W. B. Yeats, A Vision

W. B. Yeats, A Vision, Collier Books, New York, 1965.

Mountains that shelter the bay from all but the south wind, bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a soft mist; houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea; a verandahed gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting. Rapallo’s thin line of broken mother-of-pearl along the water’s edge. The little town described in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. In what better place could I, forbidden Dublin winters and all excited crowded places, spend what winters yet remain? (Rapallo I, 3)

I shall not lack conversation. Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection, has for years lived in rooms opening on to a flat roof by the sea. For the last hour we have sat upon the roof which is also a garden, discussing that immense poem of which but seven and twenty cantos are already published. I have often found there brightly printed kings, queens, knaves, but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order. Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, medieval or modern historical characters. (Rapallo, II, 3-4)

I may, now that I have recovered leisure, find that the mathematical structure, when taken up into imagination, is more than mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together into a single theme… (Rapallo, II, 5)

Sometimes about ten o’clock at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side, upon the other palm-trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats. He knows all their histories—the brindled cat looked like a skeleton until he began to feed it; that fat grey cat is an hotel proprietor’s favourite, it never begs from the guests’ tables and it turns cats that do not belong to the hotel out of the garden; this black cat and that grey cat over there fought on the roof of a four-storied house some weeks ago, fell off, a whirling ball of claws and fur, and now avoid each other. Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for cats—“some of them are so ungrateful”, a friend says—he never nurses the café cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own. Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power. (Rapallo, III, 5-6)

I heard an English voice say: “Our new Devil-dodger is not so bad. I have been practicing with his choir all afternoon. We sang hymns and then God Save the King, more hymns and He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. We were at the hotel at the end of the esplanade where they have the best beer.” I am too anaemic for so British a faith; I shall haunt empty churches and be satisfied with Ezra Pound’s society and that of his traveling Americans. (Rapallo, IV, 7)

All that is laborious or mechanical in my book is finished; what remains can be added as a momentary rest from writing verse. It must be this thought of a burden dropped that made me think of attending church, if it is not that these mountains under their brilliant light fill me with an emotion that is like gratitude. Descartes went on pilgrimage to some shrine of the Virgin when he made his first philosophical discovery, and the mountain road from Rapallo to Zoagli seems like something in my own mind, something that I have discovered. / March and October 1928. (Rapallo, V, 7)

On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. “No,” was the answer, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” (Introduction to “A Vision”, II, 8)

When the automatic writing began we were in a hotel on the edge of Ashdown Forest, but soon returned to Ireland and spent much of 1918 at Glendalough, at Rosses Point, at Coole Park, at a house near it, at Thoor Ballylee, always more or less solitary, my wife bored and fatigued by her almost daily task and I thinking and talking of little else. Early in 1919 the communicator of the moment—they were constantly changed—said they would soon change the method from the written to the spoken word as that would fatigue her less, but the change did not come for some months. I was on a lecturing tour in America to earn a roof for Thoor Ballylee when it came. We had one of those little sleeping compartments in a train, with two berths, and were somewhere in Southern California. My wife, who had been asleep for some minutes, began to talk in her sleep, and from that on almost all communications came in that way. (Introduction to “A Vision”, III, 10)

Except at the start of a new topic, when they would speak or write a dozen sentences unquestioned, I had always to question, and every question to rise out of a previous answer and to deal with their chosen topic. My questions must be accurately worded, and, because they said their thought was swifter than ours, asked without delay or hesitation. I was constantly reproved for vague or confused questions, yet I could do no better, because, though it was plain from the first that their exposition was based upon a single geometrical conception, they kept me from mastering that conception. (Introduction to “A Vision”, IV, 10-11)

They once told me not to speak of any part of the system, except of the incarnations which were almost fully expounded, because if I did the people I talked to would talk to other people, and the communicators would mistake that misunderstanding for their own thought. (Introduction to “A Vision”, IV, 11-12)

For the same reason they asked me not to read philosophy until their exposition was complete, and this increased my difficulties. Apart from two or three of the principal Platonic Dialogues I knew no philosophy. Arguments with my father, whose convictions had been formed by John Stuart Mill’s attack upon Sir William Hamilton, had destroyed my confidence and driven me from speculation to the direct experience of the Mystics. I had once known Blake as thoroughly as his unfinished confused Prophetic Books permitted, and I had read Swedenborg and Boehme, and my initiation into the “Hermetic Students” had filled my head with Cabbalistic imagery, but there was nothing in Blake, Swedenborg, Boehme or the Cabbala to help me now. They encouraged me, however, to read history in relation to their historical logic, and biography in relation to their twenty-eight typical incarnations, that I might give concrete expression to their abstract thought. I read with an excitement I had not known since I was a boy with all knowledge before me, and made continual discoveries, and if my mind returned too soon to their unmixed abstraction they would say, “We are starved”. (Introduction to “A Vision”, V, 12)

Because they must, as they explained, soon finish, others whom they named Frustrators attempted to confuse us or waste time. Who these Frustrators were or why they acted so was never adequately explained, nor will be unless I can finish “The Soul in Judgment” (Book III of this work), but they were always ingenious and sometimes cruel. The automatic script would deteriorate, grow sentimental or confused, and when I pointed this out the communicator would say, “From such and such an hour, on such and such a day, all is frustration.” (Introduction to “A Vision”, VI, 12-13)

It was part of their purpose to affirm that all the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being. Was communication itself such a conflict? One said, as though it rested with me to decide what part I should play in their dream, “Remember we will deceive you if we can”. Upon the other hand they seem like living men, are interested in all that interests living men, as when at Oxford, where we spent our winters, one asked upon hearing an owl hoot in the garden, if he might be silent for a while. “Sounds like that”, he said, “give us great pleasure.” (Introduction to “A Vision”, VI, 13-14)

The automatic writing and the speech during sleep were illustrated or accompanied by strange phenomena. [14] … a sudden flash of light fell between us and a chair or table was violently struck. Then too there was much whistling, generally as a warning that some communicator would come when my wife was asleep. At first I was inclined to think that these whistlings were made by my wife without her knowing it, and once, when I heard the whistle and she did not, she felt a breath passing through her lips as though she had whistled. (Introduction to “A Vision”, VI, 14-15)

Sweet smells were the most constant phenomena, now that of incense, now that of violets or roses or some other flower, and as perceptible to some half-dozen of our friends as to ourselves, though upon one occasions when my wife smelt hyacinth a friend smelt ea-de-cologne. A smell of roses filled the whole house when my son was born and was perceived there by the doctor and my wife and myself, and I have no doubt, though I did not question them, by the nurse and servants. (Introduction to “A Vision”, VI, 15)

…a smell of cat’s excrement announced some being that had to be expelled, … A little after my son’s birth I came home to confront my wife with the statement “Michael is ill”. A smell of burnt feathers had announced what she and the doctor had hidden. When regular communication was near its end and my work of study and arrangement begun, I was told that henceforth the Frustrators would attack my heatlh and that of my children, and one afternoon, knowing from the smell of burnt feathers that one of my children would be ill within three hours, I felt before I could recover self-control the medieval helpless horror at witchcraft. (VII, 16)

Once a Japanese who had dined with my wife and myself talked of Tolstoi’s philosophy, which fascinates so many educated Japanese, and I put my objections vehemently. “It is madness for the East”, I said, “which must face the West in arms”, and much more of the same sort, and was, after he had gone, accusing myself of exaggerated and fantastic speech when I heard these words in a loud clear voice: “You have said what we wanted to have said”. My wife, who was writing a letter at the other end of the room, had heard nothing, but found she had written those words in the letter, where they had no meaning. …There were still stranger phenomena that I prefer to remain silent about for the present because they seemed so incredible that they need a long story and much discussion. (VII, 17)

Exposition in sleep came to an end in 1920, and I began an exhaustive study of some fifty copy-books of automatic script, … And then, though I had mastered nothing but the twenty-eight Phases and the historical scheme, I was told that I must write, that I must seize the moment between ripe and rotten—there was a metaphor of apples about to fall and just fallen. They showed when I began that they assisted or approved, for they sent sign after sign. (VIII, 17-18)

The first version of this book, A Vision, except the section on the twenty-eight Phases, and that called “Dove or Swan” which I repeat without charge, fills me with shame. I had misinterpreted the geometry, and in my ignorance of philosophy failed to understand distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole depended, and as my wife was unwilling that her share should be known, and I to seem sole author, I had invented an unnatural story of an Arabian traveler which I must amend and find a place for some day because I was fool enough to write half a dozen poems that are unintelligible without it. [Michael Robartes and his Friends is the amended version.] (IX, 19)

“My name is Daniel O’Leary, my great interest is the speaking of verse, and the establishment some day or other of a small theatre for plays in verse. You will remember that a few years before the Great War the realists drove the last remnants of rhythmical speech out of the theatre. … What would happen if I were to take off my boots and fling one at Mr. … and one at Mrs. …? Could I give my future life such settled purpose that the act would take its place not among whims but among [33] forms of intensity? (Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Mae by his Pupils, I, 33-4)

“Unfortunately, although I can do whatever I command myself to do, I lack the true courage, which is self-possession in an unforeseen situation. My aim was bad. … one boot fell in the stalls and the other struck a musician or the brassy thing in his hand. Then I ran out of a side door and down the stairs. Just as I came to the street door I heard feet behind and thought it must be the orchestra, and that increased my panic. The realist turn our words into gravel, but the musicians and the singers turn them into honey and oil. I have always had the idea that some day a musician would do me an injury. The street door opened on to a narrow lane, and down this lane I ran until I ran straight into the arms of an old gentleman standing at a street corner by the open door of a big covered motor-car. He pulled me into the car, for I was so out of breath that I could not resist, and the car drove off. ‘Put on these boots’, … ‘You need not say what you have done, unless you care to tell Robartes. I was told to wait at the corner for a man without boots.’ (I, 34)

The more I tried to change her character the more did I uncover mutual enmity. A quarrel, the last of many, parted us at Vienna where her troupe was dancing, and to make the quarrel as complete as possible I cohabited with an ignorant girl of the people and hired rooms ostentatious in their sordidness. One night I was thrown out of bed and saw when I lit my candle that the bed, which had fallen at one end, had been propped up by a broken chair and an old book with a pig-skin cover. In the morning I found that the book was called Speculum Angelorus et Hominum, had been written by a certain Giraldus, had been printed at Cracow in 1594, a good many years before the celebrated Cracow publications. It was very dilapidated, all the middle pages had been torn out; but there still remained a series of allegorical pictures, a man torn in two by an eagle and some sort of wild beast, a man whipping his shadow, a man between a hunchback and a fool in cap and bells, and so on to the number of eight and twenty, a portrait of Giraldud, a unicorn several times repeated, a large diagram in the shape of a wheel where the phases of the moon were mixed up with an apple, an acorn, a cup, and what looked like a scepter or wand. My mistress had found it in a wall cupboard where it had been left by the last tenant, an unfrocked priest who had joined a troupe of gypsies and disappeared, and she had torn out the middle pages to light our fire. Though little remained of the Latin text, I spent a couple of weeks comparing one passage with another and all with the unintelligible diagrams. One day I returned from a library, where I had made a fruitless attempt to identify my Giraldus with Giraldus of Bologna, and found my mistress gone, whether in mere disgust at my preoccupation or, as I hope, to some more attentive man. I had nothing now to distract my thoughts that ran through my past loves, neither numerous nor happy, back to the platonic love boyhood, the most impassioned of all, and was plunged into hopeless misery. I have always know that love should be changeless and yet my loves drank their oil and died—there had been no ever-burning lamp.” He sank his head upon his breast and we sat in silence,… (40)

“One night, between three and four in the morning, as I lay sleepless, it came into my head to go pray at the Holy Sepulchre. I went, prayed, grew somewhat calmer, until I said to myself, ‘Jesus Christ does not understand my despair, He belongs to order and reason’. The day after, an old Arab walked unannounced into my room. He said that he had been sent, stood where the Speculum lay open at the wheel marked with the phases of the moon, described it as the doctrine of his tribe, drew two whorls working one against the other, the narrow end of one in the broad end of the other, showed that my single wheel and his two whorls had the same meaning. He belonged to a tribe of Arabs who called themselves Judwalis or Diagrammatists because their children are taught dances which leave upon the sand traces full of symbolical meaning. I joined that tribe, accepted its dress, customs, morality, politics, that I might win its trust and its knowledge. I have fought in its wars and risen to authority. Your young Colonel Lawrence never suspected the nationality of the old Arab fighting at his side. I have completed my life, balanced every pleasure with a danger lest my bones might soften.” (II, 41)

Three months later, Huddon, Denise, O’Leary and I sat in silence round the same fire. For the last few days we had slept and eaten in the house that Robarts might teach us without interruption. Robartes came in carrying a little chest of carved ivory and sat down, the chest upon his knees. (III, 41)

“A fortnight later Duddon and I were in Florence. [43] We had plenty of money, for Huddon had just bought a large picture, and were delighted with each other. I said: ‘I am going to send Huddon this little cigarette-case’. It was one of those pretty malachite things they sell in Florence. I had had it engraved with the words: ‘In memory of the 2nd June.’ He said: ‘Why put into it only one cigarette?’ I said: ‘Oh, he will understand’. (43-44)

“Now”, said Robartes, “the time has come for John Bond.” John Bond, after fixing a bewildered eye, first upon Denise and then upon me, began. He had evidently prepared his words beforehand. “Some fifteen years ago this lady married an excellent man, much older than herself, who lived in a large house on the more peaceable side of the Shannon. Her marriage was childless but happy and might have continued so had she not in its ninth year been told to winter abroad. She went alone to the South of France, for her husband had scientific and philanthropic work that he could not leave. I was resting at Cannes after completing the manuscript of a work on the migratory birds, and at Cannes after completing the manuscript of a work on the migratory birds, and at Cannes we met and fell in love at first sight. Brought up in the strictest principles of the Church of Ireland, we were horror-struck and hid our feelings from one another. I fled from Cannes to find her at Monaco, from Monaco to find her at Antibes, form Antibes to find her at Cannes, until chancing upon the same hotel we so far accepted fate that we dined at the same table, and after parting for ever in the garden accepted fate completely. In a little while she was with child. She was the first woman that had come into my life, and had I not remembered an episode in the life of Voltaire I had been helpless. We were penniless; for the child’s sake and her own she must return to her husband at once. /
“As Mary Bell left my letters unanswered I concluded that she meant me to drop out of her life. I read of our child’s birth, heard nothing more for five years. I accepted a post in the Dublin Museum, specialized in the subject of the Irish migratory birds, and at four o’clock one afternoon an attended brought her into my office. I was greatly moved, but she spoke as if to a stranger. I was ‘Mr. Bond’, she was ‘sorry to intrude on my time’ but I was ‘the only person in Ireland who could give her certain information’. I took the hint and became the courteous Curator, I was there ‘to help the student’. She wished to study the nests of certain migratory birds, thought the only exact method was to make their nests with her own hands. She had found and copied nests in her own neighbourhood, but as progress, entirely dependent on personal observation, was slow, wanted to know what had been published on the subject. Every species preferred some special materials, twigs, lichens, grasses, mosses, bunches of hair and so on, and had a special architecture. I told her what I knew, sent her books, proceedings of learned societies, and passages translated from foreign tongues. Some months later she brought me swift’s, swallow’s, corncrake’s, and reed-warbler’s nests made by her own [45] hands and so well that, when I compared them with the natural nests in the cases of stuffed birds, I could see no difference. Her manner had changed; it was embarrassed, about mysterious, as though she were keeping something back. She wanted to make a nest for a bird of a certain size and shape. She could not or would not name its species but named its genus. She wanted information about the nesting habits of that genus, borrowed a couple of books, and saying that she had a train to catch, went away. A month later a telegram called me to her country house. I found her waiting at the little station. Her husband was dying, and wished to consult with me about a scientific work he had carried on for many years; he did not know that we knew each other but was acquainted with my work. When I asked what his scientific work was, she said that he would explain, and began to speak of the house and its surroundings. The deplorable semi-gothic gateway we had passed a moment before was the work of her husband’s father, but I must notice the great sycamores and lucombe oaks and the clump of cedars, and there were great plantations behind the house. … She thought a man who planted trees, knowing that no descendant nearer than his great-grandson could stand under their shade, had a noble and generous confidence. She thought there was something terrible about it, for it was terrible standing under great trees to say ‘Am I worthy of that confidence?’ (45-6)

“The old man, who must have been animated and genial once, smiled and tried to rise from his pillow but fell back with a sign. The nurse arranged the pillows, told me to call her when he had finished, and went into a dressing-room. He said: ‘When I left the Foreign Office because I wanted to serve God I was very young man. I wanted to make men better but not to leave this estate, and here nobody did wrong except as children do. Providence had surrounded me with such goodness that to think of altering it seemed blasphemy. I married, and it seemed wrong to give nothing in return for so much happiness. I thought a great deal and remembered that birds and beasts, dumb brutes of all kinds, were robbing and killing one another. There at any rate I could alter without blasphemy. I have never taken Genesis literally. The passions of Adam, torn out of his breast, became the birds and beasts of Eden. Partakers in original sin, they can be partakers in salvation. I knew that the longest life could do but little, and wishing especially to benefit those who lacked what I possessed, I decided to devote my life to the cuckoos. I put cuckoos in cages, and have now so many cages that they stand side by side along the whole southern wall of the garden. My great object was of course to persuade them to make nests; but for a long time they were so obstinate, so unteachable, that I almost despaired. But the birth of a son renewed my resolution and a year ago I persuaded some of the oldest and cleverest birds to make circles with matches, twigs and fragments of moss, but though the numbers who can do this are increasing, even the cleverest birds make no attempt to weave them into a structure. I am dying, but you have far greater knowledge than I and I ask you to continue my work.’ At that moment I heard Mary Bell’s voice behind me: ‘It is unnecessary, a cuckoo has made a nest. Your long illness made the gardeners careless, finished to the last layer of down.’ She had crept unnoticed into the room and stood at my elbow holding out a large nest. The old man tried to take it but was too weak. ‘Now let Thy servant depart in peace’, he murmured. She laid the nest upon the pillow and he turned over, closing his eyes. Caling the nurse we crept out, and shutting the door stood side by side. Neither of us spoke for almost a minute, then Mary flung herself into my arms and said amid her sobs, ‘We have given him great happiness’. /
‘Next morning when I came down to breakfast I learnt that Mr. Bell had died in his sleep a little before daybreak. Mary did not come down, and when I saw her some hours later she spoke of nothing but the boy. ‘We must devote our whole lives to him. You must think of his education. We must not think of ourselves.’ /
‘At the funeral Mary noticed an old, unknown man among the neighbours and dependents, and when the funeral was over he introduced himself as Mr. Owen Aherne. He told us of scenes that had risen before Mr. Robartes’ eyes on several successive mornings as he awaited his early tea. These scenes being part of our intimate lives, our first meeting in the South of France, our first meeting in the museum, the four-poster with the nest on the pillow, so startled us that we set out for London that very evening. All afternoon we have talked with Mr. Robartes, that inspired man, and Mary Bell has at his bidding undertaken a certain task. I return to Ireland to-morrow to take charge until her return of the estate of her son.” (III, 48-50)