No Finer Ear for Poetry

 Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was English Poet Laureate during the reign of Queen Victoria. He is considered by many critics to be the greatest poet of that era and was easily the most popular poet writing in England. He had a particularly fine ear for musical rhythms and rhymes in his verse. T. S. Eliot said Tennyson had “the finest ear of any English poet since Milton (1608-1674). He tackled a variety of subjects in his poetry including classical mythology, religious issues, industrialization, mortality, etc. His most well-known and widely read poem is “Ulysses.” Another poem about the Greek hero, Ulysses, on one of his adventures, is “The Lotos Eaters.” Tennyson, who knew Homer’s epic The Odyssey by heart, took the short episode from Book IX. 82-97 in which Ulysses told King Alcinous about an encounter with the inhabitants on the island of the Lotos Eaters. Here is Homer’s episode, translated into prose by Samuel Butler (1900):

"I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of nine days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotos-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotos-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus, and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.”

In the Odyssey, Ulysses’ account is concise, focusses on Ulysses’ strong leadership, command of his crew and the appalling effect of eating the lotos fruit. Tennyson significantly expands the episode to 183 lines, focusing instead on a vivid description of the island and on the crew’s experience of eating the lotos flower. It begins with Ulysses’ brief encouragement, “Courage…”, winds through 5 stanzas spoken by a third-person narrator, then embarks on 8 stanzas of choric song sung by the mariners who have eaten the lotos fruit. Here are the first five stanzas:

                       The Lotos-Eaters

"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land,
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
In the afternoon they came unto a land,
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset-flush'd: and, dew'd with showery drops,
Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.

The charmed sunset lingered low adown
In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem'd the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
To each, but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Father-land,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, "We will return no more;"
And all at once they sang, "Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam."

Tennyson’s poem begins as Ulysses and his crew as they are approaching the Island of the Lotos-eaters. In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses simply provides the plot of what happened without description of the island. Tennyson’s imagery of the island is rich and offers a tranquility that can alleviate the hardships his men have been enduring. However, the imagery anticipates also the psychological effect eating the lotos will have on Ulysses’ men. As they view the land, the mariners see what looks like an eternal, tropical paradise where “…it seemed always afternoon.” The air languidly swoons, the moon is always full, the stream falls, but seems to pause, and then appears rather like smoke.

Stanza 2 continues the sensuous description: they see a “A land of streams!” Water flows like “smoke” and looking west they see “…far off three mountaintops / Three silent pinnacles of aged snow / Stood sunset-flushed.” This image of “sunset” subtly contrasts with the timelessness the mariners sensed in the first stanza of “it seemed always afternoon.” In stanza 3, the sunset is “charmed,” and “lingered low adown / In the red West” and once again time is standing still: “A land where all things always seemed the same!” What the mariners have observed so far seems a serene, timeless land to rest and refresh themselves. At this moment, Tennyson introduces the “mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters.”

In stanza 4, the Lotos-eaters give the mariners the lotos flowers. Those who eat undergo a profound transformation: “…but whoso did receive of them / And taste, to him the gushing of the wave / Far away did seem to mourn and rave / On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, / His voice was thin, as voices from the grave; / And deep-asleep he seemed, yet all awake, / And music in his ears his beating heart did make.” What also changes are how we see the imagery of those first three stanzas.

The island’s natural, Edenic beauty seemed to offer the opportunity for the mariners a tranquil rest from their arduous sea journey. But the enchanted aura of the land in the stanzas 1-3 now seems deceiving. The Edenic imagery appears more mirage than reality, designed to lure the unsuspecting mariners into eating the hypnotic flower. The effect of the lotos flower on the mariners in the last stanza of this section suggests such is the case:

...And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, "We will return no more";
And all at once they sang, "Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam."

The poem does not end with the “narcotic” effect of the lotos rendering the mariners oblivious. In the Choric Song they discuss the alternative merits of remaining forever lotos-eaters or choosing to again set out upon the sea and continue their efforts to return to Ithaca, their home in Greece. In the next post I will include the rest of the poem with more brief commentary.  

Dover Beach

Along with Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was one of the most respected writers of the Victorian period (1832-1901). His reputation as an important poet and essayist was highly valued through most of the twentieth century. These days, fewer and fewer students read or study his works. The poem that everyone should read is “Dover Beach.” Arnold and his wife spent their honeymoon at his hotel in Dover overlooking the English Channel, which became his inspiration for the poem. In his most famous poem, the major anxieties of the nineteenth-century resonate with particular power:

                         Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the noon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of Faith 
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
so various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The poem begins with the speaker observing a peaceful scene: “The “sea is calm…out in the tranquil bay.” (1-5) He calls his love to the window to share this view, but instead of directing her eyes toward the moonlight, he tells her to “Listen!” to the “grating roar / Of pebbles” tumbling against the shoreline. This sound draws him from his initial serenity and induces his imagination to hear “The eternal note of sadness” in the waves. He gives shape and gravity to what he means by “eternal note of sadness” in the next stanza by alluding to the Greek playwright Sophocles. For Sophocles, human beings’ lives were governed by fate and life could be beset by tragedy no matter what actions a person took, as he demonstrates in his most famous play Oedipus Rex.

As a Victorian writing in the aftermath of Darwin’s writings and the erosion of religious faith, Arnold’s faced a world of changing beliefs that differed profoundly from those held by men and women who lived a generation before him. Born into a Victorian family with a father who was a devout Christian clergyman and historian, Arnold was raised with the traditional Anglican faith of the time, but as he grew older his faith weakened and the rapidly changing world sowed uncertainty and doubt within his mind. What meaning could life have without the beneficent god who cared for humanity? In stanzas 3 and 4, this absence of the Chrisian God possessed his thoughts and filled him with the dread he voices in the last lines of the poem. Today, a new god has risen, artificial intelligence. Its creators blithely assert that it will replace love, faith and poetry. But this deity will provide no more “joy,” “love,” or “light,” than the god that left Arnold alone to look across the sea and imagine those “ignorant armies” fighting wars as destructive and meaningless as the ones armies continue to undertake.  

A Milton Sonnet

 In 1632, just past his twenty-third birthday, John Milton (1608-1674) seems to have had a touch of anxiety. Seven years earlier, he entered Christ College Cambridge and embarked on his studies. His intention was to take holy orders and become a Protestant minister. He worked his way through a Bachelor of Arts (1629) and a Master of Arts (1632). As he matured, Milton steeped himself in great literature. He read rapaciously and absorbed the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and Shakespeare, to name a few. His love of these great poets most certainly affected his thinking and inspired him to compose his early great poems “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On Shakespeare,” “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso.” It was during this period that the trajectory of his life seems to have swerved from the path of a religious career to one dedicated to poetry. Of course, as with so many young people, Milton looked toward the future and worried over the choice he would make. His father wondered why at twenty-three Milton had yet to begin his career as a minister, which increased his angst. Perhaps to rationalize his delay and restrain his anxiety Milton wrote his sonnet, “How soon hath Time”:

                            Sonnet VII
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
   Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
   My hasting days fly on with full career,
   But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
   That I to manhood am arrived so near;
   And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
   that some more timely-happy spirits endueth.
Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow,
   It shall be still in strictest measure even
   To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of heaven,
   All is, if I have grace to use it so,
   As ever in my great task-master's eye.

The opening two lines make a familiar claim. Even when young, time moves faster than anticipated and surprises a person who suddenly feels shuttled into adulthood. Here, “Time” is a “subtle thief of youth” and has “Stolen on his wing [Milton’s] three-and-twentieth year.” “Stolen” is grammatically the verb of subject “Time,” and means robbed; but interestingly the word also works as an adjective meaning sneaked. Why does Milton feel ambushed by “Time”? Lines 3 and 4 explain: “My hasting days fly on with full career, / But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth”: Milton had passed his 23rd birthday, but what had he to show for it? By this time in his life he was expected, particularly by his father, to begin a ministry in the church, but he kept postponing taking holy orders. His father and his university friends wondered why he had not and questioned him about his delay.

Milton was realizing that a religious ministry might not be what he envisioned himself pursuing. He had begun to feel that his true “calling” could be to write poetry. Milton’s metaphor of “But my late spring no bud or blossom shewth” acknowledges he should be more advanced along his religious “career,” but has nothing to show for his years of study. In lines 5-8, Milton admits he looks much younger than he is, “Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,” and believes his contemporaries are endowed (“endueth”) with more maturity (“ripeness”) than he. Milton looking outward at his appearance and looking inward at his maturity reverberates his uneasiness about where he should be in life. He is close to “manhood” but is trailing his contemporaries socially, who by the age of twenty-three were expected to be well along in the career they had chosen. These lines complete the octave of the sonnet and what follows is the sestet.

In the next six lines, Milton turns away from scrutinizing himself and contemplates what his lack of progress means philosophically and theologically. He conceives of his life’s progress as determined and measured by the flow of “Time” and the “will of heaven.” Being a religious Calvinist when he wrote this poem, Milton believed that he needed God’s grace, but equally important was how he “use” God’s grace constructively. As he sees it, whatever he chooses to do with his life can fulfill God’s will, his “great task-master” who watches over all he does. Still, the confidence Milton reaches for in the last two lines probably did not convince himself and certainly does not convince the reader. In the end he certainly chose well.

Wordsworth's Lucy Poems

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote five poems that were formed into a group after his death in 1850. The group is called the Lucy poems, and all but one of the poems was written in 1799 while he and his sister Dorothy were visiting Germany. During their time there, Wordsworth became depressed. He missed his collaborator and closest friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was homesick for England. No one has been able to identify who this Lucy was, although scholars speculate that she might be based on his sister Dorothy or his future wife, Mary Hutchinson. Though other critics see her as fictional or a literary device, a strategy simply invented by Wordsworth’s fertile imagination. The poems are elegiac ballads about love and untimely death. They are tinged with a speaker’s unremitting grief, and they suggest Wordsworth was not only an unparalleled writer of nature poetry, but also was one with a poignantly elegiac voice.

In the first poem, the speaker experiences a frightening fear that suddenly shocks him:

                Strange Fits of Passion Have I Know 

Strange fits of passion have I know
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the side lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"

As a ballad, this poem narrates a story, one which is brief and limited in action. The speaker journeys one night to his lover’s cottage. Before he begins his tale, he tells the reader that “Strange fits of passion have I known” but will only reveal to his Lover what those “fits” are. Of course, once we read the last line, we learn the particular effect of the fit overwhelms the speaker in this poem when he imagines the possibility of Lucy’s death. That final line likely startles the reader as it does the speaker with its abrupt and unexpected dark exclamation. What brings about this wave of fear that fills the speaker?

When the speaker begins his journey to Lucy’s cottage, he states that “she I loved looked every day / Fresh as a rose in June.” While her lovely, youthful appearance is in his imagination his eyes become “fixed” on the “evening moon” above him. He and his horse “climbed the hill,” and the moon seems to be sinking closer to “Lucy’s cot.” At this point, the speaker drifts into “one of those sweet dreams” of sleep with yet opened eyes, which he identifies as “Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!” Carried along in this trance-like state by his horse, the speaker awakens suddenly by the dropping of the moon behind Lucy’s “cottage roof.” This brief narrative poem ends with the speaker approaching always nearer his destination but never reaching it and we are suspended with him and his anxiety in time and place with each reading of the poem.

The poem “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” praises Lucy’s beauty and virtue and, this time mourns her actual death:

       She Dwelt Among Untrodden the Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
   Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
   And very few to love;

A violet by a mossy stone
   Half hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one
   Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
   When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
   The difference to me!

Perhaps this is the same woman as in the first poem, but we cannot be certain she is. Here, Lucy lived apart from the world, lived as a “Maid whom there was none to praise / And very few to love…” Her anonymity was a loss to humanity, since her beauty was singularly rare, distinguished by the second stanza’s metaphor of “A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye!” and the simile of “…a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky.” The final stanza reiterates her obscurity, then registered his devastating loss of Lucy in those last lines, which acknowledge that any further expression of grief is impossible.

The next Lucy Poem is the longest and introduces Nature as a character:

         Three Years She Grew

Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.

"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.

"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.

"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mold the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

"And vital feeling of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell."

Thus Nature spake--the work was done--
How soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.

In stanza 1, the speaker begins a brief story that will bring him sorrow. He tells us that Nature chose three years old Lucy to be “A Lady of my own.” In stanza 2, Nature says that she will “feel an overseeing power /To kindle or restrain.” In 3, She shall be “sportive” and sensitive. In 4 and 5, Nature will see that all things within Nature’s realm and cosmos will “mold the Maiden’s form.” In 6, Nature will instruct Lucy to cherish the gifts of earth. Through Nature, Lucy becomes a paragon of beauty and vitality. But that excellence is short-lived, and in the last stanza, we learn of Lucy’s death.

Like “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” the speaker’s sorrow is profound. Lucy has “left to me / This heath, this calm, and quiet scene.” Will this tranquility of Nature console him? More likely, he will despair over what “never more will be.”

The shortest of the Lucy’s poems is “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”:

         A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

A slumber did my spirit seal;
  I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
  The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
  She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
  With rocks, and stones, and tree.

The force of this pithy statement of grief cannot be overstated. The speaker perception of Lucy in stanza 1 is numbed, in a state of sleep. The question is, did a “slumber” make him simply unaware of the possibility of Lucy’s mortality, or did Lucy’s youth and beauty seem immortal and beguile him into a “slumber”? Reading stanza 2, Lucy could not “Feel / The touch of earthly years” and she slumbers now in the eternity of death. And in that death, Lucy becomes one with “earthly years” now beyond time as she whirls in “…earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

The last of the Lucy poems is “I traveled Among Unknown Men.” This poem was written two years after Wordsworth wrote the other four. The anxiety and grief that resonates through the earlier poems appears to be displaced in this one by Wordsworth’s love of England:

   I Traveled Among unknown men

I traveled among unknown men,
   In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
   What love I bore to thee.

'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
   Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
   To love thee more and more.

Among thy mountains did I feel
   The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
   Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
   The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
   That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

“I Traveled Among Unknown Men” might disappoint the reader. It seems rather tame after the intensity of the first four Lucy poems. England has now become the object of the speaker’s love—for the English countryside with its mountains and “green field[s].” Though Lucy appears in this poem, she certainly seems secondary to nature (lower case ‘n’ here). Still, she remains a mystery and fortunately always will. 

Sailing to Byzantium

From the earliest of his poems to the last ones he wrote, William Butler Yeats frequently dwelt on the subject of growing old. Perhaps his most famous poem that addresses aging is “Sailing to Byzantium.” For anyone who is interested in getting to know Yeats’s poetry, this poem is among the dozen or so that is essential to read. It was written in 1926, when Yeats was sixty-one. It is challenging intellectually, but also powerfully poignant.

                 Sailing to Byzantium

                                     1
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

                                      2
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

                                       3
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
and be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my 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.

                                       4
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

In this poem, Yeats rejects the sensuality of sexual passion and yearns to journey away from all things physical to a realm of abstract, idealized artistic beauty. Stanza 1 snaps our attention with the curt statement “That is no country for men. Ireland is “no country for old men” such as Yeats, since he sees the passionate young in “one another’s arms and hears birdsongs joyfully celebrating their fertility and believes he is too old and infirm to participate in that world of sensual fulfillment. The one quality he still possesses that should “commend” him to his country, his creative prowess, is of little value where “all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”

In stanza 2, Yeats fashions a distressing image of himself: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick.” Yet, within this “paltry thing” still exists the soul, and if that “Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing, / For every tatter in its mortal dress,” it can transport him to a realm where “studying / Monuments of its own magnificence” is the true music to replace the music of sensuality. As stanza 2 closes, Yeats announces that he has actually already left Ireland: “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” Why Byzantium? In A Vision, (1925) a book he published shortly before he wrote the poem, Yeats revealed his belief that artists were truly valued there: “I think that if I could be given a month of antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia...I think that early Byzantium, maybe never before or since recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architects and artificers…spoke to the multitude…”

In stanza 3, Yeats does not just imagine himself roaming the ancient city; he locates himself within Byzantium’s holiest structure, the Church of the Hagia Sophia. Once there, the speaker invokes the sages to leave “God’s” purifying “fire,” beseeching them to be the “singing-masters of my soul” and “Consume my heart away.” Of course, old age has withered him and would be enough to justify his request of the sages, but it is not old age or encroaching mortality only that compels his need to escape the physical world; he calls for a spiritual transformation to achieve artistic: immortality: “…and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.” His request flows also from the anguish he feels in stanza 1 and 2, his alienation from the fertile world of vigorous sexuality. Though his heart is “fastened to a dying animal” it is not his age or fear of death that makes him ill; it is the combination of having a heart made “sick” by the “desire” that can no longer be fulfilled.

Stanza 4 is curious in that Yeats seems to have moved back in time to Ireland and is once again imagining himself out of his physical body and transformed into art. In the first two lines he employs the future tense verb to indicates what he intends to do: “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing” [.] He continues in this future frame with what he envisions to be one possible “form” of existence he could assume: “But such form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling” [.] As a work of gold sculpture, Yeats will be transformed into an aesthetic untouched by deprivations of old age. But this “artifice of eternity” takes away his poetic voice making him a static figure, seen but never heard. His second idea of a bird set upon a “golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come” immortalizes Yeats’s poetry through both time and space.

September 1913

William Butler Yeats’s “September 1913” is one of his best and most anthologized political poems. The poem’s title was originally “Romance in Ireland (On reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery).” Its present title appeared in his collection Responsibilities 1914. Knowing the social context of Ireland at the time of the poem’s composition deepens the reader’s understanding and appreciation of this great poem. For five years prior to the poem, the Irish art dealer Hugh Lane offered to bequeath paintings he had acquired during his years as a collector to the city of Dublin. His only condition was that the Dublin Corporation provide funds to build a municipal art gallery to house the works. These paintings would include works by Corot, Manet, Degas and Renoir. During five years of negotiation between Lane and the Corporation, William Martin Murphy, a railroad magnet and publisher of the Irish Independent, vehemently opposed funding for the gallery. His newspaper published dozens of letters from middle- and upper-class Dubliners who also objected to the gallery, but not because of the money it would require constructing it. Rather, many of them claimed that the art intended for the gallery was vulgar and violated Catholic morals. Arguing in favor of the proposed gallery, Yeats initially wrote a poem explicitly about the controversy, “To a Wealthy Man who promised a second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures,” which lambasts the shallow middle- and upper-class attitudes toward art. In “September 1913,” Yeats not only exposes the middle- and upper-classes as philistines who value materialism above all else; he also grieves for a heroic, “romantic” Ireland he believed existed in the past but now is “dead.” The poem is composed as a ballad, with a refrain closing each stanza with a reference to John O’Leary, (1830-1907). O’Leary was an Irish patriot who was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He agitated for Irish Home Rule in the 19th century and was arrested for treason and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. He served five years then was exiled for the remainder of his sentence.

                   September 1913
 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.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
The have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wings upon every tide;
For this that all the blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitgerald 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.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, "Some woman's yellow hair
Had maddened every mother's son":
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

In the first stanza, Yeats scorns his countrymen who are only interested in adding their “halfpence to the pence” and timidly saying their prayers. Ireland no longer produces men who possess the noble and heroic qualities of the past. Men like O’Leary who sacrificed their liberty or life in the struggle to free Ireland from British rule. Stanza 2 alludes to the men of the past, “names that stilled your childish play,” who without reservation gave themselves to the “hangman’s rope.” Stanza 3 identifies noble men of the past, Fitzgerald, Tone, and Emmet who died fighting for Ireland against England’s oppressive rule.

Yeats’s contempt for the shallow materialism and religious hypocrisy of his Irish countrymen is easy to understand and justify. No doubt, there was much of both circulating among the citizens of Dublin when he wrote the poem. Yeats seems to have been unaware in this poem that in Dublin at the time was also a nobility and bravery that was growing and would surface in the Easter rebellion of 1916. That week-long hopeless but valiant uprising would reverse Yeats’s thinking and inspire his other great poem about what the Irish were capable of.

Yeats and Maud Gonne

 The poetry of William Butler Yeats spans fifty years. During that course of time, Yeats evolved stylistically and thematically. His early poems often reflect his interest in Irish myth, legends and tales. His later poems shift toward politics, the contrast between youth and age, the Irish fight for independence and civil war and his personal mythology regarding human history. The single most repeated presence in Yeats’s poetry is Maud Gonne, his unrequited love. In every collection of his poetry except one, is at least one poem alluding to or metaphorically suggesting Maud Gonne. Yeats met Gonne in January 1889, and soon after fell hopelessly in love with her. She was born in 1866 and became an Irish patriot, an actress and a feminist. She was a political activist, one of the founders of Sinn Fein and was fervent in her work for Irish independence from Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She also was a successful actress and the heroine in Yeats’s first play, Cathleen ni Houlihan. In 1891, Yeats, asked her to marry him, but she refused. Undeterred, he asked her four more times, but each time she said they could only be friends. To his horror, Gonne married Major John MacBride in 1903, and though a “drunken vainglorious lout,” MacBride was one of the heroes of the Easter 1916 uprising, executed after the revolt failed. He was an abusive husband, and he and Gonne separated in 1905. Her separation from MacBride gave Yeats hope that Maud might finally love him as he loved her. That was never to be, but all was not lost since his heartache fermented much of his verse he was to compose. Here is an early poem, written shortly after Gonne first refused to marry Yeats; it subtly alludes to her in the second stanza.

                   The Sorrow of Love

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips                          5
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the laboring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,                            10
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.     
                                                                                       (1892)

In the first stanza, it becomes clear that something regarding nature is amiss. The image of “brawling of a sparrow” clashes with the middle lines that paint attractive images of a “milky sky,” a “Brilliant moon,” and a “harmony of leaves.” Then, the last line bluntly states that all of these images “had “blotted out man’s image and his cry." In the nineteenth-century poets, such as Wordsworth, had proclaimed that nature could engender a “sense sublime / Of something far more interfused.” Nature had offered boundless possibilities for joy and artistic creation, especially for poets. In this case, nature has become antagonistic, erasing man’s identity and his speech. Is Yeats suggesting that nature can no longer offer inspiration or is he projecting his own dejection onto nature?

The second stanza shifts to a different subject. Suddenly, “A girl arose that had red mournful lips,” followed by the enigmatic line “And seemed the greatness of the world in tears.” Who is the girl and why is she denoted as “the greatness of the world in tears”? The simile that closes the stanza reveals her identity; she is obviously Helen of Troy, the “girl” who bewitched Paris and sparked the two great poems of Homer. Scholars of Yeats (and Yeats himself) have frequently pointed out that Yeats identified Maud Gonne with Helen of Troy. As you read Yeats’s poems, you will discover time and again this symbol (Helen) that he would most often employ to represent his unfulfilled passion for Maud Gonne.

Stanza 3 picks up the thread began in the previous stanza with the verb “Arose,” but then reproduces the imagery in stanza 1, only this time, “A girl” presides over those images and “rewrites” them in a way that reflects Yeats’s despair. The moon ascends an “empty sky,” and the leaves’ “lamentation leave no doubt that the presence of Helen now dominates and even supersedes nature as a force impelling Yeats’s imagination. For Yeats, Maud Gonne will always be his muse.