Self-imagery in the
Poetry of W. B. Yeats
The first aim of W. B. Yeats’s
Self-
characterizations is to dramatize his personality a self-referential with direct, passionate speech. His strategies differ according to the subject, theme, and occasion, but his self-referential
poems show how autobiography (with linked images and allusions) informs the carefully arranged mythology of his personal utterance.
To achieve this passionate personal utterance, Yeats adopts a poetic mask to present a credible, unsentimental, discursive tone. Without the mask as a distancing device, Yeats’s self-characterizations could easily degenerate into mere self-expression. The artifice of an extroverted persona (his anti-self) allows him an emotional buffer between personal passion and self-pity. One way he gets his points across without hand wringing is to exploit a grammatical demarcation. In “Adam’s Curse,” for example, Yeats objectifies the toil and pain of creating poetry and beauty by using the plural pronouns “we” and “us.” Even the “I” that closes the last stanza in the historical present sounds more statemental than subjective.
To realize how drastically the mode of self-
Characterization determines the poem’s tone (and thus its emotive message) one could change the voice to the first person: “A line will take me hours” or “My stitching and unstitching.” Yeats’s strategy for using himself in this poem or that calls for dramatizing rather than sympathizing. Such self-characterizations highlight an attitude or theme without spotlighting the speaker as a wholly self-referential “I and only I.”
Yeats characterizes himself in “Adam’s Curse” as lover and poet discussing with Maude Gonne and another woman elevated notions of rigor and style in poetry, beauty, and love. In one of the Yeats-Gonne variations, love diminishes over time like the pastel, hollowed moon. More significantly, “Adam’s Curse” marks a turning point in Yeats’s style of self-projection from the pastoral manifesto of “The Happy Shepherd” and symbol-brocaded “The Wanderings of Oisin” to a conversational tone and modernized form.
Yeats carries several arrows in his rhetorical quiver. In “The Cold Heaven” the crossed-love theme surfaces within a sudden epiphany of a cosmic over-arching, an incident of dreaming-back after death (an occult notion elaborated in A Vision), and a closing question. The strategy of “A Prayer for My
Daughter,” on the other hand, takes advantage of the conventions of address inherent in an apostrophe. “The Tower” tumbles through an acceptable testamentary discursiveness, and “Dialogue of Self and
Soul” uses the strategy of an interior debate to introduce a Nietzschean dithyramb of tragic joy and cyclic recurrence.
If “Adam’s Curse” represents a change in Yeats’s style, “Dialogue of Self and Soul” represents a change in his attitude. He dramatizes his own internal conflicts as opposites and reconciles them with a Dionysian credo. Self-mastery replaces lamentation. Sato’s blade, an unspotted soul-symbol, replaces pastel weariness, remorse, and longing. Heaven is no longer cold. Ecstatic recurrence replaces unforgiving punishment; reality replaces romantic dreaminess and dislocated desire. Instead of a battered kettle in “The Tower” the body becomes the sheaf of the timeless sword-as-soul.
“Dialogue of Self and Soul” also exemplifies one of Yeats’s favorite modes of self-characterization—summoning memories to maintain a coherent context for his self-characterizations, and thereby dramatizing his evolving outlook. Friends and associates serve as supporting actors; concrete items in his daily life—restored tower, Sato’s blade, the wind off the coast—become emblems or props in complex meditative poems. Over time, his self-characterization becomes something of a self-institutionalization—he carries his own frame of public reference. Yeats’s poems enumerates old themes well before he writes “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” The specimen poems here, especiaally “The Tower” and “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” enumerate themes found in poems only; the wayward circus animals emblematize themes found in his narrative and dramatic writings.
In “A Prayer for My Daughter” Yeats dramatizes public and internal opposites to show his way with of thinking and feeling. From his convulsive experience with Maude Gonne’s violent politics he draws the antitheses of those aristocratic qualities he invokes for his daughter—beauty, custom, ceremony, innocence, kindness, emotional balance, and domestic rootedness—symbolized by the centered, sheltering, spreading laurel tree. Cf. the chestnut tree in “Among School Children.” His self-characterization, based on the old dictum that the style is the man, includes a compulsive interweaving of images and symbols as a recurrent, personalized code.)
The prayer that his daughter avoid social turmoil and political hatred illustrates the role of accumulated self-characterization as one of the apparent objections of his poetry.
In this sense, his poems cannot be isolated without a contextual loss. Precedents from old books in “Adam’s Curse” become the precedents from Yeats’s own previous books of poetry. Thus it is insufficient to read “A Prayer for My Daughter” without the context and carry-over connotations from Yeats’s anguishing Maude Gonne poems, nasty public controversies, feminine militancy, and Dublin’s political paltriness. Similarly, the virtues he envisions for his daughter incorporate his self-dramatizations in a dozen poems idealizing the aristocratic environs of the Gregorys’ Coole Park. The central point is that Yeats’s self-characterizations are not supplements to the poems but increments to his ideal of the unity of self.
More reviews about the Self-Imagery in Yeats's Collected Poems