BIBLIOTHERAPY
David Waller finds in the poetry of W.B. Yeats a life-affirming challenge to the chaos and uncertainties of the world
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF W.B. YEATS
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was first introduced to the poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) at school more than 30 years ago. We parsed the works of this mystical Irish poet, understanding very little but mesmerised by his verse, the strangeness of his language and imagery. I still possess the yellow-covered volume of his Collected Poems (1979), complete with my schoolboy scrawls of incomprehension alongside such poems as ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ , ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ . I turn to this whenever I am looking for the nearreligious consolation of perfect beauty in language. Some of his early poems are exquisitely melancholy, such as ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (1899), about a poor man who has no riches to cast at the feet of his beloved, so he spreads his dreams at her feet. ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams, ’ he says. I defy anyone who listens to Ian Bostridge singing this to music by Thomas Dunhill, or indeed Benjamin Britten’s 1943 setting of ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ (1889), not to be moved to tears. Other poems have attained the status of near-cliché now, like ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1888), where the young poet found ‘Peace comes dropping slow’; or the Irish airman foreseeing his death, who ‘balanced all, brought all to mind’ , in coming to the conclusion that a lonely, exalted end in the ‘tumult of the skies’ was far better than a long life of mundane mediocrity. Yeats remains a controversial character: he flirted with fascism and in old age had an operation to restore his
Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1933), 1979 edition.
libido, supposedly involving the insertion of monkey glands (hence earning himself the nickname ‘the gland old man of Irish literature’). He had some plain loopy ideas about the spirit world. But put aside doubts about his politics and the details of his personal life, and you will find a poem for virtually every mood. His writing combines the intensely intimate, with the
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I defy anyone who listens to Ian Bostridge singing “Cloths of Heaven” not to be moved to tears
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arcane and the public. If forced to choose, one favourite is ‘The Second Coming’ . This great poem of 1919 starts with the famous line ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ , and ends with the despairing question: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ Often interpreted as a prophecy of totalitarianism and the Second World War (in reality, too early for that), to me it captures all the uncertainty and instability that we still feel in the world today – whether we look at the state of the economy or merely the book trade. The poem does not offer any answers except to demonstrate the power of art to create meaning and beauty where otherwise there is chaos or, worse, pure evil. Another is ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ (1918), written to commemorate the Irish airman who was the son of his muse and mentor Isabelle Augusta, Lady Gregory. Having just moved into his new home, Yeats evokes the presence of a succession of friends who due to the ‘discourtesy of death’ (a classic Yeatsian phrase) cannot be there for the housewarming. The poem celebrates the values of friendship, companionship and home, idealising the young Major Gregory as a modern Renaissance man, ‘as twere all life’s epitome’ . Although his life was cut short, he lived not like those who burn damp faggots (bundles of twigs), but rather consuming ‘the entire combustible world’ in a flare of excitement and activity. Like all Yeats’s best poems, this one is slightly mad, somewhat difficult to understand, and profoundly life-affirming.
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