YEATS'S CONCEPT OF IMAGE
D.
C. AGARWALA
Lecturer
in English, Rajasthan University
The
word image is not merely a recurring symbol in the poetry
and prose writings of W.B. Yeats; it is central to the entire poetic
metaphysical system which he sought to formulate. This concept is, however, not
destructive of the antinomies; as a matter of fact there would be no need of
image-formation had the physical forms and shapes not been subject to decay and
death. If beauty and youth were eternal, metaphysics and philosophy would cease
to exist. It is only to make eternal what is transitory that the need of image
may be realised. Thus it is not surprising that a word should accomplish so
much; Yeats’s symbols often exhaust the levels on which the poet contemplates. The
word image, in its non-referential meaning, has connotations whose application
to Yeats’s metaphysics has as much validity as to his poetics. The aesthetic
religion that the poet envisaged for himself and which was to him the legacy of
the pre-Raphaelites and of the nineties could be effected by the area of
suggestiveness covered by his use of the word image. In this paper I shall
attempt to suggest the relevance of the multiple meanings that this word is
made to yield in the context of Yeats’s poetics and also how Yeats offered a
different and altogether new approach to the problem of art-metaphysics
relationship which had confronted Plato and Aristotle and to which each
philosopher had his own answer to offer. To say all this is to suggest that
Yeats had a theory of image; having suggested this one is faced with the
problem of comparing and contrasting Yeats’s theory with the theory of image or
imagism preached and practised by Hulme, Ezra Pound and others of that group.
Before
actually attempting the task outlined in the introductory paragraph, it is
relevant in the interest of a better understanding of Yeats’s concept of image,
to digress a little and to work out a more subtle distinction:
the one between a symbol and an image. Yeats’s name is inextricably associated
with the modern development of symbolism in English literature. He began his
career as a poet with an utter disregard for rhetoric as against symbols and
symbolism–the powerful agents of imagination and poetic creativity–according to
Yeats. At all stages Yeats, in his efforts to define symbolism, is keen to
suggest the poetic-metaphysical implications. He writes:
“A
symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a
transparent lamp about a spiritual flame! (Symbolism in Poetry: Essays and
Introduction, London. 1961. p. 163)
Yeats
distinguishes between allegory and symbol also:
“I find that though I love symbolism, which is often the only fitting speech form some mystery of disembodied life, I am for the most part bored by allegory, which is made, as Blake says, by the ‘daughters of memory; and coldly, with no wizard frenzy’.” (Essays-1924 p. 474)
Yeats’s
illustration of the concept of symbolism from Burns’s poet does not exclude the
metaphysical overtones:
There
are no lines with more meloncholy beauty than these lines by Burns:
“The
white moon is setting behind the white waves,
And
time is setting with me O!”
And
these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness of the moon
and the wave, whose relation to the setting of time is too subtle for the
intellect and you take from them their beauty. But, when all are together, moon
and wave and whiteness and setting time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke
an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colours and
sounds and forms.”
A
little later in the same essay Yeats writes:
“All
sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies
or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or,
as I prefer to think, call down among us, certain disembodied powers whose
footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.” (Ideas of Good and Evil. pp.
241, 242 and 243)
For
Yeats, as for all symbolist poets, symbols help to solve the poetic-metaphysical
dilemma. Through symbols these poets hint, however, indistinctly,
at the deeper and imperceptible reality. Thus, for Verlaine, poetry is like the
blue eyes behind the veil (les bleus yeux derier du voil) and
Baudelaire dwells meditatively on the suggestive correspondences between the
real and the make-believe.
This is not
to suggest that Yeats’s theory of image is, in any essential point, different
and a departure from his idea of symbolism. It is at best a further development
of his concept of symbolism and this may be deduced from a reading of his
poetry and of his philosophic system ‘A Vision’.
For
the purpose of our present study the distinction suggested between a symbol
represented by the figure of 1, for example, and an image as something vague
and irrational is too mathematical and not serviceable. In Yeats’s sense, an
image has more metaphysical connotations than a symbol; accordingly, an image
is largely representative of the spiritual reality and it achieves a
philosophic sanction too without being deprived of the poetic suggestiveness of
a symbol. Images, thus, more appropriately, form the content of which symbols
are the only fitting and successful medium of communication. “It is possible,”
writes Yeats, “to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the image that
calls it up and gives it expression.” This is ably stated by a critic: “what
can be announced in the pulpit is not that for which the altar was built and
symbolism is most often the only possible language for the expression of
spiritual realities.” (Graham Hough: The Last Romantics. p. 228)
Philosophically an image is an abstraction and corresponds to the universal
idea or reality behind the flux of things. It is the eternal essence which
exists in the mind or the memory; the phenomenal world is its expression. In
his poem ‘Among the School Children’ Yeats conveys the idea succinctly: after
arguing what mother would congratulate herself for the pangs of her child-birth
when she sees her son at the age of sixty (‘a lean old man’), Yeats resolves
the dilemma by suggesting that mothers, lovers and nuns worship images only.
Thus an image, though only an idea, is not destructive of the phenomenon which
suggests it. The concept of Yeats’s image may now be distinguished from the imagism
of Ezra Pound and others. It will presently be discovered that there is little
common or corresponding between the two: nothing can be imagined to be more
distant from Yeats’s ideal than Ezra Pound’s ideal of an image concrete,
sharply delineated, hard and clear, not blurred or diffuse, which in Plato’s
words would perhaps mean the imitation of an imitation after sufficient
allowance has been made for the poetic sensuousness in its presentation. The
imagism of Hulme and Pound was a reaction against the vagueness and haziness of
the Romantic poetry; Yeats’s theory of image is, to that extent, a reaction
against the rigid inflexibility of the imagist movement. The image, according
to Pound, was more or less a counter devoid of suggestiveness and idealism. On
the contrary, an image to Yeats, is something which is super-terrestrial. In
this article I shall attempt to show that with this concept of an image Yeats
seems to resolve the poetic metaphysical dilemma which he faced squarely and
this he is able to do without at the same time denying the significance of the
phenomenal world.
The
term image in Yeats’s poetics acquires an unmistakable extension of
meaning as a result of the poet’s attempt to identify art with religion and
metaphysics. Yeats thus created not only a new concept of art but also a new
theology highly developed and extremely complex because it accounted for the
passage of entire time and history. The poet, quite early when he chose to be a
symbolist poet, had rejected the possibilities of his accepting a conventional
religion. What was commonplace and conventionl was inartistic and had little
appeal to the exotic and mystery loving mind of Yeats. Identifying his religion
with Blake’s, Yeat’s wrote:
“He
(Blake) announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world he
knew....In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with
books of imagination, but they ‘made their souls’ by listening to sermons and
by doing or not doing certain things...In our time we are agreed that we ‘make
our souls’ out of some one of the great poets of ancient times or out of
Shelley or Wordsworth or Goethe or Blake or Flaubert or Count Tolstoy, in the
books he wrote before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser order or out
of Mr. Whistler’s pictures, while we amuse ourselves or at least make a poorer
sort of soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain
things.” (Essays. 1924. p. 137)
Finally
Yeats succeeded, through the agency of his wife, to create a new and complex
mythological order, based on the cyclic concept of history. This new mythology
was highly personal and religion, sorcery, art, philosophy
went into the making of it. With the help of it Yeats was largely successful in
evolving a poetic-metaphysical concept of art. Accordingly the artist, on this
creative-ontological plane, was the saint also who, in order to achieve an
image of his own, had to undergo the same kind of fleshly or physical
dissolution as the Byzantium saints did for their spiritual purification.
Decidedly the artistic process to Yeats was analogous to the spiritual one. The
poet therefore implores the Byzantium saints in the holy fire of the mosaic
wall to teach him to consume ‘the complexities of mire and blood’ so that he
too is enabled to achieve his spiritual-poetic expiation:
O
sages standing in God’s holy fire
As
in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come
from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And
be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume
my heart away, sick with desire,
And
fastened to a dying animal.
It
knows not what it is; and gather me
Into
the artifice of eternity.
Clearly
the word image to Yeats is synonymous with soul and Yeats used the one
quite frequently to suggest the other. In an early poem Youth and Age Yeats
assures Augusta Gregory that he loves the fleeting soul in her so that he alone
of all her lovers will continue to love her even though she grows old and dyes
her hair and uses other devices to look young. In another beautiful lyric Before
the World was Made the beloved employs all sorts of artistic devices in an
attempt to recapture her conceptual or abstract loveliness and thus seeks to
reduce herself to her original Image:
If
I make the lashes dark
And
the eyes more bright
And
the lips more scarlet,
Or
ask if all be right
From
mirror after mirror,
No
vanity’s displayed:
I’m
looking for the face I had
Before
the world was made.
One
could even go farther and suggest that the beloved, in an attempt to change
herself into an art-image, is anxious to reduce herself to the picture of the
single lovely woman which Plato’s philosopher contemplates.
An
image, as Yeats viewed it, is “an artifice of eternity”; it alone, like the
soul, is eternal and triumphant over the change and flux. Hindu mind which
seems to have considerably and materially influenced Yeats, has pondered deeply
on the nature of human soul. In this section it will be pointed out how
parallelistic to Hindu conception of soul is Yeats’s idea and nature of image.
The soul, so long as it dwells in this world, is unable to realist its
significance and greatness; it is entangled and absorbed into what is known as
the mystery of the five senses or what the Hindus term it as Maya or
Prapanchjal. The unpurged images of the day, according to
Yeats, are likewise embedded into the blood and mire of human veins. By
consuming the lusts and desires of the flesh into a
kind of holy fire, the image, according to Yeats, acheives its purity. So long
as his heart is tied to the dying animal, the poet or the would-be saint will
fail to realize his antithetical self as well as the abstract purity of the
image-soul. He cannot acquire that objectivity or serenity of mind which is
absolutely desirable for poetic creation. So long as the flesh is powerful and
the image is slave to it, the image is in the state of impurity and will be
born again and again into its impure state until by some conscious effort
perhaps it achieves its expiation and finally enters the purgatory of pure art.
It is true that this art-image achieves its redemption by being purged into the
glowing intensity of the supernatural fire; it is, like the soul as Hindus
conceive of it, is immortal and invulnerable. As Yeats himself suggested, the
supernatural form of the image is purified by a fire which is itself kept by
the glow and intensity of t purified images:
Flames
that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor
storm disturbs, flames begotten of flames,
Where
blood-begotten spirits come
And
complexities of fury leave
Dying
into a dance
Into
agony of trance.
An
agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Moreover,
the image has been compared by Yeats to the Hades’ bobbin as it is freed from
temporal needs and physical decay and shares the wisdom of the ages:
For
Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy cloth
May
unwind the winding path,
A
mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless
mouths may summon;
I
hail the supernatural;
I
call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
The
impersonality of this aesthetic image is created by the poet by undergoing an
extreme type of restraint and rigorous discipline. The annihilation of the lure
of senses is the first requisite for the piety of the soul-image. Discipline
and restraint are the attributes which distinguish a saint or an artist from an
ordinary mortal. A dancer, for example, by constant and regular practice of
rhythmic movements disciplines his body so perfectly as to render it impossible
for others to distinguish the dancer from the dance. All thoughts and desires
get themselves merged into the supreme achievement of the antithetical self.
Yeats wrote:
“Now
contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every loved
image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knows nothing
of desire, for desire implies effort, and though there is still separation from
the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its own
existence. As all effort has ceased, all thought has become image...and every
image is separate from every other, for image were linked to image, the soul
would awake from its immovable trance.
This
idea has been poetically rendered in the following line of Yeats’s poems:
O
little did they care who danced between
And
little she by whom her dance was seen
So
she had outdanced thought
Body
perfection brought.
“It is by this kind of rigorous process of fieshly mortification that the artist is objectified into an art-object. The images on the marble floor in the city of Byzantium dance and burn themselves into an agony of trance. Once the process of poetic impersonalisation is complete and the image realisation is effected, i.e., once out of nature the image may or may never take a bodily form. It then seeks identity and bears close correspondence with other art objects such as the birds and trees which
...Gracian
goldsmiths make
Of
hammered gold and gold enamelling
To
keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or
set upon a golden bough to sing
To
lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of
what is past, or passing or to come.
Only by thus reducing
himself to art-image does the poet seek to achieve his own impersonality and
universality in poetry:
By
the help of an image
I
call to my opposite, summon all
That
I have handled least, least looked upon.
The
idea that the poet’s opposite or his antithetical self will result from an
objectification of experience and personality is suggested by Yeats with the
help of his theory of Mask. Yeats wrote:
“...and
I, that my native scenery might find imaginary inhabitants, half planned a new
method and a new culture. My mind began drifting vaguely towards that doctrine
of ‘The Mask’ which hat convinced me that every passionate man...is, as it
were, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds
images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the
nationalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman Emperor’s
image in his head and some Condottier’s blood in his heart.
(Autobiographies.p.152).
It
may however be added by way of comment that the accoount of the poet as a
medium or vehicle only for achieving poet
impersonality as suggested by Yeats is more satisfying than one
attempted by T. S. Eliot who wrote:
“….my
meaning is, that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular
medium, which is only a medium and not a personality in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”
Eliot,
here seems to postulate a duality of poetic personality; though the poet is
only a medium while absorbed in the process of poetic creation, he yet
expresses experiences and impressions which, in all probability, are his own
irrespective of the fact that they are gathered from all sides and directions.
Otherwise, one is tempted to know as to whose experiences these are that the
poet seeks to express when reduced to a poetic medium. Yeats seems to have
conceived of the poet as a medium only and the poetic process begins not by
expressing his ideas and experiences for at this stage he has none of
his own. The poet, while engaged in the poetic process, makes himself an
abstraction and thereby participates in the abstract life lying behind the
phenomenal flux. The poet is thus a medium only for conveying those abstract
images which his own soul lives and associates with. Yeats’s explanation of the
poetic medium and of the impersonality of the artist has the merit of being
more satisfying and conclusive.
Closely
related to the idea of the depersonalisation of the image is the question of
universality in poetry. It may be pointed out that universality in Yeats’s
poetics extends not only in space but in time also. It is both vertical as well
as horizontal. Largely dependent on the horizontal nature of the universality
of Yeats’s image is the poet’s cyclic concept of history. The image, like the
soul, once it enters the purgatory of a poem, can summon other souls and images
as pure and intense as itself. Thus a purged image–
Planted
on the star-lit golden bough,
Can
like the cocks of Hades crow
and then there rush spirits
after spirits and.
Those
images that yet
Fresh
images beget.
The
idea suggested seems to be that once the poet has disembodied and
depersonalised himself, the whole universe becomes dematerialised for him. The
poet then looks into the nature of things and every soul pours out, as it were,
its secret to the poet. As to the man in Baudelaire’s sonnet Correspondences
who moves through a forest of symbols where each pillar nods familiarly, so
to the poet the entire universe, dematerialised and decomposed, seems to
participate in the intense creativity of a poem. If there are still some
unpurged images, the marble of the dancing floor ‘breaks bitter furies of
complexity’. Each shade then becomes more of an image and each corporeal bird
more of a miracle. Thus the poet and the abstract universe are one. Over the
communion of the individual with the universal, the poet comments:
“Anyone
who has any experience of any mystical state of the soul knows how there float
up in the mind profound symbols, whose meaning...one does not perhaps
understand for years. Nor I think any one has known that experience with any
constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some old monument, a
strange or intricate image, that floated up before him, and to grow perhaps
dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little memories are but a part of
some great memory that renews the world and men’s thoughts age after age...”
(Essays.
p. 96)
Yeats’s
view of history suggests that there is a cyclic growth of civilization and that
according to the correspondence of the period between the two civilizations the
image of the one may be born into that of the other. The
correspondence of these images is, however, conveyed with the help of
symbols. Helen, the symbol of beauty and destruction, may be reborn in the
person of Maud Gonne to destroy another Troy or it may be reborn in that
peasant girl Mary Haynes referred to in his poems The Tower and Dust
Hath Closed Helen’s Eyes. Yeats, for all one can say, is himself the last of
the Romantics mounting once
“….in
the saddle Homer rode,
Where
the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.”
Or the Homer-image may
be reborn in the blind poet Raftery:
Strange
but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet
now I have considered it, I find
That
nothing strange; the tragedy began
With
Homer that was a blind man–
And
Helen hath all living hearts betrayed.
There
is another poem by Yeats in which the whole Irish scene is visualized as one on
Olympus and each Irish figure corresponds to an important key-image from the
Greek civilization of about 2,500 years ago. Yeats’s belief in magic and
magical practices has contributed not a little to the creative-metaphysical
theories. In the essay The Magic Yeats recorded three doctrines which
are the foundation of magic and poetry. These doctrines are
(1)
That the borders of our minds are ever shifting and that many minds can flow
into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2)
That the borders of our memories are as shifting and that our memories are a
part of one great memory, the memory of Nature itself.
(3)
That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols (The Ideas of
Good and Evil. p. 29)
Yeats’s
attitude to philosophy seems to have been unfavourable for a long time. He
whipped Plato, Aristotle and the later Platonists for ignoring the fact of
physical decay:
Plato
thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon
a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider
Aristotle played the taws
Upon
the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous
golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered
upon a fiddle stick or strings
What
a star sang and careless muses heard:
Old
clothes upon old sticks to scarce a bird.
Yeats,
in his early study of these philosophers, had thought that philosophy as
propounded by these philosophers is all transcendence and not emanating from
perceptual reality. As it took no account of physical decay and suffering it
was largely unsatisfactory. Philosophy as such, it seemed to Yeats, did not
account for the antinomies but sought to resolve them:
And
I declare my faith
I
mock Plotinus’ thought
And
cry in Plato’s teeth
Death
and life were not
Till
man made up the whole.
I
have prepared my peace
With
learned Italian things
And
the proud stones of Greece,
Poet’s
imaginings
And
memories of love,
Memories
of the words of women,
All
those things whereof
Man
makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling
dream,
Later
on Yeats adds a note of correction to these lines:
“When
I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus, I forgot that it is something in
our eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence. Has not Plotinus written:
‘Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author
of all living things’.”
Evidently
Yeats readjusted his attitude to philosophy (cf. ‘It is myself I remake’) which
he subsequently considered as the; only relevant compensation and occupation
for the old age. In order to remake his soul Yeats turned to philosophy and he
sacrificed his youthful nostalgic desires for the greater need of studying
‘monuments of magnificence.’
Yeats’s
theory of image is thus not only aesthetically and metaphysically significant,
it is an answer to the problem of art-reality relationship posed by Plato also.
There are resemblances between Plato and Yeats: the former’s doctrine of soul
and Yeat’s concept of image. The parallelism between Plato’s concept soul as a
spindle and Yeats’s notion of image as a ‘perne in a gyre” weaving and
unweaving the thread of experience can hardly be missed. Yeats’s idea of the
cyclic movement which is counted differently by different philosophers
corresponds closely to the Hindu concept of Kalpa and the Magnus
Annus of the Platonists. At the end of each civilization the Christ or
Dionysus form will emerge to teach the process of unwinding the thread. Both
Plato and Yeats emphasize reality as abstraction. It is an idea or essence.
Like Plato, Yeats also believed that the idea reality is the sole survivor; all
other objects are imitations manifestations of this reality. It is however in
his conception of art and art-objects that Yeats seems to differ sharply from
Plato and suggests an altogether new approach to the Platonic problem of
art-reality relationship. Plato exalted the philosopher at the expense of the
artist. Whereas the philosopher occupies a conspicuously prominent place in
Plato’s Republic, the poet is banished from there for he, it is presumed, is at
the farthest removes from reality and as such his output has only a pernicious
effect on the life of the Republic. Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, improved on
his master’s fallacy by arguing that the poet is a creator. He faces reality
directly and creates new forms and shapes which are the mimesis or imitation of
reality. Thus he established that the poet is not a servile imitator that Plato
imagined him to be but truly a creator in the Greek sense of the word.
Yeats seems to have gone farther and to improve upon the Aristotelian argument
by eliminating altogether the idea of imitation in the context of art. The
poet’s concern, according to Yeats, is to create images; and though the worldly
images are often unpurged the poet, before employing them in art, purges by
reducing them to their original concept. The artist thus deals with the ideas
or abstractions. In this sense art parts company with life or mere living. It
neither creates life nor imitates it. The question of verisimilitude to life
will be absurd to think of in the present context. Yeats’s attitude to life is
one of characteristic indifference. Borrowing a phrase from Leconte de
L’Isle, Yeats also said “Live! No doubt our servants will do that for us.”
Art, according to the poet, has a life of its own; it teems with intensity.
Thus the poet’s concern is the same as that of the philosopher. Plato exalted
the philosopher-king; Yeats exalted the poet to the philosopher’s status. The
poet is moreover the goldsmith of Byzantium who breaks the flood and after
purifying the images sets them on a golden bough. All images of the past are
thus associated and merged with the purified images:
All
perform their tragic play,
There
struts Hamlet, there Lear
That’s
Ophelia, that Cordelia,...
To
live like an image is to live the life of poetry. Contrasted with the life of
poetry or imagination is, according to Yeats, the life of rhetoric, of
Reformer,
merchant, statesman, learned man
Dutiful
husband, honest wife by turn
Cradle
upon cradle and all in fight and all
Deformed
because there is no deformity
But
saves from a dream.
Opposed
to this life of rhetoric again is the life of the dreamer, of the man of
imagination and of crazy man, of the fool or the philosopher who, contemplating
of reality, endeavours to be the reality himself. This is the life of the
artist–painter, musician, dancer and poet, of the young lovers and the saint
and the nuns and the mothers who are anxious to achieve their antithetical self
worshipping images and by endeavouring to be that which they love
and adore.