ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

W.B. Yeats, 1903, photo by Alice Boughton (Wikipedia)

In the lead-up to the announcement of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature on October 5th, Jeff Rich in his occasional series about writers on his (usually much more political) Burning Archive podcast, has just devoted an episode to the poetry of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) who was awarded the prize in 1923.

Wikipedia tells us that:

In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. Politically aware, he knew the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, and highlighted the fact at each available opportunity. His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: “I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”

Well, yes, the Nobel has always had a somewhat political tinge to its choices, eh?

Jeff Rich’s podcast is interesting because it covers biographical issues that weren’t covered when I studied Yeats at university.  I won’t repeat it here, you can listen for yourself or consult the Yeats page at Wikipedia.

When I consult my copy of The Faber Book of Modern Verse, (1965, ISBN 0571063489) edited by Michael Roberts and revised by Donald Hall — the marginalia with which I defaced my university books shows that we studied the much quoted ‘The Second Coming’.  What I find interesting now is that the poem isn’t dated on the page and — reading the poem in its entirety now after all these years — my first thought was to wonder whether it had been written during the prelude to World War 11, when the passionate intensity of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin was a clear and present danger.  I had to consult the Yeats Bibliography at Wikipedia to find the date of this prescient poem. It was written in 1920, in the wake of World War I.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
>A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,<
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

My scribbles, fortunately in pencil, summarise this poem as a harbinger of the coming apocalypse and articulating Yeats’ despair about the decay of culture. Mere anarchy is the resort of the hopeless and the best [who] lack conviction are disillusioned, while the worst [who] are full of passionate intensity are false prophets. This second coming is not of Christ, in whose name violence has been perpetuated over twenty centuries, but of a coming horror: a pitiless Sphinx presiding over the remnants of a civilisation.

‘Meru’ was written later, in 1934, once again suggesting that civilisation is an illusion. It was first published in Parnell’s Funeral & Other Poems (1935).

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!

Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day bring round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.

There’s some interesting commentary about Meru at The Mountain Library.  Although the civilisations from antiquity that the poem references are the ones studied by generations of British children, the Mountain Library tells us that Meru is an imaginary mountain sacred to Hindu and Buddhist faiths while Wikipedia names it as a real peak in the Himalayas.  I don’t think it matters, Yeats certainly hadn’t been there but was using it as a metaphor for his Holy Men who recognise the transience of man’s endeavours and are thus the only realists.

I disagree with Jeff Rich about many things, but not about his judgement that the poetry of Yeats is still relevant today.

FWIW this year’s betting for the Nobel is on the best-selling Haruki Murakami and the avant-garde fiction writer Can Xue.

Acknowledgements:

• The Poetry Library
• The Mountain Library