William Butler Yeats: The Rage Against Time

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams –
Some vague Utopia – and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

In my previous letter, I wrote about William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” a perfect and wondrous poem about the decline we must suffer in a world of time and desire, and how the poet hoped to escape from that decline by pouring himself into his art.  I cannot tell you how greatly I admire the poem, but as I confessed, I do not love it.

I do love “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.”  It is an elegy, but a strange one.  And it is very, very imperfect.   How imperfect it is I did not even realize until I started reading it very closely, and paying attention to all the things it says.  I will start with those imperfections, and I must confess this has led me to re-evaluate the poem.  I am not sure I love it any more – it is flawed so deeply.  But poems speak to us, not only about the world but about ourselves; we cannot, and should not, accept the airbrushed poem that only reflects what we want to see.  Poems have their own reality: They speak.

This poem is an example of the need to reread, and reread again, that I wrote of in my last letter.  I came to this poem wanting to understand that, seen through the lens of time, all fades, that time is the destructive medium in which we live.  I still think this is the ‘subject’ of this poem.  But I have come to realize that this poem reshapes past time so that it is comfortable for the poet, and that this reshaping is, well, to use contemporary parlance, hegemonic: patriarchal, male-dominated, anti-progressive, and downright false.  

A huge measure of the poem’s imperfection comes into focus when we look at the background of its ‘subjects.’ (A second imperfection we will consider later, its use of rhetoric rather than plain speaking in the second of its two sections.)

The two women the poem commemorates, Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, were compatriots of the poet in young adulthood, when all were committed to the liberation of Ireland from the imperialist yoke of Britain.  They were wealthy friends from his youth, when he would visit them at their country home, Lissadell.   

The two were well-born (rich, landed gentry), as opposed to Yeats, who as the son of a (prominent) artist, was neither wealthy nor of an ‘old’ family.  Here is how he characterizes Markievicz, in another late poem, “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”

A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.

Seeing the two women through Yeats’s poem, we have little sense of who they actually were, other than childhood friends of the poet who made wrong choices and then were brought low by time, which diminishes us all and eventually leads us to death.   It is worthwhile, well worthwhile, to consider the historical record, for both women played important historical roles.  Neither was as deluded or ‘unimportant’ as Yeats claims they were in this poem. And this willful airbrushing of history is a rot that is at the center, alas, of the poem.

Eva Gore-Booth was what we would call today a labor organizer, and a dedicated feminist.  She organized and championed labor unions and even, at one point, took a job as a worker in a coal mine so she could better understand and relate to the workers whom she was organizing.  She supported, with consequences to her life and fortunes, the movement to grant women the franchise in Britain and its territories.  Her political work as a suffragist and her union work for women’s rights in the cotton factories of England were congruent to one another.  She was, in other words, a pioneer of both the rights of labor (and especially women in the labor force) and women’s suffrage.  In this regard, Yeats was both paternalistic and dismissive of her when he wrote these lines in the poem, which suggest that she was captured in the throes of idealism and that her work did not matter in the actual, real world:

I know not what the younger dreams –
Some vague Utopia – and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.

There are, it seems to me, many reasons to dislike Yeats, his dismissal of Eva Gore-Booth one of the chief among them.  She may have, in age, looked  “old and skeleton-gaunt,” but looks do not define her political engagement, as he claims.  She mattered, her work mattered; She was no mere skeleton cast upon the rubbish heap of history.

The same holds true of his presentation of Con Markievicz.  

The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.

Yes, Markievicz was condemned to death, but that was for her participation in the Easter Rising (rebellion against England) of 1916. In another place, in another poem, “Easter 1916,” Yeats memorializes – it is one of the greatest elegies of all time – those who rose up in Dublin to oppose British rule, even though their action occurred in the midst of the First World War.  In that poem he commemorates members of the Rising (we might note that in this undeniably great poem he only speaks of the men!), and confesses that although there was an immoveable ‘stoniness’ to all of them, he misjudged them, for they played their part (a large though symbolic one) in history.  That poem is ironic: He both praises those who participated in the Rising, and also stands apart from them and judges them as fools.  Yet that Yeats  poem has a memorable refrain, 

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. 

In the poem before us, however, there is no recognition of beauty, no ironic view of his error in dismissing the revolutionaries as – perhaps – being superfluous.  There is only Markievicz “condemned to death” and pardoned, living out lonely and ignorant years.  Was she actually lonely and “ignorant”?  What actually, according to the historical record, happened to her?

Con Markievicz was the first woman elected to the British Parliament; she refused her seat, and then was elected to the first Dàil, the originary Irish Parliament.  There, she became Minister for Labor, the first woman elected to a cabinet in all of Europe. Throughout her life she was a strong, and influential, force for Irish independence, for socialism, for women’s suffrage.  Popular, powerful, she is very far from the lonely conspiracist imaged by Yeats.  To this day, she remains a hero to the Irish as a champion of the people and their need for nationhood.  She was, although caught up in the political struggles of her day, and always partisan, very far from the person whom he claims was “conspiring among the ignorant.”

So why does Yeats present these two strong political figures as he does, “ignorant” and “vague”?  First, he did not share their politics, being far closer to the British imperial powers than these two revolutionary women, and believing in a slow progression toward change (a very conservative, Burkean position) rather in revolutionary action.  Second, and maybe more important, he must have been threatened by their suffragism, their strong commitment to feminism.  We have here the male poet rewriting history so that it conformed to his expectation that women are beautiful objects, “both beautiful,” but not human beings who can play a role in history.

How can I like, love, such a poem?  That is a very real question, and one that I continue to wrestle with.   I do not agree with the way in which Yeats characterizes these two strong women: How then can I like the poem?

Contradiction exists,  in us, as well as around us.  And I read this poem – a willful misreading, it appears to me – as a poem about time and not about politics.  (My failing is obvious.)  As a poem about time, it laments the loss of youth and its wondrous beauties, and the ‘shearing’ of time that separates us from youth and brings in its stead only age, decline, and death.  It is “Sailing to Byzantium” without the solace of art.  And, read this way, it is – to my mind – a very strong and compelling poem.  Much more flawed than I want to believe, and which makes me question my need to believe.  The poem challenges me; I am not sure I adequately rise to that challenge.

Let’s look at the poem, line by line.  Here is the first sentence.

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

I fell in love, long ago, with these opening lines.  To start with, I have always loved that strange rhyme, ‘south/both’, since the ‘both’ seems so tangential to the ‘beautiful’ which follows it, yet receives a stress because it is the end of a line.  I think Yeats does mean to stress that ‘both’ were beautiful with this rhyme; still it hints of a world we do not inhabit, because ‘both’ is a rhyme word (usually it isn’t) that seems odd in this world in which we make poems.  Strange:  “both” seems like a throw-away word and at the same time the word on which the rhyme falls! How, how, “unlikely,” to cite Elizabeth Bishop. [Type ‘Gutman Bishop In the Waiting Room’ in your browser.]

“Both beautiful, one a gazelle.”  Beauty, yes, long ago, though we may notice that even in the first line the shadows of evening, of the end of the day, must be present.  (Emily Dickinson ended one of her greatest poems, on the light that comes at the end of day on winter afternoons,

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
[‘There’s a certain slant of light,’ poem 320])

The windows are open to the clement climate of summer, but also to the future which has yet to come, and which Yeats writes about in this poem.  Ah, those girls, in their lovely “silk kimonos!”  Why is one a gazelle: Long legged, skittish?  Who knows?  And why only one?  Who knows?  As an opening stanza, there are few lines that are as beautiful and as mysterious as these of Yeats.

But after that summer evening when the windows were all open, “a raging autumn shears/Blossom from the summer’s wreath.”  Time passes, seasons change, and all – including the dreamy beauty portrayed in those opening lines – is “ravaged” (destroyed, from its French derivation from a rush of water; but also, in its cognate, raving: mad, destructive, senseless) and cut off from the dreamy glories of youth and beauty and joy. 

Yeats, as we have seen, reconstructs the lives of the two women whom he is memorializing, getting the facts all wrong, diminishing the lives they lived when they should instead be celebrated. There is no getting away from this imperialism of the male gaze.   He looks, and gets it all wrong.  They were heroic, each a “A woman Homer sung” as the title of an earlier poem had it, yet he writes them as “ignorant” and “vague” and “withered.”  

Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

These lines follow “An image of such politics,” and connect through what must be one of the stranger rhymes in any English poem, ‘politics/mix.’ We are, I think, sent back to the opening, which also has a strange rhyme, ‘south/both.’ 

So what is Yeats saying?  That he thinks, often, of going to see them, these friends of his youth, and talk about Lissadell, share memories (what a wonderful line that is, “mix/pictures of the mind,” with its profound understanding that memory functions primarily through images that stick in the mind) and recall how they were joyous in those years when they sat after dinner and talked, and talked.  “Recall/That table and the talk of youth.” Then Yeats returns to the opening lines, as a refrain:  Those two girls, both of them beautiful, one a gazelle, before raving autumn sheared beauty and innocence and youthful joy away, the blossom gone as time cuts us off from the blossoming wonders with which we began.  No lines, to my mind, are more beautiful than these two, which served as lines three and four of the first stanza, and provide its conclusion:

Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

I have already said, and it bears repeating, that Yeats has got these two women wrong, seeing them as pitiable when they were in historical fact heroic.  But his longing for what is past, for a youth when the world lay all before them, when all was beautiful and innocent, is immensely powerful.  His final in his Collected Poems, “Politics,” ends:

And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

Youth and beauty fade. That is a truth that bursts in on Yeats, again and again.

And so we come to the second section.  I have already said it is rhetorical, and that is not meant as praise.  Rejecting the lyricism of the opening and closing lines of the previous section, Yeats now shouts his (futile) rebellion against time.

In the first lines, he seems to speak to the old women (“withered old and skeleton-gaunt”) he had invoked in the first section, who are now seen not only as shadows of their former selves but also as auguries of death: They are now shades, bereft of physical presence:

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;

Again, he is dismissive when he should not be: Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, who struggled against the power of capital over the working class, who fought for Irish independence of an imperial Britain, who championed the rights of women, have their struggles reduced to “All the folly of a fight/With a common wrong or right.”  Really?  Class, imperialism, male dominance, all reduced to common wrongs which it is folly to fight?  And are they even wrongs, Yeats has the effrontery to ask?  (“With a common wrong or right”)?

Paternalistic and terrible, Yeats seems on indefensible turf here.  And yet he is in another sense right, for

The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;

Everything fades, is sheared of its significance, by time.  Here one must think of the remarkable and well-known sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias.”  All fades to nothingness, not just power and politics, but even art.  

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley’s poem ends with an obvious but very terrible irony:  Eternal waste takes precedence over everything, and makes whatever words remain both hollow and false.

Thus, Yeats’s poem ends in the imperative mode, uttering a command which is as heartfelt as it is impossible to perform, for who can burn down time?

Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;

For that is what he must do, try to destroy Time, since time diminishes and then destroys all things.  About Gore-Booth and Markieviz as historical persons he is wrong; about human destiny in a world of time, he is – alas – right.

He not only wants to burn down time, he also issues a challenge, “run till all the sages know.”  Time cannot burn, the conflagration cannot “climb,” but in defiance he wants everyone to know – even the greatest minds, the “sages” of the past – that he is opposed to the destructive power of time.  Like Sisyphus, he takes on a task he knows he cannot win.

Those final lines confound me.

We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

I used to show my students images of gazebos, since they have mostly gone out of style, and few of my students knew what a gazebo was.  A structure superfluous to human purposes, being neither  shelter nor sites to enable meaningful human activity.  Beautiful perhaps, but superfluous.

This what Yeats thinks, in his later years, all human activity is.  Superfluous, perhaps beautiful, but with no purpose.  Human actions and creativity are a “great gazebo” which we have built, which like all else is devastated by the passage of time.  The “sages” know how futile human activity is: “They convicted us of guilt” suggests a deep complicity in trying to create the structures of human life, which are somehow nothing more than pretty ornaments. 

Yet Yeats, in his act of rebellion, wants to persist in the effort to fight against time.  He lights his match and tries to blow on the small flame to make it grow into a “conflagration.”  Pitiful, yet heroic.  “Bid me strike a match and blow.”

Thus, we come to the ‘rhetoric’ that marks the second stanza.  We are not used to rhetoric in lyric poems.  But Yeats recognizes the futility of fighting time: He knows that to engage in this conflict is to doom oneself to defeat.  The personal sense of loss, which marked the lyrical language of the first stanza, gives way to the rhetorical exhortation to fight against loss.  This is a fight which Yeats knows is doomed to defeat.  “Bid me strike a match and blow.”  He has gone rhetorical on us because he knows that, unlike feeling loss and the heavy burden of time, fighting loss and time is pure gesture.  It is suitable for rhetoric, not for actuality.  And so he resorts to the rhetorical close of this poem, urging a resistance which – albeit heroic – he knows is futile.