Yeats: "All Things Can Tempt Me"
 

Yeats: All Things Can Tempt Me

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse --
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.

Lately I haven’t been able to get this poem out of my head. I memorized it in my late teens and recognized Yeats’ sublime bitterness in it. I understood that he saw bitterness as a necessary precursor to “greatness” as in:

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known.
. . . . .
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?

(Meditations in Time of Civil War, I)

Still, it seemed unhealthy to me that a poet, who should be a champion of the five senses, wished to be “Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.” I was all about sensation and romance back then, very much the young man who “had not given a penny for a song/Did not the poet sing it with such airs/that one believed he had a sword upstairs.”

Now, though, that I have suffered extreme romantic and political disillusionment, I finally really get the second and third lines: “one time it was a woman’s face, or worse—/The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.” After the abandonment of girl-chasing and political activism, there are no more distractions from “this craft of verse.” At the end of the poem the speaker is wishing, in his extreme bitterness, to be cut off from the outside world not so that he might be idle and blank but so that he might have “a mind that, if the cannon sound/From every quarter of the world, can stay/Wound in mind's pondering/As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound” (All Soul’s Night). I still doubt that this desire for hermeticism is healthy but it’s where I’m at right now. I guess that’s why the poem will not stop surfacing in my mind.

This poem is, in sum, amazing--so much life-experience packed into ten lines. There are hints of humor: “a woman’s face, or worse—“. Surprise! A beautiful face is a bad thing! I also find humorous the young man who only wants to hear poems by swashbuckling poets. (That’s about as funny as Yeats gets.) And, yes, there is also a clarity of reflection that comes with the speaker’s bitterness. I am eager to learn what others think about this poem.

I was rereading that poem just last week. A lot of Yeats’s creative power seems to be connected to the tension between the “sedentary toil” of writing and introversion with his fantasy life’s desire for a life of action that would do his ancestors proud. He mines this tension to great effect in so many poems it seems to constitute more than half his work. It just goes to show you, no irresolveable conflicts, no poetry. With the understanding of course that poetry won’t resolve them either, not one little bit. Which is one of the good things about it.

The fish line reminds me of the two or three places where Yeats refers to the cold dawn, as in “The Fisherman”:

Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.


I don’t see this as a repudiation of the senses or the active life but as an affirmation of a life of the senses that isn’t a distraction from being.

Yeats,All Things Tempt Me
 

It is said that after being so disillusioned, he became philosophically symbolic and hard. Perhaps the woman's face was Maud's and actually, he thought something just the opposite in order to get off the romance
feeling. He may have judged himself as a cold fish, yet later on he managed to make a comeback with some sort of modern therapy, which he perhaps foresaw as all things tempting him in the future.

Ah, the sword uptairs. I have come to understand that not as a symbol of ErrolFlynnical swashbuckling but the evidence of a crusading political agenda. (As in many a present poet's preoccupation with their own fool-driven land.)

Having been often "accused" of having no such involvement, it comforts me to think that Yeats regarded it as a passing phase, one of the seven ages of poesie, so to speak.

And to some extent they are constants, these ages, these stages. I believe that the important thing is to be true to them while they predominate in the life of the poet.

And I believe Yeats did, too. The craft of verse, as he calls it, without a reason to be undertaken, is in itself an unresponsive fish. It goes belly-up without its reasons. As he himself wrote in his diary "one can never have too many reasons for doing what is so laborious".

Interestingly, he wrote that while he was still regarding every poem he produced as a way of explaining himself to The Face, but the truth of it persists, as does the poetry of that stage in his work.

Me, I'm in this for the long game. But I like to think that when they bear me out in a box and dare to look upstairs, they'll find that sword, well-oiled and wrapped in silk.

I read it similarly to Ann. Two wonderful, lapidary Yeats poems come immediately to mind: “Words” and “The Great Day”.

I was thinking of Yeats just yesterday in contrast to Wallace Stevens’s “The Comedian As The Letter C”, a poem of related subject matter, so far as I can ken. I’ll just say that IMHO, Stevens suffers by the comparison. I was going to start a thread to discuss Stevens’s work, but after reading said poem I thought better of it, and chopped wood instead. Which I judged superior to kicking the neighbor’s dog. Perhaps I still shall start that thread one day. I like some of Stevens very much.

Andrew, I like your “irresolvable conflicts” idea. Yes, Yeats loves those dialectics of “self” and “soul,” and “hic” and “ille.”

Carolyn, it’s good to meet you. Hmn, did Yeats undergo some kind of early psychotherapy? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Ann, I like the “sword” as a symbol for a whole way of life. Frost collapses all government, commerce and religion into a “Sword”:

The Peaceful Shepherd

If heaven were to do again,
And on the pasture bars,
I leaned to line the figures in
Between the dotted stars,

I should be tempted to forget,
I fear, the Crown of Rule,
The Scales of Trade, the Cross of Faith,
As hardly worth renewal.

For these have governed in our lives,
And see how men have warred.
The Cross, the Crown, the Scales may all
As well have been the Sword.

Michael, thank you for bringing “Words” and “The Great Day” to mind. I do love Stevens’ epyllion “The Comedian as the Letter C”. Still, I am with you. Yeats keeps growing in my estimation, and Stevens has remained the same for a while now.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg on "High Talk": http://bloodaxeblogs.blogspot.co.uk/...-gjertrud.html

Clive Watkins

What an amazing post that is,Clive. Thanks very much for that link.

"Is poetry cheap thrills, then, mere amazement, dream states, rhapsodies, and trances, ecstasy for its own sake, something to gape at, a medium for bringing on goose bumps, shivers, the jimjams? (Is revelation?)

Yeats answers: No. The wish that he made so often in his poems, as he figuratively blew out the candles, year by year, herein comes true—that he stay aroused, that the fury intensify rather than wane, that he keep faith with his poetry's ecstasy and "its bitter furies of complexity" until his death. And that his poetry prove that intellectual ecstasy, in dragging its language through the fury and mire of existence, engenders meaning."

Andrew M -- yes, that is well put. I don’t get the sense that Yeats endorses some kind of aesthetic quietism as ‘the answer’.

IMHO, art is not art that does not stir the emotions. I think there is a hierarchy of emotions, and the better or nobler the emotions, the more they want, even demand, to be shared, to be realized outside the imagination, and not walled inside like a barren, landlocked sea. How to realize these emotions in ‘the mire of existence’: ah, that is the question...

(Gratuitous, off-topic aside, which I reserve the right to delete: one reason that I dislike some of Stevens’s work is that I judge it too intellectual: detached and emotionally sterile. Jarrell fabulously called this quality in some of Stevens's work ‘G.E. Moore at the spinet.’ There are better examples of this than the poem referenced above, but I think the criticism holds for that poem.)

Just coming in very briefly here to say what a great thread this is. Thanks, Aaron, for starting it and thanks everyone else for coming in with very illuminating comments and sidelights. I'm particularly grateful to Clive for the link to 'High Talk' and Gjertrud Schnackenberg's commentary on it.

Hope to come back soon with a contribution of my own...

Great thread, thanks. Yes, through the years Yeats' lens on life changed dramatically. His long love for Maud Gonne I believe tempered his poetry. I was sent this excerpt from the poem, "Vacillation" for my fiftieth birthday and (as another poet said) “it has made all the difference”:

(from Vacillation)
Verse IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then gravely said, honeying malice:
—I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore.
He broke away.
—Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Ængus of the birds. Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts and offals.
Stephen rose.

This is spoken by "Buck" (Malachi) Mulligan in chapter one of Ulysses. Is it possible that in "High Talk" Yeats is taking a dig at his younger rival? Joyce based Mulligan on his and Yeats's mutual friend Oliver St. John Gogarty.

Curious at GS's mention of a classical (dactylic) hexameter, I just counted the syllables in the lines. She's right about the lurching, off-balance effect of the meter, but I don't find any great profusion of triple feet.

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. 15
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, 15
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks upon higher, 14
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire. 15

Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows, 15
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes, 16
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane, 17
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane. 15

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild, 15
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child. 15

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose 15
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose; 15
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on; 15
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn. 13

It's 14 lines to be sure, but in couplets. I don't find a lot of common ground with this and the sonnet tradition. Actually I hear more of a "sprung" fourteener in these lines; it could easily be written in (admittedly loose) ballad stanzas.

Processions that lack high stilts
have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair
that were twenty foot high,

And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern
Stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them
to patch up a fence or a fire.

Because piebald ponies, led bears,
caged lions, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs
upon his timber toes,

Because women in the upper storeys
demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek,
I take to chisel and plane.

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I,
whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt,
from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all.
A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits
and the dawn breaks loose;

I, through the terrible novelty
of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth
and laugh at the dawn.

One curious thing about the poem in long lines is the capitalized "Stalks" in the middle of l. 3.

I think the capitalization of "stalks" in L.3 may be a misprint, as it does not appear with the capital in any of my editions, including the variorium.

I definitely detect Oliver St. John Gogarty. The Finneran notes indicate there was also an Irish saint, St. Malachy (1095-1148) "known for his reforms."

I consider The Comedian as the Letter C to be one of the finest contemporary (sort of) poems in blank verse that I've read. At times, it's as marvelous as Shakespeare.

*ducks the slings and arrows...

As for the Yeats poem. I used to say that Yeats didn't know how to write a bad poem. He was one of my first inspirations. I'll never forget the day I opened a book of his poems in the high school library. I was in love almost immediately.

The golden apples of the sun,
The silver apples of the moon... - better than sex.

**removed Jim's name above, as it was Michael Ferris who linked to the Stevens' poem, not Jim. / :