"A little space": the psychic economy of Yeats's love poems - William Butler Yeats

Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Jahan Ramazani

Shine dull unmoving eyes. What thing art thou?

I sought thee not.

She is not merely an anti-climax to the quest but a transfixing Gorgon. Although Yeats often longs to cross the "little space" and reach the absent beloved in apocalyptic union, he suggests in this work that such a crossing would be a disaster for his poetry. In making the absent woman present, a seeker risks the Medusan fate, as Yeats also worries in "The Hosting of the Sidhe"; there, Niamh promises of herself and the other spirits with gleaming eyes and parted lips: "if any gaze on our rushing band, / We come between him and the deed of his hand" (55). The symmetrical relation in Yeats's thought between the absence of the beloved and the life of the poet requires that if the dead woman awakes, or if the poet attains the beloved and renders her present, he and his poetry must die.(10)

Because the love poems imagine that to communicate love successfully to the beloved might destroy the gap necessary for their proliferation, they hesitate over the courtly persona of the seducer. Although the poet-jester of "The Cap and Bells" seduces the young queen, he cannot succeed until he gives up his life. Only then does the queen accept his entreaties. He must pay the price of his own death to achieve his goal of union with her, reaffirming the symmetrical relation in Yeats between female death and male poetic life, male poetic death and female life. Yeats's anxieties about playing the seducer can also be seen in his transformation of an earlier love poet. Although he bases "When You are Old" on Ronsard's sonnet "Quand vous serez bien vieille," Ronsard invokes the carpe diem topos in a final effort to sway the beloved ("Cueillez d s aujourd'huy les roses de la vie"), whereas Yeats resists this trick of seduction. Moreover, he suggests that he can only produce "this book" by imagining her "old and grey," thus opening a gap for his elegiac poem to fill (41).

At first glance, many of the love poems may seem unaware of their psycho-linguistic economy of reaping aesthetic profit from feminine loss. Several poems condemn the beloved for her inaccessibility - the very precondition for poetry according to such poems as "A Dream of Death" and "The Scholars." But the apparently mystified poems embed within their condemnations the knowledge that the reverse would mean their nonexistence. In "No Second Troy," for example, the poet blames the beloved for filling his "days / With misery"; but he also justifies her conduct, as if subliminally thanking her for the "misery" that produces the blame and, hence, the poem (91). Richard Ellmann usefully identifies the poem's general movement in its four questions: it modulates from blame to justification.(11) On closer inspection we discover that even the first part of the first question already justifies and blames at the same time: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery... ?" As blame, it splits grammatically into question and answer, separated by the caesura and joined by a causative "that": "Why should I blame her? That she filled my days with misery." But it is also a full question since the "misery," like the "despair" in "The Scholars," is precisely what produces poetry-this poem in particular: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days with the misery that is producing this poem?" The answer would have to be, "I shouldn't blame her; but now there's nothing more to say." The secondary meaning, or justification, is necessarily suppressed until later in the poem, for without a certain degree of blindness to its own work, the poem would dry up its poetry-making misery and halt abruptly in its second line.