects us. It may ultimately be foolish not to name these sounds as sweet, pleasing and harmonious.
Has Yeats, in positing mind as the only reality, undervalued nature? A
reading of the “The Song of Wandering Aengus”, an early example of the brilliance of Yeats’ technique, might guide us here.

The poem can be read as an intermediary between the world of imagination, and the natural world which is beginning to take its toll on his physical nature, ten years after he had met his true love, Maud Gonne, and before he had spent his life for a “barren passion’s sake.” The love poems show that it was not a barren passion: yet looking at the unfulfilled love, and its cost to Yeats, we detect how early on Yeats’ privileging of the imagination and denial of the physical had a heavy emotional cost.
I will posit a reader who is innocent of Yeats’ later tormented project and abjuration of the physical, and will attempt a literal reading of the symbols in the poem to discover the nature behind the words, and whether what lies behind that order remains occluded.
I went out to a hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head

The hazel wood is the seat of the Druids, of magic, and the poet went there in the persona of Aengus to quell a fire in his head – usually interpreted as anger, an emotion, usually against a person who has frustrated the poet.
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread

The hazel wand was used for divining, and is noted for its beautiful pale green sheen, so why would the poet want to peel it, save in an act of destruction? Is he saying that he wanted to destroy what was both beautiful and magical?
Hooking a berry to a thread is an old method of catching a fish, but through poisoning it. A poisoned fish would not be of use to anyone – or perhaps reading it purely as a symbol, the fish as Christianity, is Yeats going to poison that faith which has so entrapped his countrymen, denying the reality of sexual love?

And when white moths were on the wing
And Moth like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout

Now, his anger spent, he laid the fish on the floor, and went to blow the fire aflame, presumably cooking it, or giving full vent to his anger, when
Something rustled on the floor
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air

The final verse of the poem envisages the poet as “old with wandering”,
but having fulfilled his love, kissing her lips and taking her hands, walking, perhaps more serenely, among long dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.

Once again, Yeats has chosen an artifice over the natural – it would be natural to feast on the apples, just as it was to consummate love for the girl. Instead, using alchemical symbolism, Yeats takes us to a higher, more secret order, where the final meaning is elusive. The promise of artifice over nature has been preferred, and stated, and his neglect here of the physical nourishing apple is a foretaste of what will haunt him in years to come, the frail paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick that a dying body becomes.
This is most explicit in his first Byzantium poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”, where he addresses the sages in “God’s holy fire”
To consume his heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is, and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

This extraordinary phrase, the artifice of eternity, is nascent in his work from the very beginning. His choice of mind, and its images, have more reality for him than any reality of the natural world. When words alone are certain good we can recognise the opportunities for transcendence, for they are a metaphysical means to a world beyond the senses, beyond nature. But they also deny the reality of nature at root, and in the end, actually reverse the order of creation, by placing the artefacts of humankind before that in which they have their birth and being: the timeless, the eternity, which cannot be portrayed as an artifice since it precedes all life and creation.
So, the symbolic order, founded on magic, on a system of correspondences may be constructed partly through the abstract powers of the mind, rather than be a true and epistemological book of Nature. In a time of apocalypse, poetry becomes, for Yeats a means of jolting us awake.
The job of environmental ethics is to find a path where a bridge can be built, a springboard to action. Yeats’ imprisonment of the self in a hieratic and hierarchical structure, may lead us to a stasis of metallic sublimation, a stage in alchemy which corresponds to the power of the soul. Even those most sceptical of Yeats’ intentions and methods cannot deny that he was a master of metre: that in his work, both the exigencies of rhyme and syntax are in complete harmony: however there are times when the meaning eludes us, or beckons us on to further readings and further contemplations which do not yield up any particular signification. And to read Yeats’ poetry in this light, is to be at times, frustrated. However, in the reflective mind, this refusal of the physical, and its imprisonment in a stasis of metallic sublimation, may cost us access to Nature, in that in seeking art and artifice, we have failed to respect Nature’s laws, with a huge cost to earth itself, and perhaps to the future of humanity.
That is not to say that the symbolic order does not exist, and from the correspondences of high art and beauty it does, but that since we are creatures of nature, we have an imperfect mind and body that has to be answered in human and natural terms, particularly in times of moral agency and urgency. In our present ecological and existential crisis, perhaps such a reading is necessary: we could ask if his apocalyptic vision is sufficient for us now, as we contemplate the destruction of Nature herself?
REFERENCES
W.B. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium, The Tower 1928 The Song of the Happy Shepherd, Crossways, 1889 Collected Poems, Arena Books, 1990 ISBN 0 09 972350 – 6
Terence Brown: The Life of W.B. Yeats, Gill and Macmillan, , ISBN-7171-3248-X 1991,2001
ibid
Kathleen Raine: Lecture delivered to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology in July 1957, and reprinted in Temenos Academy Review, 2007. ISSN 1461-779x
Harold Bloom: Yeats, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-501603-3 reprinted 1972
Plato: Timaeus, translated by Desmond Lee, Penguin Classics, 1965, reprinted 1983
ibid

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