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WHAT ROUGH BEAST INDEED? A NEW READING OF W. B. YEATS' |
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In the first stanza, Yeats introduces the beast images with, "That crafty demon and that loud beast / That plague me day and night" (2-3). To provide a gloss on Yeats's use of the word "demon," reference to his involvement in the mystical Golden Dawn must be made. According to Ellmann, Yeats "attained the inner order of the Golden Dawn" in 1893 and "bound himself with a solemn oath" to work towards becoming "self-born, born anew." He chose for his order name Demon Est Deus Inversus (D.E.D.I.), suggesting his dual human nature and his desire to undergo personal transmutation, becoming "the pure spirit of perfected man" (96). Among members of this and other secret orders, Yeats was known as D.E.D.I., and even signed correspondence with the abbreviation (124). Using the term "crafty demon" in the poem evokes an aspect of Yeats's self-construction, most probably his spiritual identity and desire to attain "pure spirit of perfected man." Describing the beast as "loud" suggests a more sensual aspect of his character, perhaps his physical identity. "Demon" and "beast" resonate with one another, as if one is physical manifestation of the other. He configures demon and beast as soul and body, an intellectual configuration of self. That these two - demon and beast, soul and body - plagued him night and day suggests an imprisonment to this self-construct. He escapes the tyranny of this intellectual self-construct only "For certain minutes at the least," (1) though he suggests that he continually struggles: "Though I had long perned in the gyre / Between my hatred and desire" (5-6). This first stanza illustrates Yeats's struggle to escape from intellectually constructed self, from the demon and beast of soul and body. The struggle for Yeats must also be a vacillation between some seldom-achieved escape from self and the intellectual construct of self as demon and beast. It is this state of escape to which the second stanza turns, introducing that state with the last two lines of the first stanza: "I saw my freedom won / And all laugh in the sun" (7-8). The lines suggest a manic quality to his escape from self. The last two lines of the first stanza also intimate the vision quality of this escape state, for he "sees" his freedom won as in a dream. This dream may well represent a drug-induced hallucination. Yeats experimented early with drugs, mostly hashish but later occasional opiates. Arthur Symon, member of the Rhymers, a group Foster describes as Yeats's self-configured "mutually supportive literary circle," introduced Yeats to recreational hashish use (108-9). In the late 1890s Yeats experimented with drugs to induce visions and enhance artistic creativity: [I]t was no accident that the language was by turns narcotic and hallucinogenic. WBY had learned to take hashish with the shady followers of the mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin in Paris, and with Davray and Symons the previous December. In April 1897 he experimented with mescal, supplied by Havelock Ellis, who recorded that "while an excellent subject for visions, and very familiar with various vision-producing drugs and processes," WBY found the effect on his breathing unpleasant; "he much prefers haschich," which he continued to take in tablets, a particularly potent form of ingestion (Foster 178). By 1898 Yeats attempted psychic communication "astrally and chemically (mescalin on 16 September, hashish four days later). Unsurprisingly, visions followed" which Yeats recorded in his "visions notebook" (196). That "all laugh in the sun" may allude to his ironic realization that, though drugs little helped his creative process, they contributed to his visionary freedom from intellectual self-construct. In his vision state Yeats enacts the move of "All Souls Night," "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," and many later poems, calling up ghosts of the dead. This event occurs in the Irish National Gallery, filled with paintings of dead Anglo-Irish nobles (including his own ancestors) and an Irish Franciscan. Whereas Yeats concludes "All Soul's Night" refusing to tell his "certain marvelous thing" and refuting his own art, this poem calls the ghosts from the art. While mummy wrappings, the trappings of the dead, essentially "mum" his artistic voice in "All Souls Night," the dead effectively live again through art in his escape vision, a significant departure from the selfish nihilistic theme of "All Soul's Night." "Demon and Beast" enacts the same move as "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," for calling up ghosts of the dead leads to the poem as creative expression. In "Demon and Beast," however, such imaginatively fruitful conjuring of spirits happens only after escaping his construction of self. Within this vision these portrait ghosts welcome him and beckon him into their gallery company, a potentially uncomfortable move for the aging Yeats. The escape from self that allows this vision seems also to allow animation in these paintings, suggesting that escape from self represents the ability to share in the experience of the dead. When Strafford smiles "as though / It made him happier to know / I understood his plan" (13-15), Yeats clearly equates the understanding gained in this escape vision with realizing the plan of the dead. I suggest their plan is to survive through art. Wadding belonged to a more enlightened Catholic Church of the sixteenth century, while Strafford and the Ormondes belonged to the Ascendancy. Both groups felt threatened by Ireland's current violent, bloody civil war and by popular, priest-controlled, reactionary Irish Catholic nationalism. Yet each group survives in the gallery's art and beckoning ghosts. This echoes the lasting move in Shelley's "Ozymandias": the king's visage, though shattered, retains both artist's shaping hand and king's domineering snarl. Yeats himself made a similar move in "The New Faces," in which "the living seem more shadowy than they [the ancestors, the first dead]" (8). In "The New Faces" Yeats configures art as giving the first dead new and everlasting life: art is that "where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time" (4). The move to suggest art as a means of surviving resonates within Yeats's poetic corpus and informs the escape vision of "Demon and Beast": he is beckoned to become as the portraits have become, ghosts surviving the devastation of civil war. He ultimately understands their thoughts as their plan to survive, equating their thoughts with his own "thoughts" - creative expression or art: "For all men's thoughts grew clear / Being dear as mine are dear" (19-20). The third stanza enacts his sorrow at the physical world's intrusion into his escape vision. Demon and beast, soul and body, his intellectual constructed self, intrude upon his thoughts in the guise of gulls perning and splashing around a portly green-pated bird on a lake. Yeats repeatedly uses the image of an intrusive bird disturbing his escape from the physical world. In "Her Triumph" a "miraculous strange bird" (12) shrieks into his chivalric escape vision. In "A Memory of Youth," remembering a time when he loved Maud Gonne and considered that love returned, a bird interrupts his reverie and steals the pleasure of the remembrance. "Were it not that Love upon the cry / Of a most ridiculous little bird / Tore from the clouds his marvellous moon" (19-21). Returning to "Demon and Beast," as he transitions from escape reverie to physical reality he realizes that, having escaped from demon and beast ("being no more demoniac" 30), a simple bird shocks him into action. This shocking transition from escape vision to physical world, from freedom to possession, "Could rouse my whole nature" (33). Yeats configures the pain of this transition as an impetus for creating art, a means of survival revealed in the ghosts' plan. Understanding the pain that often accompanies artistic creation anticipates his move in "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," in which violence and suffering become part of his creative agony, necessary to the process of artistic expression. The rousing of nature through painful transition also suggests a more sinister implication, that painful destruction may actually enhance the creative process. In the fourth stanza Yeats, in a moment of clear self-understanding, states that rousing his nature, a "natural victory," is a product of his intellectual self-construct. His escape vision suggests a better way of engaging in the creative process: escaping the tyranny of intellectual self-construction, avoiding the pain of creation, and remaining alive in his art. Rather than suffering through the apocalyptic destruction of civil war and attempting to salvage joyful creativity from dolorous destruction, he wishes to linger in the escape vision by living through art, not existing through physical pain. The move is that of "The Stolen Child" and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree": escaping, configuring himself as above and beyond the physical events surrounding and threatening his existence. Yet he acknowledges that no matter how well he escapes the tyranny of demon and beast into imaginary escape vision, body and soul always manage to pull him back into the physical world. Thus he ironically undercuts his claim of "being no more demoniac" by suggesting that, as long as he lives, he cannot escape the intellectual self-construct of body and soul. It is here that growing old becomes a welcome event, not an anxious moment. "Chilled blood" - sluggishness of body and soul-allows him to enter more such escape visions, the "sweetness" that he craves: "And that mere growing old, that brings / Chilled blood, this sweetness brought" (38-39). He wants the freedom from demon and beast to linger longer than moments, for "half a day," perhaps (42). The last stanza brings the sweetness he craves to a culminating definition. Yeats configures the starvation of monastic Anthony and his followers in the Egyptian desert as an "exultant" occasion. He envies their "sweetness" of denying the physical, of entering into the euphoria of dying. Death allows them to enter the vision state he so desperately craves and provides freedom from body and soul, from demon and beast, from intellectual self-construct. Just as the escape vision allowed him to see that the dead ghosts survive beyond their own lives and struggles, he envisions his death like that of the monks, denying the physical and awaiting his everlasting life through his art. He foresees his existence through art beyond his physical life and the physical struggles of Ireland. He makes the same move in "I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness" by suggesting that, come apocalypse, Ascendancy's destruction, or his own demise, he will keep working and his work will live. |
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What About that Rough Beast? |