by Nils Peterson
Years ago I was listening to Robert Bly talk about poetry. It was at a conference on form and he was in the process of leaving Whitman and going on to Yeats as part of his own conscious public wrestling, not so much with the Muse as which Muse and where the Muse comes from. He paused for a moment and, to let his batteries charge, said – “Well, what do you think of this Nils?” He’d been talking about the formal aspect of Yeats, the rhythm and the rhyme and the kind of consciousness such usage requires of the reader and the writer. I, startled, could think of nothing else to say than that Yeats writes the kind of poem that you can wake up in the middle of the night and find that you know by heart without ever having made the effort to memorize it. I mentioned having been at a wedding where, unexpectedly, I was asked to recite some poetry. I was able after a minute of two or two with a pencil to come up with a fairly accurate version of “The Folly of Being Comforted.” Bly nodded, and went on his merry way, but I found myself troubled. So, at the end when he asked for comments, I found I had to add this anecdote.
In the middle ’60s when I first was a new husband, a new teacher, and new father, I met my first indication of the changing consciousness of women in a freshman English class. I was teaching the Yeats poem “A Prayer for My Daughter.” I found it, and in many ways still do a marvelous poem and I spoke of it to my class with great enthusiasm saying that this is what I would wish for my daughter – that she would be “beautiful” but not “too beautiful” and “learned courtesy” for:
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
by those that are not entirely beautiful….
I added that I’ve known enough of it in myself to think that,
An intellectual hatred is the worst.
While musing in front of the class, thinking of my own infant daughter’s destiny, it seemed as if I too could pray –
May her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious…,
having had because of growing up as a chauffeur’s child on a great estate, some illusions about what that would be like.
One of my women students, tough, honest, told me – “You’re wrong. You shouldn’t say wish that on your daughter.” In fact, she went on to say that “I had no right to wish that on my daughter.”
I was set back on my heels, shocked. It had seemed to me the most unexceptionable of fatherly wishes, what, indeed, any father, would want. The class finished with a good argument. And Bly’s evening finished when, shortly after my story, Robert said, “Well, something must be happening here because I feel a lot of anger in my stomach and it’s time for bed.” And yes, the evening all of a sudden had become filled with a strange uncomfortable energy.
But the evening and my story are not quite over. After the meeting, a tall woman, maybe in her mid 30s came up to me as I was leaving to go off to drink some wine and asked if she could talk to me for awhile. I said sure, so we chatted at first shuffling from foot to foot then, finding comfortable seats, we settled into a long talk.
She told me that something like that had happened to her at about the same time at the University of Michigan, if I recall, only she was the student. She had just come into her liking of literature and was very fond of her instructor. As you know, sometimes those things go together. Yet, as the instructor went and on about “Prayer for My Daughter” in much the same way as I had, something rose up in her, and, when the beaming instructor turned to her for confirmation of all the things he’d been saying, a confirmation she had given so gladly so often, she could not give it though she wanted desperately to please the teacher she liked, respected, perhaps even loved. The result was a great wounding which she still felt 15 years later.
Her story sent me thinking in two ways – they may be finally one. I am a great lover of Yeats and have been since I first started reading poetry seriously. He was very much in vogue at the academy and I had no reason then to reject its judgments, but during my talk with that woman, perhaps out of my own wrestling with the fathers, I found myself asking what is wrong with Yeats, and, since Bly’s conference was a conference on form, I begin thinking in those terms.
Yeats fashioned for himself a powerful instrument, a deep masculine solid voice, markedly rhythmical. There is no mistaking his poems for prose. In the recording of him I’ve heard (and in Bly’s imitation of him reading “Lake Isle of Innisfree”) it is a clear that instrument is no accidental term. It is a voice, a style, connected with music – a tongue like a reed loving the long vowels, a voice of rooted in the belly, not in the mind, although the mind borrows it once in a while – (to make my distinction clear I think of the voice of Auden centered though sometimes in the mind). Yeats’s voice, physical and poetic, is a bardic voice, a prophetic voice, a voice suitable for the human utterance of the songs of the great archetypes – and, when that is Yeats’s matter, it is an appropriate voice. (“Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Sailing to Byzantium”), but when Yeats has a more human subject, it betrays him.
Thought about it this way, “A Prayer for My Daughter” is almost funny. There is a poet who is a new father of a new daughter which means a new poem. A Lear-like storm sweeps across the heath and the wind screams about the romantic tower of a middle-age man who was afraid of what the world is coming to. He wonders what boons he should ask the gods to protect his daughter so that she will not go on “unaccommodated” into the storm. There are things he wants her to have, but, more interestingly there are things he wants her not to have – opinions for one,
An intellectual hatred is the worst
So let her think opinions are accursed….
He goes on to recount the terrible things that have happened to Maude Gonne because she had ideas. Opinions is the word we often used to dismiss another’s ideas, a kind of dismissive shifting of ground. So much, then, for Maude’s struggles to be a self operating in the quotidian world of flux and change, a woman with a vision of how things should be better than they are. A woman, rather, should become what he now he wishes his daughter to become,
A flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be
And have no business but dispensing round,
Their magnanimity‘s of sound….
The reason for this is terribly clear despite the convoluted syntax of his lines,
My mind, because the minds that I have loved
The sort of beauty that I have approved
Prosper but little, has dried up of the late.…
Because it is not a good time for the carriers of the values that Yeats approves, it is not a good time for Yeats, and his mind “has dried up of late.” This, of course, is the obsessive subject of the last 25 years of his creative life. In this context, he is seeing his daughter as a carrier of his values. And the fact he wants her not only to have but be a kind of home he can go to.
But I think Yeats is betrayed here, betrayed by the instrument he had worked so hard to create. His voice is too big for the occasion and what should be a small human poem becomes contaminated by his personal fears and the patriarchal archetype. Surely, in part, this is what my student and my friend were objecting to – not only the substance, but the manner, the big heavy oracular manner dripping with fatherly assurance that this is, indeed, the way things are, that these values are the indisputable ones, and that their coming loss will be tragic. His personal feelings about life are here too, but one doesn’t feel them as small, personal, human. It is all high drama.
Perhaps there was a storm whistling through the air when Yeats was thinking about all this but could his voice of have encompassed a gentle spring breeze? I’m afraid he would have sounded much like Bottom when he promises to “roar at you as gently as any sucking dove.” The poems of poets are dictated as much by what the writer can’t do as what he or she can. (I love his love poems to Maude Gonne, but would not a woman get tired of being addressed in the high style all of the time? I’m guessing yes. Maude evidently did. I think that is part of what she is telling him when she asked him the day after the occasion for his poem “Adam’s Curse.” He has asked her again to marry him and she has refused and he tells her of his unhappiness and she replies “you make beautiful music out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that.” She saw that indeed he saw his life as a drama, a drama in the high old style. Indeed, in “Adam’s Curse” he tells her that he has striven to love her “in the old high way of love….” “The old high way” is a very attractive way, attractive in its sound, in its call, and in its feel to the romantic a young man not very well connected with the world. I speak personally here as well as from observation. It enables one to give in fully to one’s desire without having to put up with the “lineaments of the gratified desire.”
Now when I read Yeats, even in the big poems when his big voice is working well, I find myself a little suspicious. I find myself wondering what is concealed behind the megaphone. I find myself wondering if part of that rough beast “slouching to be born” is not for Yeats the feminine spirit coming into its power, its political power, and that that for Yeats would be a something of a nightmare. Yet when the subject is right, the voice is right, the poem is right and we are given treasures like “O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, /Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? /O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, /How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
I add that I am grateful to the young women who spoke up in class. I became a better father because of her and I think a better teacher. I wish I could remember her name.
Here’s “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-leggèd 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 hatred 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.