I

If Seamus Heaney sets his questions for W. B. Yeats, it is not alone because Yeats is something of an expert on the location of the spirit but because he is also implicated in the bond between spirit and nation (or ‘race’) which the Irish poets have inherited. Accordingly the full panoply of Yeats’s mystical beliefs ranging from the ordinary stuff of religious doctrine to hermetic lore concerning magic and the Kabbala is not my subject here. I am concerned only with his ideas regarding the ontological status of the individual soul after the cessation of biological life. We know that Yeats possessed firm beliefs on the matter, though these are not always self-consistent nor entirely satisfactory from the philosophical standpoint—nor need they be. In the last analysis, they pertain to his ideas about the nature and capacity of the human imagination and its relation to the art of poetry and its relation to the Anima Mundi—that is, ‘the memory of Nature’. What is more, they were a reaction against a kind of materialism that he found insufferable and a kind of metropolitanism that he found suffocating.

In “Reveries Over Childhood” Yeats famously wrote: ‘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, an almost infallible church, of poetic tradition, of a fardel 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 form philosophers and theologians.’ There is reason to question the sincerity of that remark considering that it speaks of a felt need rather than a definite conviction; but in the main it frames the consistent sense of Yeats’s many depositions on the matter. In the “General Introduction to My Work” of 1937 he wrote near the end of his life:

This is a highly condensed summary of many points of personal belief about the place of the imagination in the cosmic order to which—for polemical reasons—he has added the unlikely supposition that St. Patrick might condone the implied identity of ideas in Christ, Dante, William Blake and Gautma Buddha, with some lights from William Shakespeare. But though there are numerous passages in the Autobiographies, the Memoirs, the Essays & Introductions and the Letters which amplify each of the matters touched on here, it is the poetry which provides the essential record of Yeats’s spiritual beliefs, the poetry itself supplies an adequate—not to say a luminous—record.

On the question of post-mortal existence, Yeats wrote in “The Tower”:

This seems to mean, inter alia, that life after death is an invention—we say ‘construct’ these days—of the human mind, inspired by passions that required such a notion as a necessary correlate of our own fraught condition: In reaching this position Yeats professes to ‘mock Plotinus’ faith / And cry in Plato’s teeth’, thus setting that the belief in a separate domain of ideal forms at nought. At other times, of course, he preferred to invoke that very belief as when, in “Among School Children”, he poses the question:

It is easy to miss the point that it is the ‘shape upon her lap’—an infant child—has been ‘betrayed’ into life by the pleasure of sexual congress on the mother’s part, and that it is the baby who ‘struggles to escape’ from life under the influence of Platonic recollections of an anterior condition. (The case is just as Wordsworth described it when he spoke of the soul ‘trailing clouds of glory’ when it first enters into the ‘prison house’ of life; yet in its recurrent form, Yeats’s idea of immortality is indistinguishable from his idea of imagination. In “Sailing to Byzantium”, where he makes a poem out of his yearning for lost youth, he coins a deservedly famous phrase in the context of a prayerful plea to the ‘singing masters of his soul’:

This poses a problem to common-sense: is there a heaven or is there not? Is it merely a state of aesthetic apprehension created by artists through their artifacts? If so, the poet may have wasted his sea-journey—an irony that the poem bitterly comprehends in its adumbration of the ageing process and its mechanical alternative: perpetual existence as a clockwork bird. Yet, if eternity is an indeed an ‘artifice’ in keeping with the ‘unshakable belief’ that Yeats professed in the thesis ‘that whatever of philosophy has been made poetry alone is permanent’, then the literary imagination is indeed the gateway to eternity and in effect its onlie begetter. Of the numerous attempts which Yeats struggled to rationalise this idea under the influence of his theosophical initiation the 1901 essay on “Magic” is the most factual and reasoned as to form and content. In it he enumerated three famous propositions amounting—in paraphrase—to the assertion that our minds and memories continually flow into each other and are part of ‘the great memory of Nature herself’ (that is, Anima Mundi), and that poets can access this memory through the use of symbols. This formula allows the artist to participate in the processes of divine making—and likewise the manufacture of history—through his engagement with the intrinsically spiritual processes of imagination. What it does not assert, and what Yeats would later assert, is that the spiritual is itself a product of imagination or, more precisely, the modality of the imagination when operating in the highest possible way.

In “Under Ben Bulben”, his poetic testament, Yeats offered an emphatic pronouncement on the relationship between individual and universal mind, and did so in the context of man’s natural fear of death and annihilation:

The immediate effect is a form of philosophical consolation that argues for the power of the memory to overcome the finality of death rather than more positive assertion (already met with in “The Tower”) that ‘life and death were not’ until ‘man made up the whole’. That idea might itself be taken as a poetical redaction of the common notion that men are distinguished from animals by their capacity to foresee their own extinction, and that human consciousness is largely conditioned by that difference. Yet more is meant by it: Yeats seems to suggest that ‘the human mind’ is the primary embodiment of a higher spiritual agency that employs birth and death as the necessary phases of its own perpetual expression, alteration and renewal. Yet if Yeats’s conception of permanence and transience in mortal affairs is cosily related to the idea of a continual process of incarnations by which ‘that which is above’ is introjected into ‘that which is below’—the case of “Leda and the Swan” being a prime instance—then a more disturbing idea is also present, that of nation, since

The position of race in this system of thought is acutely important since it provides a more particular and more passionate context for ‘human mind’ than the oriental idea of the individual’s ultimate absorption in Buddhistic nirvana. Indeed, the claim made here for ‘ancient Ireland’ is a blasphemous privileging of one national context over another which Buddhism and theosophy by their very nature must deny—and not because of a cultural partiality to the alternative nationhood of India. At the close of his “General Introduction”, Yeats wrote:

Here his objection was to the Irish Free State, which proved such a disappointing outcome of his revivalist enthusiasms in an early period. Yet Yeats was profoundly nationalist in the sense that his conception of spirituality as a force in the world attached to ‘race’ as its primary ground at the level of the historical and the actual. In his introduction to the three-volume edition of The Works of William Blake (1893), produced in collaboration with Edwin Ellis, he wrote:

He went on: ‘The German produces transcendental metaphysics, the Englishman positive science, not because either one has discovered the true method of research, but because they express their racial moods or affections.’ He might have added—as he did in his explication of the term ‘Unity of Being’ in the “The Trembling of the Veil”—‘ Have not all races had their first unity from mythology that marries them to rock and hill?’; or, later in the same decade: ‘Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and reacting upon one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the lips?’ (In prose, as in poetry, Yeats knew well how to use a rhetorical question.)

To say, then, that Yeats was a nationalist for ‘passing reasons’ is to say that he was a nationalist by reason that his conception of the imagination was rooted in the idea of national and racial life but that his interest in race and nation shifted from Ireland to India (and by implication the widest mystical purview on man and society) in later life. That shift was instigated, in large by disillusion just as the original fixation on Irish nationhood and Irish race had been occasioned by a sense of spiritual and artistic opportunity as well as the affiliations of family and history. In the cultural context Yeats was sure of the essential relationship between nationality and literature, as when he coined the well-known epigram: ‘There is no great literature without nationality, and no great nationality without literature.’ In the spiritual context, the record of his thinking reveals a darker conception of the Irish race than the propagandist in Yeats—whose role he so slightly rates in the “General Introduction”—suggests or could suggest. Once again, it is the later poems which provide the chief record of this conception and incidentally reveal the animus that turned him against a more genial view of modern Irish nationhood. Of these the most illustrative of the relation between race and spirit is perhaps “The Statues”.

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In “The Statues” W. B. Yeats celebrates an imaginary Ireland which he regards as providing a bulwark against modernity, here introduced to view in the form of a rebarbitive phrase ‘this filthy modern tide’. In so doing, he presupposes that the Irish peasantry have preserved ‘their ancient deposit’ of mythological and wisdom in the amber of defeat following the overthrow of the Gaelic warlords during the sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious wars. The poem contains several hieratic phrases, not least an ambiguous reference to ‘our proper dark’ considered as the medium or agency by which the spirit of the ‘Heroic Period’ of Celtic pre-history and the more recent revolutionary period of nationalist history united to form a cornerstone for the modern Irish state.

There are several things in this stanza which jar today—as they must have jarred with the majority of Irishmen when they were written. That communal-sounding subject-phrase, ‘We Irish’, gleaned from the writings of the Bishop Berkeley, involves a specific degree of colonial double-vision (as numerous critics have remarked). For Yeats, as a descendent of the same class as the bishop and idealist philosopher, the epithet serves to assert that the Anglo-Irish are the best part of the Irish nation both their own character and through their resemblance to the beaten native aristocracy. By a similar sleight of hand, he co-opted the even more glaringly colonial term ‘Irishry’ and yoked it with the term ‘indomitable’ to create one of those ringing phrases of his involving a short substantive and a latinate modifier such as ‘invulnerable tide’ or ‘unappeasable host’ that produce climactic effects in other places. In his consciously-wrought testament, “Under Ben Bulben”, Yeats thus asks the reader to cast his mind on other days—meaning the ancient past—‘that we in coming days may be / Still the indomitable Irishry’ [italics mine]. His poem “The Statues” is part and parcel of the same prescription set forth there and fortified in the more overtly polemic pages of his “General Introduction for My Work”, an unpublished essay where he writes: ‘If Irish literature goes on as my generation planned it, it may do something to keep the “Irishry” living […]. It may be indeed that certain characteristics of the “Irishry” must grow in importance.’ The Yeatsian plan for Ireland is that it should proceed in the future by returning radically to the past.

Viewed in this light, ‘our proper dark’, so far from hinting at a doubtful capacity for rational thought, locates the most imaginative element of Irish spiritual life in an irrational—even anti-rational—impulse that found its original expression in the heroic deeds of ancient Irish heroes and was later embodied by the self-sacrifice of the 1916 leaders who—like the patriotic martyrs whom Yeats apotheosised in “September 1913”—gave their lives in the state of mind that he characterises there as ‘all the delirium of the brave’.

For Yeats, from start to finish, Irish life had a psychic and a literary value at variance with the social values and religious beliefs of the ordinary people although it was precisely to them that he turned to fuel his own ideals. There is an undeniable element of truth in John Frayne’s assertion that, while the poet ‘did not have to use these [Irish] myths in his poetry’ since they were not in fact ‘an essential part of his culture or upbringing’, he did however need them as ‘an independent body of undeveloped myth close to English and Irish experience yet sufficiently strange to his contemporary readers so as to seem novel and original’. In other words, he needed them to play the game of English poetry most effectively at the period in which he played it. As Sean O’Faolain saw the case:

Hence the folklore of the peasantry might be seen as the remnant of ancient wisdom and heroic passions that stood in some relation to the oldest traditions of Aryan traditions. In this he was encouraged by his Lady Gregory: ‘If [she] had not said when we passed an old man in the woods, “That man may know the secret of the ages”, I might never have talked with Shri Purohit Swãmi or made him translate his Master’s travels in Tibet’. It hardly mattered that maintaining a reservoir of myth and folklore for revivalists to draw on would involve the perpetuation of superstitious terrors in the Irish countryside; and it was with some surprise that Yeats found himself pilloried in the Cork Examiner in March 1895 when a peasant woman was found to have been burnt to death by a husband who believed she was a changeling.

In his “General Introduction”—composed at much the same time as “The Statues”—Yeats quoted Arnold Toynbee’s view of the Irish, whom the latter regarded as originating in a race of nomad-warriors quite distinct from the settled peoples who created urban civilisation. Yet all has changed: ‘[m]odern Ireland’, he wrote, ‘has made up her mind, in our generation, to find her level as a willing inmate in our workaday world’. This was the antipathy of the ideal of Irishness that Yeats had tried to foster and it was in these circumstances that he chose Patrick Pearse as the modern embodiment of the irrational forces which governed Irish society in more heroic days.

In identifying Pearse as a member of the ‘ancient sect’ of Ireland rather than the herald of a modern country, Yeats he was not—as some readings suggest—casting him in the character of an enlightened nation-builder (a role for which he was tolerably well suited in his actual character as a political thinker and a school-master). Instead, Yeats arranged the forces of his poem in such a way that Pearse is aligned not with the Pythagorean quantities of harmony and reason but with the ‘vague Asiatic immensities’ of pre-Hellenic despotism. The epithet vague would recur in a revealing instance of Yeats’s writing at the period when he wrote:

In the emotional scheme of the poem he represents heroic ‘passion’ of the sort associated with Cuchulain in the first instance, only secondarily through his antithetical self bringing on the ‘calculation, number, meansurement’ which effect the completion of his partial nature in accordance with Yeats’s theory of masks and anti-selves selves, making it possible for an Irish state to come into existence. Yeats’s poem thus speaks centrally of a new order based on irrationality transforming under the pressure of tragic action into rationality and new nationhood: race converting into stateship but statehood of a kind that ought still bear the memory of its origins in the condition of the nomad-warrior of ancient Ireland. That was to be the legacy of the Irish literary revival and the reason why Yeats should feel warranted in asking the question of his own play Cathleen Ni Houlihan: ‘did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?’ In its refusal of spiritless democracy and its adumbration of atavistic forces in Irish historical memory, it did just that—as Pearse and the other executed leaders inveterately showed by quoting its best known lines in their last words and final letters.

At the heart of “The Statues” stands an anomalous and—indeed—a contradictory applicat-ion of the idea of ‘darkness’ as it figures in the phrase ‘our proper dark’. The Druids are not kindred to the Greek philosophers nor is their version of literary culture—each letter pantheistically identified with a type of tree in Ireland—identical with the Pythagoreans’ cult of universal numbers. Yet Yeats sees the two orders as complementary and incomplete without the other. Hence Phidias’s statues, in the poem, are said to possess ‘proportion’ while chronically lacking ‘character’—as boys and girls, ‘pale from imagined love’, well know. It is ‘boys and girls’ of this type who start revolutions in the knowledge that ‘passion could bring character enough’ (to quote the poem again); and it is they who vivify a purelyo geometric idea of the kind associated with the name of Pythagoras by pressing their ‘live lips’ against the statues themselves—much as Pygmalion did with his statue. For Yeats the Irish revolution participated in the nature of a wider process of epochal destruction and renewal which he envisaged famously in “The Second Coming” as some ‘rough beast […] Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born’. Yeats’s Pearse is no rational exponent of republican democracy tipped by strategy or accident into revolutionary violence but—as Terence Brown has recently reminded as—‘a magus who summoned a ghost out of the racial dark’.

In poem after poem Yeats elaborated upon this idea with increasing relish in successive poems. For him Pearse became the harbinger of the return of mythological forces under the form of modern violence; a Celtic avatar no less than a Fenian revolutionary.

What Yeats sees spreading out from the imaginative drama of the Easter Rising is something like the overthrow of the Roman empire, plunging the world—as he remarks elsewhere—into ‘a fabulous formless darkness’. In that benighted state, he tells us, ‘we are lost amid alien intellects, near but incomprehensible, more incomprehensible than the most distant stars.’ Here, indeed, he might be talking of the Anglo-Irish— men such as Henry Midleton in the first ‘song’ of this cycle—surrounded in their social twilight by the atavistic passions in nationalist Ireland. Of course, the ‘we’ in that last sentence is much more like the empirical subject of contemporary British life than the national community denoted as ‘We Irish’ in “The Statues”. In that poem—by constrast with his metropolitan man of letters who writes much of the prose—eats adopts the persona of a latter-day Irish druid-philosopher-bard at once in touch with supernatural sources of poetry and the revolutionary passion for modern nationhood while keeping the ‘cold, logical intellect’ of Bishop Berkeley—as he called it in King of the Great Clock Tower (1934)—strictly at bay.

There is room here to consider a minute antithesis: for, since ‘formless spawning fury’ in “The Statues” rhymes so well with the ‘formless dark’ of Wheels and Butterflies, then the ‘proper dark’ attributed to the Irish must be of a different sort from that which is merely formless. Hence we recognise in the two versions of the term a distinction between that kind of ‘darkness’ which is purely moribund and destructive and another—nearer to the Irish kind—which consists in passionate and instinctive knowledge. To be generative in the sense intended by Yeats, ‘our proper dark’ certainly must contain some forms within itself—forms such as the emblematic person of Cuchulain. And so it does. In his “General Introduction”, Yeats tells us that ‘behind all Irish history hangs a great tapestry’ and that ‘nobody looking at its dim folds can say where Christianity begins and Druidism ends.’ It is against this background of merging pagan and Christian, ancient and modern, that he places Pearse: ‘in the imagination of Pearse and his fellow soldiers the Sacrifice of the Mass had found the Red Branch in the tapestry.’ They found, in other words, their heroic inspiration in figures such as Diarmuid, Conchobar and Cuchulain though their conscious mind was fixed on Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross which Pearse, at least, was determined to emulate (a somewhat blasphemous comparison idea which has been upbraided by Fr. Francis Shaw and others). Another writer might say that the discovery of any resemblance to those ancient heroes was essentially fictive but Yeats has it that Cuchulain actually ‘stalked through the Post Office’ when Patrick Pearse summoned him—though so did his antithetical self, the opposite of such ‘vague immensities’ reply. In all of this, “The Statues” speaks of real presences, of true revenants and ghosts come from the past into our own time.

In prose writings of the period, Yeats repeatedly made repeated use of ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’ as terms for a generative power or its opposite in an antithetical arrangement of natural forces. In annotations to the 1929 edition of The Winding Stair, he wrote of one poem, ‘I have symbolised a woman’s love as the struggle of the darkness to keep the sun from rising from its earthly bed.’ Comparably, in the closing remarks of his profoundly undiplomatic “General Introduction”, he looks upon the contemporary form of Irish statehood as it appeared to him on the main street of the capital (a scene of some humiliation from the aesthetic standpoint):

‘My own dark’: here is phrase that corresponds with some exactitude to the coinage ‘our proper dark’ in “The Statues”. By it Yeats surely means that the racial consciousness of the Irish, with its promise of a dark illumination at the polar extreme from the commercial illuminations of Western civilisation has failed—as Toynbee’s sentence bears witness—and that he must now turn to yet darker sources of irrationalism for the ‘Unity of Being’ that he seeks. Hence his parting assertion that he never had been an Irish nationalist except for ‘passing reasons’ as he gives himself increasingly to European fascism. Yet Ireland had provided Yeats with a context in which he could experience the interfusion of the natural and the supernatural, and indeed—at one point in its political history—the domination of the social order by atavistic, supernatural forces, sustained by the ‘passion’ of the revolutionaries. To some extent everyone in Ireland has experienced the upsurge of the atavistic in recent times—not so much through the persistence of fairy faith or the literary revival of ancient legends as through the presence and activity of Irish nationalism both in its benign and its malignant forms. The points can be illustrated conveniently with reference to a literary dialogue between Seamus Deane and Seamus Heaney in 1977 during the course the former took issue with a virulent critic of the Provisional IRA and the tradition of physical force republicanism that they stood for: ‘But surely’, argued Deane, ‘this very clarity of O’Brien’s position is just what is most objectionable. […] In other words, is not his humanism here being used as an excuse to rid Ireland of the atavisms which gave it life even though the life itself may be in some ways brutal? Perhaps so—but in any case it greatly amplifies the impact of literary conception of Irish national history that it still connects with such forces—lethal or creative—in the living Irish world of today.

It may be added that there are purely literary—or intertextual—examples of ‘darkness’ which must at least be assayed as possible sources from Yeats’s interest in the term. In pride of place, perhaps, is Jonathan Swift’s excoriation of the Rosicrucians—a name he adopts for the Dissenters in one satirical passage of A Battle of the Books. Since Yeats was himself a Rosicrucian initiate the passage must have, at least, intrigued him:

—and here a marginal note says ‘A Name of the Rofycrucians’—

While Prospero famously calls Caliban ‘this thing of darkness’ in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Yeats himself made interesting use of the trope of darkness in praising Padraic Colum to “AE” [George Russell] when he said: ‘He has read a great deal, especially of dramatic literature, and is I think , a man of genius in the first dark gropings of thought.’ In quoting this recently, Sanford Sternlicht has added: ‘Unlike Yeats, Colum never groped deeply in thought. He was content to feel deeply about his country, his wife, his friends, and the poor, hardworking people of the rural Ireland of his youth.’

In considering Yeats’s negotiation of the questions of individual soul and national spirit, it is impossible to establish anything like a definite system of ideas other than the geometric arrangement of historical possibilities and characterological variations set out on an astrological chart that he called A Vision. His own testimony on the subject of such schematic attempts at cosmic theory are generally unprepossessing, as where, in the revised edition of A Vision he writes of his ‘circuits of sun and moon’ that he ‘regards them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndam Lewis and the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. they have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.’ The effect of this disclosure on Louis MacNeice was to make him abandon any hope of finding real philosophy in any part of Yeats and to cast doubt on his motives and equipment for the intellectual task (as distinct from talent for the poetry he created). ‘Lacking intuitive knowledge of people’, Reflecting on the ‘classification of human types’ which makes up so much of A Vision, MacNeice concluded that Yeats ‘declined to accept explanations offered by professional psychologists’ on the otiose premise that ‘[I]f life is to be conditioned by accidents, the accidents must be supernatural’ F. R. Leavis was likewise unconvinced, writing that ‘[i]t is characteristic of Yeats to have no centre of unity, and to have been unable to find one’, the lack being most ‘apparent in his solemn propoundings about the Mask and the Anti-Self, and in the related schematic elaborations.’ And Monk Gibbon, a hostile Irish contemporary, argued that Yeats was not a mystic at all.

Denis Donoghue, a sympathetic Irish critic, makes the same point in an infinitely kinder an a juster vein: ‘In fact, strictly speaking magic in Yeat’s later work served only the same purpose as the faery-islands in the early poems—to fence off an area of private ground within which his Spirit might roam at will.’ It may be, therefore, that Seamus Heaney’s ‘set question to the ghost of W. B. Yeats’ on the location of the spirit is addressed to the wrong authority after all. Nevertheless it would be a mistaken to overlook the visionary power of poems such as “Meru”, one of the “Philosophical Songs”. Almost uniquely among his writings, it offers a version of mystical insight which takes the reader beyond the antithetical into the néant: While it is recognisably a poem in the tradition of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, it is also a confession that at the bottom of civilisation-building and philosophical systems there is a groundlessness of being that sets all postulates and theories at nought—including those that claim a racial basis for their intellectual representations:

That poem, dated 1934, offers the view that all thought necessarily debouches into nothingness and, if it suspends the question whether that nothingness is a Buddhistic, existential or simply nihilistic, it possesses the special authority of one who has contemplated through a life time the ruin of class, caste, country houses, race and family in the Ireland all around him. Terence Brown has offered a fine appraisal of the poem “Meru” in the course of his remarks on ‘late Yeatsian orientalism’ in general:

And here he aptly quotes from “The Statues”: ‘In this mood the East for Yeats in his last years is the Buddha, whose “empty eye-balls knew / That knowledge increases unreality, that / Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show’, before offering a paraphrase of “Meru” by drawing on a comparable phrase in Yeats’s great poem “The Tower”: ‘Eastern thought intensified his growing fear, as death approached, that there was nothing behind the “superhuman mirror / Resembling dream” that man had made to disguise from himself the truth of nihilism from “the desolation of reality”. Allowing that we can always pick up another book, or put down that book and do other things, I cannot think there is anything to quarrel with in this paraphrase and the intellectual view of life it stands for. The wonder is that Yeats’s religious, magical and mystical concern with self, friends and nation are so entirely co-extensive with an apprehension of nothingness that only an antithetical sense of the mind’s structure can adequately comprehend them.