The significance of Yeats

W. B. Yeats was no Catholic but he could not escape the influence of a Catholic culture on his boyhood upbringing nor on the how he saw the world, even when it was through the eyes of a strained Rosicrucianism or occult researches into the 'automatic writing' of his wife. His ability to enchant, to take us to the borders of Faerie remains, even after his political friendships and mystical wanderings are taken into account. For this reason he is one of my favourite poets.

When I was in my mid-twenties I took a trip to Ireland to visit Dublin and County Sligo where Yeats spent much of his early years under the influence of his Grandfather William Pollexfen. Dublin I barely recall; a city of dusty streets and buildings in mid-demolition and reconstruction amidst the pervasive smell of the Guinness factory at the water's edge. But Sligo is etched into my memory forever.

It is no wonder Yeats made it the setting of so many of his poems with its "haystack levelling winds", long empty strands and confabulation of folk tales and religious stories and influences. Sligo is very beautiful but also very wet. Staying for three weeks in the summer, we were treated to one day without rain and a constant wind buffeting the fields and cottage. Creevykeel where we stayed nestles quite close to Ben Bulben and is near to Drumcliff churchyard where Yeats is buried under that black headstone, so bleak and so final: Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!

The louring hills and sweeping seascapes, cottages drenched in the memory of a people out of time and the rustling of the wind in the reeds beside the shore of strand or lake. The drear farms that came alive at the talk of insurgency and southerners making their way north in the wake of the 'troubles'. All that and the Celtic gods competing in the mind of a superstitious people who were once in love with God.

As I walked the empty strands and rain-swept hills, I read Yeats' poems. Those miraculous fragments of a world shot through with the supernatural, haunted with the presence of the other. Of that which lies just beyond the reach of human thought and imagination and which can only be captured, if at all, in mystical communion and prayer. But Yeats was no mystic in the sense of one who communes with the God of Jacob, Isaac and Abraham.

Yeats' power derives from another source, from the springs of an imagination formed by his own search for meaning beyond the sensible world. This was a search that drew upon Christian revelation but which treated it much as he treated all material for his imagination - as just that, material upon which his fertile mind could work until it found a pattern that gave a form to his deepest longings and desires.

These, ultimately, were and remain those of the heart. Yeats' early poetry is often that which appeals most to modern readers and this is perhaps the reason for his appeal. Where cerebral, he looses us in a world of arcane symbols that reach back into the world of the occult, one which intersects in myriad ways with Yeats' own private experience and perception. One which at times is hard to fathom.

But not in works like Down by the Salley Gardens, The Song of Wandering Aengus, He wishes for the Clothes of Heaven or  Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland. Yeats is at his best when he is most elemental or when he creates an imaginative tapestry into which he leads the reader as if into another world. These early poems that I have named come in the period up to the turn of the twentieth century when Yeats' vision was transfixed by a beauty that was tantalisingly just out of reach, that he found in myths and legends of the Celt, in echoes of the Catholic faith, in the diffuse pantheism of the East and in nature's perpetual call to its origins.

And of course, to the beauty of woman, of "cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes" that he hope would lead him "to build a perfect beauty in rhyme" (He tells of Perfect Beauty). Perhaps one of the greatest legacies of Yeats is his ability to remind us of the importance and presence of beauty in our midst. Beauty that is an antidote to the ugliness he saw in the burgeoning modernism of his time. An ugliness in contemporary life that lead him to the post-war lamentations of The Second Coming:

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Yeats knew that intellectual beauty of the kind found in many of his poems, was a reflection of a real beauty whose origins lie beyond the borders of this world. A beauty that he sought in many places from Celtic myth to the occult practices of his later years. And beauty, Yeats also knew, both wounds and consoles because it recalls us to the transience and impermanence of mortality and the permanence of a Beauty for which we long and which is found in its completeness only in Christ. Lest we miss the point, his poems remind us that we must take care not to ignore its presence in our lives.

Images: Portrait of Yeats by Augustus John, Ben Bulben with Yeats epitaph.