I
There is a mass of legend, often malicious (‘the mirror of malicious eyes’) concerning Yeats’ view of magic, and his practices. Rosicrucianism, his association (though it seems to have been slight) with Madame Blavatsky, ‘the low comedian of the world to come’; his incursions into the Christian kabbala and the hermetic philosophies; his miscellaneous reading of Swedenborg, Blake, the Neo-Platonists, Indian and Arabian mystics; all these go to form the initial stock of the ‘rag-and-bone shop of the heart’. It is typical of the man that his reading was desultory and unsystematic: ‘I have read somewhere that ...’ is a common phrase in his essays; and ‘sometimes the more vivid the fact the less do I remember my authority. Where did I pick up that story of the Byzantine bishop and the singer of Antioch, where learn that to anoint your body with the fat of a lion ensured the favour of a king?’ [2] The acquisitive poetic [148] instinct appears to be always at work, and his taste for the recondite as source-material may well have been another device to achieve a certain remoteness, a defended position. All this can be twisted into a picture of the amateur of magic, the member of the Ghost Club, half in earnest, half charlatan: taking himself and his occult world too seriously and allowing it to cloud and distort his judgement. And, since the whole matter raises the question of a poet’s use of his material, it is well to attempt some analysis of this magic.

I suggest that the key to it may be found in the opening stanza of a bad but interesting poem:

Because there is safety in derision
I talked about an apparition,
I took no trouble to convince,
Or seem plausible to a man of sense,
Distrustful of that popular eye
Whether it be bold or sly.
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger. [3]

Now the fifteen apparitions were in reality only seven: fifteen was brought in (much as Keats altered the ‘score’ of kisses in La Belle Dame Sans Merci to ‘four’) in deference to the demands of metre. ‘The Apparitions’ are a series of death-dreams that occurred after his illness in Majorca, and were of special significance in relation to Lady Gregory’s deal, and to his own. [4] Two readings are possible. It may be that the worst of the apparitions was quite literally, the worst, too terrible to be contemplated, linked perhaps to the image of himself as an ‘old scarecrow’; suggesting, too, the complex speculations over the nature of matter and his readings of Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, G. E. Moore and the prolonged arguments [149] on the nature of reality with T. Sturge Moore. [5] Alternatively (but not exclusively) we may consider that ‘there is safety in derision’ is a key phrase. It involves what Yeats called ‘scrutiny by the intellect’, born of the knowledge that the visions, which “A.E”. had taught him to see, were not to be accepted at their face value. By 1922 he had adopted the maxim, ‘the thing seen is never the vision, nor the thing heard the message’. [6] Further, if mystery or magic became certain, wholly believed, it was no longer magic or mystery; and to himself as well as to his audience his own Sibylline stature would have been diminished through that certainty. Jack Yeats’ image of his brother’s position is worth considering: ‘he was like a man on a moving staircase, perpetually putting one foot off the staircase on to the ground’. It is true that this ambiguous attitude can be countered by assertions so definite in their implied beliefs that they must be taken seriously: ‘I have again and again tested the visibility and audibility of min created forms’ [7] or ‘The experiments made by J. Ochorowicz in photographing images of the mind were made with the medium Stanislava Tomsczyk (now Mrs Everard Fielding) at Warsaw and are well known.’ [8]

I do not know the nature of these ‘tests’ and ‘experiments’, but Yeats was obviously concerned to check and verify them so far as he thought possible, and so far as his temperamental inclinations to a partial belief allowed; and was prepared to admit failure, distortion and delusion in these phenomena. Some of them, on the edge of consciousness, were phantasmagoric, but still, perhaps, capable of generating images for poetry. Early magical experiences are stored, modified and re-combined in memory, and are then recalled when some event, personal or political, appears to assert their validity. The white fowl that sat on the highest bough of the Tree of Life [9] might become the golden cock of “Byzantium”; the great love stories, like that of Baile and Aillinn, renewed themselves perpetually (there was Blake’s word for it) in the present.

It is clear that from the first Yeats wished to create a rhetorical [150] and processional mythology, a framework of events which would allow to these past memories their full significance and continuity in relation to the past. He was enough of a Victorian to be implicated in the religious controversy. ‘I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel [10] of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. [11] I wished for a world, where I could discover this tradition perpetually. ... I had even created a dogma: ‘Because these imaginary people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go to truth.’ [12]

This material, part traditional, part personal, and part to be acquired by study, is to be fused into a system; not a philosophical system but one which should have its roots among the people and their folk-lore:

Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus’ stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology, that marries them to rock and hill? [13]

In all this there was support from “A.E”., whose belief in the Otherworld, reincarnation and the earth gods was held simply and tenaciously. “A.E”. could cite Kant in support of Yeats’ views on communication with the supra-natural:

I am much disposed to assert the existence of immaterial natures in the world and to place my own soul in the class of these beings. It [151] will hereafter, I know not where or when, yet be proved that the human soul stands even in this life in indissoluble connection with all immaterial natures in the spirit world, that it reciprocally acts on these and receives inspiration from them. [14]

“A.E’s” vision was as definite as Blake’s: ‘He has made drawings since he came here of quite a number of supernatural beings.’ [15] His theory of Anima Mundi was in substance that of Yeats and it, too, depended on reincarnation:

I do not think I could say of any of my earlier poems that I had learned in experience or suffering here what was transmuted into song. Indeed I would reverse the order and say that we first imagine, and that later the imagination attracts its affinities, and we live in the body what had first arisen in soul. I had the sense that that far-travelled psyche was, in this and other waking dreams, breathing into the new body it inhabited some wisdom born out of its myriad embodiments.[16]

There were other grounds for believing that Ireland might provide him with the necessary material. Long before he had foreshortened history in A Vision he found confirmation of his cycle theories in the world of the peasant: ‘... .. I have noticed that clairvoyance, pre-vision, and allied gifts, rare among the educated classes, are common among peasants. Among those peasants there is much of Asia, where Hegel has said every civilization begins. Yet we must hold to what we have that the next civilization may be born, not from a virgin’s womb, nor a tomb without a body, but of our own rich experience.’ [17]

This first mythology, then, is to be at once historical, pantheistic and prophetic (like Prometheus); and at the same time local and patriotic. The final result was to be profoundly mystical: ‘... .. I delighted in every age where poet and artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject-matter known to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is something called “Unity of Being”, using that term as Dante used it when he compared beauty in the Convivio to a perfectly proportioned human body.’ [18] We have here a further stage: this ‘Unity of Being’ is linked [152] to the realization, or the discovery by the great artist, of formal perfection of the body: and becomes later the symbolism which he finds in measurement. [19]

Unity of being is attained through the projection into consciousness of men’s common ancestral memories. The thought is faintly [20] of Shelley. It is a difficult process.

... Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity? [21]

The mythology was at hand in the Celtic legend. From the point of view of a young man in the Nineties, the founder of literary societies in London and in Dublin, it held great promise. If Ireland could be awakened to her natural heritage of the heroic ages of Cuchulain, Finn, Conchubor, Deirdre and the rest, if the people of Ireland could really see their country as Cathleen-ni-Houlhian, [22] a unity both spiritual and political would follow. Cathleen-ni-Houlihan might serve as the symbol of beauty and womanhood and a romantic Ireland. The quarry was a rich one: Hyde, Martyn, Lady Gregory with her Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne were all working it. There were sufficient memories [153] in place-name and legend, and dramatic episodes at his very door. ‘I have a story of a Sligo stable boy who was dismissed by his employer because he had sent her late husband’s ghost to haunt a weatherbeaten lighthouse, far out in the bay’. [23] There were vivid Elizabethan phrases from ‘The Book of the People’, as in the conversation recorded in Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs:

‘How did you know you were damned?’
‘I saw my own thoughts going past me like blazing ships.’ [24]

At times the imagined or recorded tales seem to possess a curious quality as if a pre-Raphaelite vision had mingled with the Celtic legend. ‘‘Sometimes at night’, said the boy, ‘when you are reading with a stick of mountain ash in your hand, I look out of the door and see, now a great man driving swine among the hazels, and now many little people in red caps who come out of the lake driving little white cows before them . And I fear the tall white-armed ladies who come out of the air, and move slowly hither and thither, crowning themselves with the roses or with the lilies, and shaking about them their living hair, which moves, for so I have heard them tell the little people, with the motion of their thoughts, now spreading out and now gathering close to their heads.’ [25]

This theory of the common myth, its peculiar symbolism, and its undoubted power, gave him grounds for belief that this consciousness of the past might yet unify the people. There should be pride in that national heritage that could lead to a new flowering, of art and national life; much as the eighteenth century, for a few brief years, hoped for a new Homeric epic of the North from Macpherson’s Ossian, or as Morris sought a rejuvenating simplicity and strength in the Norse saga. The pattern was to include traditional mystic symbolism fused with the common beliefs of the people; the folk-lore of Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs could amalgamate, in a poet’s mind, with classical Irish legend. The poetry would take full advantage of the genius of place, using the numinous associations of the great pilgrimages: ‘I think I would go - though certainly [154] I am no Catholic and never shall be one - upon both of our great pilgrimages, to Croagh Patrick and to Lough Derg. ... In many little lyrics I would claim that stony mountain [Croagh Patrick] for all Christian and pagan faith in Ireland, believing, in the exultation of my youth, that in three generations I should have made it as vivid in the memory of all imaginative men among us, as the sacred mountain of Japan is in that of the collectors of prints: and I would, being but four-and-twenty and a lover of lost causes, memorialize bishops to open once again that Lough Derg cave of vision once beset by an evil spirit in the form of a long-legged bird with no feathers on its wings.’ [26]

This bird, or its kin, recurs in “The Pilgrim”, and may well be linked to the mysterious birds in Margaret Clarke’s picture, St Patrick Climbs Croagh Patrick, in the Municipal Gallery. It recurs in verse:

A great black ragged bird appeared when I was in the boat;
Some twenty feet from tip to tip had it stretched rightly out,
With flopping and with flapping it made a great display,
But I never stopped to question, what could the boatman say
But fol de rol de rolly, O. [27]

The promise was kept in the little lyrics: “The Dancer at Cruachan and Cro-Patrick”:

I, proclaiming that there is
Among birds or beasts or men
One that is perfect or at peace,
Danced on Cruachan’s windy plain,
Upon Cro-Patrick sang aloud;
All that could run or leap or swim
Whether in wood, water or cloud,
Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him. [28]

And again in “The Pilgrim”:

Round Lough Derg’s holy island I went upon the stones,
I prayed at all the Stations upon my narrow-bones [155],
And then I found an old man, and though I prayed all day
And that old man beside me, nothing would he say
But fol de rol de rolly, O.

And this did not exclude the possibility of a greater complexity, when legend blended into esoteric symbols:

I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling, it The Rose, [29] because of the Rose’s double meaning; of a fisherman who had ‘never a crack in his heart’ [30]; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the young [31], or of some cheerful fiddler [32], all those things that ‘popular poets’ write of, but that I must some day - on that day when the gates began to open - become difficult or obscure. [33]

At the same time the age was ripe for a revelation, or a second coming. Yeats was acutely aware of the breaking-up of the world. In his essay on “The Tragic Generation” there is already the thought of the gyre, of the age moving towards its opposite:

Why are these strange souls born everywhere today? with hearts that Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. ... Why should we believe that religion can never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as Mallarmé said, by ‘the trembling of the veil of the temple’, or ‘that our whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book’? Some of us thought that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again. [34]

The thought of the Sacred Book, the book that the hermit-saint may interpret, comes again in the last plays and in “Supernatural Songs”. There were exciting possibilities in ‘scientific’ spiritualism. ‘If photographs that I saw handed round in Paris thirty years ago can be repeated and mental images photographed, the distinction that Berkeley drew between what man creates and what God creates will have broken down.’ [35] Recurrent visions, manifestations of the superhuman, strengthened the possibility: ‘When supernatural events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when [156] they repeat themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony.’ [36]

II
At this point it is important to stress the fact that Yeats’ magical preoccupations were in no way peculiar to himself; and still less were they evidence (as certain critics have suggested) of perversity or mental abnormality. He was following a well-trodden road, which seems to have broadened suddenly in the later nineteenth century into a diffuse and esoteric mysticism that looked to magic for its support. And magic was more than a support; it provided a continuous sense of excited exploration. No doubt some of the excitement was in the knowledge that it was proscribed by the Churches, and that its evil lay close at hand. True mysticism would have become dispersed in its own rarefied essences. Magic fulfilled the desire for ritual, ministered to his own sense of importance; through it he could claim his position as the seer, the prophet, always withholding part of his secret; he could blur or define the symbols as the proto-thought required.

But this mysticism had a long and honourable history, although by the Nineties it had degenerated into what Auden calls ‘lowermiddle-class occultism’. All Neo-platonist interpretations of the doctrine of the Unity of Being had been re-affirmed, in many ways and in varying degrees, in Romantic literature. The Pythagorean souls of the star-world had been accepted by Plato; Newton considered that hypothesis plausible, and even Kant was not altogether sceptical.

All ancient nations believed in the re-birth of the soul and had probably empirical evidence like that Lafcadio Hearn found among the Japanese. In our time Schopenhauer believed it, and McTaggart thinks Hegel did, though lack of interest in the individual soul had kept him silent. It is the foundation of McTaggart’s own philosophical system. [37]

Yeats was in the habit of grasping at any philosophical authority that might be wrenched to support him. He read into Berkeley too much, perhaps, of his own thought. But philosophy, however [157] much it might be adulterated by theosophy, gave him at least the assurance that he had tradition behind him; he would choose ‘Plato and Plotinus for a friend’.

I could not read philosophy till my big book was written. Those who gave the material forbid me to do so; they feared, I think, that if I did so I would split up experience till it ceased to exist. When it was written (though the proofs had yet to come) I started to read. I read for months every day Plato and Plotinus. Then I started on Berkeley and Croce and Gentile. You introduced me to your brother’s work and to Russell, and I found Eddington and one or two others for myself. I am still however anything but at my ease in recent philosophy. I find your brother [G. E. Moore] extraordinarily obscure. [38]

Again he writes:

That sentence of yours about Time, Space, and Experience, has abolished all the philosophers I have ever read - Plato, St Thomas, Kant, Hegel, Bergson and last and least the Bald One. However that very British brother of yours had already abolished the lot. Bye the bye, please don’t quote him again till you have asked him this question: ‘How do you account for the fact that when the Tomb of St Theresa was opened her body exuded miraculous oil and smelt of violets?’ If he cannot account for such primary matters, he knows nothing. [39]

This throws some light on the thought of ‘Must we part, Von Hügel’ (“Vacillation”, VIII) [40] and there is a further letter to Mrs Shakespear [41] that is related both to it and to “Stream and Sun at Glendalough”.

That night before letters came I went for a walk after dark, and there among some great trees became absorbed in the most lofty philosophical conception I have found while writing A Vision. I suddenly seemed to understand at last, and then I smelt roses. [42] I realized the nature of the timeless spirit. Then I began to walk and in my excitement came - how shall I say - that old glory so beautiful with its autumn tint - the longing to touch it was almost unendurable. The next night I was walking in the same path and now the two excitements [158] came together - the autumnal tinge incredibly spiritual remote erect delicate-featured, and mixed with it the violent physical image, the black man of Eden. Yesterday I put my thought into a poem which I enclose, but it seems to me a poor shadow of the intensity of the experience. [43]

The poem is the first of “Vacillation”:

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy? [44]

But such symbols were linked to the ‘ancestral memory’ and were to be recognized as ‘standard’ components of mythology. Their recurrence in archetypal form strengthened that belief; and to Yeats and his circle the continuity of myth as shown in The Golden Bough was yet another proof of the fragmentary nature of [159] Christianity. [45] The images are thus of immense though indeterminate significance, even if they cannot at once be recognized, or their meanings related to each other.

Qu’une image, retenue par le verbe d’un poète ou évoquée par l’arabesque d’un bas-relief, vienne infailliblement susciter en moi une résonance effective, je puis poursuivre la chaine des formes fraternelles qui relic cette image aux motifs de quelque mythe très ancien: je ne connaissais pas ce mythe, et je le reconnais. Entre les fables des diverses mythologies, Ies contes de fées, les inventions de certains poètes et le rêve qui se poursuit en moi, je perçois une parenté profonde. [46]

In the Preface to Fighting the Waves Yeats seems to suggest that Jung had provided a scientific justification for the value of his symbols. ‘Science has driven out the legends, stories, superstitions that protected the immature and the ignorant with symbol’: his own wisdom, linked to the new sciences, might form part of ‘that concrete universal which all philosophy is seeking’ [47].

Yeats’ interpretation was more complex than that of Jung. Yet the close similarity to Jung’s habit of thought is once again emphasized by Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963), and he appears to envisage a literal belief in various concepts which Jung treated as figurative. The problem of the perception of Unity demanded that occult sciences should be enlisted in its service. Once grant a sympathy between man and the universe, it becomes essential to see the destiny of man as linked to planets and stars. Man is the centre of creation, and a privileged being; he is the mirror of the universe. He will seek to explain his pilgrimage towards cosmic unity as a retracing of those steps through which unity was lost. Those steps belong to myth: and hence myth acquires a renewed importance:

That I might hear if we should kiss
A contrapuntal serpent hiss. .... [48] [160]

The heavy lingering stress on contrapuntal directs us towards its meanings in depth; the sound itself suggests a heavy, lithe, slack but powerful quality. The clue might rest with the dead and their traditional wisdom:

For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path. ...

The whole pursuit became exciting as the images expanded or contracted their significances, perhaps in obedience to some supernatural power:

Quelque signe, image ou hiéroglyphe, étrangement ordonnés, parviennent à exprimer en peu d’instants ce qu’on emploierait des heures à dire en paroles. [49]

Now all these investigations, all the speculations on dream symbols, phantoms, the hidden philosophies, have a long history. Yeats could have found endless justifications for his thought in the work of Hugo, Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, Clemens Brentano, and a dozen others. The problem was to find one or more mythologies which would serve to link symbols in some kind of pragmatic framework, from which all else would develop.

The quest for a myth had therefore a multiple object. It was nationalist, prophetic, mystical; it provided continuity and meaning for experience; and it afforded a release for that dramatic nostalgia generated by the memories of the Sligo mountains as seen from his London surroundings. The “Innisfree” mood lends itself easily to sentimentality; [50] and there was plenty of precedent in Mangan and Davis and T. W. Rolleston. And, above all, the myth gave him power; to shape a world in which the heroes were virile and violent, the women gentle and dreaming - all but one fierce woman whose image remained with him. [161]

Further, the ‘significant actions’ of that mythology, in Arnold’s phrase, were few. There was the death of Deirdre, Cuchulain fighting the waves, and the epic of his death, with ‘six mortal wounds’, bound to the pillar, the scald-crow perching on his shoulder: an heroic image of Yeats himself that haunted him to the last, and which he used in “Cuchulain Comforted”. But even The Countess Cathleen owes its source to a legend in French.

The battles and kings cannot be fitted into a coherent pattern: and they move in Yeats’ verse and prose with that far-off embroidered stiffness of Spenser’s or Morris’ world. The long Swinburnian rhythms accentuate their remote fantastic ‘beauty’; the term so constantly and aimlessly used in the critical writings of the time:

I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea! [52] [162]

The problem of Yeats was to link the Danaan shore to the peasantry. [53] He believed that Ireland could discover, from the beliefs and emotions of her common people, the habit of mind that created the religion of the Muses. But what the common people had to give was much more direct and violent and brutal than this trance-like world; only Synge, and perhaps O’Casey, could have found it. What remained, of course, when ‘Helmets, crowns and swords’ were thrown ‘into the pit’, when the circus animals had deserted, were two certainties: the dead return among the living, and there is an ancestral memory in the people as in the universe, into which the poet can send down roots and from which he can draw new vitality:

I had as yet no clear answer, but knew myself face to face with the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of embodied individual memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their thoughts. [54]

Side by side with the development of the first mythology there is his own interest in the psychic: and the important figure is MacGregor Mathers, who initiated him into the Order of the Golden Dawn, an order of Christian kabbalists. [55] Yeats even speculated as to whether Blake had belonged to the same order. George Russell was also a visionary, but whereas he sought to reach that state through austerities, the practice of Mathers was ritualistic:

My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by that method Mathers had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged without a clue into a labyrinth [56] of images, into that labyrinth that we are warned against in those Oracles which antiquity has attributed to Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poets. ‘Stoop not down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images.’ [57]

Mathers’ method or symbolic system was to use cardboard or [163] painted symbols to evoke a world beyond visible reality[58] This world and its symbols were fragmentary at first, but might, as Yeats thought, ultimately cohere by association to form a new and more deeply apprehended life. Further, one image had the power to suggest another in a related train; [59] they can be communicated between individuals, or be shared by several people at some given point of time, thus suggesting the possibility of some cosmic event. It appears that revelatory images may be deliberately invoked:

I knew a man once who, seeking for an image of the absolute, saw one persistent image, a slug, as though it were suggested to him that Being which is beyond human comprehension is mirrored in the least organized forms of life. [60]

In “The Stirring of the Bones” he tells how, when staying with Martyn at Tullyra, he decided that he must make his invocation to the moon. After he had repeated the ritual for eight or nine nights, he saw a galloping centaur, [61] and a moment later ‘a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting an arrow at a star’. The same night Symons, also staying at Tullyra, wrote a poem of great beauty on this theme, but without the bow and arrow. On Symons’ return to London, he found a story, sent to The Savoy by Fiona MacLeod, in which there was a vision of a woman shooting an arrow into the sky; and later of an arrow shot at a faun that pierced the faun’s body and remained, the faun’s heart torn out and clinging to it, embedded in a tree. The child of one of Mathers, pupils had come running in from the garden crying out: ‘Oh, mother, I have seen a woman shooting an arrow into the sky [164] and I am afraid that she has killed God.’ A few months later, a little cousin dreamed of a man who shot a star with a gun and the star fell down; but ‘I do not think’, the child said, ‘it minded dying because it was so very old’, and presently the child saw the star lying in a cradle. [62]

This image of the archer and the star found on a Cretan coin, or in a Renaissance painting, became a dominant image: perhaps because it afforded such a striking instance of the cosmic validity of such a vision. He knew from Shelley that the same dream occurs again and again. Of its power upon his mind there can be no doubt. It could combine with his favourite ‘Brightness falls from the air’ to form the images of the first two verses of ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ and take on strange overtones:

... Brightness remains; a brighter star shoots down;
What shudders run through all that animal blood?
What is this sacrifice? Can someone there
Recall the Cretan barb that pierced a star? [63]

To the memory it affords also an emblem of the artist, a justification of his historical cycles, and a re-affirmation of the workings of ‘The Body of Fate’: [165]

Many years ago I saw, between sleeping and waking, a woman of incredible beauty shooting an arrow into the sky, and from the moment when I made my first guess at her meaning I have thought much of the difference between the winding movements of nature and the straight line, which is called in Balzac’s Seraphita the ‘Mark of Man’, but comes closer to my meaning as the mark of saint or sage. I think that we who are poets and artists, not being permitted to shoot beyond the tangible, must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes. I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether in one man’s life or in that of an age, are mathematical, [64] and that some one in the world, or beyond the world, has foreknown the event and pricked upon the calendar the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Napoleon: that every movement, in feeling or in thought, prepares in the dark by its own increasing clarity and confidence its own executioner. We seek reality with the slow toil of our weakness and are smitten from the boundless and the unforeseen. [65]

The explanatory gloss as to the whole is in the notes to Autobiographies (1926), p.473. It represents such classic examples of Yeatsian complexity, of richness of layered associations, in its relation to several poems that we may summarize it here.

The Child and the Tree are related to an apple-tree in Devonshire, which is in turn linked to an ancient Cretan hymn. But Bolder is the tree embodied; behind the myth is the Cretan Apollo who in old Cretan belief was a sun-god. But the symbolic tree is also Hebrew ‘and the star at which the arrow was shot seems to have symbolized a Sephiroth attributed to the Sun’ The woman who shot the arrow is the Cretan mother-goddess, but she is also Artemis. The heart torn out refers to the Myth of the Child Slain and Reborn, which is also Cretan in origin. But all this converges, in the first of “The Songs from a Play”, on the Dionysian-Christ association, and the wounded side of Christ in The Resurrection.

The interest in dream-symbolism is perpetual:

When you write to me about the symbol please tell me the figures you saw as well as the conclusions you come to. I saw the white door today and the white fool. He was followed out of the door by a marriage procession who had flowers and green boughs. Last night I had a dream about two lovers, who were being watched over by a blackbird or a raven, who warned them against the malice and the slander of the [166] world. Was this bird a transformation of Aengus or one of his birds? You are perhaps right about the symbol, it may merely be a symbol of ideal human marriage. The slight separation of the sun and moon permits the polarity which we call sex, while it allows the creation of an emotional unity, represented by the oval and the light [66] it contains. [67].

(This may be the origin of

a most ridiculous bird
Tore from the clouds his marvellous moon.

- in “A Memory of Youth” [68], and of the ‘miraculous strange bird’ in “Her Triumph”[69].)

In séance or in vision there was the exciting possibility that his own age had been deliberately blinded:

Was modern civilization a conspiracy of the sub-conscious? Did we turn away from certain thoughts and things because the Middle Ages lived in terror of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed upon us by beings greater than ourselves for an unknown purpose? [70]

Further, Yeats’ theory of memory demanded a traffic with the dead. Memory and the ghost are only different aspects of the same experience; for

our animal spirits are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of Anima Mundi, and give substance to its images in the faint materialization of our common thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our visitor. [71]

After death we live our lives backward for a number of years, treading the halls that we have trodden, growing young, even childish again. The dead achieve a Donne-like exactness of being and desire:

. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost’s right
His element is so fine [167]
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine. [72]

There is also a certain morbid excitement of the ‘dark tomb haunter’, and he quotes with approval (and remembering, as always, job) Lake Harris on Shakespeare: ‘Often the hair of his head stood up and all life became the echoing chambers of the tomb.’ [73]

Yet is it not most important to explore continually what has been long forbidden and to do this not only ‘with the highest moral purpose’, like the followers of Ibsen, but gaily, out of sheer mischief, a sheer delight in that play of the mind. Donne could be as metaphysical as he pleased, and yet never seem as unhuman and hysterical as Shelley often does, because he could be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will thirst for the metaphysical, who have a parched tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision of Evil? [74]

‘A sheer delight in that play of the mind.’ I believe that, when all is said, Yeats half-believed in his world of séances, just as he half-believed (and more at one stage of his life than at another) his own world of A Vision: that pretexts for the play of the mind, the dramatic apprehension of the rapid and heterogeneous image, were what he sought and found. There is abundant evidence that, for him, the phenomena of the séance were real; but what was reality? There was safety in derision, or in the possibility that those phenomena were no more than the evidence for a new Berkleian Theory of Vision. The other half of the mind stands aside prepared to mock ‘because there is safety in derision’. From another point of view, the tomb-haunting of the séance is the first step to the progression through ritualism and spiritualism towards certain of the traditional values to be found in death. Nathaniel Wanley’s apostrophe to the Skull has at least validity in history:

                    ... For if wee
Rightly define the true Philosophy
To be a Meditation of the Graue
Then while I hugge thee I am sure I haue
The best Philosopher .... [75]

Yeats is redeemed from morbidity by this ‘sheer mischief’, the [168] awareness of the physical that phrase and idiom harmonize completely in their opposition:

‘The third thing that I think of yet’,
Sang a bone upon the shore
’Is that morning when I met
Face to face my rightful man,
And did after stretch and yawn’:
A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind . [76]

But the passage quoted has a further significance; Donne avoids becoming inhuman or morbid ‘because he could be as physical as he pleased’. Again and again Yeats pulls back his verse from the sentimental and morbid by the physical:

O but there is wisdom
In what the sages said;
But stretch that body for a while
And lay down that head
Till I have told the sages
Where man is comforted. [77]

Perhaps that is one justification for the ‘sensuality’ of the last phase.

The grave offers the possibility of a clue to the labyrinth. It is a symbol which can foreshorten human history, provide a framework for incantation, assert and stabilize Yeats’ pre-occupation with ancestry (whether his own or that of the nation), and clarify and focus the problems of sensuality, old age, and death. The Christian synthesis is rejected: but that great poem to von Hügel will show the attitude clearly.

Must we part, Von Hügel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb [78] [169]
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweets odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance
Eternalized the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out Pharaoh’s mummy. I - though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb - play a predestined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hügel, though with blessings on your head. [79]

The reference to Homer, standing for epic strength and virility, occurs frequently; sometimes grouped in opposition to Horace, and in counterpoint with Plato, as in Mad as the Mist and Snow . Against this we have the homeliness of the Anglo-Irish phrases unchristened heart, blessings on your head . The ideas play between saint and mummy, for those self-same hands are of the ghosts of Egyptian embalmers. [80] The lion and the honeycomb is a reference to Judges XIV, but I am still doubtful about the image; unless, as Ellmann suggests, [81] Yeats has some private meaning. The lion is obviously strength and energy: honey for sweetness of word, the contrast to bitterness. So in “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid”:

... To show how violent great hearts can lose
Their bitterness, and find the honeycomb. [82]

But honeycomb can also stand for the sexual act (‘Honey of generation has betrayed.’) [83] and, rather strangely, for longevity.

The tomb and the ghost make possible that peculiar dispassionate elegiac strain which is typical of the later work. There were many dead: the ‘companions of the Cheshire Cheese’, Mathers, Synge, Major Robert Gregory; O’Leary: the men who fell in the 1916 Rising; and all ‘those renowned generations’. Belief in the ghost, in the trickery of the dance, were very minor properties of the play [170] in which he was Lear or Timon. [84] Perhaps some impish humour lit up from time to time his belief or unbelief:

Mathers is much troubled by ladies who seek spiritual advice, and

one has called to ask his help against phantoms who have the appearance of decayed corpses, and try to get into bed with her at night. He has driven her away with one furious sentence, ‘Very bad taste on both sides.’ [85]

But when all this is weighed up, and all that is irrelevant, or subsidiary, or half-believed has been set aside, we can see Yeats’ mind moving steadily towards certain propositions:

1.	Both the practice of magic and the history of myth led Yeats to the point at which the recurrence of symbols or emblems leaves no doubt as to their validity in human psychology and religion.
2.	This in turn confirmed the belief in some kind of cyclic or repeating pattern in history.
3.	Both these propositions suggested a common reservoir of thought, the ‘Great Memory’, on which we can draw, either unconsciously or by ‘controlled’ dream or vision.
4.	The correspondence between the symbols of myths, and those of individual and group psychology, suggested that through their use the poet may express a more profound sense of reality than is possible by abstract thought; and that this expression may be justified after the event by philosophical and scientific inquiry.

I feel that an imaginative writer whose work draws him to philosophy must attach himself to some great historical school. My dreams and much psychic phenomena force me into a certain little-trodden way but I must not go too far from the main European track, which means in practice that I turn away from all attempts to make philosophy support science by starting with some form of ‘fact’ or ‘datum’. [86]

A Vision is the rough draft towards a system by which myth and magic and philosophy might be related; but this too will be seen to be a kind of poetry, to be justified after the event. Before considering its implications it is convenient to consider a single component of the system, ‘The Phases of the Moon’.

Notes
1. Yeats, in conversation with Myles Dillon.
2. Explorations, p.291. He picked it up in “The Life of St Pelagia the Hermit”, in Helen Waddell’s The Desert Fathers, pp.178-80. ‘A certain Byzantine Bishop had said upon seeing a singer of Antioch, ‘I looked long upon her beauty, knowing that I would behold it upon the day of judgement, and I wept to remember that I had taken less care of my soul than she of her body.’ - (A Vision (A) p.157; (B), p.285) But it would have been typical of Yeats’ associative thinking to have transmuted Byzantine material to illuminate, say, “Crazy Jane and the Bishop”. He seems to have collected unusual scraps of information at an early date; as in John Sherman’s comment on his fiancée: ‘It is clear she did not know that a French writer on magic says the luxurious and extravagant hate frogs because they are cold, solitary and dreary.’ (John Sherman, p.49.)
3. “The Apparitions”, Coll. Poems, p.386.
4. I am indebted to Mrs Yeats for this information.
5. See T.Sturge Moore, Letters, in particular pp.58-108.
6. This is a note taken down by L. A. G. Strong, to whom I am indebted, from W. B. Y.’s conversation.
7. T. S. Moore. Letters, p.82.
8. Ibid., p.69.
9. Essays & Introductions, pp.44-45.
10. Fardel: the Autolycus-word is interesting. The rapid and violent association of images from ‘the old rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ becomes more pronounced as the technique matures and ‘patterns’ become clear.
11. Cf. the allusions to Plato, Plotinus, Vico, Henry More, McTaggart, von Hügel. The history of the Trinity, and heretical modifications of that ‘abstract-Greek absurdity’, seems to have been one of his obsessions.
12. Autobiographies, pp.115-16. (‘Where got I that truth? Out of a medium’s mouth.’)
13. Ibid., pp.193-94.
14. Song and Its Fountains, p.41.
15. Wade, p.287.
16. Song and Its Fountains, p.29.
17. On the Boiler, p.27.
18. Autobiographies, p.190.
19. See pp.206-07 [infra].
20. I say faintly; for he had striven to rid himself of Shelley’s influence, because ‘his system of thought was constructed by his logical faculty to satisfy desire, not a symbolical revelation received after suspension of desire.’ At the same time, there are many verbal echoes of Shelley, particularly from Prometheus and The Witch of Atlas . And there seems to be some relevance in

- to the second verse of “Byzantium”, where image is used in Shelley’s sense.
21. Autobiographies, pp.194-95. It is of interest that Yeats wanted the Irish ‘to unite literature to their great political passion, to live as the men of ’48 by the light of noble books and the great tradition of the past’.
22. ‘One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen-ni-Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung. .’ ( Plays, 1931. Notes, p.419.)
23. A Vision (A), p.239.
24. The phrase lived with him, as such memorable things were apt to do; it is quoted again in If were Four and Twenty, p.63.
25. Stories of Red Hanrahan (1927), p.134.
26. If were Four and Twenty, p.5. For the ‘evil spirit’ Mrs Yeats has referred me to Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland: ‘In another lake there is a ‘huge-winged creature, it is said, which escaped the power of St Patrick, and when he gambols in the water such storms arise that no boat can withstand the strength of the waves’ (Vol. II, p.124).
27. Coll. Poems, p.360.
28. Ibid., p.304.
29. The Rose, 1893. See in particular “The Secret Rose” ( The Wind among the Reeds, 1899) for the fusion of the Celtic legend, the Magi and pre-Raphaelitism.
30. Cf. “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman” (Crossways ): ‘When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.’
31 Cf. “The Song of the Old Mother”.
32. Cf. “The Fiddler of Dooney”.
33. Autobiographies, p.254.
34. Ibid., p.315
35. Introduction to Hone & Rossi, p.xxiv.
36. Autobiographies, p.264.
37. Explorations, p.396.
38. T.Sturge Moore, Letters, p.83.
39. Ibid., p.121.
40. Coll. Poems, p.285.
41. Nov. 1931.
42. Yeats was liable to these smell hallucinations, which are well known to psychologists. The experiences were sometimes shared by those present at the time. (L. A. G. Strong.)
43. I am indebted for this reference to Professor Jeffares.
44. Coll. Poems, p.282.
45. ‘When I was young we talked much of tradition, and those emotional young men, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, found it in Christianity. But now that The Golden Bough has made Christianity look modern and fragmentary we study Confucius with Ezra Pound, or like T. S. Eliot find in Christianity a convenient symbolism for some older or newer thought .’ ( Preface to Upanishads, p.10.)
46. Béguin, L’Ame Romantique et Le Rêve, I, Introduction, p.xiii.
47. Explorations, p.376, 378.
48. “The Lady’s Third Song”, Coll. Poems, p.345.
49. Béguin, op. cit., I, p.200.
50. ‘I think he hated all his early poems, and ‘Innisfree’ most of all. But one evening I begged him to read it. A look of tortured irritation came into his face and continued there until the reading was over.’ ( Letters to Dorothy Wellesley, p.192).
51. Cf. W. G. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland.
52. “The White Birds”, in Coll. Poems, p.46. The whole poem is of interest for the Swinburne-Morris characteristics, and the pernicious influence of decadent romanticism, as well as for the faults of technique. Note the death image of the seabird that ‘announced death or danger to a Pollexfen’.
53. George Moore gives an amusing and malicious account of Yeats’ incursion into Irish agriculture: vide Salve, pp.81-84.
54. Autobiographies, p.262.
55. Hone, Life, p.71.
56. See ‘Byzantium’, and the Theseus-image of the thread-clue.
57. Autobiographies, p.255.
58. The Tarot Pack can be used for this purpose.
59. ‘Those images that yet / Fresh images beget ...’ (“Byzantium”), and ‘... those forms [among the leaves of Byzantine decoration] that represent no creature eye has ever seen, yet are begotten one upon the other as if they were themselves living creatures’. (A Vision (A), p.192).
60. A Vision (A), p.195. There is, perhaps, a suggestion of humour in Yeats’ description of this. Compare: ‘... I once visited a Cabbalist who spent the day trying to look out of the eyes of his canary; he announced at nightfall that all things had for it colour but no outline. His method of contemplation was probably in error.’ (Introd. to Hone & Rossi, p.xxviii). Cf. also the episode at Madame Blavatsky’s: ‘A big materialist sat on the astral double of a poor young Indian ...’ (Wade, p.59).
61. Perhaps stimulated by Sturge Moore’s poem, “The Centaur’s Booty’”.
62. Cf., Autobiographies, p.372. The inference was, of course, that some cosmic event had been recorded simultaneously and independently.
63. Coll. Poems, p.319. Yeats had read S. W. Grose’s Catalogue of Greek Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in which many such ‘archer’ coins are illustrated. There are possible instances in Vol. II, pl.239.15 or 243.22. It is not unlikely that these illustrations suggested other images, or confirmed the sense of ‘dominance’ of them, e.g. of the Dolphin which occurs so frequently. There is also the Chinese poem about the archer Yi, who shot down nine suns (Waley). The image of the archer shooting at a star also occurs in Hannay’s Wisdom of the Desert, but the source for the desert and saint imagery is the Lausiac History of the Palladins: and from this he seems to have derived his ideas of sainthood. It contains the source of “Demon and Beast”.
 It is quite in keeping with his methods that the first discovery of such symbols should be accidental: ‘I suppose that I must have put hawks into the fourth stanza because I have a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it, to symbolize the straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of intuition’ (Notes to Coll. Poems, p.534; of “Meditations in Time of Civil War”.)
 And there is, I think, some humour in the symbolism in John Sherman: ‘John’, she said, ‘look at this brooch William gave me - a ladder leaning against the moon and a butterfly climbing up it. Is it not sweet? We are going to visit the poor.’ (p.141).
64. Vide the ending of “The Gift of Harun AI-Rashid”.
65. Mythologies, p.340.
66. I do not understand the allusion and the grammar is obscure; but the kind of thing Yeats had in mind is shown from the note to The Wind Among the Reeds, quoted on p.253.
67. Wade, p.324.
68. Coll. Poems, p.137.
69 See p.58 [supra].
70. Autobiographies, p.264. This also is close to Jung’s position.
71. Per Amica Silentia Lunae, p.59.
72. “All Souls’ Night”, Coll. Poems, p.256; and also as the epilogue to A Vision.
73. A Vision (A), pp.87-88.
74. Autobiographies, p.3
75. “Good Friday” [Poems].
76. “Three Things”, Coll. Poems, p.300.
77. “Consolation”, ibid., p.310.
78. This is St Teresa of Avila. ‘Such a strong and wonderful perfume came from her sepulchre that it was resolved to exhume the sacred body. ... It was found entire, incorruptible and flexible as though it had only just been laid in the tomb, and impregnated with a sweet-scented liquid such as God causes to flow from it until this day, thus attesting the sanctity of His servant by a perpetual miracle’ (from the Bull of Gregory XV, 1622). St Teresa’s heart was pierced by the dart of an angel, as the symbol of the heavenly love which transfixed her - the cosmic image again. I do not know whether there is a contrast suggested between the ponderous mystic utterances of von Hügel. and the practical common-sense precepts of the Saint.
79. “Vacillation”, viii, Coll. Poems, p.285. There is, in the eighth and ninth lines, a thought which seems to be an echo from Shelley’s Prince Athanase, which Yeats had read carefully:
Nor what religion fables of the grave
Feared he ...
80. Wade, p.790.
81. Identity, p.274.
82. Coll. Poems, p.513.
83. A classic instance in iconography is Kranach’s Menus and Cupid.
84. ‘I Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear
         Or that William Blake.’ ( Coll. Poems, p.346.)
85. Autobiographies, p.346.
86. T. Sturge Moore, Letters, p.149