From the Archive: Yeats (2000)

Billy Schraufnagel

English 125-8, Fayen

April 23, 2000

Yeats Paper

A Moment’s Thought Cased in Stone

In the poems “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” and “Lapis Lazuli,” W. B. Yeats portrays two artifacts that, while different, resonate very strongly with each other. Sato’s ancient blade from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” and the Chinese carving in “Lapis Lazuli” both seem to capture Yeats’s attention as he devotes many lines to describing each one. The character My Self in the former poem takes an entire stanza to describe the fantastic blade:

My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees

Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,

Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass

Unspotted by the centuries;

That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn

From some court-lady’s dress and round

The wooden scabbard bound and wound,

Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn. (“Dialogue”, 9-16).

A similar poetic mood is conveyed by Yeats’s depiction of the lapis lazuli carving:

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,

Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,

Over them flies a long-legged bird

A symbol of longevity;

The third, doubtless a serving-man,

Carries a musical instrument. (“Lapis Lazuli”, 37-42).

The two juxtaposed passages immediately yield some common impressions. A feeling of endurance over time emerges from “still as it was” and “Unspotted by the centuries” in the first poem and “a symbol of longevity” in the second. Great craftsmanship and grace seem evident in both artifacts as well, through the use of words like “consecrated,” “flowering,” “silken,” “carved,” and “long-legged bird.”

These almost holy artifacts are not without blemish, of course. As physical objects that have been handled in the physical world for many generations, they are subject to erosion. Though “Unspotted,” Sato’s blade has “tattered” and “faded” with time. The Lapis Lazuli contains “discolouration of the stone,” “accidental cracks,” and “dents” as revealed in the lines following the above-quoted passage (lines 43-44).

Yeats easily integrates these imperfections with the substance and power of each artifact. Poetically, the line, “Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn,” turns the adjective “tattered” directly into the verb “protect” and the adjective “faded” into the verb “adorn.” Likewise, the poet’s eye seemingly subconsciously converts physical flaws into scenic features on the Lapis Lazuli: “Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche, / Or lofty slope where it still snows” (lines 43-46). Examining these four lines even more closely shows Yeats moving numerically from 1-2-2-1 nouns per line. Seen as a sort of palindrome, discolouration becomes slope, crack becomes avalanche, and dent becomes water-course. Thus, through the structure of his poetry, Yeats fuses the material of the stone with the energy contained within it, as the sculpted scene. The substance of the art and that which the art seeks to represent or convey thus become inseparable.

As the descriptions of the two artifacts unfold, Yeats seems to approach more closely the vital energy contained within them. The story of the blade has already seeped through Yeats’s early description of it: the phrases “razor-keen”, “like a looking-glass”, and the “embroidery, torn / From some court-lady’s dress and round / The wooden scabbard bound and wound,” suggest a possible environment the blade was designed for and thrived in for some time. “Razor-keen” and “looking-glass” give a sense of a dangerous place in which spying and secrecy abound. The description of the embroidery adds to that feeling of violence, intrigue, and winding. Its “flowering, silken” appearance also suggests an aura of permeating majesty, if only superficially.

Later in the poem, Yeats provides even more color to this consecrated blade: “Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it / Five hundred years ago.” (25-26). At this point, the sheer age of the artifact washes over the poet and the reader, and it becomes a personal weapon, fashioned with care and craftsmanship for a specific end. The somewhat enigmatic “embroidery” becomes “Heart’s purple” (27), pumping with life. By the end of that stanza, the character My Self has been moved to action: “And claim as by a soldier’s right / A charter to commit the crime once more.” (30-31). The word “charter” is a physical object, usually a document, that has authority and contains within it some energy transmittable to humans, exactly what Yeats finds in Sato’s blade. The specifics of Yeats’s “crime” are perhaps unclear; although the previous stanza mentions “the crime of death and birth.” (24). Perhaps the crime Yeats can now commit is a murder of some sort. Regardless, the blade, as an unmoving object, has given the poet some sort of energy, presumably similar to the energy invested in it by Montashigi five hundred years prior.

Yeats travels through the Lapis Lazuli in a similar way, but with subtle differences. The story of the blade is arrived at through external examination and postulation. While visible in the object, the energy exists outside of the object itself. Imagination converts the embroidery and knowledge of the blade’s maker into some active force for the poet. In contrast, Yeats literally immerses himself into the Lapis Lazuli carving. As already mentioned, Yeats moves from a purely physical description to noticing the physical imperfections to incorporating those flaws into the art of the sculpture. From that point, he travels linearly through the scene. The geographical figures (water-course, avalanche, slope) become “plum or cherry branch” (47), living things, though without human indication. The next line brings “the little half-way house” (48), a sign of human life, though itself without motion. “Those Chinamen” (49)– human life; “climb towards”(49)– living, breathing, linear action (like the process of the poetry). With the next line, “I / Delight to imagine them seated there,” (50) Yeats the poet has let himself become invested in the scene. The poem/carving then adopts an emotional air: “on the mountain and the sky, / On all the tragic scene they stare.” (51-52).

The motion thus far builds to an emotional and metaphysical climax in the final four lines of the poem, as the poet actually interacts with the characters in the carving, who respond in turn: “One asks for mournful melodies; / Accomplished fingers begin to play. / Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.” (53-56). This transformation brings music and emotional awakening to a piece of stone that has existed for countless lifetimes. It erases the barrier of hundreds of years in time, bringing the music of ancient China to Yeats, an early 20th century Irish poet, and to us, his readers.

Again, we see a difference between the blade, whose energy almost lifts up from it to enter the poet, and the stone carving, into which Yeats himself enters from the outside. The opposing methods of thinking about the energy transfer do not cover the critical notion that both objects contain a living energy transmitted through time from the original artist to Yeats as an observer. Yeats explores this idea of origin later in the closing lines of “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”:

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest. (“Dialogue” 65-72).

This process of “following to the source,” “measuring” or examining, and “forgiving” or taking into account the physical flaws, is what we have seen Yeats do already with the ancient blade and the stone carving. We have also seen him, as a result of this process, tap into the energy contained within each object, and in so doing somehow link or communicate with that source he was searching for. The result of this search for deeper meaning is obviously very rewarding: Yeats feels a sense of release (“laugh”), a sense of joy (“sing”), and a sense of holiness (“everything we look upon is blest”).

The same theme emerges from “Among School Children,” as he attempts to “follow to the source” a woman with whom he is in love: “And wonder if she stood so at that age – / For even daughters of the swan can share / Something of every paddler’s heritage – ... And thereupon my heart is driven wild / She stands before me as a child.” (“Among School Children”, 19-21 & 23-24). He desires with her the same communion that he has with the blade and the carved stone. However, the woman “stands before” him, and he does not ever connect with her. The combination of seeing her vital energy and not being able to access it is maddening to Yeats– his “heart is driven wild.” Although this poem refers to a different situation in a different context, this passage serves as an illustration of Yeats’s desire to dissolve the barrier of time and to seek a universal origin in everything he experiences.

To be sure, Yeats’s fascination with artifacts and other vestiges of the ancient world arises elsewhere in his poetry. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poet begins by finding himself trapped in a world that seems full to capacity, with lovers loving, birds singing, “The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas” (line 4), and all “Caught in that sensual music” (7). His only judgement about this world is that he feels trapped and out of place, beginning the poem with “This is no country for old men” (1), and ending the first stanza by seeking out “Monuments of unageing intellect” (8). It’s almost as if those around him experience the energy that he will eventually find in the Lapis Lazuli carving but hasn’t yet.

In other words, Yeats, as an old man in this poem, needs to arrive at the energy that surrounds him to avoid being a pathetic example of what his surroundings overcome: “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,” (9-12). But since he is so out of place and alienated from his environment, he cannot directly access or assimilate himself into the energy around him. In order to empower himself, then, he must escape his surroundings and enter into his song through some ancient representation of energy that he may more easily identify with: “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence;” (13-14).

With this in mind, he travels to Byzantium, an ancient remnant of a civilization in which he feels much more comfortable. It is an environment of monuments, one very different from the one he recently left. He knows that energy surrounds him, but it is not the free-wheeling scattered immediacy of his original location. It is instead a land of contained energy, locked away in these mystical vestibules, similar to the ancient blade and Lapis Lazuli discussed earlier. As he couldn’t enter into his previous environment, he immediately desires communion with the powers of Byzantium: “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.” (21-24). What this translates to is a desire to physically morph into an artifact: “I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing, / But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make” (26-27). At this point in his life, Yeats believes the best way to defeat his mortality and turbulent emotions is to shed them, and encase his human energy into a golden, unchanging form that will not decay with time.

Though Yeats seems fairly optimistic about his becoming a golden bird, he leaves room for doubt whether this, or any physical representation, will be satisfying. At the end of “Sailing to Byzantium,” he describes his anticipated function as a combination of fairly mindless tasks: “To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; / Or set upon a golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium” (28-30). Here, Yeats may be identifying the tendency of art to become a pure decoration, void of any life or power.

He explores this impulse more fully in “Byzantium,” a poem that seems to pick up where “Sailing to Byzantium” left off. In this poem, Yeats contemplates more deeply on images and their capability for the miraculous. He dwells longer especially on the golden bird from the end of “Sailing to Byzantium”:

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

More miracle than bird or handiwork

Planted on starlit golden bough

Can like the cocks of Hades crow

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

In glory of changeless metal

Common bird or petal

And all complexities of mire or blood.” (“Byzantium” 17-20, 21-24).

What Yeats has desired in the previous poem is literally a “miracle”, to be transformed into a golden bird. As the first two lines of this passage emphasize, Yeats’s focus was on the miraculous aspect, his immersion into an image, without consideration of what or why that image was. If the original act of transformation is miraculous, the vision (bird) and the craftsmanship (handiwork) of the work has been lost. Through these lines, Yeats discovers the bird to be “planted,” or without motion, “embittered,” and nothing more than “changeless metal.” “Changeless” here has become less of an escape from mortality than a stubborn refusal to emote, defined as only a rejection or “scorn” of the physical “complexities of mire or blood.” In the next stanza, the miracle moves from a golden bird to an eternal flame which is equally powerless: “An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve” (32).

Frustration over this failure leads Yeats to radically shift focus and seemingly revert to a living, dynamic world, embracing that which golden bird shuns: “Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood, / Spirit after spirit!” (33-34). The sense of almost relentless forward motion is unavoidable in these lines. The final three lines of the poem further explicate that sense: “Those images that yet / Fresh images beget, / That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” (38-40). Clearly, “Those images that yet / Fresh images beget” recalls the earlier line, “Spirit after spirit,” as both lines convey continual regeneration. In the final line, “dolphin” (especially when considering “mire and blood” from line 33), marks a return to biological complexity for Yeats after having tried to avoid it for so long. A “gong” is used earlier in the poem as a literal signal for a sleeping. The aura brought upon the Emperor’s palace by the gong “disdains” (5) “The fury and the mire of human veins” (8). The “gong” acts in the opposite direction of the dolphins, rejecting movement and “mire” in favor of adopting artifice– similar to Yeats's original escape to Byzantium. The words “torn” and “tormented” highlight the struggle between the dolphin and the gong, and all are under the overarching image of the “sea.”

The sea, then, is a synthesis of contrary and hostile images and moods that flow from, out of, and into each other, giving the impression of an activity, turmoil, and general fullness. One cannot help but remember the opening image of “Sailing to Byzantium,” with its “salmon-falls” and “mackerel-crowded seas.” After leaving that world for Byzantium, Yeats seems to have returned with a piece of Byzantium that he places into his original world (“gong-tormented”).

Whether or not the final state in “Byzantium” satisfies Yeats, the poems “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” show that Yeats clearly struggles to understand the relationship between dynamic energy and enduring form. A closer examination of the original poems we examined, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” and “Lapis Lazuli,” will reveal the same interplay, although in a less adversarial way. These two poems contain images or objects with enduring form that seemed to satisfy Yeats, yet those images account for only about half of each respective poem. In addition, Yeats’s encounter with Sato’s blade and the Lapis Lazuli carving are marked by a living presence that the golden bird and eternal flame from “Byzantium” lacked.

In “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” this presence arrives to the poet as an affirmative response to Sato’s blade: “Such fullness in that quarter overflows / And falls into the basin of the mind / That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind” (33-35). The sense of “fullness” again recalls that setting in “Sailing to Byzantium” of dynamism that Yeats wants to reach. Remember as well that the object can only be accessed through the workings of the poet’s imagination. The result of this imagination-artifact communion is a paralysis of the senses and intellect, which immediately transfers the poet from the ancient to the immediate, another illustration of Yeats’s poetic (and literal, in this case) dialogue. This interplay results in a transcendence: man “ascends to Heaven” (38).

The carving contains the same poetic merging, with the image of a musical instrument carved into the stone. As the “fullness” of Yeats’s experience with the blade “overflowed” in an immediate outpouring of energy, the “mournful melodies” of the Chinese musician bring a life to the carving. In this case, Yeats examines the interplay between performative art (via the imagination) as linked to physical art. Earlier in “Lapis Lazuli,” he presents an event with the same quality in a different manner. He discusses tragic drama, specifically Hamlet and King Lear, and theater’s ability to achieve that transcendent overflow or fullness: “All men have aimed at, found and lost; / Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: / Tragedy wrought to its uttermost... It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce” (“Lapis Lazuli” 18-20, 24). Yeats here is trying to get at the lively, impulsive energy in theater that was also present in the music. The even greater beauty of plays like Hamlet and King Lear is their permanence: “Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, / And all the drop scenes drop at once / Upon a hundred thousand stages” (21-23). These dramatic figures are as permanent and as powerful as any sculpture or artifact, and they are continually re-grown and re-invented with every production.

Yeats desperately seeks this same dualism in his poetry. The sum of his creative spirit and energy is grander than his frail, dying body, so he feels the need to find a lasting shrine (as Wordsworth would say) in which to house it. But, as revealed in the poem “Byzantium,” Yeats fears the tendency for physical representation of nature or the human spirit to become mummified, breathless, and impotent. So the form in which he lays his art must be such that it allows his initial energy to emerge with each reading or performance: “‘A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught” (“Adam’s Curse” 4-6). In this way Yeats’s spirit (and not just his words) is preserved and continues as an active force long beyond his death. In addition, Yeats magnifies and gives new life to the art forms that have touched him so deeply.