Yeats Image

7/31/2019 Yeats Image

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YEATS'S CONCEPT OF IMAGE

D. C. AGARWALA

Lecturer in English, Rajasthan University

The word image is not merely a recurring symbol in the poetry and prosewritings of W.B. Yeats; it is central to the entire poetic metaphysical systemwhich he sought to formulate. This concept is, however, not destructive of theantinomies; as a matter of fact there would be no need of image-formation hadthe physical forms and shapes not been subject to decay and death. If beautyand youth were eternal, metaphysics and philosophy would cease to exist. It isonly to make eternal what is transitory that the need of image may be realised.

Thus it is not surprising that a word should accomplish so much; Yeatsssymbols often exhaust the levels on which the poet contemplates. The wordimage, in its non-referential meaning, has connotations whose application to

Yeatss metaphysics has as much validity as to his poetics. The aestheticreligion that the poet envisaged for himself and which was to him the legacy ofthe pre-Raphaelites and of the nineties could be effected by the area ofsuggestiveness covered by his use of the word image. In this paper I shallattempt to suggest the relevance of the multiple meanings that this word ismade to yield in the context of Yeatss poetics and also how Yeats offered adifferent and altogether new approach to the problem of art-metaphysicsrelationship which had confronted Plato and Aristotle and to which eachphilosopher had his own answer to offer. To say all this is to suggest that Yeatshad a theory of image; having suggested this one is faced with the problem ofcomparing and contrasting Yeatss theory with the theory of image or imagismpreached and practised by Hulme, Ezra Pound and others of that group.

I

Before actually attempting the task outlined in the introductory paragraph, it isrelevant in the interest of a better understanding of Yeatss concept of image,to digress a little and to work out a more subtle distinction: the one between asymbol and an image. Yeatss name is inextricably associated with the moderndevelopment of symbolism in English literature. He began his career as a poetwith an utter disregard for rhetoric as against symbols and symbolismthepowerful agents of imagination and poetic creativityaccording to Yeats. At allstages Yeats, in his efforts to define symbolism, is keen to suggest the poetic-metaphysical implications. He writes:

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, atransparent lamp about a spiritual flame! (Symbolism in Poetry: Essays andIntroduction, London. 1961. p. 163)

Yeats distinguishes between allegory and symbol also:

I find that though I love symbolism, which is often the only fitting speech formsome mystery of disembodied life, I am for the most part bored by allegory,which is made, as Blake says, by the daughters of memory; and coldly, with no


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wizard frenzy. (Essays-1924 p. 474)

Yeatss illustration of the concept of symbolism from Burnss poet does notexclude the metaphysical overtones:

There are no lines with more meloncholy beauty than these lines by Burns:

The white moon is setting behind the white waves,

And time is setting with me O!

And these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness of themoon and the wave, whose relation to the setting of time is too subtle for theintellect and you take from them their beauty. But, when all are together,moon and wave and whiteness and setting time and the last melancholy cry,they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement ofcolours and sounds and forms.

A little later in the same essay Yeats writes:

All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energiesor because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or,as I prefer to think, call down among us, certain disembodied powers whosefootsteps over our hearts we call emotions. (Ideas of Good and Evil. pp. 241,242 and 243)

For Yeats, as for all symbolist poets, symbols help to solve the poetic-metaphysical dilemma. Through symbols these poets hint, however,indistinctly, at the deeper and imperceptible reality. Thus, for Verlaine, poetryis like the blue eyes behind the veil (les bleus yeux derier du voil) andBaudelaire dwells meditatively on the suggestive correspondences betweenthe real and the make-believe.

This is not to suggest that Yeatss theory of image is, in any essential point,different and a departure from his idea of symbolism. It is at best a furtherdevelopment of his concept of symbolism and this may be deduced from areading of his poetry and of his philosophic system A Vision.

For the purpose of our present study the distinction suggested between asymbol represented by the figure of 1, for example, and an image assomething vague and irrational is too mathematical and not serviceable. In

Yeatss sense, an image has more metaphysical connotations than a symbol;

accordingly, an image is largely representative of the spiritual reality and itachieves a philosophic sanction too without being deprived of the poeticsuggestiveness of a symbol. Images, thus, more appropriately, form thecontent of which symbols are the only fitting and successful medium ofcommunication. It is possible, writes Yeats, to separate an emotion or aspiritual state from the image that calls it up and gives it expression. This isably stated by a critic: what can be announced in the pulpit is not that forwhich the altar was built and symbolism is most often the only possiblelanguage for the expression of spiritual realities. (Graham Hough: The Last


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Romantics. p. 228) Philosophically an image is an abstraction and correspondsto the universal idea or reality behind the flux of things. It is the eternalessence which exists in the mind or the memory; the phenomenal world is itsexpression. In his poem Among the School Children Yeats conveys the ideasuccinctly: after arguing what mother would congratulate herself for the pangsof her child-birth when she sees her son at the age of sixty (a lean old man),

Yeats resolves the dilemma by suggesting that mothers, lovers and nunsworship images only. Thus an image, though only an idea, is not destructive ofthe phenomenon which suggests it. The concept of Yeatss image may now bedistinguished from the imagism of Ezra Pound and others. It will presently bediscovered that there is little common or corresponding between the two:nothing can be imagined to be more distant from Yeatss ideal than EzraPounds ideal of an image concrete, sharply delineated, hard and clear, notblurred or diffuse, which in Platos words would perhaps mean the imitation ofan imitation after sufficient allowance has been made for the poeticsensuousness in its presentation. The imagism of Hulme and Pound was areaction against the vagueness and haziness of the Romantic poetry; Yeatsstheory of image is, to that extent, a reaction against the rigid inflexibility of the

imagist movement. The image, according to Pound, was more or less a counterdevoid of suggestiveness and idealism. On the contrary, an image to Yeats, issomething which is super-terrestrial. In this article I shall attempt to show thatwith this concept of an image Yeats seems to resolve the poetic metaphysicaldilemma which he faced squarely and this he is able to do without at the sametime denying the significance of the phenomenal world.

II

The term image in Yeatss poetics acquires an unmistakable extension ofmeaning as a result of the poets attempt to identify art with religion andmetaphysics. Yeats thus created not only a new concept of art but also a new

theology highly developed and extremely complex because it accounted forthe passage of entire time and history. The poet, quite early when he chose tobe a symbolist poet, had rejected the possibilities of his accepting aconventional religion. What was commonplace and conventionl was inartisticand had little appeal to the exotic and mystery loving mind of Yeats.Identifying his religion with Blakes, Yeats wrote:

He (Blake) announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in theworld he knew....In his time educated people believed that they amusedthemselves with books of imagination, but they made their souls by listeningto sermons and by doing or not doing certain things...In our time we are agreedthat we make our souls out of some one of the great poets of ancient times or

out of Shelley or Wordsworth or Goethe or Blake or Flaubert or Count Tolstoy,in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser orderor out of Mr. Whistlers pictures, while we amuse ourselves or at least make apoorer sort of soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certainthings. (Essays. 1924. p. 137)

Finally Yeats succeeded, through the agency of his wife, to create a new andcomplex mythological order, based on the cyclic concept of history. This newmythology was highly personal and religion, sorcery, art, philosophy went into


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the making of it. With the help of it Yeats was largely successful in evolving apoetic-metaphysical concept of art. Accordingly the artist, on this creative-ontological plane, was the saint also who, in order to achieve an image of hisown, had to undergo the same kind of fleshly or physical dissolution as theByzantium saints did for their spiritual purification. Decidedly the artisticprocess to Yeats was analogous to the spiritual one. The poet therefore

implores the Byzantium saints in the holy fire of the mosaic wall to teach himto consume the complexities of mire and blood so that he too is enabled toachieve his spiritual-poetic expiation:

O sages standing in Gods 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.

Clearly the word image to Yeats is synonymous with soul and Yeats used theone quite frequently to suggest the other. In an early poem Youth and Age

Yeats assures Augusta Gregory that he loves the fleeting soul in her so that healone of all her lovers will continue to love her even though she grows old anddyes her hair and uses other devices to look young. In another beautiful lyricBefore the World was Made the beloved employs all sorts of artistic devices inan attempt to recapture her conceptual or abstract loveliness and thus seeksto reduce herself to her original Image:

If I make the lashes dark

And the eyes more bright

And the lips more scarlet,

Or ask if all be right

From mirror after mirror,

No vanitys displayed:

Im looking for the face I had

Before the world was made.


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One could even go farther and suggest that the beloved, in an attempt tochange herself into an art-image, is anxious to reduce herself to the picture ofthe single lovely woman which Platos philosopher contemplates.

III

An image, as Yeats viewed it, is an artifice of eternity; it alone, like the soul,is eternal and triumphant over the change and flux. Hindu mind which seemsto have considerably and materially influenced Yeats, has pondered deeply onthe nature of human soul. In this section it will be pointed out how parallelisticto Hindu conception of soul is Yeatss idea and nature of image. The soul, solong as it dwells in this world, is unable to realist its significance and greatness;it is entangled and absorbed into what is known as the mystery of the fivesenses or what the Hindus term it as Maya or Prapanchjal. The unpurgedimages of the day, according to Yeats, are likewise embedded into the bloodand mire of human veins. By consuming the lusts and desires of the flesh into a

kind of holy fire, the image, according to Yeats, acheives its purity. So long ashis heart is tied to the dying animal, the poet or the would-be saint will fail torealize his antithetical self as well as the abstract purity of the image-soul. Hecannot acquire that objectivity or serenity of mind which is absolutely desirablefor poetic creation. So long as the flesh is powerful and the image is slave to it,the image is in the state of impurity and will be born again and again into itsimpure state until by some conscious effort perhaps it achieves its expiationand finally enters the purgatory of pure art. It is true that this art-imageachieves its redemption by being purged into the glowing intensity of thesupernatural fire; it is, like the soul as Hindus conceive of it, is immortal andinvulnerable. As Yeats himself suggested, the supernatural form of the image ispurified by a fire which is itself kept by the glow and intensity of t purified

images:

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flames,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And complexities of fury leave

Dying into a dance

Into agony of trance.

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Moreover, the image has been compared by Yeats to the Hades bobbin as it isfreed from temporal needs and physical decay and shares the wisdom of theages:

For Hades bobbin bound in mummy cloth

May unwind the winding path,


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A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the supernatural;

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.The impersonality of this aesthetic image is created by the poet by undergoingan extreme type of restraint and rigorous discipline. The annihilation of the lureof senses is the first requisite for the piety of the soul-image. Discipline andrestraint are the attributes which distinguish a saint or an artist from anordinary mortal. A dancer, for example, by constant and regular practice ofrhythmic movements disciplines his body so perfectly as to render it impossiblefor others to distinguish the dancer from the dance. All thoughts and desiresget themselves merged into the supreme achievement of the antithetical self.

Yeats wrote:

Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every

loved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knowsnothing of desire, for desire implies effort, and though there is still separationfrom the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its ownexistence. As all effort has ceased, all thought has become image...and everyimage is separate from every other, for image were linked to image, the soulwould awake from its immovable trance.

This idea has been poetically rendered in the following line of Yeatss poems:

O little did they care who danced between

And little she by whom her dance was seen

So she had outdanced thought

Body perfection brought.

It is by this kind of rigorous process of fieshly mortification that the artist isobjectified into an art-object. The images on the marble floor in the city ofByzantium dance and burn themselves into an agony of trance. Once theprocess of poetic impersonalisation is complete and the image realisation is

effected, i.e., once out of nature the image may or may never take a bodilyform. It then seeks identity and bears close correspondence with other artobjects such as the birds and trees which

...Gracian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling


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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.

Only by thus reducing himself to art-image does the poet seek to achieve hisown impersonality and universality in poetry:

By the help of an image

I call to my opposite, summon all

That I have handled least, least looked upon.

The idea that the poets opposite or his antithetical self will result from anobjectification of experience and personality is suggested by Yeats with thehelp of his theory of Mask. Yeats wrote:

...and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary inhabitants, half planneda new method and a new culture. My mind began drifting vaguely towards thatdoctrine of The Mask which hat convinced me that every passionate man...is,as it were, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone hefinds images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as thenationalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some RomanEmperors image in his head and some Condottiers blood in his heart.

(Autobiographies.p.152).

It may however be added by way of comment that the accoount of the poet asa medium or vehicle only for achieving poet impersonality as suggested by

Yeats is more satisfying than one attempted by T. S. Eliot who wrote:

.my meaning is, that the poet has, not a personality to express, but aparticular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality in whichimpressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

Eliot, here seems to postulate a duality of poetic personality; though the poetis only a medium while absorbed in the process of poetic creation, he yet

expresses experiences and impressions which, in all probability, are his ownirrespective of the fact that they are gathered from all sides and directions.Otherwise, one is tempted to know as to whose experiences these are that thepoet seeks to express when reduced to a poetic medium. Yeats seems to haveconceived of the poet as a medium only and the poetic process begins not byexpressing his ideas and experiences for at this stage he has none of his own.

The poet, while engaged in the poetic process, makes himself an abstractionand thereby participates in the abstract life lying behind the phenomenal flux.


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The poet is thus a medium only for conveying those abstract images which hisown soul lives and associates with. Yeatss explanation of the poetic mediumand of the impersonality of the artist has the merit of being more satisfyingand conclusive.

Iv

Closely related to the idea of the depersonalisation of the image is the questionof universality in poetry. It may be pointed out that universality in Yeatsspoetics extends not only in space but in time also. It is both vertical as well ashorizontal. Largely dependent on the horizontal nature of the universality of

Yeatss image is the poets cyclic concept of history. The image, like the soul,once it enters the purgatory of a poem, can summon other souls and images aspure and intense as itself. Thus a purged image

Planted on the star-lit golden bough,

Can like the cocks of Hades crow

and then there rush spirits after spirits and.

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget.

The idea suggested seems to be that once the poet has disembodied anddepersonalised himself, the whole universe becomes dematerialised for him.

The poet then looks into the nature of things and every soul pours out, as itwere, its secret to the poet. As to the man in Baudelaires sonnetCorrespondences who moves through a forest of symbols where each pillarnods familiarly, so to the poet the entire universe, dematerialised and

decomposed, seems to participate in the intense creativity of a poem. If thereare still some unpurged images, the marble of the dancing floor breaks bitterfuries of complexity. Each shade then becomes more of an image and eachcorporeal bird more of a miracle. Thus the poet and the abstract universe areone. Over the communion of the individual with the universal, the poetcomments:

Anyone who has any experience of any mystical state of the soul knows howthere float up in the mind profound symbols, whose meaning...one does notperhaps understand for years. Nor I think any one has known that experiencewith any constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some oldmonument, a strange or intricate image, that floated up before him, and togrow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little memories are buta part of some great memory that renews the world and mens thoughts ageafter age...

(Essays. p. 96)

Yeatss view of history suggests that there is a cyclic growth of civilization andthat according to the correspondence of the period between the twocivilizations the image of the one may be born into that of the other. Thecorrespondence of these images is, however, conveyed with the help of


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symbols. Helen, the symbol of beauty and destruction, may be reborn in theperson of Maud Gonne to destroy another Troy or it may be reborn in thatpeasant girl Mary Haynes referred to in his poems The Tower and Dust HathClosed Helens Eyes. Yeats, for all one can say, is himself the last of theRomantics mounting once

.in the saddle Homer rode,

Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

Or the Homer-image may be reborn in the blind poet Raftery:

Strange but the man who made the song was blind;

Yet now I have considered it, I find

That nothing strange; the tragedy began

With Homer that was a blind man

And Helen hath all living hearts betrayed.

There is another poem by Yeats in which the whole Irish scene is visualized asone on Olympus and each Irish figure corresponds to an important key-imagefrom the Greek civilization of about 2,500 years ago. Yeatss belief in magicand magical practices has contributed not a little to the creative-metaphysicaltheories. In the essay The Magic Yeats recorded three doctrines which are thefoundation of magic and poetry. These doctrines are

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting and that many minds can

flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a singleenergy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting and that our memories area part of one great memory, the memory of Nature itself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols (TheIdeas of Good and Evil. p. 29)

V

Yeatss attitude to philosophy seems to have been unfavourable for a longtime. He whipped Plato, Aristotle and the later Platonists for ignoring the fact ofphysical decay:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;


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Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle stick or stringsWhat a star sang and careless muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scarce a bird.

Yeats, in his early study of these philosophers, had thought that philosophy aspropounded by these philosophers is all transcendence and not emanatingfrom perceptual reality. As it took no account of physical decay and suffering itwas largely unsatisfactory. Philosophy as such, it seemed to Yeats, did notaccount for the antinomies but sought to resolve them:

And I declare my faith

I mock Plotinus thought

And cry in Platos teeth

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

And the proud stones of Greece,

Poets imaginings

And memories of love,

Memories of the words of women,

All those things whereof

Man makes a superhuman

Mirror-resembling dream,

Later on Yeats adds a note of correction to these lines:

When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus, I forgot that it is something inour eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence. Has not Plotinuswritten: Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the


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author of all living things.

Evidently Yeats readjusted his attitude to philosophy (cf. It is myself I remake)which he subsequently considered as the; only relevant compensation andoccupation for the old age. In order to remake his soul Yeats turned tophilosophy and he sacrificed his youthful nostalgic desires for the greater need

of studying monuments of magnificence.

Yeatss theory of image is thus not only aesthetically and metaphysicallysignificant, it is an answer to the problem of art-reality relationship posed byPlato also. There are resemblances between Plato and Yeats: the formersdoctrine of soul and Yeats concept of image. The parallelism between Platosconcept soul as a spindle and Yeatss notion of image as a perne in a gyreweaving and unweaving the thread of experience can hardly be missed.

Yeatss idea of the cyclic movement which is counted differently by differentphilosophers corresponds closely to the Hindu concept of Kalpa and theMagnus Annus of the Platonists. At the end of each civilization the Christ orDionysus form will emerge to teach the process of unwinding the thread. Both

Plato and Yeats emphasize reality as abstraction. It is an idea or essence. LikePlato, Yeats also believed that the idea reality is the sole survivor; all otherobjects are imitations manifestations of this reality. It is however in hisconception of art and art-objects that Yeats seems to differ sharply from Platoand suggests an altogether new approach to the Platonic problem of art-realityrelationship. Plato exalted the philosopher at the expense of the artist.Whereas the philosopher occupies a conspicuously prominent place in PlatosRepublic, the poet is banished from there for he, it is presumed, is at thefarthest removes from reality and as such his output has only a perniciouseffect on the life of the Republic. Aristotle, Platos disciple, improved on hismasters fallacy by arguing that the poet is a creator. He faces reality directlyand creates new forms and shapes which are the mimesis or imitation of

reality. Thus he established that the poet is not a servile imitator that Platoimagined him to be but truly a creator in the Greek sense of the word. Yeatsseems to have gone farther and to improve upon the Aristotelian argument byeliminating altogether the idea of imitation in the context of art. The poetsconcern, according to Yeats, is to create images; and though the worldlyimages are often unpurged the poet, before employing them in art, purges byreducing them to their original concept. The artist thus deals with the ideas orabstractions. In this sense art parts company with life or mere living. It neithercreates life nor imitates it. The question of verisimilitude to life will be absurdto think of in the present context. Yeatss attitude to life is one of characteristicindifference. Borrowing a phrase from Leconte de LIsle, Yeats also said Live!No doubt our servants will do that for us. Art, according to the poet, has a life

of its own; it teems with intensity. Thus the poets concern is the same as thatof the philosopher. Plato exalted the philosopher-king; Yeats exalted the poetto the philosophers status. The poet is moreover the goldsmith of Byzantiumwho breaks the flood and after purifying the images sets them on a goldenbough. All images of the past are thus associated and merged with the purifiedimages:

All perform their tragic play,


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There struts Hamlet, there Lear

Thats Ophelia, that Cordelia,...

To live like an image is to live the life of poetry. Contrasted with the life ofpoetry or imagination is, according to Yeats, the life of rhetoric, of

Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man

Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn

Cradle upon cradle and all in fight and all

Deformed because there is no deformity

But saves from a dream.

Opposed to this life of rhetoric again is the life of the dreamer, of the man ofimagination and of crazy man, of the fool or the philosopher who,contemplating of reality, endeavours to be the reality himself. This is the life ofthe artistpainter, musician, dancer and poet, of the young lovers and the saintand the nuns and the mothers who are anxious to achieve their antithetical selfworshipping images and by endeavouring to be that which they love andadore.

Sailing to Byzantium

Symbolism: The use of symbolism is very important throughout the poem. Thetitle of the poem Sailing to Byzantium contains 2 important symbols-: (a)Sailing which depicts a metaphorical journey and gives substance and aphysical aspect to what Yeats is trying to achieve. (b) Byzantium symbolizes aworld of artistic magnificence and permenance, conjuring up in the mind of thereader, a rich and inclusive culture such as that associated with the Byzantiumempire. The images of birds, fish and young lovers used by Yeats in the firststanza symbolises transience and mortality. Yeats highlights this aspect of the

world he lives in, so that the world which he seeks i.e. Byzantium, becomesmore clearly focused. In the second stanza Yeats uses the symbol of ascarecrow to represent the decrepitute of old age. The scarecrow is a repulsivelifeless image symbolising everything that Yeats wants to reject in his mortalexistence. The symbol of music and song runs through the poem providing aunified motif between the worlds of intellect and sensual worlds. In the openingstanza the song is that of the birds in the trees, a sensual though transientsong. In the second stanza he projects an image of a singing school a


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suggestion that the joy experienced in this artistic paradise is morecomporable than the joy of song. This idea is again repeated in stanza three. Inthe final stanza the song of the golden bird which entertains the lords andladies of Byzantium represents the intellectual joy to be experienced by Yeats.

The golden bird of the final stanza is a chosen image of the permenant formYeats wishes to take, in essence it represents durability which one associates

with the untarnishing quality of gold, by virtue of its physical permenancethere is the understood contribution of its song, thereby providing what Yeatshopes will be the representation of the artistic existence he yearns for.

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Yeats Image