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WHAT ROUGH BEAST INDEED? A NEW READING OF W. B. YEATS' |
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"A Prayer for my Daughter" presents Yeats's newborn daughter Anne sleeping through a howling storm "half hid / Under this cradle-hood and coverlid" (1-2). This newborn intentionally evokes the rough beast of "The Second Coming," "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." Yeats configures the beast as his own second coming, physical survival through art, birth of pure spirit (the escape vision as creative process) into controlled physical existence as beast. Yet the birth of Anne also suggests a physical rebirth through which he will survive biologically after apocalyptic destruction. After comparing this physical procreation of self through Anne to the spiritual birth of self through beast in the second stanza - "Imagining in excited reverie / That the future years had come" (13-14) - Yeats disparages his physical procreation. Configuring her physical appearance as that which will attract or repel appropriate or inappropriate suitors, Yeats turns this prayer for his daughter into a lament on the potentially ineffective future of physical reproduction. Fearing she will attract a bridegroom full of "arrogance and hatred" (77) that might taint Yeats's bloodline and doom his descendants to their own intellectual apocalyptic end, Yeats returns to his "sweet" vision in the prayer's penultimate stanza. Considering that, all hatred driven hence, He finds his solution in his self-delighting escape vision, in his "own sweet will" - rebirth through his art, not through his soul and body. Reading "Prayer for My Daughter" in light of this interpretation of "The Second Coming" reinforces the strong move made in "Meditations in Time of Civil War," particularly that made in the last poem, "I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness." Instead of relying upon his daughter's bridegroom to provide a lasting "house, / Where all's accustomed, ceremonious" ("Prayer" 73-4) or relying on his own tower-home to provide creative life that "overflows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, / And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains" ("Ancestral Houses" 3-5), Yeats chooses instead to "turn away and shut the door" (35). He wishes to retreat into his escape vision in the last lines of "I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness": The abstract joy, "Abstract joy" and "daemonic images" certainly evoke the beast of "The Second Coming," while the "ageing man" evokes "Demon and Beast" which describe the relative ease of experiencing escape vision as physical faculties become sluggish and impaired. That he equates visions experienced as an aging man with those experienced as a growing boy may also suggest a strong affinity between earlier drug-induced hallucinations and his current age-induced escape visions. Certainly Yeats mistrusts physical reproduction as a means of surviving the converging gyres in "Prayer for My Daughter." "A Meditation in Time of War" emphasizes the brief visionary state of his escape, realizing for the briefest time his physical insignificance in the face of spiritual animation. He configures his own rebirth through art as a means of becoming "that One [who] is animate" (4). Perhaps "To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee" best encapsulates the theme of living through art. In the words carved into the stone which "remain when all is ruin once again" (6), Yeats envisions himself existing beyond his own death. Reviewing the other poems in Michael Robartes and the Dancer in light of this newly offered reading of "Second Coming" might reveal a unifying pattern for the collection. In this I stand on shifty ground, so provide only the sketchiest of suggestions to direct rereading. The dialogical poems between man and woman - "Michael Robartes and the Dancer," "Solomon and the Witch," and "An Image from a Past Life" - may configure Yeats's vacillating dialogue between escape vision existence and intellectual demon and beast constructed self. Evidence from the earliest printing of these poems in manuscript and in The Dial indicate that the dialogical "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" immediately followed "The Second Coming," suggesting some connection between the two. Perhaps Yeats configured the dragon of "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" as the beast of "The Second Coming." If so, then the argument presented by "He" in the first verse paragraph may be an internal argument over future existence in art between intellectual constructed self and escape vision existence. The "She" who clarifies and summarizes, who gets the last word, may represent his growing understanding that physical beauty and procreation may not offer the most efficient solution for his survival. Perhaps the political poems - "Easter 1916," "Sixteen Dead Men," "The Rose Tree," "On a Political Prisoner," and "The Leaders of the Crowd" - work to suggest Yeats's growing dismay at the immanent destruction Ireland faces. As he previews the approaching apocalypse and examines the real possibility that his figure of Ireland in Cathleen ni Houlihan may well have caused some of that bloodshed (Ure 69), the political poems may also work to force Yeats into a defense of continued poetic production. He answers his own internal indictment with the solution of "The Second Coming": he must create poetry in order to survive the destruction. That Michael Robartes and the Dancer as a collection has received little critical attention elicits no negative response because it defies unified discussion as a collection. That "Demon and Beast" has received so little attention shames Yeats scholars. Even taken as an independent poem, Yeats's self-awareness in this poem alone deserves attention. He recognizes his own self-constructed D.E.D.I. demon and beast identity as restrictive and tyrannical. He identifies his escape into dream space as an effort to escape his soul and body, a move made elsewhere but seldom so self-consciously. He suggests a method for surviving the civil war and the apocalyptic destruction surrounding him that had not been previously identified except in The Tower. Even had these characteristics not been identified, Yeats scholars should certainly have struggled with this poem because of its proximity to "The Second Coming," particularly when aware of Yeats's deliberate building of meanings in poem after poem. I find the interpretation of "The Second Coming" presented in this paper a much more satisfying reading of the poem. Yeats's early configuration of self as D.E.D.I., his struggle and need to survive into the next gyre, and his insecure self-identity all read seamlessly into this interpretation. This reading also abandons the need to place the poem within a loosely Christian tradition, a move that has baffled previous critics. Finally, this reading avoids the temptation of identifying the beast as some historical epoch or character, a move that far too many critics have made. Yeats is beast, pure spirit physically reborn in art. |
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