You must be won
At a full moon in March, those beggars say.
That moon has come, but I am here alone. |
| —A Full Moon in March. |
I
Any consideration of “The Phases of the Moon” must be linked ultimately to the whole philosophy of A Vision, but this single aspect of Yeats’ belief is so important a source of imagery that it is convenient to consider it under a separate heading. The most convenient starting-point is from Chaucer’s “The Frankeleyn’s Tale”:
He him remembered that, upon a day,
At Orliens in studie a book he say
Of magik natural, which his felawe,
That was that tyme a bacheler of lawe,
Al were he ther to lerne another craft,
Had prively upon his desk y-laft;
Which book spak muchel of the operaciouns,
Touchinge the eighte and twenty mansiouns
That longen to the mone, and swich folye,
As in our dayes is not worth a flye;
For holy churches feith in our beleve
Ne suffreth noon illusion us to greve. [1]
Yeats knew this, and used the corresponding passage in Skeat’s notes. [2]
‘I here quote from my Preface to Chaucer’s “Astrolabe” (Early English Texts Soc.), p.lix: “The twenty-eight ‘moon stations’ of the Arabs are given in Ideler’s Untersuchungen dher die Bedeutung der Sternnamen, p.287. He gives the Arabic names, the stars that help to fix [173] their positions, &c., . For the influence of the moon on these mansions, we must look elsewhere, viz., in lib. i, cap. ii and lib. iv, cap. 18 of the Epitome Astrologiae of Johannes Hispalensis. [3] Suffice it to say that there are twelve temperate mansions, six dry ones, and ten moist ones. The number 28 corresponds with the number of days in a lunation.’ Skeat has a further note on the passage, to which Yeats does not appear to have paid much attention: he quotes from Chaucer’s Astrolabe:
Natheles, thise ben observances of iudicial matiere and rytes of payens, in which my spirit ne hath no feith.
Another source is that richest of mines, Cornelius Agrippa: e.g. ii Ch. xxxii of Occult Philosophy:
The sun is the lord of all elementary virtues, and the moon by virtue of the sun is the mistress of generation, increase or decrease ... but the moon, the nighest to the earth, the receptacle of all the heavenly influences, by the sweetness of her course is joined to the sun and the other planets and stars, every month, and being as it were the wife of all the stars [4] and receiving the beams and influences of all the other planets and stars as a conception and imaging them forth to the inferior world as being next to itself, is the parent of all conceptions.
There is no need to labour the implications of moon-symbolism throughout poetic history; but to Yeats, for reasons both of life and genius, that emblem had a particular value. The period from Responsibilities onwards is marked by a complete revaluation of the experiences before 1914, and in particular of those events which followed the “Estrangement” of 1909. It was necessary to impose an order upon that experience, to attempt to re-shape the ‘cosmic dance’ to suit his own purpose. There was plenty of precedent in the astrologers, in Chaucer, Dante, the Elizabethans, Swedenborg, Blake.
In this dance the moon had special values. It could become an emblem, set against the Tower, of the antithesis of contemplative and active man, as in “Blood and the Moon”, iv: [5] [174]
No matter what I said,
For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power,
Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living; but no stain
Can come upon the visage of the moon
When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
He could make it serve his strange capacity for irradiating his world from within, for communicating that ‘dance-like glory’, which might be borrowed in part from Shakespeare or from Shelley. He was familiar with its manifestations in the pastoral landscapes of Blake, Calvert, Palmer. But above all the moon was the woman-principle. He was to see the golden cock ‘by the moon embittered’ in “Byzantium”. In “Lines written in Dejection” [6] there is a classic instance of the mother-aspect of moon-symbolism, the significance of which Miss Bodkin has described so fully. [7]
The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;
I have nothing but the embittered sun;
Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
And now that I have come to fifty years
I must endure the timid sun.
Here every image carries its psychological implications; and this is 1915, a critical year. To impose an order on circumstances, to find an order in the inconstancy of the woman-principle, would be to ‘divine an analogy that evades the intellect [8], and at the same time to bring his own circle of destiny into line with the wheel of eastern mysticism, the circles of Dante and Blake. The system would explain ‘why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny’. [9] It had astrological precedent, and there were the Instructors to answer, in part at least (for they were not quite certain whether the wheel was divided into twelve parts or ten), the questions that arose out of complication and contradiction. It could produce ‘a sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is not merely imagining’. [10]
II
The explanatory diagram in A Vision [see fig.] is in the form of the Great Wheel of the lunar phases. It is closely associated with the cones and gyres, but the geometrical complexities set up by this are not of great interest in the interpretation of the poetry. The wheel symbolizes ‘every completed movement of thought or life’ (that is, it is applicable equally to a millennium or to a single life-span) or to ‘a single judgement or act of thought’ [11]. In the anti-clockwise revolution, man, starting from Phase 1, seeks his opposite at Phase 15, and then returns to his original starting-point.
In this progress, the circle is further resolved into a system of interlocking cones, symbolizing, in their oppositions and tensions, the four Faculties. ‘When the Will predominates, and there is strong desire, the Mask or Image is sensuous, but when Creative Mind predominates, it is abstract. When the Mask predominates it is idealized, when the Body of Fate, it is concrete, and so on. [12]
The main division of the circle is between Primary and Antithetical. This dichotomy persists through the book; the egoist is opposed to the saint, artist to business man or politician, and so on. It is all-important, and on it depends Yeats’ conception of personality which I have suggested in the chapter ‘self and Anti-Self’. In brief:
| (a) |
All unity is derived from the Mask. The ‘antithetical Mask’ is ‘the form created by passion to unite us to ourselves’. [13] |
| (b) |
Personality, no matter how habitual, is a constantly renewed choice, varying from ‘an individual charm, in the more antithetical phases, to a hard objective dramatization. .’ [14] |
| (c) |
The variations or oscillations between aspects of personality are subject both to choice and to external circumstance. Man may be in or out of phase, according to the success or [176] otherwise of his struggle with the various ‘false’ attributes in his psychology.
(d) Phases 1 and 15 are opposites - ‘the superhuman phases’ in which chance and choice coincide. |
| (e) |
Each phase is characterized by two major attributes, Will, and Body of Fate, or circumstance: and by two other attributes, the Mask or the Creative Mind, either of which may be true or false. These are shown in a complex and not altogether consistent table. |
| (f) |
Each phase has also special ‘characters’: the Four Perfections; Four Types of Wisdom; Four ‘Contests’ (conflicts), which are the Moral, Emotional, Physical and Supersensual; with a further Four which are placed under the curious headings of ‘Rage’, Phantasy’, etc. |
| (g) |
There are a large number of other headings - ‘General Character of Created Mind’, ‘General Character of Body of Fate’, and a ‘Table of the Quarters’ giving other attributes. It is of interest to note that the poem “The Four Ages of Man”[15] is taken directly from the first of these.. There is also a number of unclassified attributes. |
[Note: p.177 in the original is given over to a calligraphic diagram of the “Phases of the Moon” - as attached. ]
One day the full correlation of these phases and attributes may beworked out; it is obvious that there is a general correspondencewith his own biography. I am concerned at present only with the direct bearing of the system on the interpretation of certain, poems.
In the figure shown on the previous page [p.177], I have re-drawn from A Vision a simplified diagram of the wheel. The astrological signs. have been disregarded, and relevant quotations from “The Phases of the Moon”[16] and elsewhere have been inserted, together with comments selected from the texts of A Mision. Much is omitted that does not appear to me relevant to the interpretation of the poetry. But if the life-span is taken at seventy years, and the quadrant plotted in relation to Yeats’ own life, the correspondence is striking. At the same time, it is clear to me that there is a conflict in A Vision itself: for there appears to be both a progression through the [178] stations’, and a static aspect in which every station is listed as characteristic of specific human types.
The fullest explanation is in “The Phases of the Moon”. The meaning of the poem is far from clear; so far as it can be isolated from the poetic statement, we have a pattern in which it is convenient to think of this circle of twenty-eight points; starting with the crescent moon.
The first quarter, Points 1-6, is given up to adventure and sensuous happiness, a time not unlike Keats’ Chamber of Maiden Thought.
The initial period of animal happiness is followed by the phase of experience, in which ‘he follows whatever whim’s most difficult. .’
and though scarred
As with the cat-o’-nine-tails of the mind,
His body moulded from within his body
Grows comelier. [17]
Nos. 11-12 are periods of violent heroic action: with the peculiar phrase (to which Yeats frequently recurs and which appeared to have a special significance for him: ‘Athena takes Achilles by the hair’ [18]. Phase No. 13 sees the
soul at war
In its own being.
This is followed by a period of quiescence and contemplation and knowledge at the full moon, when
The soul begins to tremble into stillness,
To die into the labyrinth of itself.
The fifteenth phase is of great importance. Thought and will, effort and attainment, become indistinguishable. During the previous stage all the images and ‘cadences of the mind’ - a peculiar phrase - have been converging towards this state where ‘contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where [179] every beloved image has bodily form, and every bodily image is beloved’. This may be in part the explanation of
Paul Veronese
And all his sacred company
Imagined bodies all their days
By the lagoon you love so much,
For proud, soft, ceremonious proof
That all must come to sight and touch. [19]
Compare with this:
All that the being has experienced as thought is visible to its eyes as a whole, and in this way it perceives, not as they are to others, but according to its own perception, all orders of existence. [20]
This and the preceding sentence are referred to in the lines:
ROBARTES. All thought becomes an image and the soul
Becomes a body: that body and that soul
Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,
Too lonely for the traffic of the world:
Body and soul cast out and cast away
Beyond the visible world.
AHERNE. All dreams [ref21]of the soul
End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.
ROBARTES. Have you not always known it?
AHERNE. The song will have it
That those that we have loved got their long fingers
From death, and wounds, or on Sinai’s top,
Or from some bloody whip in their own hands.
They ran from cradle to cradle till at last
Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness
Of body and soul.
I do not understand these last lines. It is possible, as Jeffares has suggested, that they may allude to an affair with ‘Diana Vernon’ in 1896. He saw her as one who had known in her life much passion (and suffered greatly). His idea of doomed beauty is, of course, recurrent: as, for example, in the “Crazy Jane” poems. Perhaps a key to the interpretation of the whole passage is contained in a note [180 ] on The Only Jealousy of Emer. ‘The invisible fifteenth [22] incarnation is that of the greatest possible bodily beauty, and the fourteenth and sixteenth that of the greatest beauty visible to human eyes. Much that Robartes has found might be a commentary on Castiglione’s saying that the physical beauty of women is the spoil or monument of the victory of the soul, for physical beauty, only possible to subjective natures, is described as the result of emotional toil in past lives.’ [23] Past suffering, therefore, has produced this present beauty. But such beauty is doomed, recognizing that it must soon vanish:
It must be that the terror in their eyes
Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour
When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.
This would be the last phase of the circuit; the one immediately preceding it being that of the Saint, when the heavenly light is still broken.
Phase 16 is one of excitement and ‘aimless illusion’, with ‘an element of frenzy, and almost always a delight in certain glowing or shining images of concentrated force: in the smith’s forge ... in the solar disc; in some symbolical representation of the sexual organs; for the being must brag of its triumph over its own incoherence.’ [24]
There is some illumination here of other aspects of imagery; such as the recurrent sword metaphor in relation to the ‘glowing or shining images’; and the thought of the smith’s forge suggests an enrichment of meaning in “Byzantium” -
The golden smithies of the Emperor.
It is perhaps significant that this phase is also one of illusion; ‘in it the soul may surround itself with some fairyland, some mythology of wisdom or laughter’. [25] On the suggested time-scale of the wheel this would correspond to the early 1900s.
In a superb passage he describes the loneliness of the phase, the fifteenth, under the full moon: [181]
When the moon’s full those creatures of the full
Are met on the waste hills by country men
Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul
Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves,
Caught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye
Fixed upon images that once were thought;
For separate, perfect, and immovable
Images can break the solitude
Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.
Perhaps the image is of The Countess Cathleen and Maud Gonne, and the hope that the solitude of those eyes would be broken by an image; for A-herne, with his aged, high-pitched voice (that will one day be the voice of Ribh ‘that ninety years have cracked’) laughs at the thought. The moon crumbles, and then
The soul remembering its loneliness
Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,
It would be the world’s servant, and as it serves,
Choosing whatever task’s most difficult [26]
Among tasks not impossible, it takes
Upon the body and upon the soul
The coarseness of the drudge.
The period of the drudge, and its coarseness, is that of the Abbey Theatre. It is followed by a phase which picks up the past piece by piece:
Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man, [27]
Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,
Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all
Deformed because there is no deformity
But saves us from a dream.
There may be anticipation of desire here. Yeats’ children were born in 1919 and 1921:
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right. [28] [182]
The deformity is that of the Mask, the Anti-Self, the practical man, who will later develop into the Hunchback: the phase in which Yeats will be the ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’, now possessed of power.
Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents. The end of the poems lingers on them. Aheme ponders over the words:
I’d stand and mutter there until he caught
‘Hunchback and saint and fool’, and that they came
Under the three last crescents of the moon,
And then I’d stagger out. He’d crack his wits
Day after day, yet never find the meaning.
And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard
Should be so simple. ...
This most important transition between the Hunchback and the Saint is expressed concisely in the poem of that name. [29]
HUNCHBACK. Stand up and lift your hand and bless
A man that finds great bitterness
In thinking of his lost renown.
A Roman Caesar is held down
Under this hump.
SAINT. God tries each man
According to a different plan.
I shall not cease to bless because
I lay about me with the taws
That night and morning I may thrash [30]
Greek Alexander from my flesh,
Augustus Caesar, and after these
That great rogue Alcibiades.
HUNCHBACK. To all that in your flesh have stood
And blessed, I give my gratitude,
Honoured by all in their degrees,
But most to Alcibiades. [31] [183]
The system of the Phases of the Moon is not without its significance in Yeats’ own life. He was capable both of perceiving his own life in terms of that cycle, and of adjusting his own life and thought to fit the framework, remembering his father’s advice that he should control his fantasies; though we can never be certain whether he was rationalizing his own emotions in terms of the myth, or explaining the myth in terms of himself. That the two were closely related is plain from A Vision: ‘Upon the throne and upon the cross alike the myth becomes a biography’.
The three aspects of personality are, I believe, of immense importance in Yeats’ poetical development. The Hunchback is the ‘Multiple Man’. Yeats seems perplexed in his attempt to define his true significance, for this is ‘the first of those phases for which one can find few or no examples from personal experience’. ‘One must create the type from the symbols without the help of experience’. [32]
The Hunchback is ‘the most completely solitary of all possible men’. ‘Without personality he is forced to create its artificial semblance’. His hump symbolizes the ‘ambition that thwarts what seems to be the ambition of a Caesar or of an Achilles. He commits crimes, not because he wants to . . . but because he wants to feel certain that he can.... If he live amid theologically minded people, his greatest ambition may be to defy God, to become a Judas, who betrays, not for thirty pieces of silver, but that he may call himself creator.’ [33] ‘If the man of this phase seeks, not life, but knowledge, of each separated life in relation to supersensual unity . he will, because he can see lives and actions in relation to their source and not in their relations to one another, see their deformities and incapacities with extraordinary acuteness. His own past actions also he must judge as isolated and each in relation to its source ...’ [34] It is worth noting that the ‘Body of Fate’, or circumstance, proper to the Hunchback is ‘enforced disillusionment’.
It will be seen that these phases can be related to specific poems in the late period: [184]
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought. [35]
and
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? [36]
And I think there is something of the perversity, the paradoxical renunciation of ‘Hatred of God may bring the soul to God’ [37] in the self-justifications, the ‘enforced disillusionment’, of this phase.
I do not wish to press this argument too far, and exact chronological correspondences are obviously impossible; but the resemblances are so close that a consideration of them increases very greatly the coherence of the last poems.
So, too, the correspondence with the Saint. Examples of this are Socrates, and, strangely enough, Pascal. ‘Thought and action have for their object display of zeal or some claim of authority. ...’[;] ‘... the man asserts when out of phase his claim to faculty or to supersensitive privileges beyond that of other men; he has a secret that makes him better than other men.’
This suggests something of Keats’ ‘negative capability’. the total life has suddenly displayed its source.’ ‘If he possesses intellect he will use it but to serve perception and renunciation. His joy is to be nothing, to do nothing, to think nothing; but to permit the total life, expressed in its humanity, to flow in upon him and to express itself through his acts and thoughts.’ [38] ‘He will, if it be possible, not even touch or taste or see: ‘Man does not perceive the truth; God perceives the truth in man.’ [39] The paradox of Ribh and his renunciation is again emphasized. [185]
The Fool of the last crescent is natural man, ‘a straw blown by the wind ... and is sometimes called “The Child of God” ... The physical world suggests to his mind pictures and events that have no relation to his needs or even to his desires; his thoughts are an aimless reverie; his acts are aimless like his thoughts; and it is in this aimlessness that he finds his joy.’ [40] He is in part the Shakespearean Fool, in part the fool of folk-lore ‘who is as wide and as wild as a hill’. He is the fool of the play The Hour Glass, natural man whose wisdom may save humanity.
III
The richness and depth of the normal moon-symbolism is greatly magnified by the myth of the phases. In the short and difficult poem “The Crazed Moon” [41] there is, I think, a double symbolism at work. In this the moon is womanhood,
Crazed through much child-bearing
The moon is staggering in the sky.
Mankind seeks for the ‘children born of her pain’, the events that arise from her predestined round. But in the next there is virginal womanhood:
When she in all her virginal pride
First trod on the mountain’s head
What stir ran through the countryside
Where every foot obeyed her glance!
What manhood led the dance!
which stands both for an earlier, more rich age, and - the accent of the two pieces is similar - for the memory of Constance Gore-Booth.
When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulben to the meet,
The beauty of her countryside
With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred . [42]
In the third verse, woman and circumstance both unite in the symbol: [186]
Fly-catchers of the moon,
Our hands are blenched, our fingers seem
But slender needles of bone;
Blenched by that malicious dream
They are spread wide that each
May rend what comes in reach.
In “The Cat and the Moon”, the pupils of the cat’s eyes change with the phases of the moon. The cat is ‘the nearest kin of the moon’, most sharply affected by its sensuality:
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood. [43]
For the cat is also the emblem of man, and also his antitype; in the Preface [44] to the play he wrote: ‘... [1] allowed myself as I wrote to think of the cat as the normal man and of the moon as the opposite he seeks perpetually, or as having any meaning I have conferred upon the moon elsewhere.’ What follows is of special interest: ‘Doubtless too, when the lame man takes the saint upon his back. the normal man has become one with that opposite, but I had to bear in mind that I was among dreams and proverbs, that though I might discover what had been and might be again an abstract idea, no abstract idea must be present. The spectator should come away thinking the meaning as much his own manufacture as that of the blind man and the lamed man had seemed mine.’ So the cat goes creeping through the grass, his eyes changing from round to crescent as the moon changes:
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes. [187]
The application of the myth reaches what I take to be its greatest complexity in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”. [45] In the first movement the poet is concerned with his own predestined obedience to ‘some magical hidden breath’.
When had I my own will?
O not since life began.
In the second, there are two poles between which the mental conflict oscillates: the Sphinx on the grey rock of Cashel (related, I suggest, to Ingres’ Oedipus and the Sphinx) and
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest ...
Both know the answer to the riddle of existence; the Sphinx in a kind of fierce exultation of intellect, the Buddha in love and sadness. It seems likely that Yeats in his own mind was the Oedipus whose task it was to solve the riddle of Ireland (linked always in his thought with Egypt) whose misfortunes of blood and suffering were not unlike those described at the opening of Sophocles’ play. The Sphinx and the Buddha represent the two approaches to wisdom, from West and East. Between these two is the vision of the dancing girl, Iseult Gonne, or the girl dying into a dance in the Japanese play [46] (‘That, it may be, had danced her life away’); the image of desire for the girl who sang on the sea-shore in Normandy
Let all things pass away.
In the third movement the pattern becomes clearer. Iseult Gonne is linked in memory to her mother, who is Helen
Who never gave die burning town a thought;
To such a pitch of folly I am brought,
Being caught between the pull
Of the dark moon and the full ...
The Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw is now both the oracle, and the woman, and the cat mysteriously linked to the moon with her expanding and contracting pupils; the tail is lashed, as by [188] a cat before it springs: and we are again confronted with the mysterious beast of the Second Coming, that symbolized ‘laughing ecstatic destruction’ [47] - woman, or cat, or Sphinx, or those strange winged lions in Ricketts’ illustrations for The Sphinx. In contrast there is the Buddha:
That other’s moonlit eyeballs never moved,
Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,
Yet little peace he had,
For those that love are sad.
So the two resolve themselves into symbols of action and contemplation; and this antithesis provides, I think, the explanation of the difficulty in “The Statues”. [48]
Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha’s emptiness.
Sphinx, lion, woman, cat, have been, as it were, tamed in the contemptuous and homely epithet, with its overtones from the Witches in Macbeth. [49]
I have used this moon symbolism as offering a simple illustration of the need for sympathy in understanding Yeats’ cosmic interpretation, so that we may realize the full complexity of his imagery. I have deliberately selected only a few aspects. When we come to consider A Vision, we have again an ordered cosmic dance, in which the gyres are the basis of the system, with some image of a shuttle or bobbin within these cones, interlocking or juxtaposed; and over all the moon’s influence as a deterministic factor in virtue of which man oscillates between Choice and Chance. Man’s life is a microcosm of the larger cycles of history. These are the essentials of A Vision. The very profusion of diagrams gives rise to limitless flexibility of application; so that, as we read, we feel that Yeats is juggling with his own beliefs in something approaching bewilderment. All this has to be applied - again in a desultory and arbitrary [189] fashion - as a theory of history. But the theory is so important for. the interpretation of the poetry that it is necessary to set out its main features. ‘History seems to me a human drama, keeping the classical unities by the clear division of its epochs, turning one way or the other because this man hates or that man loves.’
[END]
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