Civilization is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought
...
                                                                -“Meru”, Supernatural Songs.

I must create a system myself or be enslaved by another man’s. - Blake.

I am the first to substitute for Biblical or mythological figures, historical movements and actual men and women - A Vision (A), p.xii.

A Vision is of interest for three reasons. It gives us an idea, [191] however fragmentary, of Yeats’ view of history; and therefore of such divergent matters as the myth-value of Leda and the Swan, Greek sculpture, Byzantine mosaics, the painters of the Renaissance and the poetry of T. S. Eliot. It helps to explain the symbolic values he found in the work of the artists of his various ‘eras’, waxing and waning in their arts, repeating themselves in cycles, or seeking their Opposites, according to the Phases of the Moon. And, finally, it offers an instance of the strange workings of his mind, that could select and sometimes distort so much historical fact to fit his theories; but which, having seen history in this arbitrary pattern, could use its symbols with such conviction. Perhaps this sense of conviction is more important, as the undercurrent of his working mind, than the diffuse and fragmentary philosophies that are evoked to strengthen it.

For all the exasperation it has produced, I do not think that it is possible to dismiss A Vision with contempt or to argue, as Kleinstück has done, for its entire irrelevance. It offers a broad and sweeping chronicle of those historical events that seemed important to Yeats. Its detail is often helpful and at times essential to our interpretation. A major difficulty in presenting a simplified version for this purpose is the discrepancy between the two versions, that of 1925 (the Werner Laurie edition) and the Macmillan edition of 1937. [3] The early version, which is noted for convenience as “A”, is more likely to represent the immediate result of the original automatic writings, the visit to Italy (the book was finished in Capri) and the stimulus resulting from pictures, statues and mosaics. The 1937 or “B” version is heavily cut, toned down, and modified so as to admit, in parts, of a half-serious interpretation - perhaps

Because there is safety in derision. [“The Apparitions”, CP386]

A desire to seek safety in derision, or a certain love of mischief, may have been responsible for the machinery of disguise - the puppet figures of Robartes and Aherne, the drawing of the magician that looks like an authentic woodcut, but which was done by Dulac. (A beard was added to disguise the resemblance of the finished block to Yeats himself.)

There is a certain mystery about it all. ‘I published in 1925 an [192] inaccurate, obscure, incomplete book called “A Vision”. It lies beside me now, clarified and completed after five years’ work and thought.’ But it was published in a limited edition of 600 copies in 1925; it was re-worked at Rapallo during 1929-30 [4], and this statement on its revision was made in 1931. It seems probable that Yeats did carry out exhaustive revision (he speaks of rewriting for the seventh time that part of it that deals with the future); then, knowing that its promise of a philosophical system could never be fulfilled, he abandoned it and returned to The Tower, until the ‘corrected’ version was published in 1937.

The ‘B’ version throws a good deal of light on Yeats’ reading between 1925 and 1937, though it is not clear when the bulk of the revision took place. There is some evidence for the period of 1926-8. It is perhaps significant that in it there are a number of footnotes explaining his indebtedness to various sources. They include An Adventure (that of the Petit Trianon), Pierre Duliem’s Systéme du Monde, Toynbee’s A Study of History, Henry Adams’ History as Phase [5] and Flinders Petrie’s The Revolutions of Civilization . [6] All such references are omitted in the first edition; it looks as if Yeats designed, with how much seriousness we do not know, to give the whole credit to the mysterious “Instructors” and to excuse some of the obscurities and inconsistencies by the work of the equally mysterious “Frustrators”. These “Instructors” and “Frustrators” deserve a special note in the light of Jung’s latest work. Under these somewhat pompous titles they seem to derive from certain normal experiences in Indian mysticism, towards which Yeats was attracted throughout his life. The Guru who guides the mystic in his progress towards enlightenment may be the spirit of some long-dead sage; other “influences” may convey enlightenment in dreams or visions. But evil or malicious spirits may seek to confuse or intervene or mislead, and this was familiar in the séances, and dramatized in [193] The Words upon the Window Pane. It is possible to regard both “Instructors” and “Frustrators” as a dramatic and startling method of denoting that which provided, through his own Blakean practices of vision and dream, the material which was revealed. Whether the sources are archetypal dreams, ancestral memories, “cosmic” visions of the type of the Archer and the Star, or emotion recollected and transformed in the dream state, it is impossible to decide. But it seems likely that, having once been familiar with such “systems” as were afforded by the Golden Dawn, the writings of G. R. S. Mead, and his reading in astrology, the images multiplied and adjusted themselves in a steady and elaborate progression. Later he refers to the complex and recondite sources that he has used. It is clear from the Prologue in ‘A’, addressed to Vestigia (who is Mrs Mathers), that much of the reading goes back to theosophical days. There are allusions to Husserl, to Arabian astrological manuscripts, Frobenius, Josef Strzygowski ('the most philosophical of archaeologists’); and there is, I think, evidence of a more commonplace debt to H. G. Wells’ Outline of History.

As usual, the net of desultory reading has been flung wide. The “gyres” - the conical spirals of determined events in which man and events move - are from Plato: ‘The first gyres clearly described by philosophy are those described in the Timaeus which are made by the circuits of “the Other” (creators of all particular things), of the planets as they ascend or descend above or below the equator. They are opposite in nature to that circle of the fixed stars which constitutes “the Same” and confers upon it the knowledge of Universals.’ [7] But there is also a Chinese aspect: ‘I have a Chinese painting of three old sages sitting together, one with a deer at his side, one with a scroll open at the symbol of yen and yin, those two forms that whirl perpetually, creating and re-creating all things.’ [8]

The origin and development of the gyres has been discussed at length by A. N. Jeffares, and, lately, by H. H. Vendler. They derive, through many ramifications, from Plato, Heraclitus, Descartes, Swedenborg, Boehme, Blake. A gyre is ‘a combination of line and plane, and as one tendency or the other must always be stronger, the gyre is always expanding or contracting’. Therefore [194] two cones are used to symbolize the double effect of the normal tensions set up in life: i.e. soul and self, man and nature, heart and head.

In the sketch at page 196 [fig.], the manner in which Yeats used the gyre as the basis of a symbol-group is suggested. The figure of the interlaced double triangle used in A Vision has been simplified to show two expanding cones, each formed by a sphere moving onward in space. Within the cones moves the ‘perne’, a spool which unwinds the thread spirally as the sphere moves onward: spool and thread having in part connotations of the Three Fates, in part those of the exploration of the labyrinth, ‘Hades’ bobbin’ of ‘Byzantium’. As each age reaches its catastrophic climax it disintegrates, ‘things fall apart’: yet within, as it were, the new age starts its growth, ‘unwinding the thread the previous age has wound’. But the movement is not merely circular and spiral, but oscillatory, like the shuttle, and thus provides an image for the antithetical aspects of personality. ‘Gyre’ and ‘perne’ are also associated with bird-flight, and the failure of the falconer, God, to control the falcon, [9] the human mind in its spiral ascent; so that we have an association with the winding stair and the whole range of images from The Tower, linked to Blake’s “A Design of Circular Stairs” (Paradiso, xix).

Any attempt at a detailed analysis of A Vision is likely to be unprofitable. But it is possible to extract from the book what appear to be Yeats’ central poetic beliefs, isolating them from any attempts to consider them as components of a system; and then to show the forms which those beliefs assume in the fabric of his verse. The important points are perhaps these:

The basis of the time-scheme is the Platonic Great Year; the period at the end of which all the planets would, in theory, return to their original positions. This is the so-called thema mundi . The time taken for this cycle was variously estimated from 6,000 years to 24,000, 72,000 or even more. Yeats appears to accept the estimate of 26,000 years for the cycle.

Christ’s life and death are images of the Great Year. According to tradition the world and the sun were created in the Vernal Equinox, the moon two days later. His Crucifixion and Conception took place two days after the Vernal Equinox. Hence the explanation of the lines

And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God’s death were but a play. [10]

The date of Conception changed from year to year, but that of the Birth did not.

The Great Year is split up into twelve cycles corresponding to the twelve lunar months. At the First Cycle the first new soul comes into the world; at the end of the Twelfth Cycle there will be born a New Fountain. (This is, in another form, the Second Coming [196]

'Then there will come the first of a new series, the Thirteenth Cycle which is a Sphere and not a cone.’ [11] I suggest that this is the origin of the obscure cosmic image in “Chosen” of A Woman Young and Old:

. . . Where his heart my heart did seem
And both adrift on the miraculous stream
Where - wrote a learned astrologer
The Zodiac is changed into a sphere. [12]

Each of the Twelve Cycles lasts, in theory, approximately two thousand years; but, since history is seen as a series of interlaced expanding and contracting cones, there is no break in continuity. This series of cones or gyres is also perceived in terms of wheels, which are used to interpret not only each complete era, but also each half of it, thus complicating its astrological explanation. Since I am concerned only with the light that the system sheds on the poetry, I shall disregard this complication and others connected with psycho-astrological theories such as that of the ‘tinctures’. What is important at this stage is Yeats’ idea of a ‘millennium’ - ‘the symbolic measure of a being that attains its flexible maturity and then sinks into rigid age’. [13] ‘The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation, the scream of Juno’s peacock.’ [14].

The first era is 2000 B.C.- A.D. 1. Greek civilization drives out an older one. Yeats is but dimly conscious of the first period to 500 B.C., though he speaks of ‘some corner of the mathematical Babylonian starlight’ - mathematical because of the Babylonian eminence in astronomy. There is, however, a First Annunciation, the myth of Leda and the Swan, bird and woman, corresponding to the Second Annunciation, giving birth to Greece; hence

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead. [15]

By 1000 B.C. the Jewish religious system was complete, and the Jews themselves grown barbaric and Asiatic. The progress is through Homer, the development of civil order, to a phase of independence and solitude. In the sixth century B.C. ‘personality begins, but there is as yet no intellectual solitude’. The discovery of solitude [16] brings with it ‘the visible art that interests us most today’. After the Persian wars the ‘Doric vigour’ suggests a deliberate turning away from all that is Eastern, or a moral propaganda like that which turned the poets out of Plato’s Republic. In Phidias Ionic and Doric influences revive again. Persia falls before Phidias and his ‘westward-moving art’ just as Rome gave way to the glory of the Byzantine Empire, and the Byzantine to the Renaissance. The end of the millennium comes with the birth of Christ. The Annunciation and Birth are in some degree astrological events, linked to older civilizations - aspects of the same myth repeating itself. The date of 6 January for Christmas has been received ‘from the learned men of an older civilization, from the Greeks and Chaldeans perhaps, perhaps even from those worshippers of Korê at Alexandria who upon that day carried up from the Temple Crypt a wooden figure marked upon head and hands and knees with a Cross and a Star, crying out “The Virgin has given birth to the God”.’ (This explains the fabulous darkness in “Two Songs from a Play”:

The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war [202]

When that fierce virgin and her Star
Out of the fabulous darkness called. [17])

The star-conception image is frequent -
Another star has shot an ear

- perhaps linked in association with the vision of the arrow shot at a star, and therefore another aspect of this world-image. [18] With this dominant the Magi are continually associated; Mantegna’s Adoration of the Magi (though it cannot be related specifically to any one description) may be thought of as illuminating his image of them. The same painter’s Apollo and Diana shows Apollo standing on a star-covered sphere, and shooting an arrow into space, a symbol that occurs on Cretan coins, and in Blake, as well as in Chinese poetry and painting.

It appears that 2000 B.C.-A.D. 1 is, arbitrarily, Phase I of the millennium. At its end there is the ‘Galilean turbulence’: ‘the Roman Empire stood appalled’. The Christian church is in sharp antithesis to the realization of divinity through the discovery of formal perfection that Yeats finds in Greek sculpture. ‘It follows that it must be idolatry to worship that which Phidias and Scopas made . ‘Night will fall upon man’s wisdom now that man has been taught that he is nothing. .’ The gyre is widening at its end. Man is ‘stirred into a frenzy of anxiety and so to moral transformation. .’ (There was to be something of this kind when the last gyre ended, round about 1927.) ‘The mind that brought the change, if considered as man only, is a climax of whatever Greek and Roman thought was most a contradiction to its age; but considered as more than man He controlled what Neo-Pythagorean and Stoic could not - irrational force. He could announce the new age, all that had not been thought of, or touched, or seen, because He could substitute for reason, miracle ... We say of Him because His sacrifice was voluntary, that He was love itself, and yet that part of Him which made Christendom was not love but pity, [19] and not pity for intellectual despair, though the man in Him, being antithetical like His age, knew it in the Garden, but primary pity, that for the common [203] lot, man’s death, seeing that He raised Lazarus, sickness, seeing that He healed many, sin, seeing that He died.’ [20]

I have quoted this passage at length because I believe that it contains several important clues to Yeats’ thought. Christianity casts out the rational for the miraculous:

Odour of blood when
Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline. [21]

It is in part (for there is also the thought of the Irish Troubles) the explanation of the line in “The Gyres”:

Irrational streams of blood are staining earth [22]

- an irrationality that is associated with the coming of Christianity, and hence with the ‘rough beast’ and the ‘uncontrollable mystery’ of “The Second Coming”. The “Two Songs” are taken from the beginning and end of The Resurrection .

THE GREEK. O Athens, Alexandria, Rome, something has come to destroy you! The heart of a phantom is beating! Man has begun to die. Your words are clear at last, O Heraclitus. God and man die each other’s life, live each other’s death. [23]

Further, this reference to Christ’s Agony in the Garden is the only one that I can find in all the poetry and prose. We know that Yeats was strongly affected by Mantegna ('A thoughtless image of Mantegna’s thought’). We know that he visited the National Gallery in London. There is no conclusive evidence that he had seen Mantegna’s “Agony”. But the possibility that he knew it is a strong one. There is the peculiar marble quality of the rock, the pity, bewilderment, and a hint of fanaticism in the face:

Nobody before him had so pitied human misery. He preached the coming of the Messiah because he thought the Messiah would take it all upon himself. Then some day when he was very tired, after a long journey perhaps, he thought that he himself was the Messiah. He thought it because of all destinies it seemed the most terrible. [24] [204]

I do not think it can be accidental that the image of the white heron occurs as a dominant symbol in Calvary. In Mantegna’s “Agony” two white herons are fishing in the stream that winds at the foot of the Mount. They are dispassionate, apart, symbols of the ‘subjective’:

God has not died for the white heron.

It is plain elsewhere that the heron stands for the lonely, self-sufficient man, perhaps linked to the other lonely image of the Fisherman. It is objective life, dissociated from mental conflict; graduated downwards, the fifth plane of activity in the picture. Mantegna is far more concrete, more concerned with the symbols of ordinary life, than El Greco. Herons, rabbits, birds, the minute life of plant and bush and tree, and the armed party led by Judas emerging from the city - all these are set in a most moving and dramatic rhythm. On the bough of the sparse and dying tree a bird, half-vulture and half-raven, is sitting watching Christ. It may be kin to the image in “Byzantium”, or to the “miraculous strange bird” of the love poems. But I suggest that there is a kinship with that black bird which, in Oliver Sheppard’s statue, watches the dying Cuchulain from the stump of a tree.

The significance that Yeats sees is more than an artistic decadence, for the statue both represents man’s vision of the image of God, [205] in his mathematical proportions (the Greeks had found the secret of perfect man) and a potential embodiment of the soul. He had read Plotinus:

I think, therefore, that those ardent sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it. [26]

The statue was more than a representation of man.

He stresses the delineation by the Romans of character revealed in the face and hands alone; the head being screwed or dovetailed on to a ‘stock’ body made in the workshop. (This is the age becoming ‘rigid’.) ‘When I think of Rome I see always those heads with their world-considering eyes, and those bodies as conventional as the metaphors in a leading article, and compare in my imagination vague Grecian eyes gazing at nothing, Byzantine eyes of drilled ivory staring upon a vision. .’ [27]

This interest in statuary is partly the result of the visit to Sicily and Rome, but he seems to have studied plaster casts with some care in order to substantiate a theory that the depth of the eye-socket had some connection with the state of a given civilization. The thought occurs in “A Bronze Head” - that of Maud Gonne, illustrated in Hone’s Life:

Here at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead. [28]

In “Beautiful Lofty Things” she is seen in terms of statuary:

... Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train,
Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head. [29]

Yeats may have had in mind any one of a dozen different statues, but Phidias, to whom he refers so often, had made a head of Athena (Copenhagen) superbly arrogant, and the Lemnian Athena. Either [206] could have fittingly expressed Maud Gonne’s poise. The values of statuary were linked in a curious manner to the formal qualities of the Noh plays:

. Statues full of an august formality that implies traditional measurements, a philosophic defence. [30]

The measurements refer not only to the ‘divine perfection’ achieved by the Greeks, but also to the rules of proportion which the Egyptians followed for their human figures. The figure was first divided by a vertical line passing through nose, navel and genitals,. making of the body two symmetrical halves. The figure was then further divided by twenty-two horizontal lines ruled at regular intervals; the mouth was invariably placed on the twentieth parallel and so on with the other features. In the sixth century the Greeks obeyed the first part of the system: [31] hence

Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.

Egyptian statues are always architectural decorations, and hence there is no reason to show action. The proportions are a ‘philosophic defence’, perhaps as representing constancy in the changing world, perhaps merely from Yeats’ own obsession with symmetry. It is pertinent to quote B6guin again:

Et le grand mystère, qu’ils poursuivaient par tant de voies diverses, était une formule capable d’exprimer à la fois le rhythme du tout et le rythme analogue de chacune de ses parties vivantes. De 1à leurs speculations mathématiques: le nombre seul peut rendre compte d’une réalité compte comme essentiellement rhythmique . [32]

The reign of Justinian (527-565) should coincide with Phase 15, though the chronology is confused; and the building of St Sophia precedes the ‘moment of climax’. It appears, so close is the correspondence with parts of A Vision, that Yeats had been reading H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, which had been published in 1920. For an example: [207] One characteristic of its [Byzantine] decoration is a peculiar rigidity; all the flexibility of Greek and Roman painting and sculpture has gone, and in its place we have mosaics shewing flat, symmetrical, erect figures in full face. Hardly ever is there a profile or any stir of foreshortening. It is as if that natural body which the Greeks idolized had become reprehensible, a thing of fear. [33]

Justinian is followed by a blank period, including Phases 17-21. The next date that Yeats feels, though somewhat vaguely, to be significant, is ‘the break up of Charlemagne’s Empire’, which is equivalent to Phase 22, and which explains the image in “Whence Had They Come?”

Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming
Charlemagne was conceived? [34]

This brings us to about the end of the tenth century, and the ‘sinking down of Christendom into the heterogeneous loam’. The gyre breaks up into ‘Asiatic and anarchic form’.

The next period is 1550-1680 which covers Phases 16, 17 and 18. The important artists are Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian: its achievements are the Sistine Chapel and the Camera della Segnatura. Then for a moment intellect and emotion are unified, but the phase dies with the ‘noble ineffectual faces’ of Van Dyck. In Milton’s “On [208] the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” the two elements, sacred and profane, which had been unified in the Sistine Chapel, fall apart: and the Chapel remains throughout several poems a most significant symbol. It seems to me that Yeats linked it with all the Creation and Annunciation relics, perhaps with Pater’s most suggestive phrase in mind:

Not the judgement but the Resurrection is the real subject of his last work in the Sistine Chapel; and his favourite subject is the legend of Leda, the delight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. [35]

In the period 1680-1875 ‘the world begins to long for the arbitrary and accidental, for the grotesque, the repulsive and the terrible, that it may be cured of desire’. [36] Gainsborough’s women recall Egyptian faces. Rodin is a typical figure of Phase 21; ‘creating his powerful art out of the fragments of those Gates of Hell that he had found himself unable to hold together - images out of a personal dream’. 1875-1927 is Phase 22, the last crescent before the Second Coming, and the beginning of the third millennium. Phase 23 is the first where there is hatred of the abstract (although in other writings Yeats had found this hatred in Swift and Berkeley too). ‘The intellect turns upon itself’. [37] Pound, Pirandello, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Brancusi, are figures of this phase. So, in some curious way, is Shaw; Yeats liked to insert his friends or enemies into ‘the System’:

Shaw, as I understand him, has no true quarrel with his time, its moon and his almost exactly coincide. He is quite content to exchange Narcissus and his Pool for a signal-box at a railway junction, where goods and travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glittering road. [38]

But there is perhaps salvation:

I agree about Shaw, he is haunted by the mystery that he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor. [39]

In the Preface to Fighting the Waves, he includes Virginia Woolf as a typical figure. It is of special interest that all reference to contemporary figures, and the discussion of their significance, is cut [209] out of the 1937 edition: in which the chronology proper follows, word by word, that of the early version. In outline, Yeats believes that myth and fact have now fallen apart: and for that reason man is calling up myth ‘which now but gropes its way out of the mind’s dark, but will shortly pursue and terrify’. This is another reference to “The Second Coming”. The new era will be like the beginnings of Christianity, bringing its stream of irrational force. Phase 24 may offer peace, but it will be followed first by a kind of passive obedience, and after by decadence.

I foresee a time when ... a ceaseless activity will be required of all; and where rights are swallowed up in duties, and solitude is difficult, creation except among avowedly archaistic and unpopular groups will grow impossible. Phase 25 may arise, as the code wears out from repetition, to give new motives for obedience. ... Then with the last gyre must come a desire to be ruled or rather, seeing that desire is all but dead, an adoration of force spiritual or physical, and society as mechanical force be complete at last.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
By those wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood
Themselves obedient,
Knowing not evil or good. [40]

A new period, that of the Eleventh gyre, will commence in 1927. Yeats has observed, in the poets and artists to whom he has referred, a ‘falling in two of the human mind’. This may be a preparation for the last phase. ‘Perhaps now that the abstract intellect has split the mind into categories, the body into cubes, we may be about to turn back towards the unconscious, the whole, the miraculous’. [40] The cultivated classes will be separated from the community. A new philosophy will arise, concrete in expression, established by immediate experience, personal. It will teach individual immortality and the re-embodiment of the soul. The ecstasy of the saint and mystic will recede: ‘Men will no longer separate the idea of God from the human genius, human productivity in all its forms.’ The new era will be different from Christianity; the ‘new thought must find expression among those that are most subtle, most rich in memory’. It is to be the product of an aristocracy, the learned and [210] the rich - ‘and the best of those that express it will be given power, less because of that they promise than of that they seem and are. This much can be thought because it is the reversal of what we know, but those kindreds once formed must obey irrational force and so create hitherto unknown experience, or that which is incredible.’ [42]

I was writing my notes in Galway and drawing my historical diagrams while his first Edition was passing through the press in Germany. I had never heard his name and yet the epochs are the same, the dates are the same, the theory is the same. Even some of my examples, such as the drilling of the eyes in the Roman statues. and the screwing on of Roman portrait-heads to ready-made conventional bodies, and these examples are used to prove the same things. [43]

At Rapallo Yeats was reading Spengler in the mornings and writing verse in the afternoons.

Wyndham Lewis also provided confirmation:

I have read Time and Western Man with gratitude, the last chapters again and again. It has given, what I could not, a coherent voice to my hatred. You are wrong to think that Lewis attacks the conclusions of men like Alexander and Russell because he thinks them ‘uncertain’. He thinks them false. To admit uncertainty into philosophy, necessary uncertainty, would seem to him to wrong the sovereignty of intellect, or worse, to accept the hypocritical humility of the scientific propagandists, which is, he declares, their ‘cloak for dogma’. He is a Kantian, with some mixture of older thought, Catholic or Greek, and has the vast Kantian argument behind him, the most powerful in philosophy. He considers that both ‘space and time are mere appearances’, whereas his opponents think that time is real though space is a construction of the mind. [44] [211]

It is essential to realize this intense and perpetually growing interest in philosophy, and to watch the emotion receiving sanction, as it were, so that images are reborn, not as refractions of second-hand opinions, but in a state of intense excitement arising from the central certainty that his previous intuition had been just, even to the smallest detail. The very myths were now stabilized:

He [Ezra Pound] is sunk in Frobenius, Spengler’s German source, and finds him a most interesting person. Frobenius suggested the idea that cultures (including arts and sciences) arise out of races, express those races as if they were fruit and leaves in a preordained order and perish with them; and the two main symbols, that of the Cavern and that of the Boundless.

Compare

And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree,
That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, century after century,
Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality. [45]

 He [Frobenius] has confirmed a conception I have had for many years, a conception that has freed me from British Liberalism and all its dreams. The one heroic sanction is that of the last battle of the Norse gods, of a gay struggle without hope. Long ago I used to puzzle Maud Gonne by always avowing ultimate belief as a test. Our literary movement would be worthless but for its defeat. Science is the criticism of Myth. There would be no Darwin had there been no Book of Genesis, no electron but for the Greek atomic myth; and when the criticism is finished there is not even a drift of ashes on the pyre. Sexual desire dies because every touch consumes the Myth, and yet a Myth that cannot be so consumed becomes a spectre. [46]
 I am reading William Morris with great delight, and what a protection to my delight it is to know that in spite of all his loose writing I need not be jealous for him. He is the end, as Chaucer was the end in his day, Dante in his, incoherent Blake in his [sic]. There is no improvement: only a series of sudden fires, each though fainter as necessary as that before it. We free ourselves from obsession that we may be nothing. The last kiss is given to the void. [47]

I suggest that there are matters of profound importance emerging [212] here. A Vision was coming into its own, and all the preceding thought that had been given to it was being shown, at least in part, to be valued. Hatred was justified:

I study hatred with great diligence,
For that’s a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense. [48]

Science, the ‘opium of the suburbs’ is the enemy, its criticism of myth an indispensable adjunct of its own growth; so that, logically, new myths might later win their justifications as foreshadowing proved reality. Only the mind is certain; Spengler and Berkeley meet, the two representatives of their disintegrating gyres. From the pessimism of Schopenhauer - ‘Schopenhauer can do no wrong in my eyes, I no more quarrel with his errors than with a cataract’ [49] comes the sense of joy in defeat:

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. [50]

The reading of Spengler explains much of the ‘fascism’ of On the Boiler . Yeats is aware of the change in Europe. ‘But Europe is changing its philosophy. Some four years ago the Russian Government silenced the mechanists because social dialectic is impossible if matter is trundled about by some limited force.’ [51] The prophet of the new age must believe in the return of the ‘unfashionable gyre’; he must abandon the straight-line evolutionary Darwinian thinking of Western Civilization; he must follow Toynbee in adopting, as the proper unit of history, a culture or a civilization, the age of Phidias or of Byzantium. Both Spengler and Toynbee have a strong tendency to mysticism, the one romantic, the other religious. So, in the pattern of history, Yeats must consider, with Swift, the factor [213] I suggest, too, that Yeats received confirmation from this study of much of his previous interest in BaIzac; through whom I think he saw the possibility of fusing the religious elements in Ireland. That he was profoundly interested in this writer is apparent from various essays and The Herne’s Egg: ‘Balzac is the only modern mind which has made a synthesis comparable with that of Dante. .’ ‘I might set some exceptional young man, some writer of Abbey plays, to what once changed all my thought: the reading of the whole Comèdie Humaine .’ [52] Unity might yet be possible, Neoplatonism and Catholicism and folk-lore finding common ground. ‘Then, too, I would associate that doctrine of purgatory, which Christianity has shared with Neo-platonism, with the countryman’s belief in the nearness of his dead “working out their penance” in rath or at garden end; and I would find in the psychical research of our day detail to make the association convincing to intellect and emotion. I would try to create a type of man whose most moving religious experience, though it came to him in some distant country, and though his intellect [were] wholly personal, would bring with it imagery to connect it with an Irish multitude now and in the past time.’ [53]

Myers had documented the subject with great elaboration in his Human Personality and its Survival after Death; [54] Conan Doyle had shown his photographs of ectoplasm to packed audiences, Strzygowski [55] had shown mysterious photographs and wax mouldings of spirit limbs, Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond was widely known. Behind all was Christian doctrine, out of which might be chosen

What seems most welcome in the tomb [56]

and perpetually supported from the text

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses ... [57]

We may isolate Yeats’ apparent beliefs under a few broad headings:

Yeats’ account of the events after death is made more difficult because of an astrological complication imposed on its progress, in addition to its relationship to the historical cycles and to a total reincarnation cycle of some two thousand years. To attempt to précis and synthesize the accounts in the two versions of A Vision would be onerous and not very profitable. I propose only to select some of the more dramatic episodes which are directly related to the work.

The experience of death is not separation from the body, but from exclusive association with one body. The Daimon is a kind of inclusive and eternal soul, it contains within itself, co-existing in its eternal moment, all the events of our life, all that we have known of other lives.

At the moment of death the experiences of life pass rapidly before the soul. The body lies for a time while the soul disengages itself: this I take to be the meaning of

Ah, when the ghost begins to quicken, Confusion of the death-bed over ... [59]

The first stage is one of darkness and sleep, in which the dead may have a vision of their ‘Blood Kindred’, either as simulacra or as spirits awaiting reincarnation. At this stage it may appear to the [216] living; Myers’ account of the frequency and time-appearances is relevant. [60]

Three aspects of the dead then begin to emerge. The Spirit first floats horizontally within the dead man’s body, but later rises till it stands at his head. So with the Celestial Body, which subsequently assumes an opposite position at the feet. [ref61] The ‘Passionate Body’, which rises from the genitals, and stands upright; thereafter to vanish.

The Spirit must then explore its past life on the road to self-knowledge; much as a man in old age may review his own living progression

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought [...] [61]

In this search the Spirit encounters all those who have influenced the man, or whom he has influenced: ‘But if he has belonged to some faith that has not known rebirth he may explore sources that require symbolical expression’. [63] On the ‘Return’ the Spirit exhausts the good and evil of past life by re-enacting it. In the ‘Dreaming Back’ the Spirit is attracted to the Passionate Body, and at this stage may re-enact (and in the process appear as a phantasm), significant events, whether painful or happy. A murderer ‘may be seen committing the murder night after night’ [64] or ‘the seer but meets the old huntsman once more amid a multitude of his friends and all his hounds’. [65]

The dream may be long or short or intermittent, ‘but the man must dream the event to its consequence as far as his intensity permits’. ‘The more complete the exploration the more fortunate will be its future life the dream is as it were a smoothing out or an unwinding’. ('He unpacks the loaded perne’ and the labyrinth of “Byzantium”.

When the Spirit is freed from pleasure and pain by re-living the experiences which caused them, it now enters upon ‘a state of [217] intellect’ in which it is also set free from good and evil. It is a state of equilibrium, but in it there is neither emotion nor sensation. But here men and women meet, and seek to supplement, in each other, the defects they experienced in life. Only in death, and in this final state of equilibrium, is unity possible.

When my instructors began their explanation of the Great Year all the history I knew was what I remembered of English and Classical history from schooldays, or had since learned from the pages of Shakespeare or the novels of Dumas. When I had the dates and diagrams I began to study it, but could not so late in life, and with so much else to read, be a deep student. So there is little in what follows but what comes frorn the most obvious authorities. [66]

But once the excrescences can be cut away to show the simple pattern of A Vision the work takes on a new complexion. In the simplified presentation of its main features, I have omitted the psychology of the Four Faculties, the Twenty-Eight Embodiments, the Zodiacal references, the geometry of the interlocking cones, and the long mysterious analysis of Souls and Spirits, with its curious terminology of ‘covens’ and ‘shiftings’. In these rejections I am aware that there may be some loss in detailed explanation of at least two poems. What remains shows his sense of the continuity both of history and of myth; it explains the dramatic interest which he found in certain figures and events; and the plausibility of it all is sufficient to account for the increasing certainty of unified thought from 1926 onwards. T. Sturge Moore has commented aptly upon it. ‘... A Vision maps out a frame of thought more capacious than [218] most poets have had at hand, though no doubt as difficult to use and as full of gaps as any other.’ [67] It is unlikely that future poets will ever use such source-material. No one without Yeats’ dramatic and esoteric inclinations would dare to exploit it. A Vision remains the product of his own idiosyncracies, intensely valuable to him as a offering a perpetually expanding and dramatically ordered universe. Its ‘arbitrary, harsh, difficult symbolism’ seems to have retained the power to stimulate him until the end of his life.

Notes
1. Cf. “Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors”, Coll. Poems, p.287.
2. A Vision (B), p.8. But this was an understatement by the Instructors: they gave much more.
3 Reprint 1962 by Macmillan.
4. Hone, Life, pp.412-13. But the ‘vision scripts’, the raw material of the system, went on at intervals from 1926-34, and, at rarer intervals, up to the date of the second publication in 1937 (Mrs Yeats). Much of the note-material was never used.
5. ‘I have read Adams & find an exact agreement even to dates with my “law of history”.’ (Wade, ed., Letters, p.666). This is dated 14 March 1921. Compare Yeats’ later discovery of Spengler.
6. The last was read in 1923.
7. A Vision (B), p.68.
8. Explorations, p.396.
9. Taken, as Jeffares has noted, from Inferno, xvii.
10 “Two Songs from a Play”, Coll. Poems, p.239. But in A Vision the Crucifixion, and the assassination of Julius Caesar, are seen in some sort of alignment as miraculous events [(B), p.254].
11. (A), p.170. See also Ellmann, Yeats, The Man and the Masks, p.286.
12. Coll. Poems, p.311. The ‘learned astrologer’ is Macrobius; Coll. Poems, p.5 3 6. Compare: ‘According to Simplicius, a late commentator upon Aristotle ‘the Concord of Empedocles fabricates all things into “an homogeneous sphere”’ (A Vision (B), p.67).
13. A Vision (A), p.180.
14 Ibid.
15. Coll. Poems, p.241.
16 Cf., ‘I would be ... solitary as the dawn’; and the whole symbol of the hermit-scholar in “The Tower”.
17. Coll. Poems, p.240.
18. bSee p.164. Shot also contains the idea of intense physical or spiritual effort.
19. Cf., ‘In pity for man’s darkening thought .’
20. A Vision (B), p.275.
21. “Two Songs from a Play”, Coll. Poems, p.239.
22. Ibid., p.337.
23. Note the correspondence with the characteristic movement of the gyres.
24. The Resurrection, in Coll.. Plays, p.579.
25. A Vision (B), p.275.
26. On the Nature of the Soul, Fourth Ennead, iv. 3, 11 (trans MacKenna).
27. A Vision (A), p.188.
28. Coll. Poems, p.382.
29. Ibid., p.348.
30. E. & L, p.225.
31. There are moments when I am certain that art must once again accept the Greek proportions .’ (On the Boiler, p.37)
32. Béguin, op. cit.,, p.101. Compare also Blake: ‘Mathematic Form is Eternal in Reasoning Memory’.
33. The Outline of History, 8th rev. [edn.], p.559.
34. Coll. Poems, p.332.
35. The Renaissance, ‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’.
36. A Vision (A), p.2o6.
37. A Vision (A), pp. 2 11 et seq.
38. Autobiographies, p.294. Cf. Wilson, Axel’s Castle, pp. 59, 6o.
39. Wade, ed., Letters, p.671.
40. A Vision (A), p.212; and in “The Double Vision of Michael Robarts”, Coll. Poems, p.192; which reads and for or in the last line.
41, Introduction to The Cat and The Moon in Wheels and Butterflies, p.140.
42. A Vision (A), p.215.
43. T. Sturge Moore, Letters, p.105. For the significance of the Roman statues, see A Vision (B), pp.18 and 276.
44. Ibid., p.122.
45. “Blood and the Moon”, II, i, p.268. [Brackets mine - Ricorso ed.]
46. I do not know what this means, unless it be the Phoenix-image. Or perhaps the key is in “Baile and Aillinn”: ‘Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed’; or again it may be that Yeats is thinking of Blake’s Spectre, the symbol of the critical reason which is antagonistic to vision.
47. T. Sturge Moore, Letters, p.154. There are further references to Frobenius and the symbolism of the Cavern in A Vision (B), pp. 258-9.
48. “Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient”, Coll. Poems, p.330.
49. T.Sturge Moore, Letters, p.117.
50. “Lapis Lazuli”, Coll. Poems, p.338. L. A. G. Strong points out that he owes this remark to Lady Gregory: ‘All true tragedy is a joy to him who dies.’ The thought is of Nietzsche, as are many of the preceding quotations.
51. Introduction to Fighting the Waves, in Wheels & Butterflies, p.73.
52. Explorations, p.269.
53. Ibid., p.267. Many of these aspects are incorporated in The Dreaming of the Bones .
54. F. W. H. Myers (London 1903). The author died in 1901.
55. If I were Four and Twenty. See, especially Section Vl-end.
56. “Vacillation”, VIII, in Coll. Poems, p.255.
57. 4 Hebrews xii, i.
58. A Vision (A), p.262.
59. “The Cold Heaven”, Coll. Poems, p.140.
60. Op. cit, especially Chapters I, VII - ‘Phantasms of the Dead’.
61. See “A Prayer for My Son” (Coll. Poems, p.238) and The Only Jealousy of Emer
62. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” (Coll. Poems, p.265).
63. A Vision (A) p.225.
64. Purgatory.
65. This is one version of the universal ‘Wild Hunt’. Vide E. A. Armstrong,, The Folklore of Birds . Cf. “The Ballad of the Foxhunter” and “Hound Voice”.
66. Explorations, p.291.
67. In English, Vol. II, No. 11, 1939. And there is a notable passage in Arland Ussher’s The Twilight of the Ideas: ‘The doctrine of antiquity that everything which the mind of man can conceive has happened and will happen again in eternal cycles seems to me (besides being metaphysically cogent) to satisfy certain religious aspirations of our nature in a less objectionable manner than Christian or Eastern supernaturalism - those namely for the marvellous, for congruence, and for return’ (p.46).

[END]