POETS Day! Yeats and Graves and the Moon

Robert Graves, W.B. Yeats, Mother, Maiden, Crone... But most importantly, I make my poetic debut.

Illustrated by Rene Sears

Years ago, I was writing a POETS Day about the Australian poet Judith Wright. I’ve written here that I’m a fan of Poetry Foundation’s website because they do a great job putting together mini-bios of poets with links to their works, etc. There wasn’t one for Wright even though they mention in the mini-bios of others that this poet or that was winner of the prestigious Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

I sent an email to whoever the intern is that has to answer @info type email and surprisingly got a response. “Thank you for pointing out the oversight…”, “We need to rectify…”, etc. Most importantly, they asked me if I had any suggestions about which of her poems to feature along with her bio page.

There’s still no bio page, but that’s unimportant. Poetry Foundation is an outgrowth of the legendary Poetry magazine founded by Harriet Monroe. She had a bigger hand in shaping Modern Poetry than most; maybe than anyone. She consulted giants like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. And now, through other means, her publication was consulting me. This led to my frequently making irrefutably truthful statements like, “Poetry magazine, which has sought editorial advice from people like Eliot, Pound, and me…”

Anyway, I was reading a poem yesterday and it became so obvious to me that the poet got stuck in a rhythm that didn’t work with a rhyme scheme that he couldn’t maintain but had passed the point of abandoning his sunk costs and pressed on.

I giggled and wrote down these lines:

That Dreadful Rhyme
(Ben Sears 1973 – )

It’s never wise to train their eyes
With early rhymes in early times
Because you’re stuck, a fool for luck,
Inventing ways to stretch the phrase
And keep in time that dreadful rhyme
You rue you’d ever started.

And at an electronic click sending this post live, with that bit of light verse I am a published poet. Going forward in truth and irrefutability, “Poetry magazine, which has sought editorial advice from poets like Eliot, Pound, and me…”

It’s POETS Day! Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Abandon whatever sunk cost you’ve invested in the workday and cut it short. The weekend starts when you decide.

But first, some other verse.

***

According to a Goodreads review page info blurb, the literary critic and W.B. Yeats biographer Richard Ellmann wrote that with the poets 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds, “Yeats set the method for the modern movement.” Again, from a blurb and I have no verification that he wrote or said that, but it “rings true,” to borrow a phrase from spy craft.

The book I see mentioned most often as Yeat’s great turn, the work that distinguished him, is In the Seven Woods, published in 1903. There’s good reason. In the Seven Woods marks a turn from Romanticism to less fanciful poetry. Walter Savage Landor is said to be an inspiration for this turn and while not direct evidence, the ever impressionable fetichist Ezra Pound spent a great deal of time under Yeats wing (as a defacto apprentice, though I suspect Pound would say it was a collaboration and exchange of ideas among equals or some such) and later wrote deferentially, worshipfully, of Landor. I suspect he picked up the admiration from his collaborative mentor.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is hailed as the Beatles’ best, often as the best, album. I like The White Album more. Sgt Pepper was an announcement that they had the lay of the land and were headed off in a revolutionary direction. The White Album seems to me the aftermath; them having made a stir and let us all know, and then writing and playing as emancipated. They had agency, were beholden to no one, unrestrained, and did as they pleased, free to experiment. Consider my appraisal of those two albums, replace with the Yeats books, and then reverse the order.

In the Seven Woods was his declaration of a new direction, but coming after The Wind Among the Reeds. The decision to go where and write as he wished was made without fanfare and the splashy (by poetic standards and lesser still by Yeats’s reserved standards) change of direction came later, as a result. The Wind is romantically inspired and knocked for an unapproachable measure of Irish folk and fairy business that’s impenetrable without frequent reference breaks. It’s worth the breaks. The Wind is music from an early major poet whose instincts are on display at a point when his approach neared a cusp.

It’s best read as a whole. If you’re interested, there’s a free but horribly typeset download from Project Gutenberg or this charming scan of an old copy, with someone’s illegible penciled-in notes, from Internet Archive. I can’t keep up with the twisty Internet Archive legal battles but last I heard they stopped stealing copyrighted work and are making nice with decent people. If I’m wrong, sorry. The Wind is past all that and in public domain and the link above is to an older publication past rights as I understand them. The penciled in notes are not dated.

In her article “The Love Poems of The Wind Among the Reeds: A Circle Drawn around the Absolute” (Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, Highlights of the Northeast Student Conference (Mar.,1979)), Joan Dayan writes of the book, “Primary icon in his search for an eternal beauty coeval with God is the figure of the ‘white woman whom passion has worn/As the waves wear the dove-grey sand,’ from ‘A Poet to his Beloved.’”

A POET TO HIS BELOVED
(W. B. Yeats 1865-1939)

I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams;
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-gray sands,
And with heart more old than the horn
That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:
White woman with numberless dreams
I bring you my passionate rhyme.

Her article gets mixed up in academia speak but there are interesting points discernable through attempts to impress with cant. Though, to get to those points, you have to get past this eyebrow-lifter on page two:

“The convention of this world-weary woman, ‘vague, many imaged’ with ‘the strength of the moon’ is by no means original with Yeats. But no other English poet in the Romantic or Paterian tradition realized the exacting stylistic qualifications this image of ineffable purity elicited.”

She does a very good job with the “ineffable purity elicited,” suggesting poems in the collection form pieces of a “husk” around an indescribable “null” so, though not capable of being conveyed, we get a sense of the author’s sense of awe. That’s fine and well handled. The eyebrow-lifting bit is that she’s tossed Yeats in among the English. She’s just inviting troubles.

The Christian thing to do would be to assume she meant “in the English language” when she wrote “English.” But she didn’t. And if she did, it seems like a pretty big slip. “No other English poet” from Sandymount, County Dublin is as identified with Irish independence or as a preserver of Irish folklore as Yeats. That’s such a “Hey… wait a minute” that the meat of her assertion gets forgotten for the side-eyeing.

Paterian refers to theories on literature and art propounded by Walter Pater. As I understand it, his ideas melded with or became Aestheticism, which is fairly malleable. At the very least, its edges blur. I wouldn’t put Robert Graves down as an Aesthetic. If I’m wrong and he is, then Dayan’s assertion is flat wrong. If I’m right, and he isn’t, he’s the reason she had to affix the qualifier “in the Romantic or Paterian tradition.” No English poet in any tradition “realized the exacting stylistic qualifications this image of ineffable purity elicited,” as fully as Graves, and he wasn’t Irish.

I have a thumbed through copy of Graves’s great poetic thesis, The White Goddess. I’ve never read it through, treating it as a reference book I read a chapter of here and there. Maybe over the years I’ve got the whole, but I’ll claim it as something I’m familiar with rather than something I know. The blurb (I’m big on blurbs this week, I guess) on the back from some noble soul at The Noonday Press (A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux who deserve a “[sic]” after “Straus” for not using an Oxford comma on the back cover of a book by an Oxford lecturer) does a pretty succinct job of teasing:

“The eldest European deity was the White Goddess of Birth, Love [sic] and Death, visibly appearing as the New, Full [good grief] and Old Moon, and worshipped under countless titles. She was beautiful, generous, fickle, wise, implacable.”

Yeats does a wonderful job with the ineffable, but Graves devoted his career to her.

The White Goddess
Robert Graves (1895-1985)

All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by Apollo’s golden mean –
In scorn of which we sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom we desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.

Hecate, goddess of the moon and her three faces, the phased moon, the mysteries and wonders attached to womanhood; all inform Graves’s poetry. He’s awed and cowed and conquering as needed. That he is privleged at times or troubled at times to adapt as She changes is a theme throughout his work, excepting that focusing on his war experience. Graves’s tone conveys that he should adapt and accommodate even when annoyed.

The Three-Faced

Who calls her two-faced? Faces, she has three:
The first is inscrutable, for the outer world;
The second shrouded in self-contemplation;
The third, her face of love,
Once for an endless moment turned on me.

In life, Graves wasn’t such a good adapter. Rather, he adapted fairly often by finding a new muse, even if it was just for a few months or so before going back to the old muse. Whether there were phases he couldn’t abide or whether Laura Riding or whoever his moon goddess of the moment wasn’t tripartating regularly enough for him, he had to effect change by other means I’ll leave up to discretion. I’m reminded of a Kids in the Hall sketch:

Dave: Yes, I had to. You see, she was a woman, and I happen to love all women. In fact that’s why she threw the drink.
Bruce: I see, she found your love too interesting, too intense, too…jackhammer.
Dave: No…not specific enough.
Bruce: I see, she was upset that you were loving other women. In her narrow way, she presumed that you were…cheating on her.
Dave: Yes, but wasn’t I really only cheating myself?

He directly referenced the three faces archetype at least twice. I feel like there’s another out there if only for symmetry’s sake, but these are the ones I could find. This next poem pulls the trinity from her and makes it a creature of his perception. It’s part of his understanding. He’s exploring. There are a few ways to look at this because in his exploring he’s muddied the waters terribly. He’s allowing that the myth he’s ascribed to woman, this moon goddess aura, is a projection. It may be that his projection is a reaction to something innate in her, invented in him, or a form independent that imprints from neither. Muddied.

Three Times in Love

You have now fallen three times in love
With the same woman, first indeed blindly
And at her blind insistence;

Next with your heart alive to the danger
Of what hers might conceal, although such passion
Strikes nobly and for ever;

Now at last, deep in dream, transported
To her rose garden on the high ridge,
Assured that there she can deny you
No deserved privilege,
However controvertible or new.

This final is my favorite of his treatments. We have maiden, mother, crone, though not in that order. He knows Her as a child, a lover, and, in disbelief with a sense of loss, an aging companion.

The Sweet-Shop Round the Corner

The child dreaming along a crowded street
Lost hold of his mother, who had turned to greet
Some neighbour, and mistakenly matched his tread
With a stranger woman’s. ‘Buy me some sweets,’ he said,
Waving his hand, which he found warmly pressed;
So dragged her on, boisterous and self-possessed:
‘The sweet-shop’s round the corner!’ Both went in,
And not for a long while did the child begin
To feel a dread that something had gone wrong:
Were Mother’s legs so lean, or her shoes so long,
Or her skirt so patched, or her hair tousled and grey?
Why did she twitter in such a ghostly way?
‘O Mother, are you dead?’
What else could a child say?

Maybe The Wind Among the Reeds is Revolver.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]