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 8304495

Gerety, Jane

POETRY A N D M AG IC: A S T U D Y O F YEATS’S POEMS OF M E D IT A T IO N

The University o f Michigan Ph.D. 1982

University
Microfilms
International 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M I 48106

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 POETRY AND MAGIC: A STUDY OF YEATS'S

POEMS OF MEDITATION

by
Jane Gerety

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A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(English Language and Literature)
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in The University of Michigan
1982
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Doctoral Committee:

Professor George Bornstein, Chairman

Professor Herbert Barrows
Professor Raymond Grew
Associate Professor Stuart McDougal
 RULES REGARDING THE USE OF

MICROFILMED DISSERTATIONS

Microfilmed or bound copies of doctoral dissertations submitted

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but they are to be used only with due regard for the rights of the author.
Extensive copying of the dissertation or publication of material in excess
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of standard copyright limits, whether or not the dissertation has been
copyrighted, must have been approved by the author as well as by the Dean
of the Graduate School. Proper credit must be given to the author if any
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material from the dissertation is used in subsequent written or published
work.
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For James and Kathleen Gerety,
m y first and wisest teachers
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 ACKNOWLEDGEiMENTS

I am deeply indebted to Professor George Bornstein

for his careful and patient guidance from the beginning

of this p roject to its completion. His own scholarship

and his astute criticism of the thesis in its draft

stages have helped me immeasurably. For their c o ntri­

bution as teachers to my understanding of modern poetry

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and for their careful reading of the text, I am grateful

to Professor Herbert Barrows and Stuart McDougal. My

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thanks also go to Professor Raymond Grew whose point of

view as an historian with a deep appreciation for Yeats

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provided a unique perspective on the committee.

M y friends, colleagues, parents, sisters, and

brother have offered invaluable intellectual, spiritual,

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and practical support each step of the way. For every­

thing from conversations that helped me clarify my

thinking to long hours spent proofreading, I am grateful

to my friends. I could not have done without the

efficiency of Karen Mann, who typed the manuscript.

Finally, my deep gratitude goes to the Sisters of

Mercy, Province of Baltimore, who have supported me as

sisters and encouraged me as friends.

iii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

CHAPTER

I. MAGIC AND POETRY IN YEATS'S EARLY VIEW . . .1

Yeats's Magical Credo
The Religion of Art
Magic and the Irish Tradition
Magic and Symbols

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Magic and Y e a t s 's View of Blake and
Shelley
Literary Magician Figures
Poet Magicians in Yeats's Early Verse
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II. MAGIC AND POETRY IN YEATS'S L A T E R VIEW . . 65

Magic and Art in Per Arnica Silentia

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Lunae
Magic and Art in A Vision
Vision in Indian Philosophy
Art and Vision in "A General
Introduction to my Work"
Visionary Artists
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Magician Poets in Yeats's Later

Fiction and Verse:

III. MAGICAL AND ROMANTIC MEDITATIONS ......... 121

Yeats's Search for Methods of

Meditation
Golden Dawn Meditation
Romantic Meditation

IV. YEATS'S POEMS OF MEDITATION 156

Meditations on Simple Images

Images from Nature
Images in the Mind's Eye
Tarot Meditation: Presences
Symbolic Ritual Meditations

LIST OF WORKS C I T E D ....................... 242

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 CHA P T E R I

MAGIC AND POETRY IN YEATS'S EARLY VIEW

From the time he was a boy in Sligo, Yeats

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associated poetry with magic. In "Reveries over

Childhood" he remembers that a poem, The Lay of the Last

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M i n s t r e l , gave him "a w i s h to turn magician that competed

for years with the dr e a m of being killed upon the

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seashoreThat same seashore and its adjacent cliffs

provided the setting where Yeats recalls playing "at

being a sage, a magician or a poet." (Auto 42) He later

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realized the childhood fantasy and became a sage,

magician, and poet in all seriousness, following each as

a separate role but perceiving always profound

connections among the three. So bound especially were

poetry and magic in Y e a t s 1s thought that often he could

only explain one in terms of the other.

Throughout his prose but especially in the essays

collected in Ideas of Good and E v i l , the close alliance

of poetry and magic pervades Yeats's thought. At times

in these essays he relates his two dominant interests

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metaphorically; at other times he explores their common

ground, particularly their reliance on the imagination

and symbols. In "Magic," for example, he says that

visions are:________________

a proof of the supremacy of imagination,

of the po w e r of many minds to become one,
overpowering one another by spoken words
and by unspoken thought till they have
become a single, intense, unhesitating
energy. One mind was doubtless the
master, I thought, but all the minds gave
a little, creating or revealing for a
moment wha t I m u s t call a supernatural
artist.2

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In the same essay he maintains that only a different

degree of consciousness distinguishes the artist's use

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of symbols from that of the magician: "Symbols are the

greatest of powers, whether they are used consciously by

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the masters of magic, or half-consciously by their

successors, the poet, the musician and the artist."

(E&I 49) Artists and magicians, moreover, use the same

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methods to discover symbols. In the late essay,

"Prometheus U n b o u n d ," Yeats speaks of "a form of

meditation that permits an image or symbol to generate

itself." (E&I 422) And poets and magicians share the

same power: the artist, Yeats insists in "Magic,"

"enchants, charms, binds wit h a spell" both his own mind

and those of others. (E&I 43) Finally, the poet's work

has a magical effect. Drama, Yeats claims in "The Tragic

Theatre," can induce "unearthly excitement of like kind

 3

wit h the ecstasy of seers," (E&I 191) and "tragic

artists," he maintains in "The Return of Ulysses," "can

move by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance."

(E&I 200)

Yeats spent a lifetime obeying the inner voice that

told him, "Hammer your thoughts into unity." In "If I

were Fou r - a n d - t w e n t y ", w h e r e he explains this lif e ­

long preoccupation, he names as his three interests:

"interest in a form of literature, in a form of

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philosophy, and a belief in nationality." (Ex 263) The

prose that shows his exploration of these three interests

in his effort to unite them.

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reveals the undeniable debt he owes to mag i c a l concepts

In the early essays Yeats

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professes his belief in magic as a personal philosophy;

he defines it and analyses the principles that magic and

literature hold in common; he also reveals the centrality

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of magical concepts to the tradition of Irish folklore.

Thus, by means of magic Yeats blends his three interests

and arrives at a symbolist aesthetic that he never

abandoned.

Yeats's Magical Credo

Two essays written in 1901 address the subject of

magic directly: "Magic" and "Is the Order of R.R. and

A.C. to Remain a Magical Order?" The former, addressed

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to the general public, was written in the thick of a

controversy concerning suspicions of black magic in

French Rosicrucianism,^ and the latter, privately printed

for the Adepti of the Golden Dawn, spelled out Yeats's

position in an internal struggle concerning the

organization and philosophy of that occult society.5

Together they reveal Yeats's definition of magic as well

as its importance in his personal philosophy and

aesthetic. In "Magic" he offers his credo:

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I believe in the practice and philosophy
of what we have agreed to call magic, in
what I mus t call the evocation of spirits,
though I do not k n o w what they are, in
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the power of creating magical illusions,
in the visions of truth in the depths
of the mind." (E&l 28)
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He goes on to list the three doctrines that he sees as

the foundation of nearly all magical p r a c t i c e s :

(1) That the borders of our m i n d are

ever shifting, and that many minds can
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flow into one another, as it were, and

create or reveal a single mind, a single
energy.
(2) That the borders of our memories
are as shifting, and that our memories
are a part of one great memory, the
memory of Nature herself.
(3) T hat this great m i n d and great
m emo r y can be evoked by symbols. (E&I 28)

The power of creating magical illusions is, of course,

the power of the imagination, a faculty for which Yeats

learned a new reverence through his magical experiments.

His experience of visions proved to him the supremacy of

the imagination over other faculties. These magical

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illusions, he believed, offer an experience akin to

Pater's hard gem-like flame: they become for the

visionary "a single intense unhesitating energy." (E&I 36)

Belief in the.power of the imagination constitutes

the primary link between magic and poetry in Yeatsian

philosophy. The other is the notion of symbol, the means

we have of breaking down the barriers between the

ordinary world and the super-conscious world. In "Magic"

Yeats equates the super-conscious w ith "the great memory,

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the memory of Nature herself," (E&I 28) which can only

be evoked by symbols. In "A Postscript to Essay called

'Is the Order of R.R.

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and A.C. to remain a Magical

Order?'" he goes even further in assigning to symbols an

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independent power. He says that "It is a first principle

of our illumination that symbols and formulae are powers,

which act in their own right and w i t h little

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consideration for our intentions however e x c e l l e n t ^

As George Harper points out, at this point religion and

art become one for Yeats: "Symbols are not simply mental

constructs for the convenience of the creative

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imagination but part of the anima mundi." Yeats sought

to establish a relationship to the timeless world of

Anima Mundi through the practice of magic. He sees this

relationship as also necessary to the artist. As he

says in the A u t o b i o g r a p h y : "I kno w that revelation is

from the self, but from the age-long memoried self. . .

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and that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self

for certain moments to our trivial daily m i n d ." (Auto

182-83)

The supremacy of the imagination, the independent

power of symbols, and the existence of that storehouse

of symbols, the A n i m a Mundi, are the chief concepts by

which Yeats links poetry and magic in the early essays.

In the 1901 essays on magic he speaks explicitly of wha t

we think of as the occult; elsewhere he broadens the

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category of magic to associate poetry w i t h myst i c i s m and

religious experience in general. In short, he associates

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artistic creation w i t h any experience w hereby one enters

into a state of consciousness different from the ordinary

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and thereby attains knowledge beyond the power of

ordinary human intellection. The explicit association of

art and magic predominates in the essays wri t t e n before

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1910 when Yeats feels m o s t adamantly the need to defend

his magical practice and w hen he is also discovering the

particular magical beliefs of ancient Ireland. A n echo

of these references to poetry as magic lingers in the

essays written after 1910, but there he more often aligns

the two metaphorically as, for example, w h e n he discusses

the ritual origins of N o h drama and concludes that "the

elaborate technique of the arts, seeming to create out of

itself a superhuman life, has taught mor e m e n to die than

oratory o r the Prayer Book." (E&I 235)

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The Religion of Art

If Yeats believes that the poet, primitive or

modern, participates in the work of the supernatural

artist, it is a small step for him to consider artists

as priests. The early essays show him making this

transference easily. He concludes "The Celtic Element

in Literature" (1896) by casting the new art— the

symbolical m o v e m e n t — in the role of a new religion built

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on a reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth

century and the m a terialism of the nineteenth. The arts,

Yeats insists,
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"by brooding upon their own intensity

have become religious and are seeking. . . to create a

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sacred book." (E&I 187) As art takes the place of

religion, artists have vocations to a special priesthood,

and Yeats himself does not shy away from the role of
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prophet. "Magic" concludes with the message he feels

called to proclaim:

Can there be anything so important as to cry

out that what we call romance, poetry,
intellectual beauty, is the only signal that
the Supreme Enchanter, or someone in His
councils, is speaking of wha t has been, and
shall be again, in the consummation of
time. (E&I 52)

Yeats sees his own time as a magical moment in the •

history of the world, when the poets consciously take

over the role of religion and begin their redemptive work.

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In "The Autumn of the Body" (1898) he describes this role:

"the arts," he says

are about to take on their shoulders

the burdens that have fallen from the
shoulders of priests, and lead us back
by filling our thoughts wit h the
essences of things. We are about to
substitute once more the distillation
of alchemy for the analysis of chemistry
and for some other sciences; and certain
of us are looking everywhere for the
perfect alembic that no silver or golden
drop may escape. (E&I 193)

As Yeats explains the sacred function of the new art—

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that of penetrating the essences of things, giving life

and touching the heart as religion once d i d — his rhetoric

reinforces his thought.

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work toward the unity of distillation rather than the

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breaking apart of analysis; the progress of modern

science will be devalued in favor of a return to the

medieval "science" of alchemy. He then uses the language

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of alchemy to describe what the n e w art is searching for:

an instrument to distill and refine all that is ordinary

so that it becomes precious and lasting.

In "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900) Yeats reinforces

this identification of art and religion whe n he asks,

How can the arts overcome the slow dying

of men's hearts that we call the progress
of the world, and lay their hands upon
men's heartstrings again, w ithout becoming
the garment of religion as in old times?
(E&I 162-63)
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The priesthood of art has a special mission to Ireland, a

land whose national character provides two passions ready

to the hands of art: "love of the Unseen Life and love

of country." (E&I 204) Yeats urges artists to find

these passions of the people, but to do this, he says,

"we must take upon ourselves the method and the fervor

of a priesthood. We must be half humble and half proud

. . . . We m u s t baptize as well as preach." (E&I 203) The

religion that art aligns itself with in Yeats's view

differs greatly from orthodox Irish religion— Protestant

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or Cat h o l i c — where body and spirit are often thought of

as enemies. Yeats appeals to the older, more primitive

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religion of magic wh i c h sees no dichotomy between the

spiritual and material worlds, the philosophy that views

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the seen life as the gateway to the "Unseen Life."

Magic and the Irish Tradition

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Yeats's search for an Irish tradition on which to

found his art led him to ascribe the beginnings of

poetry to magic. In "The Celtic Element in Literature"

he begins his discussion with Renan's description of the

Celtic imagination, wh i c h is built, according to Renan,

on "a love of Nature for herself, a vivid feeling for

her magic." (E&I 173) Yeats then quotes Arnold's

characterization of the Celtic passion for nature as

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coming more from a sense of nature's mys t e r y than of her

beauty. He agrees w i t h the importance Arnold assigns to

the Celtic imagination in English literature but sees

what Arnold calls "natural magic" as "the ancient

religion of the world, the ancient worship of Nature and

that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all

beautiful places being haunted.. . (E&I 176)

Yeats sees the animism that characterized the

ancient world v i e w — whereby people believed that "trees

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were divine and could take a human or grotesque shape

and dance among the shadows" (E&I 175) — as the beginning

of poetic vision.

world,
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Seeing the divine in the created

"so great a mystery in little things," (E&I 175)

allowed the ancients to believe in the real power of

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symbol and ritual: "the waving of a hand, or of a sacred

bough was enough to trouble far-off hearts or hood the

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moon wit h darkness." (E&I 175) This is imagination in

its purest form for Yeats, and he sees in this animistic

view of nature the beginnings of poetry: "All old

literatures," he says,

are full of these or like imaginations,

and all poets of races who have not lost
this way of looking at things could have
said of themselves, as the poet of the
Kalevala said of himself, "I have
learned my songs from the music of many
waters." (E&I 175)

Believing that impassioned meditation, which brings men

to the edge of trance, makes imaginative vision possible,

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Yeats decries the deterioration of this power in Irish

poets even as early as the makers of the Saga: he laments

"their unlearning, it may be, the impassioned meditation

which brings men beyond the edge of trance and makes

trees, and beasts, and dead things talk w ith human

voices." (E&I 175)

Poetry had its origin for Yeats in a direct and

immediate sharing of imaginative vision. In "Magic" he

speculates about this non-verbal visionary experience:

M e n who are imaginative writers today

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m a y well have preferred to influence
the imagination of others more
directly in past times. Instead of
learning their craft with paper and a
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pen they may have sat for hours
imagining themselves to be stocks and
stones and beasts of the wood, till
the images were so vivid that passers-by
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became but a part of the imagination of
the dreamer, and wept or laughed or ran
away as he would have them. (E&I 4 3 ) °

The poet's predecessor is the meditative dreamer who can

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lead his own mind to a vision that directly influences

the imagination of others. This is a magical power he

possesses as Yeats suggests when he asks, "Have not

poetry and music arisen as it seems, out of the sounds

the enchanters made to help their imaginations to enchant,

to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the

passers-by?" (E&I 43)

People can share visions directly, Yeats concludes,

because of the Anima Mundi, that collection of images

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that has an existence apart from individual, m i n d s ,.what

in "Magic" he calls "the seeming transitory mind made out

of many minds." (E&I 43) Here he refers to this mind as

"the supernatural artist" that the enchanter creates or

reveals for himself as well as for others. Yeats does

not seem sure at this point whether the enchanter—

hence the p o e t — finds the images in the storehouse of

Anima Mundi or whether his imaginative act puts them

there. What is clear, however, is that he sees creating

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and revealing as a single act. Yeats does not

distinguish seeing from image making in poetry or in

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Primitive belief that saw "in the rainbow the
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still bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence"

(E&I 174) also saw the possibility of things changing

into one another. Yeats points to the magical origins

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of metaphor when he analyses Arnold's examples of the

Celtic influence in English poetry. "More yellow was her

hair than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands

and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone

amidst the spray of the m e adow fountains," he insists,

could not have been w ritten "if men had never dreamed

that fair wo m e n could be made out of flowers, or rise

up out of m e a d o w fountains." (E&I 177)

The primitive, magical view presumes the existence

of a world of spirits whose signs abound within the

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physical world. The arts, Yeats claims, "are founded on

the life beyond the world, and they mus t cry in the ears

of our penury until the world has been consumed and

become a vision." (E&I 184) He sees belief in a

spiritual world preserved in the Irish people who have

been untouched by the spirit of the counting house.

These people believe in the power of ritual to reveal

the life beyond the world and to influence it. In

"What is Popular Poetry?" (1901) Yeats reports what he

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has learned from those who hold this view and points to

the origins of poetry in ancient ritual:

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They cannot separate the idea of an art
or a craft from the idea of a cult with
ancient technicalities and mysteries.
They can hardly separate mere learning
from witchcraft, and are fond of words
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and verses that keep half their secrets
to themselves. (E&I 10)

Ritual helps to form the basis of the ancient alliance

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of magic and art, as Yeats explains in "Ireland and

the Arts" (1901). In the ancient unity of art and

religion, making ceremonies was a form of art which the

ancients performed "upon fear of death, upon the hope of

the father in his child, upon the love of m a n and

woman." (E&I 203) Words had power in the ancient view;

hence the primitive consciousness believed that

ceremonies could influence reality. The ancients

even gathered into their ceremonies

the ceremonies of more ancient faiths,
for fear a grain of the dust turned
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crystal in some past fire, a passion

that had min g l e d w i t h the religious
idea might p e rish if the ancient
ceremony perished. (E&I 203)

In the magical world, words themselves evoked the

essences of things, so, used in ritual, language could

influence the things themselves. Yeats believed that to

tap that primitive belief buried in Irish tradition

would uncover the power of words, of ceremony, and

therefore of poetry.

Yeats agrees w i t h Arnold that literature must

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return to the "passionate turbulent indomitable reaction

against the d e s p o t i s m of fact"; (E&I 173) in other

words,
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it must recapture the magical vie w of the world.

It was his conviction that literature had already

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dwindled to a "mere chronicle of circumstance, or

passionless fantasies and passionless meditations," and

that the only cure for this was that it be "flooded

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with the passions and beliefs of ancient times." For

Yeats the essential Celts w h o m all "ideal men of genius

must resemble" are the "ancient hunters and fishers and

ecstatic dancers" (E&I 184 ) — m e n who wer e able to give

themselves over to wha t he would later call excited

reverie.

Magic, as Yeats describes it in his personal

philosophy and in his analysis of the early Irish world

view, conjoins two opposing stances toward nature. The

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magician is one who is open to the mystery of nature,

one who can suspend his ordinary mental processes and

enter into a state of trance so that he may receive

vision; but he is also one who can actively influence

nature by word and ritual gesture. These two attitudes

of passive receptivity and active control characterize

the poet-magicians who populate Yeats's poems, plays, and

stories. Through magic these seekers after dreaming

wisdom attain both knowledge and power.

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Magic and Symbols
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Yeats's philosophy of magic led him naturally to
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a poetics that assigned central importance to the

symbol, the means by which we have access to the Unseen

Life. He returns to the idea of symbol repeatedly in the

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early essays, defining its centrality to his theory of

art and associating it continually with the practice of

magic. For Yeats symbols are the greatest of all powers,

as he proclaims in "Magic," "whether they are used

consciously by the masters of magic or half-consciously

by their successors, the poet, the musician and the

artist." (E&I 49) In "Magic" he focuses primarily on

their power, dismissing the importance of distinguishing

between inherent and arbitrary symbols. They all derive