Finding Yeats continued

In his poem, A Prayer for my Daughter, written in 1919, Yeats writes about the conditions he wants for his daughter as she grows and the kind of woman he hopes she will become. He wants her to have a solid foundation so she might cultivate qualities of mind he approves: kindness, courtesy, merriment, innocence and beauty. These are to be cultivated in contrast to women of opinionated mind who risk everything for an old bellows full of angry wind.

Oh dear, these are not the sentiments likely to appeal to modern women who value their 'opinions' and do not appreciate being put down for holding them. Yeats is yearning for establishment values based on long-term land ownership from which custom and ceremony cultivate fine sensibilities. But how many people have such a solid base and what happens when the base is rocky? Are we all bound to fall into barbarism?

These sorts of questions led me into a search to find out more about Yeats and where he was coming from. First, though, I read a short novel by the Irish-born novelist Elizabeth Bown whose books I once looked into and enjoyed many years ago. In The Last September (published in 1929) Elizabeth Bowen describes life in an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy mansion of the type Yeats seems to have yearned for and which was indeed part of Bowen's legacy at Bown Court, her family's country estate. The story is set in 1920 when Ireland was rocked by the 'Troubles' between the British army and the IRA. This was part of the context in which Yeats sought the stability of old places and old ideas. In Bowen's novel the movement is forward with the young woman of the place set to move on into a wider world.

R.F. Foster's wonderful biography of Yeats considers the context of A Prayer for my Daughter in fascinating detail. Yeats appears to be reacting against his own 'troubles' with Maud Gonne and contrasting her radicalism with what he perceived as the kindness and courtesy of his young wife, George, who had given birth to the 'daughter', Anne, who is the child of the poem. The poem is also influenced by Yeats's acquisition of a 'castle' (his famous Tower), and his immersion in spiritualism at the time. All this plus 'his apprehension at a world descending into formless anarchy' as he expressed over and over again in his poems, as in The Second Coming which he composed around the same time as the Prayer:
Things fall apart; the centre can not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Being introduced to Yeats's poem through my poetry group led my to think a lot about the foundations (or not), of place, of belonging, of reactions when stability is threatened. It led me to Elizabeth Bowen and into a reading of Yeats's life and his poetry. The journey through words is a rich and rewarding one.

Text details for this post:
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. Vintage paperback novel (1998) with an introduction by Victoria Glendinning. pp. 206. Available Book Camel $8 plus postage and packaging.

R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life 11: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Pulished by Oxford University Press, 2003. Copy borrowed from City Library, Melbourne.

W. B. Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter, in W. B. Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan paperback. First published 1962.

Finding Yeats

I sometimes meet with a group of people who like to write poetry. The theme of place (special places, belonging to a place) was suggested for our most recent meeting. Someone had come up with the phrase dear perpetual place when the theme was being discussed. Later I discovered that the phrase was from a poem by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. I found the poem and also set out on a journey learning about Yeats. I'll start by typing out the long poem then share my reflections and some of the things I've been learning. This poem was written in 1919.

A Prayer for my Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack - and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatreds driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Reference: from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) in W B Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan, 1965

Knock Backs

We all have the experience of getting knocked back on some things; hopes dashed, dreams smashed. Writers typically receive piles of rejection letters or miss out on prizes or receive bad reviews for books.

In a letter to the American poet, Anne Sexton, in 1967, the English poet, Ted Hughes, wrote a list of the harms that can come from being reviewed favourably. His comments were meant to console Sexton for the bad reviews she received in England for her book Live or Die. Hughes's comments can be applied as a balm to all sorts of disappointments. It goes like this:

'They [favourable reviews] tend to confirm one in one's own conceit - unless they praise what you yourself don't like.

Also they make you self-conscious about your virtues - just as when you praise a child for some natural charm.

Also they create an underground opposition: applause is the beginning of abuse.

Also they deprive you of your own anarchic liberties by electing you into the government.

Also, they separate you from your devil, which hates being observed and only works happily incognito.'

Sexton's biographer notes that the poet posted this good advice over her desk, but that 'it was, unfortunately, to grow more and more pertinent'.

Anne Sexton. A Biography by Dianne Wood Middlebrook. Virago paperback, 1991. Available from the Book Camel. In good condition. Contains photos, appendix, sources and notes, bibliography, index. 488pp. Price: $15 plus postage and packaging.

Bright Star John Keats

Many friends have been to see Bright Star, the film about John Keats directed by Jane Campion. I wrote a poem about it:

Dressing for Keats

Emerging from my rock of penury
with nothing
and with no-one to inhibit me
I dressed as a poet
and took the train to see
a film about John Keats,
dressing for his memory.

On the silver screen
the storytelling mistress
flung out her mat of mystery
embroidered with flowery stitches
fabrics lifting
to petal faces
in beds of blossom.

She played his songs
in voices soft like pastel palates
words of vigorous youth that note the ghostly spectre
then hit on trees and birdsong rising from the land.
These words lift hearts with every beat
they bid us fly upon the music sweet.



What did Keats think about the purpose of poetry?

His idea of ‘Negative Capability’ now appears under the heading ‘Theory’ in relation to Keats and his poetry (see, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on Keats).

The phrase appears in a letter Keats wrote to his brothers, George and Thomas, in December 1817. He discusses a number of experiences in the letter before he comes to the phrase, and it is as if he is following a thread that leads him closer and closer towards a definition of what he values in life and in art.

He has been to see a painting called Death on the Pale Horse which he considers a ‘wonderful’ picture, especially if the painter’s age is considered ( I assume the painter, West, was young). But the painting does not satisfy him:
'…there is nothing to be intense upon, no women one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality. The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’,and you will find this exemplified throughout: but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness.'

Keats goes on to relate another experience, this time it is a social one when he dined with a group of men, some of whom he was meeting for the first time. This experience also gave him food for thought about what he really valued:
'They only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low company. ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours,’ said I to myself!'

These thoughts begin to coalesce as he brings the letter to a close and moves towards that phrase which is now counted as part of Keats’s theory:
'Several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.'

The Letters of John Keats, Vols 1 & 2, are available from the Book Camel.

In with the new

Before January passes completely from view I want to move the Book Camel blog out onto the track once more.

When the English author, Graham Greene, was having his long-standing love affair with Catherine Walston in the 1940s and 50s, he gave her a notebook diary each year in which he handwrote a quotation for every day of the year. Greene was obviously a very romantic fellow.

I was thinking about that endearing habit, and reading about Greene and Walston at the beginning of January and also wondering what quotes would be appropriate for the first few days of 2010. Here in the hills north of Melbourne the new year came in with a great rush of rain and a storm of thunder and lightning. A storm bold enough to wash away the old year and bring in the new. What words could describe that marvellous scene?

Dicctionaries of quotations offer up many possibilities for describing rain, thunder, lightning and storms. I liked Shelley, from The Cloud throwing up the echo of thunder:
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder...
Then his vigorous rhymes:
I wield the flail of the lashing hail
And whiten the green plains under
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
That, I think, will serve quite well as my quotation for the start of the new year, 2010.

The book about Greene and Walston is The Third Woman - The Secret Passion that Inspired The End of the Affair. It's by William Cash and available from the Book Camel.