Myself That I Remake Spiritual Renewal in the Life and Work of William Butler Yeats   section 1: Spiritual Renewal Through Contraries   One of the most striking characteristics of Yeats’s mind was its tendency to cling with equal intensity to seeming polarities, rejecting neither but drawing creative power from the tension of opposition. He had a zealot’s capacity for faith combined with a skeptic’s sense of detachment. His continual yearning for unity countered a deep understanding that life derives from conflict. He strove to define his self by defining his anti-self. As these distinctions proved extremely productive to him throughout his life, they would seem deliberately cultivated; the fact is, however, that Yeats spent much of his time in anguish that destiny had made a battlefield of his soul. Despite a lifetime of ambivalence and uncertainly, Yeats knew from the beginning that the very forces which weighed so painfully upon his spirit were those which sustained him with the substance of his life and his art.   Faith and Doubt In a review of George Russell’s Homeward: Songs by the Way, Yeats wrote that “an Irishman cut adrift from his priest is exceedingly speculative.” There may be a good deal more self-revelation in this assertion than Yeats intended; in any case he was himself exceedingly speculative, and cut adrift from his grandfather’s Christianity and his father’s aesthetic atheism, Yeats’s mind was heavily laden with a miscellany of magic, theosophy, Brahmanism, and Celtic myth. His father certainly disapproved of his son’s metaphysical leanings, but did encourage an attitude of intuitive belief, and demanded no degree of consistency, only emotional intensity. John Butler Yeats wrote: A poet should feel quite free to say in the morning that he believes in marriage and in the evening that he no longer believes in it; in the morning that he believes in God and in the evening that he does not believe in God, the important thing being not that he keep his mental consistency but that he preserve the integrity of his soul. His son learned that belief was a matter of mood, a style of thought; it need not be rational, and is probably stronger and in some way truer if it is not. Yeats developed a belief in belief itself.    More important is his conviction that belief is self-confirming. In a letter of 1899 he asserted, “Whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstance of our lives.” In Deirdre Fergus explains: I have believed the best of every man, And find that to believe it is enough To make a bad man show him at his best, Or even a good man swing his lantern higher. The important thing is not to believe that which the eye can confirm — that would only confirm the continuation of a rather dismal status quo — but to believe that which should be true, and which may come true if enough people share the visionary faith. (Throughout his life, and particularly in his youth, Yeats was obsessed by those psychic phenomena invoked by the combined mystical powers of a group of adherents, as at a séance.) In The Trembling of the Veil, Yeats insisted that “as life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, and it is these thoughts, tested by passion, that we call convictions.” The note of fatalism is strong here, but for Yeats beliefs, convictions, are of little use except as they buoy the spirit when the body or the intellect is beaten. In “Vacillation” he counsels: Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought, And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come. Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb. Belief is necessary to man in that it is “life-furthering,” to use an expression Yeats liked in Nietzsche.    Certainly much of Yeats’s eloquence in championing belief is directed at himself. In a journal entry of 1929 he wrote emphatically, “I must kill skepticism in myself, except in so far as it is mere acknowledgment of a limit. . . .” The vehemence here is no more characteristic than the qualification; Yeats must have had himself ruefully in mind when he wrote these lines in “The Second Coming”: The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. He could muster very real spasms of passionate intensity, but he never allowed himself to sustain a conviction; truth is a fluid which can be held, at least for a while, in the cup of an open-ended belief, but it can never be nailed down by a belief made inflexible and dogmatic. For all his need to believe he had to accept also his natural skepticism: We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty. . . . Yeats can be every bit as eloquent in questioning belief as he is in affirming it. In A Packet for Ezra Pound, he addresses the issue of his faith in his own philosophical system as set forward in A Vision: Some will ask if I believe all that this book contains, and I will not know how to answer. Does the word belief, used as they will use it, belong to our age, can I think of the world as there and I here judging it?    Faith and doubt, thesis and antithesis — Yeats found a degree of reconciliation in his notion of heroism. Fergus, in Deirdre, is no less noble for advising an optimistic outlook in the face of almost certain disaster; in fact, he is all the more noble for his futility. Yeats has little interest in the popular conception of the valiant hero. The sort of valour which emerges victorious is usually brutal or stupid, hardly admirable. Yeats instead finds heroism in “the hardest work among those not impossible,” where failure is likely though uncertain, and he emphasizes an attitude of resolute integrity: “In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is called, as though to call him something that summed up all heroism, ’Doom Eager.’” Typically, Yeats finds a parallel between the hero and the poet: The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat. The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained. Yeats found in heroism a perfect paradigm for the vast difficulties with which he confronted himself, and demanded, “Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.” Belief and skepticism both had their uses as Yeats dug deeper and deeper into his own mind.   Unity and Antinomy At the age of twenty-one Yeats coined an aphorism, “Talent perceives differences, Genius unity,” telling both in its confidence and its direction of thought. His subconscious insisted on prodding him with this idea. He describes its voice heard one night when he was still a young man: This sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: “Hammer your thoughts into unity.” For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.    But if Yeats’s heart yearned for unity, his thoughts resisted being hammered together. Contraries seemed to him the very stuff of life, and this tension is the central impulse behind the Crazy Jane poems, as in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”: ’Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ’But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’ The greater the tension, the greater the passion a poet can develop in his attempt to bridge the gulf: “What is passion but the straining of man’s being against some obstacle that obstructs its unity?” In antinomies Yeats sought the “passionate intensity” he felt so lacking in his character. He was particularly intent on tapping the powers latent in those conflicts deep within his own mind. This process was exciting and urgent to Yeats: We all have something within ourselves to batter down and get our power from this fighting. . . .All depends on the completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath. . . .Without this conflict we have no passion only sentiment and thought.   Self and Anti-self What was this “beast” Yeats felt lurking within himself, and who or what could hold it down? The fundamental split for Yeats was that within each individual, a split between spirit and intellect which divides from the self its own true nature and leaves the individual unfulfilled and unhappy. The most essential task for anyone is to discover the unity inside his own being, and for the poet it is to reveal the truth that can bring this unity.    Yeats insists again and again that the self is a priori, primordial, that the true self is the font of truth itself. I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made. In his very earliest poetry Yeats had assured himself that “there is no truth saving in thine own heart,” and he knew that ultimately he had nowhere else to look: I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water with low sounds lapping by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. His early work of this nature is lovely in its misty uncertainty, but the fact remains that, at least at this stage, he had no idea of what he was seeking. He assigned himself a grail and pointed the way within, but for now there were only poignantly unanswered questions: Who will drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? “The deep wood’s woven shade” remained unexplored territory.    In 1914, with the aid of a medium, Yeats attempted automatic writing and to his great delight found himself communing with “Leo Africanus,” the spirit of a Moorish poet dead for centuries, who claimed he was Yeats’s true anti-self and that “by association with one another [they] should each become more complete.” Through Yeats Leo wrote: You seek to meet not your own difficulties, but the difficulties of others. Entangled in error, you are but a public man. Was this merely self-delusion? Self-hypnosis? In any case the event was dramatically real to Yeats, and surely we can, at the very least, accept it as the demonstration of a very real split within his subconscious. His strategy was not to seek any sort of middle ground but to play both roles, that of the self and that of the anti-self, as fully and consciously as possible, as if to mend his soul he would have to rend his soul. Owen Aherne the public man and Michael Robartes the, private dreamer were both real, both Yeats. Each kept the other alive. “No mind,” he wrote, “can engender till divided into two.”    Yeats was sorely troubled by these splits within himself; they were not merely a poetic device, although he was able to use them as such, and to great effect. He was a believer, and he was a skeptic. He sought a unified self, and he sought a divided self. Any attempt to portray truth, he was sure, would have to make use of the parallax, the “double vision,” he knew to be his lot. “No matter how full the expression, the more it is of the whole man, the more does it require other expressions for its completion.” In this struggle for expression there is heroism, and in defeat there is a higher victory. When their hearts are so high That they would come to blows, They unhook their heavy swords From golden and silver boughs; But all that are killed in battle Awaken to life again.   © Michael Fleming Oxford, England March, 1984   on to section 2    Yeats contents page other biographies    Fox Paws home page    e-mail to Mike