Proteus

"Proteus" is in one way an extended riff on the creative process; it's self aware and forces the reader to think about Joyce and his relation to writing Ulysses. Dedalus' struggle to capture the essence of experience as it happens, or in the "ineluctable" passage of time, is the struggle of authorship. Authorship of one's experience, and by extension, of records of that experience.

The process fascinates Dedalus; he is unable to stop his thoughts, first from controlling or authoring the way he experiences his walk along the beach, and then from spiraling out to simulatenous possible experiences, like visiting his Uncle Richie. Joyce convinces us that he has in fact gone to his uncle's house. This forces the reader to intepret whether experiences are channeled from reality and narrated by the self, or whether all experience is in fact engineered.

The question becomes important again when Dedalus sees the cockle pickers. His fantasies about them are as real as anything else; in fact, they are all we reader's have to judge them. That is, there is no break between an objective and subjective, because the total experience is subjective. The reader has to become a participant and make his own assessments.

As much as he is fascinated by creation, Dedalus is equally intimidated by it, and especially by his powerlessness over it. By the end of the chapter, the few lines of poetry he is trying to write seemed to me like an escape from his thoughts and were experienced as a relief from the maelstrom of consciousness. Writing things down, fixing (as in a fixed reality) deadens Dedalu's experience, and there is no question that the lines he writes are less interesting than what he thinks. But given the tumult, which is more frighening because it is a quotididan tumult (notice that everything he thinks about is in his line of vision, and relates directly to what he is happening...there is no thinking about the future, beyond the next hour or so) a fixed, unshifting point must be experienced as a relief.

Nestor

In the "Nestor" episode, Joyce develops Dedalus' social personality along two lines: his external behavior and his internal psychology. Unlike the "Telemachus" episode, Dedalus is shown around people who are not his peers. Rather they are his subordinates and his superior. The way he behaves around his students and his "mentor" Deasy give the reader a nuanced idea of who Dedalus is in the world.

Dedalus is awkward. His jokes and riddle fall flat on the boys. He cannot guage his audience, and must seem weird to their prepubscent perceptions. Like an adjunct professor, he is not inclined towards rules or norms. We see this in the way he responds to Armstrong, the class clown. Rather than punish the boy, he humours him. Also he does not favor Comyn, the teacher's pet, over the others; he has no special respect for the boy's pedantry. He doesn't care very much for what he's teaching them, recognizing it as rote learning of a certain class, not true edcuation.

With Sargent, Joyce develops Dedalus' empathy. The ironically named boy who asks for help with his algebra is not Dedalus' younger analogue; like Dedalus he is physically weak, but unlike him he is also stupid. Dedalus identication is misguided, then; it is more a reflection of his lingering sadness over his mother, who he melodramatically reflects "saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been". There is a sad humour to his heavy handed line of thought. Neither is Dedalus' identificaton with Sargent accurate, nor can his guilt ridden reflection be taken too seriously, and so the passage is ironic, but touchingly so. With Sargent we see Dedalus as, alas, a little boy.

Empathy and awkardness are at play with Deasy; the uncomfortable (and funny) conversation is pitch perfect. Importantly he does not ignore the man's request to have his letter published, he internally resolves to do it, despite the fact that he recognizes Deasy as a fool. More interesting to me are Dedalus' non sequitors: "Histor is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". "That is god...a shout in the street". Deasy's facile response is first (basically) "God is great"; and second "I am happier than you", which is undoubtedly true, but leaves the modernistic sentiment hanging in the air, for the reader to ponder.

Terrible Beauty

In my paper I want to look at Yeats' terrific and original sense of aesthetics. I think that beginning in his middle period, he often approached beauty as terrifying. Ecstasy is derived from the Latin for "terror", and this is the typical sort of Yeatsian ecstasy. Beauty offers the poet transcendence, but to a fiercer, more brutal plane. His aesthetics could be called awesome, in the older sense of the word.

Poem 311, "Ribh in Ecstasy", is instructive. The poem's speaker, surely a facet of the poet's own personality, describes sex between cosmic entities, "Godhead on Godhead". The potency of their union triggers a feeling of riveted powerlessness. The effect is heightened by the ominous next line "Some shadow fell". The last lines compare this cosmic sex to the average, every day encounter, amorous cries that...come" and then must return to routine.

The poem is also helpful for showing the connection between Yeat's aesthetics and poetics. The first lines, "What matter that you understood no word!/Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard/in broken sentences", gives the uneasy, almost inverse relationship between being very moved and being able to say, at what, or why. Some of Yeats' most beautiful poems are also his least comprehensible; the connection isn't accidental.

"Lapis Lazuli" describes the destruction of "Old civilisations" and the consequences, and finds joy in the apocalyptic topic. Yeats almost seems to be laughing at the prospect of war. Is it because he considers it inconsequential, given the great unknown forces he believed were guiding the world? Is the promise of rebirth, and new growth, enough to compensate for the casualties? The very beautiful lines that take us from a lapis lazuli statue into a scene on a hill, a "tragic scene" though not unbroken by the hint of new life in the form of flowering trees, are key. This is the mysterious "transfiguring" that links terror with beauty.

Breaking it down: stanza by stanza, line by line

In this post I'd like to take a step back from sociopolitical and biographical details of W.B. Yeats' life and analyze the opening poem of  The Tower, paying close attention to the language and poetics Yeats employs. This is difficult poetry; however, that doesn't preclude interpretations. In fact I'd argue that interpretations are necessary, that we must try to draw meaning from the lines, obscure as they may be. We can understand Yeats to be saying more than one thing at the same time, but this means that there is a range of, or multiple, coexistent (and interactive) but fixed interpretations, rather than than an interpretation that is nebulous, or nonexistent. 

Sailing to Byzantium is a poem in four sections. Immediately this suggests to me the four seasons, particularly given Yeats' motif of cycles, passing time, mortality and the "gyre". The opening demonstrative "That is no country for old men" foreshadows what Yeats reveals in line 15, that he has "sailed the seas and come/to the holy city of Byzantium". QED, the journey of the title is already completed; it is a voyage written in the present perfect (this seems trivial, but will almost subconsciously resonate with the closing lines). Moving back, the first stanza is a catalogue of life, of what is "begotten, born, and dies". The magnificently paradoxical "dying generations" are along the thematic lines of the cyclical, death paired alongside generation. The middle lines of the stanza, "The salmon falls, the mackerel crowded seas,/Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/Whatever is begotten, born, and dies", because there are full of stresses, read as busy, nearly chaotic: an echo of hectic, generative life. The rhythm in the last line of the stanza is much more restrained, to correspond with the idea of a detached "timeless, unageing intellect". We can summarize the meaning of the first stanza: The speaker of the poem, presumably an old man, finds himself irrelevant because of his age and inferred impotence; yet he recognizes something more lasting than those involved in the natural cycles of life, which is ignored by the "dying generations". 

The second stanza makes clear the speaker's identity more clear. The first two lines seem to state inarguably that the speaker is an "aged man", and feels a certain impotence. However he has found a certain alternative: he is "but a paltry thing" unless "Soul clap its hands and sing", and "louder sing/for every tatter in its mortal dress". The more aged and decrepit the body, the stronger the "singing" should be. What this singing refers to is ambiguous at this point. However, as this is a poem and many poems are self referential, there is the definite possibility that "singing" could refer to writing poetry (this really is not even coded; singing and reciting poetry have an ancient connection beginning in classical poetics, and antiquity is on the line from the title; writing poetry must therefore be considered as a compelling extraction of singing). The next line almost seems like a lapse, a misplay by Yeat: 'Nor is there singing school but studying'. The singing school has no connection to the other elements of the poem, and feels forced by the meaning that is being conveyed by the next line, that singing is only learned via reflection on "Monuments of its own magnificence". The mellifluous alliteration is in line with the musicality of the singing metaphor and points further in the self referential direction. The last lines are the clearest in the stanza, and from them we can fix an almost certain interpretation: The speaker is returning to the Classical, to get in touch with the ageless eternally rejuvenating (Platonic and possibly, if the idea of singing as poetry has already convinced, Homeric) realms of antiquity. Note that this stanza must function on a metaphorical level, that the literal is simply nonsense: That monuments could teach singing, which would revitalize the soul, and that those monuments are located in Byzantium (Constantinople, Instabul). 

The third stanza opens with the thrilling image of "sages standing in God's holy fire", a demonstration of the men's tenacity and a possible reference to the phoenix, which regenerates from the ash's of a fire and so is immortal. The line also seems to be a quasi classical invocation, as to a muse, suggesting that antiquity has already begun to influence the speaker. "As in a gold mosaic of a wall" is a knotty line, which we may not want to pin down. "Wall" suggests stability and lasting qualities (but maybe also ruins), while the metaphor could be read as correlating the sages to individual tiles and "God's holy fire" as the whole "gold mosaic", suggesting that meaning and power is granted by connection with a greater force or design. Then, Yeats would himself become part of this operation, would become an element within the "gyre" or another tile within the mosaic. The final four lines are simple by comparison: the speaker wants his human characteristics, his "heart" and his body ("dying animal") to be transformed and so by made immortal. "Artifice of eternity", like the mosaic, or singing, clearly seems to mean that immortality is crafted by creative acts; again, my tendency is to interpret this most immediately as poetry in general and this poem specifically. 

The final stanza is rather fanciful, but also really clever. Here the speaker seems to have escaped the perils of aging, the "no country for old men", in fact the natural world entirely. Maybe that is a little exuberant, perhaps he has only yearned for this transformation: "Once out of nature I shall never take/My bodily form from any natural thing".  Also, notice that the monuments of magnificence have shrunk to fine metalwork, and then baubles. Yeats suggests that the fountain of youth outlined in the poem may have its drawbacks. Many of the allusions crystallize here; the scene created is undoubtedly an ancient one (one that seems to be confabulated from different epochs, the Greek and Roman); singing is reinforced by the closing image of a golden bird "set upon a golden bough to sing".  Perhaps the singing has become literally true? At a shallow level, yes, but the profitable association of singing with poetry yields a deeper interpretation. In the line "a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/Of hammered gold and gold ennameling" the artisanal aspect of the artifice seems like a match for Yeats "flexible (tensile, malleable) yet firm" poetics. And the closing line seems to perfectly capture the tradeoffs a natural life, i.e. one spent in the moment, and one spent writing (that is, the writing can never exist in the present moment, but only reflect "what is past, or passing, or to come") and also to be an avowal of the poetry that follows (that is, it is a suitable opening poem for the volume). 

There is a mix of Christian, Greek, and Roman reference in the poem. Does this suggest a connection between the three, or does Yeats mean that all great works of art rooted in any school of thought can last?  

The Wind Among the Reeds

This volume is, like most of Yeats, multivalent. The consistent thread through these poems is the the "He"; this is the clue to a relationship which may be to poetry, or a love affair, or a god, or, to combine all three, to the Muse of lyrical verse...the emotion that is the course of the volume runs from the high spirited young, eager young poet, a virtuoso of the felt world to the dejected older poet who has lost use of his early love and grown philosophical. 

Some of Yeats' concerns we can witness throughout his works are apparent in this collection, especially in the linchpin that ties the beginning poems to the last, 59 and 60, the Cap and Bells  and The Valley of the Black Pig. The first poem seems to correspond to the two components of poetry, the heart and the soul: the soul, "blue" and wise,  and the  sweet tongued "red", whoch only together (and separate from the jester) have the power to charm the poem's young queen .

The Valley of the Black Pig is a poem obsessed with historicity. In the evening "dew dropped" hours, a motif throughout the volume, the narrator loses himself and seems to move into ancient, "unknown" epochs: we have the cromlech and the cairn, two symbols of ancient Gaelic culture, submitting to what must be assumed is the Roman empire. These are established as players in a dichotomy between rational and irrational, with the short term preference on the the masters of the "still star" but the realistic bet with the irrational to trump these empiricists.