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

Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Jahan Ramazani

O hiding hair and dewy eyes,

I am no more with life and death,

My heart upon his warm heart lies,

My breath is mixed into his breath.

Here, and through much of The Wind Among the Reeds, the hair of the woman already mingles her and her lover; the poem's sonic repetition further joins them in "one mass." Yeats frequently represents this erotic union of subject and object by having his lovers "murmur" rather than talk, since murmuring implies the elision of distinctions between word and referent, lover and beloved. He uses both this device and iteration in "The Indian to his Love," imagining that the lovers wander "with woven hands, / Murmuring softly lip to lip" (14). As George Bomstein states, the hope for an interfusion with the beloved on a secluded island recalls the end of Shelley's Epipsychidion.(17) But, in The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats's phonemic unifications of lover and beloved are the verbal tokens of what can happen not in this world but only after apocalyptic death brings about a post-verbal world, as with the breast on breast of "He hears the Cry of the Sedge," or the "kiss to kiss" of "He remembers forgotten Beauty" (67, 63). Although Yeats devoutly wishes for such a consummation, he also guards the psychic and linguistic space of poetry by casting the achieved quest into the indefinite future, believing like Stevens that "not to have is the beginning of desire."

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Even though Yeats's love lyrics celebrate their own libidinal energy, they also guiltily worry that they take all the poet's "love / And not those things that they are emblems of" (347) - namely, women. Yeats sometimes writes as if he were a modem Pygmalion who "fell in love with his own creation."(18) But he is a less naive Pygmalion, knowing that his beloved will not wake from her aesthetic death. Long after he has sloughed his early style, Yeats continues to think he cannot invest psychic capital in both the artifact and the living woman, and he mythologizes these alternatives as part of "The Choice" between the "life" and the "work" (246). Either the living or the lifeless woman absorbs a man's love. He says in "Two Songs from a Play": "Love's pleasure drives his love away, / The painter's brush consumes his dreams" (213). For Yeats, the parallel between the psychic economy of the lover and the artist is exact: "Our love letters wear out our love; ... every stroke of the brush exhausts the impulse" (Au, 210). Nietzsche, one of Yeats's strongest precursors, states this view in even more elemental terms: "The force that one expends in artistic creation is the same as that expended in the sexual act: there is only one kind of force. An artist betrays himself if he succumbs here, if he squanders himself here."(19) In many poems about the "space" sustaining desire, Yeats agrees that the proper "choice" for male poets and painters is clear: they must prefer the dead woman to her living rival.

Yeats writes about the rivalry between a dead and a living woman in a play, The Only Jealousy of Emer, but his chief lyrics about the rivalry are in the volume of 1921, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The dead woman violently competes with her living counterpart in these lyrics. Despite the attempts of the man in "An Image from a Past Life" to reassure the living woman, "She" is terrified by the beautiful image of an absent woman with streaming hair (178-79). "She" desperately covers his eyes to prevent him from seeing the image that threatens to annihilate her. The fear is no less real if we read the poem as an inner debate, the poet torn between love for the dead image and for her living antagonist. Because "the hovering thing" is a disembodied specter of the woman irretrievably lost, she dominates the imagination as the living woman cannot. She belongs to "another life," incompatible with the life of the real woman.