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WHAT ROUGH BEAST INDEED? A NEW READING OF W. B. YEATS' |
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Canonical poems too often stagnate into unchallenged interpretations because critics avoid reading against the traditional grain. I present an embarrassing personal example: though I consider myself a critical reader, I recently heard Shelley's "Ozymandias" read as if for the first time. From high school advanced placement courses and tutorials through Romanticism courses and English literature surveys, I have consistently applied the same interpretation to this poem: what humans create must inexorably crumble in the face of passing epochs. I read Ozymandias's words ironically, for his kingdom lay as the statue's shattered remains, decayed and wrecked. He believed his kingdom invincible, but ultimately descended into the Egyptian desert dust. Upon hearing the poem recited again, I perceived for the first time the detailed and long-lasting shattered visage: whose
frown, The poem tells little of the ancient king, but reveals the everlasting power of the artist. Though Ozymandias, Greek name for Ramses II, lived in the time of biblical Moses, the artist's rendering of the king's face reveals even now the passion and leadership of that King of Kings. The poem celebrates the artist's function of defying time. Though the king no longer rules and his kingdom lay in dust, the power of the artist remains in the still recognizable great statue's ruins. "Ozymandias" so interpreted introduces a recurring theme in Yeats's poetry. As he aged Yeats became more concerned about his own survival and the survival of Protestant Ascendancy aristocracy in war-torn and increasingly Catholic Ireland. He married late, purchased and renovated an ancestral home, sired two children, and wrote of leaving his legacy-personal, artistic, political-to his home and his class. Art's survival through time's destructive power appealed to Yeats because it represented the possibility of his own survival through the apocalyptic convergence of gyres. At few other times did destruction seem more immediately immanent for the Ascendancy than during the Anglo-Irish War and the resulting Irish Civil War. The Tower, and most particularly "Meditations in Time of Civil War," demonstrates Yeats's discomfort about and reaction to the ravaging war. By purchasing and restoring the ancestral tower, Thoor Ballylee, he chose to create despite the raging madness surrounding him. He sought desperately for a way to outlive the ravaging war and the coming apocalyptic end of the age. Many of the poems included in Michael Robartes and the Dancer, most written before those in The Tower, suggest a desire to survive through destruction as did the Ozymandias sculptor. "The Second Coming," the poem most closely aligned with "Ozymandias," has been interpreted as Yeats's anxiety at World War One and the Irish Civil War's destruction. According to this interpretive school he perceives in these wars hints of future convergence of gyres and the corresponding destructive replacement of old order with new order, a destruction that includes him and his Ascendancy class. The last two lines are read as a rhetorical question, the answer to which has not yet been determined. The end has been interpreted like that of "Leda and the Swan," ambivalent and typically Yeatsian in its indecision. I suggest an alternative reading. "The Second Coming" follows "Demon and Beast" in Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Too often in Yeats's canon, a poem's interpretation focuses attention on the poem's formal construction and referential function, not on its context within its collection. Yet Yeats intended that these poems be collected in their printed order. Critics have written little about "Demon and Beast;" I believe interpretations of "The Second Coming" have suffered as a result. I suggest that, after closely reading "Demon and Beast" and applying that interpretation to "The Second Coming," Yeats intended the poem to definitively answer its own concluding question. |
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Michael Robartes and the
Dancer |