The Last of The Romantics - An Introduction To The Symbolism of William Butler Yeats

The Last of the Romantics: An Introduction to the Symbolism of William Butler Yeats
Author(s): Hiram Haydn and Hiram Hadyn

Source: The Sewanee Review , Apr. - Jun., 1947, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1947), pp.
297-323
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537734
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THE LAST OF THE ROMANTICS:
An Introduction to the Symbolism of
William Butler Yeats
By HIRAM HAYDN
SO William Butler Yeats styled himself. "Art is a revela

tion, and not a criticism," he says in Ideas of Good and
Evil, thus establishing himself in the great tradition which
stemmed originally from the Ion. A conviction which he ac
quired early, in youthful defiance of his father's allegiance to
scientific naturalism, it colored decisively not only his own work,
but also his evaluation of all poetry and poets.
In his essay on "Magic," he declares that the origin of true
poetry is a great "Mind" or "Memory," that "of Nature her
self," and asks, "Can there be anything so important as to cry
out that what we call romance, poetry, intellectual beauty, is the
only signal that the supreme Enchanter, or some one in His coun
cils, is speaking of what has been, and shall be again, in the con
summation of time?"
This Great Mind or Memory, he later reveals in The Tremb
ling of the Veil, is that "Anima Mundi described by Platonic
philosophers, and more especially in modern times by Henry
More. . . ." He identifies it with Spenser's Garden of Adonis,
with Blake's "Los," the eternal mind, and with Shelley's Intel
lectual Beauty: he finds an apprehension of it in all the poets
whom he ranks highest.
But the main current, from the Renaissance down, has been
alien to his genius. He looks back with affection to the Medieval
period, contrasting, in his essay on "Spenser," "the passion of the
Middle Ages with the craft of the Renaissance," in a passage
that suggests Diotima's words in the Symposium: "Now whoso

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298 THE LAST OF THE ROMANTICS
ever is wise in these matters is inspired by the Spirit, but he that

is wise in the crafts and the arts is merely a mechanic."
In "The Autumn of the Body," he points out that, with Goethe
and Wordsworth and Browning, the poet has ceased to consider
all things in the world "a dictionary of types and symbols" and
begun to be a critic of life and interpreter of things "as they
are." Often, in his prose, he expresses the belief that the age of
criticism will pass and an age of imagination return. He was
particularly impressed with the Symbolist movement at the turn
of the century; in "The Celtic Element in Literature," he wrote,
"The reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century
has mingled with a reaction against the materialism of the nine
teenth century, and the symbolical movement, which has come to
perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raph
aelites, and in France in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Mallarm?,
and Maeterlinck, and has stirred the imagination of Ibsen and
D'Annunzio, is certainly the only movement that is saying new
things."
But most of this group belonged to an older generation than
Yeats's own, and those who did not had said all they had to say
before 1914. Their offspring (Edmund Wilson has traced the
genealogy brilliantly in Axel*s Castle) employed symbolism in
a way largely uncongenial to Yeats, and he was left alone.
Moreover, although he retained his respect for some of these
men, his critical acumen was too considerable to allow him to
over-rate them. Similarly, in The Trembling of the Veil, he
presents a penetrating anatomy of the Pre-Raphaelites' stepsons,
those members of the Rhymers' Club with whom he was inti
mately associated in his London youth; still loyal and affectionate,
he nevertheless analyzes their fatal weaknesses with precision.
It is clear, then, that Yeats's claim to the title of "the last of
the romantics" is more than an expression of vanity by one who
feels himself fundamentally out of tune with his times. And
although he never relinquished his conviction that an age of

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HIRAM HAYDN 299
imagination would eventually succeed that of criticism

statement of the issue in A Vision suggests that the "n
nation" will be of a sort vastly different from the var
mantic one of Spenser and Blake and Shelley and him
Throughout both his prose and verse, however, h
this last outpost with eloquence and vigor, in straight
position and in poetic imagery. He sets forth his t
ticularly clearly in "Ego Dominus Tuus," where
"Hie" carry on a dialogue in which they present co
conceptions of the artist's function. Ille (Yeats's sp
seeks "an image" and maintains that "Art is but a
reality." When Hie declares, "I would find myself
image," Ille's reply is: "That is our modern hope. W
critics, or but half create."
This is the substance of his quarrel, and its appositen
Eliotian school is irrefutable. Wherever he deals wit
ject, he contrasts in general the life of retirement and
tion with that of the man of activity, seeking "self-r
in the world around him, and in particular the two kind
exemplified by Ille and Hie. Believing the world of s
politics to be inimical to the artist's genius, he urges t
be an ascetic?not in the popular sense, but in that of r
from the newspaper and the market place. "Great pa
writes in "The Body of the Father Christian Rosenc
an interesting blending of the influences of Blake and
angels of God and of more moment than comments
dencies of the times."
Now it is common knowledge that, in the middle per
life and work, Yeats wearied of the Celtic dream-wo
youth and renounced both the beautiful but vague imag
earlier poetry and his voluntary withdrawal from
world around him, saying that "one must face the hard
of life." Most commentators have considered this t
heralded in the little poem called "A Coat" and sym

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his vision of "the man in Connemara cloth," the decisive turning

point of his career. And so it was, if one is speaking in terms of
his ultimate growth as a poet: his acquisition of a leaner, more
incisive style and his adoption of more catholic symbols?for the
first time, symbols rooted solidly in the world of external reality.
But if such statements are meant to imply that the man him
self lost his distrust of the world of action, then I believe they
are false. As he had earlier taken a leading part in the "Celtic
Revival," so now he turned to public life. But he wore the aspect
of a man who reluctantly, under the pressure of an aroused loy
alty and indignation, accepted the demands of national and per
sonal responsibility. Paderewski and Masaryk are but two
examples of this characteristic trend of the era?the reaction of
the artist and the scholar who, unable longer to ignore the chaos
around them, accepted the burden of political leadership.
Yeats's contribution was genuine and valuable, and, indeed,
one has only to read his political poems and his autobiographical
and critical prose to see how shrewd and fullbodied a mind he
turned upon the world of empirical actuality. Yet there is ample
evidence in the work of his middle and later periods that he never
forsook the realm of speculation and mysticism; in his last ten
years, he again devoted himself to it almost exclusively. At the
end of The Tower (1928), in "All Souls' Eve, Epilogue to <A
Vision'," he warns us, "I have mummy truths to tell, whereat
the living mock." And in his "Meditations in Time of Civil
War":
The abstract joy,

The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.
"The last of the romantics" remained a romantic to the last.

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HIRAM HAYDN 301
II
"The great memory," says Yeats in his essay on Shelley, "is
... a dwelling house of symbols, of images that are living souls."
Again, in "Magic," he declares that "this great mind and great
memory can be evoked by symbols."
These statements, upon which he considerably enlarges, are
corollaries of his conception of the nature of poetry, and illumi
nate the theory of symbolism which dominates his writing. Ed
mund Wilson defines the symbols of the French Symbolists as
"metaphors detached from their subjects." He points out that
it is bewildering to deal with "merely accidental images, which,
by an association of ideas, have come to stand for the poet's
emotion." Now, although Yeats was unquestionably influenced
by this group, he rarely depended upon an exclusively subjec
tive and largely incommunicable type of symbol.
In the first place, his symbolism is based upon a systematic,
if eclectic, mysticism. He maintains, in the same essay on Shelley,
"It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless
meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon,
or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can
escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious
arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature."
It is this broader field of reference that has made him a poet
of greater stature and wider audience than the Frenchmen and
Englishmen at whose feet he sat. Happily for him and us, he
deserted the precious literary circles of Paris and London, and,
returning to Ireland, first made use of the established but half
forgotten wealth of symbolism in Celtic lore. To the casual
reader, the Sidhe and the Shadowy Horses and Fergus with his
brazen cars probably remain his most characteristic symbols.
But his sources were legion. In addition to his basic preoc
cupation with Neo-Platonism and Celtic mythology, he was fa
miliar with the mysteries of the Cabalists, both Christian and

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Hebrew, alchemy, theosophy, astrology and the Rosicrucians.

He attended seances at Madame Blavatsky's; in the 'nineties he
was a member of a group of "Hermetic Students" among whom
it was a common practice to call up "the great memory" by
means of symbols, either as presented on cards or simply as con
ceived by the evoker. He read Blake, Boehme and Swedenborg;
he mentions with equal facility "The Devas of the East, and the
Elemental Spirits of medieval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient
Ireland." An extensive study of the symbolism of the Rose,
alone, as he used it again and again in his early poetry, reveals
associations with Christian, Hebrew, Rosicrucian, Brahman, Bud
dhistic and Platonic imagery, as well as that of Dante's heaven.
This extraordinary collection of esoteric sources insures, first
of all, that his symbolism had an infinitely greater storehouse
from which to draw than those of his contemporary fellow-Sym
bolists. But it also provides wonder that his poetic ship did not
founder under the load of such a cargo. It is not surprising to
find him writing in 1919, when, according to popular legend,
he had deserted his early allegiance to symbolism, "I have no
speech but symbol, the pagan speech I made amid the dreams of
youth."1
That he escaped such a shipwreck (he entitled one of the sec
tions in The Trembling of the Veil "Hodos Chameliontos?The
Path of the Chameleon"?referring to the way in which a mystic
becomes lost in the midst of many symbols which he cannot in
terpret)?that he escaped at all was undoubtedly due to the
highly skeptical critical faculty that made him demand of A.E.
that he examine his visions, and that, when asked if he believed
everything he had written in A Vision, as revealed through au
tomatic writing, prompted him to reply, "If you mean that they
are there, in the sense that you and I are here, it is a hard ques
tion. The world of symbols is not that of everyday." What
ever his personal convictions, he knew supremely well how to
adapt the symbols of his mystical experience and reading to the

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HIRAM HAYDN 303
demands of poetry?how to combine with their provocative mys

teriousness the discipline that makes them effective imagery.
But his greatest triumph is unquestionably the extent of his
audience and the quality of their applause. Twentieth-century
readers of poetry expect "difficultness"?even the extensive al
lusiveness of "the critics and half-creators." But by no other
established major poet (except Eliot, who has supplied footnotes)
have they been asked to accept a symbolism so steeped in occult
lore. Yet they have not merely accepted Yeats; to the day of
his death they accorded to him more often than to any other the
title of "the greatest living poet."
His mastery of technique?the melodiousness of his early
work, the magnificence of the middle period, and the spare struc
ture and new harmonies of the last, together with his always un
surpassed ear for the quotable and haunting phrase?may be
largely responsible for this recognition. And he has undoubtedly
seemed, using these traditional tools in familiar forms, decep
tively simple?in an age when forms have been turned upside
down and inside out by most artists.
At any rate, he has vindicated his early declaration in "Ire
land and the Arts": "The Catholic Church is not the less the
Church of the people because the Mass is spoken in Latin, and
art is not less the art of the people because it does not always
speak in the language they are used to." As Mr. John Crowe
Ransom stated in an article of a few years ago in The Kenyon Re
view, "Yeats never . . . requires much editorial gloss to explain
a symbol because it is the property of an occult sodality or be
cause it is private to himself alone. . . . The symbol is objective
and easy, or else it is actually developed a little way so that the
'impartial spectator' who reads (and who stands in our mind for
the test of the poem's objectivity) can go on and obtain a suffici
ently clear and exciting image to answer to it."
Nevertheless, a detailed study reveals a central and consistent
theme running throughout his prose and verse?more than that,

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a highly elaborate "religious system." Critics and interpreters

have been almost unanimously aware of this fact, but?to the
best of my knowledge?none has yet published a complete and
ordered analysis. To be able to "go on and obtain a sufficiently
clear and exciting image to answer" to the symbol used, may suf
fice for a single given poetic experience?and to convince the
average reader of the solidity of the poet's gift. Yet one can
hardly hope to form a valid estimate of Yeats's final stature, his
relation to his times and to the main current of English poetry,
without weighing the body of his thought.2
Ill
In The Death of Synge, Yeats declares, "I think that all hap
piness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other
self; that all joyous or creative life is a re-birth as something not
oneself, something which has no memory and is created in a mo
ment and perpetually renewed."
This statement is perhaps the locus classicus for his theory of
the Mask, or Daemon, which each individual must find if he is
to attain complete fulfillment. As he says in Dramatis Personae,
"If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are
and assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon
ourselves, though we may accept it from others."
Necessarily, those others who will perform such a service for
us are rare. "True love," he maintains in Estrangement (ex
tracts from a diary kept in 1909), "is a discipline. . . . Each di
vines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the
mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved
sees an image to copy in daily life; for love also creates the
Mask."3
However, the artist must find his Mask for himself, usually
in the antithesis of himself. Further light is thrown upon Hie
and Ille by this declaration. Ille, aware of its truth, is "seeking

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HIRAM HAYDN 305
an image" to help him to find his "anti-self," but Hie merely

pursues the realization of himself in the world of activity.
Once more in Dramatis Personae, Yeats explicitly applies hic
theory to writers and their art, with illustrations:
A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is

said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self
opposite of all that he has named 'himself.' George Moore,
dreading the annihilation of an impersonal bleak realism,
used life like a medieval ghost making a body for itself out
of drifting dust and vapour. . . . Synge was a sick man pic
turing energy, a doomed man picturing gaiety; Lady Greg
ory, in her life much artifice, in her nature much pride, was
born to see the glory of the world in a peasant mirror.
Of himself he says, with a disarming freedom from shame

facedness, "And have I not sung in describing guests at Coole?
'There one that ruffled in a manly pose, For all his timid heart'
?that one myself?" His own antithesis, as a poet, is that art
"as cold and passionate as the dawn," which he symbolized by
the fisherman in Connemara cloth. And there can be no question
but that, from the time he first envisioned such an art, his own
grew in power and scope, to culminate eventually in the major
achievements of The Tower: "Leda and the Swan," "Sailing to
Byzantium," and "Among School Children."
Such a conception of the origin and realization of creative work
predicates conflict as a first cause. And, indeed, in a note to the
section on the Hermetic students in The Trembling of the Veil,
Yeats says definitively, "All creation is from conflict, whether
with our own mind or with that of others."
Moreover, since he is convinced that "art is but a vision of
reality," conflict is not only necessary to creation; it is the con
dition of existence, whether mortal or immortal. This basic
duality, this need for a pair of antagonists, is everywhere, in
everything. Yeats opposes, throughout most of his poetry and

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prose, two perpetually warring forces, one or the other of which

dominates every entity in his cosmos.
He has a variety of names for these forces, but they are es
sentially the Subjective and the Objective. The Subjective Man
is the Imaginative Man?he who has cherished the Phoenix nest,
negation of will, and seeks reality in revelation. The Objective
Man is the Critical or Active Man, who is concerned with the
reality which he finds around him, through observation, and who
seeks the fullest realization of his will. In these opponents we
find the nearest thing, in Yeats, to a definition of Romanticism
and Realism.
Another name for Objective Man is Primary Man, and, as
such, he is associated with the Sun (that is, the Dark Moon),
especially in A Vision, where Yeats's astrological system of hu
man personality lists twenty-six possible types, corresponding to
the twenty-six phases of the moon between the two superhuman
poles, where human life is impossible. Subjective Man is here
termed Antithetical Man, and is associated with the Moon (that
is, the Full Moon). Starting at the right of the objective pole,
the soul moves toward subjectivity, but, after the subjective pole
is reached, once more toward objectivity. As Aherne, the com
panion of Michael Robartes, significantly puts it:
Before the fall

It sought itself and afterwards the world.
After the elaborate Michael Robartes explanation of the origin

of this system in the foreword to A Vision, Yeats tells us, in A
Packet for Ezra Pound, that the substance of it was revealed
through his wife's automatic writing. Be that as it may, it is
not difficult to find precedents for the fundamental ideas of
eternal conflict and the antitheses, minus the astrology, either in
his own earlier work or in that of his acknowledged masters. The
central concept goes back at least as far as Empedocles. Among

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HIRAM HAYDN 307
the many to whom Yeats himself refers, Blake is pe

most.
But tracing the line of succession will not illuminate
and significance of Yeats's philosophy nearly so we
low throughout his own work the various pairs of sym
represent the opposing life forces that contain and
h:.s human archetypes?and his heavenly ones.
For, as the Emerald Tablet of Hermes puts it, "T
below are like the things above." Yeats posits, beyon
fines of time, a parallel to his perpetual earthly c
"Hodos Chameliontos," for instance, he relates how
young girl was dispatched by means of symbols to a cer
tain garden which he found hard to identify unti
read the Purgatorio, she heard "the music of heave
from a tree, and upon pressing her ear to the trunk,
it was made by "the continual clashing of swords."
Again, when Martin, in The Unicorn from the St
having misconstrued the meaning of his first visi
cipitated a small local war, is once more in a trance, h
"Father John, Heaven is not what we have belie

be. It is not quiet, it is not singing and making m
all strife at an end. I have seen it, I have been th
lover still loves but with a greater passion, and
still rides but his horse goes on always, always.
the joy of Heaven, continual battle. I thought t
was here, and that the joy was to be found here
that all one had to do was to bring again the old w
of the stories?but no, it is not here; we shall n
to that joy, that battle, till we have put out the sen
thing that can be seen or handled, as I put o
candle. . . ."
These heavenly conflicts are waged between adversaries usually

designated as the angels and the gods. But they, too (we shall
encounter them later), are simply units in the eternal struggle

:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
?higher representatives than men of two fundamentally op

posed attitudes. It is only with a study of the final irreconcilable
forces themselves, as Yeats symbolizes them, that the whole sys
tem of his thought becomes clear.
The first two great warring symbols are the Rose and the
Cross. As I have already suggested, the Rose has many mean
ings for Yeats. But there is one major connotation which it al
ways retains: that of the Platonic idea of Intellectual Beauty.
Yeats himself comments upon its fundamental significance for
him when he says, in a note to the Collected Poems, " 'The Rose'
[here the title of a section] was part of my second book . . . and
I notice upon reading these poems for the first time for several
years that the quality symbolized as The Rose differs from the
Intellectual Beauty of Shelley and of Spenser* in that I have
imagined it as suffering with man and not as something pursued
and seen from afar. . . ." And in "Hodos Chameliontos," speak
ing of his early poetry, he makes the identification without any
qualifications: "With a rhythm that still echoed Morris I prayed
to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty."
The Rose of Battle ("Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the
World") represents that Anima Mundi which we have already
encountered. "Beauty grown sad with its eternity" has made
this Rose, or world, where "God's battles" are waged by the
eternal enemies. But, at the same time, the Rose is she who,
before even the archangels were, "lingered by [God's] . . . seat"
("The Rose of the World": this idea, stemming from the argu
ment between Phaedrus and Agathon in the Symposium, is com
mon to Christian Platoriism and the Hebrew scriptures; Milton,
for one, tells the legend at the beginning of Book VII of Para
dise Lost), and God "made the world to be a grassy road before
her wandering feet." It is thus that she has become the immortal
opponent of the Cross; for in this capacity she, too, has chosen
to suffer with man, and the poet prays that he may learn to find

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HIRAM HAYDN 309
her, "eternal beauty wandering on her way ... in all poor fool
ish things that live a day."
So much compression here increases an already sufficient com
plexity. But the major issues are clear enough. The love of
the Rose, Intellectual Beauty, is "the perception of beauty in
thought and things" ("The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry"),
and is therefore inimical to the love of the Cross, "objective,
sorrowful pity." The Rose opposes the multiplicity of its "re
ligion" to the unity which the Cross symbolizes. It represents
the point of view, in Boehme's words, that "The Hunger of the
Soul must be turned to the source of eternal joy. . . . Heaven
is Nature filled with divine Life attracted by Desire. Life be
hind, rather than above the life of sense," and thus once more
opposes the Cross, the symbol of renunciation. The Rose is sad
with intellectual despair, the Cross with "primary" pity.
One could go on and on but the point should be clear, and
incidentally the long tradition behind Yeats. Besides Boehme,
there is the Symposium: "Love's work is to bring to birth the
children of Beauty, whether of body or soul." Blake, according
to Yeats, believed that "nothing is pleasing to God except the
glad invention of beautiful and exalted things": "Go, put off
holiness and put on intellect." (Yeats, as editor, points out that
"intellect" here equals "imagination.")
For Yeats himself clarifies his enthusiasm for his favorite
poets by interpreting their positions in this struggle of the Rose
and the Cross. Of Spenser he says, "His religion, where the
paganism that is natural to proud and happy people had been
strengthened by the platonism of the Renaissance, cherished the
beauty of the soul and the beauty of the body with, as it seemed,
an equal affection." And of William Morris: "The early Chris
tians were of the kin of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree,
and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he was of the kin of the
Well and of the Green Tree and he sawr an Earthly Paradise."
Finally, the Rosicrucian symbol has obviously influenced

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Yeats's choice of the Rose and the Cross. In his Histoire de la
Magie, Eliphas L?vi, who exercised a considerable influence upon
both the French Symbolists and the group of Hermetic students
which Yeats frequented, offers this commentary:
It [the Rose] was the flesh protesting against the oppres

sion of the spirit, it was Nature declaring herself to be, like
grace, the daughter of God, it was love refusing to be stifled
by the celibate, it was life desiring to be no longer barren,
it was humanity aspiring to a natural religion, full of love
and reason, founded on the revelation of the harmonies of
existence of which the Rose was for initiates the living and
blooming symbol. . . . The conquest of the Rose was the
problem offered by initiation to science, while religion toiled
to prepare and establish the universal, exclusive, and defin
itive triumph of the Cross.
Before continuing the study of the pairs of opposing symbols,

it would be wise to note the distinction which Yeats makes be
tween Christ the man and Christ the Messiah, or his religion.
For instance, in Estrangement, he remarks, "Every symbol is
an invocation which produces its equivalent expression in all
worlds. The Incarnation invoked modern science and modern
efficiency, and individualized emotion. It produced a solidifi
cation of all those things that grow from individual will."
Such a statement clearly links Christ the Messiah and ortho
dox Christian dogma with the Objective forces. Again, in A
Vision, Yeats considers Christ the man, and especially in the
Garden, as Antithetical or Subjective, but finds his pity, upon
which Christianity is built, Primary or Objective pity. It is this
later significance which the Cross bears, as the antagonist of the
Rose; and Christ-on-the-Cross is synonymous with the Cross,
a symbol of renunciation and Objective, common love.
"Christianity," says Yeats, directly and defiantly, "has sup
pressed the wise." As Blake had pointed out, men go to heaven

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HIRAM HAYDN 311
because they have cultivated their understandings, not because

they have curbed their passions.
In such stories as "The Crucifixion of the Outcast" and "Out
of the Rose" he treats this subject in various ways, but it is in
"Rosa Alchemica" that he explicitly depicts the opposing ele
ments again, with the same symbols and with a secondary an
thropomorphic set, the angels and the gods.
The scene is the Alchemical Temple of Michael Robartes,
where by night immortal spirits from Egypt and Greece come
to dance in a mosaic-lined room. The narrator first observes,
on the ceiling, "an immense rose wrought in mosaic." Then, he
continues, "I saw that the floor was of a green stone, and that
a pale Christ on a pale cross was wrought in the midst. I asked
Robartes the meaning of this, and was told that they desired to
trouble His unity with their multitudinous feet."
And finally, "about the walls, also in mosaic, was a battle of
gods and angels, the gods glimmering like rubies and sapphires,
and the angels of the one grayness, because, as Michael Ro
bartes whispered, they had renounced their divinity, and turned
from the unfolding of their separate hearts, out of love for a
God of humility and sorrow." Robartes further points out that
there is "a limited sense of beauty" in a preoccupation with one
god.
IV
Inevitably the question of reconciliation arises. Must the
opponents battle forever?
At the conclusion of the passage from his History of Magic
quoted above L?vi says: "The reunion of the Rose and the
Cross, such was the problem proposed by supreme initiation,
and, in effect, occult philosophy, being the universal synthesis,
should take into account all the phenomena of being."
Now Yeats refers to and even envisions such a reconciliation
from time to time. In his essay, "The Happiest of Poets," he

78.110.106.136 on Sun, 13 Sep 2020 22:22:39 UTC
speaks of it in connection with William Morris: "He may not

have been, indeed he was not, among the very greatest of the
poets, but he was among thet very greatest of those who prepare
the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses."
It is such a reconciliation that he pictures dramatically in "The
Rose of Peace." Here, if Michael, "leader of God's host,"
when "Heaven and Hell wage war," were to look down upon
Beauty, he would forsake the wars and go off to "weave out of
the stars a chaplet for [her] head." And everyone, seeing that
the Great Time had come, would "go to God's great town."
And God would bid his warfare cease,

Saying all things were well;
And softly make a rosy peace
A peace of Heaven with Hell.
The Rose here is not only the symbol of one of the warring
elements, but also colors the reconciliation, which?like the bat
tle?takes place in that "Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the
World."
Yeats also associates the Rose with the godhead in those places
where he pictures a less idyllic final scene. In "Out of the
Rose," for example, the old knight prays to the setting sun: "O
Divine Rose of Intellectual Flame, let the gates of thy peace
be opened to me at last." Since this story predicates the general
consumption in "intellectual fire" of "all that which is not God,"
and only those who die in the service of God before this holocaust
will be gathered to the final Nothingness of God, it becomes ap
parent that this Rose is identical with God. It is the equivalent
of Boehme's "magic fire-spirit, the Soul, [which] cannot perish
because it is an eternal Essence," and of the Incorruptible Fire
and Incorruptible Rose of the Alchemists. Such an absorption
into the Godhead also bears a direct relationship to similar con
cepts in neo-Platonic writings and points the way to Yeats's
eventual concern with the Ved?nta.

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HIRAM HAYDN 313
If we return to Martin, in "The Unicorn from the Stars," we

find that he concludes the speech in which he has related to Father
John his vision of Heaven as eternal battle, in the following
manner:
We must put out the whole world as I put out this candle
We must put out the light of the stars and the light of the
sun and the light of the moon, till we have brought every
thing to nothing once again. I saw in a broken vision, bu
now all is clear to me. Where there is nothing, wher
there is nothing?there is God!
The refrain appears yet again, as the title of a story in T

Secret Rose collection. There, a monk, answering the Child
oll's question, says that "The ruby is the symbol of the love
God." When the child asks, "Why?" the monk replies "Becau
it is red, like fire, and fire burns up everything, and where th
is nothing, there is God."
The conclusion and the formula, despite the euphemism
the "rosy peace," are inescapably clear. Reconciliation=Not
ing=God. But this is still the far distant "that which is to com
in the long last." Meanwhile, "The nobleness of the Arts is
the mingling of contraries, the extremity of sorrow, the extremity
of joy, perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrende
overflowing turbulent energy, and marmorean stillness; and it
red rose opens at the two beams of the cross, and at the tryst
place of mortal and immortal, time and eternity." Hence tr
art becomes one means of reconciliation. But the warfare c
tinues, all the way to the impressionistic stage directions for T
H erne's Egg (1938).
There are new antagonists in the later poems, but they a
fundamentally unchanged. In "The Double Vision of Micha
Robartes," Robartes, "being caught between the pull of the dar
moon and the full," sees the Sphinx and the Buddha:

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One lashed her tail ; her eyes lit by the moon

Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head erect.
That other's moonlit eyeballs never moved,

Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,
Yet little peace he had,
For those who love are sad.
But it is in "The Second Coming" that Yeats uses the Sphinx

most effectively as a symbol.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
With this poem Yeats arouses the suspicion that, as the Magi,
in his poem of that name, unsatisfied "by Calvary's turbulence,"
hope to find once more "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial
floor," so he too anticipates a balancing of the Objective Christian
era with one closer to his heart. If reconciliation is only to come
with the final Nothingness of God, it may be at least that, in
the unending warfare, one side succeeds the other in cycles of
predominance.5
Reading back with this in mind, one finds a profusion of hints.
In "The Celtic Element in Literature," for example, Yeats at
tributes to Verhaeren the idea that "the arts, brooding on their

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HIRAM HAYDN 315
own intensity, have become religious and are seeking to create

a sacred book." He is less specific in "Rosa Alchemica" when
he is speaking of those simpler days "before men's minds, sub
tilized and complicated by the romantic movement in art and
literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined
revelation." But it is also in "Rosa Alchemica" that he compares
the stars to "furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who
labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy,
bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect
labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many
dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth
of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls
weighted with so many dreams."
With the poems which I have quoted and those dealing with
Robartes (the obscurity of these is illuminated with the publica
tion of A Vision), the rumblings in the air continue. Then comes
A Vision, in which he predicts the future of Europe: "A deca
dence will descend, by perpetual moral improvement. . . ."8 The
decadence of this world, "being democratic and primary, may
suggest bubbles in a frozen pond?mathematical Babylonian star
light." But there will follow, inevitably, a period governed by
"a form of philosophy which will become religious and ethical
. . . and be in all things opposite of that vast plaster Herculean
image, final primary thought. . . ."
Yet even this passage is only preparation. In 1929, with A
Packet for Ezra Pound, the revelation at last occurs. In a ram
bling introduction, chiefly valuable for its biographical informa
tion, he explains that since his experience with his wife's auto
matic writing, which led to the writing and publication of A
Vision, he has been reading philosophy?for the first time, Hegel,
Berkeley, Plotinus7 and others. But they have not helped his
difficulties directly, he reports. The most important result of
this reading has been that he is now thoroughly disgusted with
parts of A Vision, especially those in which he has set down his

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interpretation of history; he has misunderstood the material with

which he has been working.
Then, quietly enough, he looses, his bolt. The "sacred book"
is not to fail; he announces the long-awaited "birth of that elab
orate spiritual beauty." For this little book, alone of all his
printed exclusively in Ireland, is to be "the introduction of a
book which will, when finished, proclaim a new divinity" :
Oedipus lay upon the earth at the middle point between

four sacred objects, was there washed as the dead are washed,
and thereupon passed with Theseus to the wood's heart until
amidst the sound of thunder earth opened, 'riven by love'
said the messenger, and there sank down into the earth soul
and body. I would have him balance Christ who, crucified
standing up, went into the abstract soul and body, and I
see him altogether separated from Plato's Athens, free from
all that cabinet of perfection, an image from Homer's
age. ...
Although Oedipus raged against his sons, the rage was
noble because 'it seemed to contain all life. . . .' He knew
nothing but his mind, and yet because he spoke that mind
fate possessed it and kingdoms changed according to his
blessing and cursing. Delphi . . . spoke through him, and
though men shuddered and drove him away they spoke of
ancient poetry, praising the boughs overhead, the grass under
foot, Colonus and its horses. . . . What if Christ and Oedipus
or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael
Angelo, are the twro scales of a balance, the two butt-ends
of a see-saw? What if every two thousand and odd years
something happens in the world to make one sacred the
other secular, one wise the other foolish, one fair the other
foul, one divine the other devilish? What if there is some
arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope
of a balance, the dip of a scale, and so date the coming of
that something?
Many of the statements in this book are confusing. For ex

ample, until I read A.E. on the subject, I believed that a new

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HIRAM HAYDN 317
sacred book was to follow. But it now seems evident that, al

though A Packet post-dates A Vision, it is indeed A Vision to
which Yeats is referring when he speaks of a book "which will,
when finished, proclaim a new divinity." This anomaly was ex
plained with the later publication, in a trade edition, of a revised
version of A Vision.
At any rate, with the account of Oedipus' divinity in A Packet
and the exposition in A Vision of "The Great Year of the An
cients, a cycle of Anima Mundi symbolized by the passage of the
sun through the Zodiacal constellations ... in his system consid
ered but as one year of that mightier being whose months and.
days, all with their own radiant vitality, influence our own evolu
tion,"8 we find the long line of immortal opponents?the Sun and
the Moon, the Cross and the Rose, the Angels and the Gods, the
Buddha and the Sphinx?illumined one last time. With a new
and final boldness, the system has been newly and finally ap
plied: metaphysics has become declared theology.
V
What, then, may already be said with any certainty ab
Yeats's "system"? First, I believe, that it is a gigantic tou
force, fashioned of his conviction of the need of a comprehen
"mythology" with which to combat the world pictures of Ch
tianity and science.9 I do not mean to imply by "tour de for
either insincerity or the willful concoction of purely arbitra
dreams. But I do mean that Yeats, equipped with as hi
formal and elaborate a mind as Dante or Milton, was not
fortunate enough to find at hand an official religion?a wi
acknowledged and acceptable "mythology"?for which he m
become the spokesman.10
The two immediately obvious world pictures available?t
of the Christian church and that of Science?were equally unc
genial to Yeats. He rejected what was to him the hard-he
positivism of the second as thoroughly as he did what he

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sidered the negativism, asceticism and rationalized ethics of the

first.31 After nearly foundering in a cloudy lake of esotericism
in the early London days, he fastened upon the Celtic myths a>
a means of unifying spiritual and national allegiances into a co
herent and concrete body of poetic imagery. But he eventually
wearied of this world, and after his interlude as a "public man,"
he executed his tour de force?making for himself a building
fashioned of many diverse elements. A tour de force?for it
was a desperate compound of necessity. Yet it contains a sub
structure that integrates it in a perfectly traditional way.
To understand this, it would be well to turn first to Estrange
ment, in which he declares: "Supreme art is a traditional state
ment of certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to
age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. The
revolt of individualism came because the tradition became de
graded, or rather because a spurious copy had been accepted in
its stead. Classical morality?not quite natural in Christianised
Europe?dominated this tradition at the Renaissance, and passed
from Milton to Wordsworth to Arnold, always growing more
formal and empty until it became a vulgarity in our time?just
as classical forms passed on from Raphael to the Academicians."
This consistent belief of his meant that he could not be satis
fied by inventing a wholly personal and isolated "system." His
art must rest upon "certain heroic and religious truths," however
"modified by individual genius." Yet his distaste for Christian
theology remained; he must search elsewhere for his base.
He finally found it in the great ancient tradition of philosophia
perennis, with which he had long flirted. Ananda Coomaras
wamy's "The Vedanta and Western Tradition,"12 which dis
tinguishes clearly between this tradition and that of modern Wes
tern philosophy, and also illuminates the use of symbols in
"eternal philosophy," is helpful:
In modern philosophy things are either so or not so; in

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HIRAM HAYDN 319
eternal philosophy this depends upon our point

Metaphysics is not a system but a consistent doctri
not merely concerned with conditioned and quantit
perience but with universal possibility. It therefore
possibilities that may be neither possibilities of man
nor in any sense formal, as well as ensembles of pe
that can be realized in a given world. The ultima
of metaphysics is a Supreme Identity in which the o
of all contraries, even of being and not-being, is re
its 'worlds' and 'gods' are levels of reference and
entities which are neither places nor individuals bu
of being realizable within you.
This was the tradition, in its devious manifestations, w

Yeats aligned himself, rather than that of orthodox Ch
or systematic philosophy.18 And if we review his own "
and his symbols with this passage in mind, it seems to
that we no longer find it difficult to reconcile their su
disturbing and unreal appearance with such a statem
mund Wilson's, that "Yeats's sense of reality ... is i
that of no man alive?indeed, his greatness is partly du
to the vividness of that sense."
We can, in other words, if we choose, dismiss as
personal idiom all the astrological trappings of his
"private" prose and the confidential assertions abo
found in automatic writing, and concentrate on the tru
universal symbols of his major poetry for an unders
his "mythology." Surely, to take only one example, hi
upon the "Subjective" and the "Objective" as the fun
life-forces indicates that his "worlds" and "gods" ar
reference and symbolic entities," which are "states of b
able within you."
Moreover, as Yeats grows older, an intellectual ske
pears more frequently in his poetry. There are cert
The Tower, both bitter and passionate, which state the

78.110.106.136 on Sun, 13 Sep 2020 22:22:39 UTC
320 'IHE LAST OF THE ROMANTICS
And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul. . . .
I have prepared my peace

With.
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling dream.
Perhaps the most telling confessio

"The Circus Animal's Desertion":
. . . And yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchant
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dom
Players and painted stage took
And not those things that they
The will to believe was urgent an

flashes down to the end he admit
the seances, the astrology, the auto
intellectual games, with which at t
self and which almost always de
tempt, from these and other sou
world picture, came from the do
thesizing mind and to defy the "de
in which he lived.
It remains only to analyze the p
failed to set forth a comprehensiv
compelling "system." Poetry li

78.110.106.136 on Sun, 13 Sep 2020 22:22:39 UTC
HIRAM HAYDN 321
great imaginative apprehension of the world, a concrete but not

exact symbol of their age, yet spilling over, by virtue of its uni
versality, to represent more than merely that age. We have al
ready pointed out that they had available, in a sense that Yeats did
not, an accepted world order which they could expound with in
tegrity. But there are at least three other reasons for the differ
ence?all related to his choice of symbols.
First, he placed too heavy a reliance upon esoteric symbols?
ones prohibitive to a wide audience. They are, and probably
always will be, caviar to the general.
Secondly, where he does use traditional and universal pro
totypes or symbols, he brings together ones which, to most of
us, do not "belong together." He is too eclectic. His juxtapo
sition and balancing of Christ and Oedipus, Saint Catherine of
Genoa and Michael Angelo, the Buddha and the Sphinx, the
Angels and the Gods confuse all but those minds that delight
in new combinations for their own sake. Here is a real sense in
which his symbols are insufficiently connected with normal ex
perience?each of them is torn from the soil of its established
context, and presented with its roots dangling in a vacuum.
The third reason derives from the second. The arbitrary
union of these diverse symbols not only robs them of their usual
compulsiveness, derivative from their relation to their original
setting; it also almost certainly prohibits their use in a single
long poem. Yeats's genius apparently did not tend in that di
rection at any rate, but it is in that form that the great imagina
tive spokesmen for world views have always written?achieving
their impact through the single and integrated cumulative effect.
In his nostalgia for a coherent and credible meaning to ex
pound, Yeats first turned to the past, then broke altogether with
the central Western tradition. Caught in a similar dilemma,
other distinguished contemporaries have made similar choices,
each in his own way, or returned to the Mother Church. Eliot,
Huxley, Auden. . . . But of these and all the rest?with the

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possible exception of Auden, from whom we still have reason

to hope for great poetry?Yeats is the only one of sufficient
creative vision to have achieved a position beside Lucretius,
Dante, Milton, Goethe. That he did not is partly explained by
the basic temperamental tendencies we have considered, partly
by the times in which he lived. For as Santayana wrote, "Poetry
is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it
is itself a theoretical vision of things at arm's length." And as
yet "we have no graphic image of what may fill our infinite times
and distances."
Perhaps Yeats groped for such an image, but his thinking and
his temperamental interests were centered elsewhere. He turned
backward and Eastward. In view of his own definition of great
art as "traditional statement" and his preference among tradi
tions, perhaps we must concede him his self-appointed title of
"the last of the romantics" (or at least, the last of the great ro
mantics)?for it is clear that throughout he identifies "romantic"
with his Subjective Man, Ille, and with the tradition of Anima
Mundi, the Rose, the Sphinx and Oedipus. His opponent,
whether the classicist or the realist or neither, is the exponent of
Objective Man, Hie, the Cross, the Buddha and Christ the Mes
siah. Yeats's chosen peers are Spenser, Blake, Shelley and Mor
ris; not Milton, Wordsworth, Browning and Arnold. We return
in the end to the beginning: "Art is a revelation, and not a
criticism."
So much we know; the rest we can only surmise. Even the
comprehensive dream with which he "prepared his peace" may
contain more resemblance to reality than most of us can now see.
For as he wrote in one of his greatest poems,
O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

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HIRAM HAYDN 323
NOTES
'What he had discarded was Symbolism, not symbolism. It is only with "T
cus Animal's Desertion" (1939) that he finds the storehouse empty:
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.
2This very task has been excellently handled by R. P. Blackmur in his essa
Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats," which appears in The Expense of Greatness
Editions, New York, 1940). I had completed this essay before I encounte
Blackmur's, but?as he says?"Other approaches to Yeats' poetry would h
duced different emphases."
3Contrast this conception with his theories about exclusively sexual love, w
maintains, is often inextricably bound up with spiritual hate. Hence he co
man's Daemon with his mistress. He is particularly concerned with this app
of the Mask principle in The Winding Stair; one example is the meeting of
old people who have been lovers in their youth. They feel nothing but ha
each other; yet, Yeats hints, could they recapture their youth, they wou
before.
4This is not, of course, a very exact statement of the steps which represent the
Neo-Platonic progression towards "the contemplation of Beauty's self" in Spenser's
Fowre Hymnes.
5Cf. Blackmur, The Expense of Greatness, pp. 79-82. The various cyclical theories,
applied to the universe, to the history of man, to politics, have dominated the minds
of many thinkers from Pythagoras to Spengler, including such diverse figures as Plato,
Machiavelli and Cardinal Newman.
6Cf. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals: "I think that the commedia umana for an
epicurean spectator-god must consist in this: that the Europeans, by virtue of their
growing morality, believe in all their innocence and vanity that they are rising higher
and higher, whereas the truth is that they are sinking lower and lower?i.e., through
the cultivation of all the virtues which are useful to a herd. . . ."
7This is a surprise, for he has written of Plotinus.
8A.E., The Living Torch. Compare with Plato's "Great Year."
9Cf. Saurat, Literature and Occult Tradition, p. 51: "The evolution of philosophical
poetry becomes the history of the evolution of a certain type of mind?the type op
posed to_ the scientific mind, even though there are often strange links between the
two?which is yet far from having disappeared from our civilization."
10Cf. Blackmur, op.cit., p. 77.
"Saurat, op.cit., p.^ 51: "For this type of mind Christianity as it stands, after the
immense work of logical cogitation done by the Schoolmen, after the Renaissance and
Reformation, is much too civilized a religion."
12The American Scholar, Spring, 1938. Vol. 8, No. 2.
13In 1936 he collaborated with Shri Purohit Swami on a translation of the Upani
shads. For some detail see Yeats's letters to Lady Dorothy Wellesley. This collabo
ration may even have effected a conscious deviation on Yeats's part from an open
allegiance to Magic, which is the fundamental approach that R. P. Blackmwt uses
in his study.

78.110.106.136 on Sun, 13 Sep 2020 22:22:39 UTC

The Last of The Romantics - An Introduction To The Symbolism of William Butler Yeats

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The Last of the Romantics: An Introduction to the Symbolism of William Butler Yeats

Author(s): Hiram Haydn and Hiram Hadyn

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537734

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SO William Butler Yeats styled himself. "Art is a revela

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ever is wise in these matters is inspired by the Spirit, but he that

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imagination would eventually succeed that of criticism

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his vision of "the man in Connemara cloth," the decisive turning

The abstract joy,

"The last of the romantics" remained a romantic to the last.

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Hebrew, alchemy, theosophy, astrology and the Rosicrucians.

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demands of poetry?how to combine with their provocative mys

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a highly elaborate "religious system." Critics and interpreters

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an image" to help him to find his "anti-self," but Hie merely

A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is

Of himself he says, with a disarming freedom from shame

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prose, two perpetually warring forces, one or the other of which

Before the fall

After the elaborate Michael Robartes explanation of the origin

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the many to whom Yeats himself refers, Blake is pe

"Father John, Heaven is not what we have belie

These heavenly conflicts are waged between adversaries usually

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?higher representatives than men of two fundamentally op

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It [the Rose] was the flesh protesting against the oppres

Before continuing the study of the pairs of opposing symbols,

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because they have cultivated their understandings, not because

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speaks of it in connection with William Morris: "He may not

And God would bid his warfare cease,

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If we return to Martin, in "The Unicorn from the Stars," we

The refrain appears yet again, as the title of a story in T

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One lashed her tail ; her eyes lit by the moon

That other's moonlit eyeballs never moved,

But it is in "The Second Coming" that Yeats uses the Sphinx

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

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own intensity, have become religious and are seeking to create

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interpretation of history; he has misunderstood the material with

Oedipus lay upon the earth at the middle point between

Many of the statements in this book are confusing. For ex

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sacred book was to follow. But it now seems evident that, al