Yeats' "Second Coming": What Rough Beast? Author(s): Richard P.

Wheeler

" The Second Coming " is often regarded as a powerful poem, having special force even in the work of a man
acknowl edged to be a writer of much powerful verse

1 Harold Bloom, in a discussion of "The Second Coming," concerns himself primarily with " the nature of its power
" (p. 317).* Bloom points to serious confusions in the poem; it

" the power of The Second Coming is not called in question by these smaller questions, but perhaps its artistry is "
(p. 323). This paper investigates the power of " The Second Coming " in terms of the role played by the experience
of power as a necessary dimension of human relationships, particularly in the conditions of infancy and childhood.
Bloom writes: " There is something in the power of The Second Coming that persuades us of our powerlessness " (p.
324). This reading assumes a radical split between the imagina tion that created the poem and those that are stirred
by readings of it.

. Yeats participates in a sense of power that his readers experience as hostile and alien. As Ivor Winners has it: "
Yeats approves of this kind of brutality." *

what it tells me about the direction of history. In so far as "The Second Coming" presents a poet/prophet's privileged
insight into historical possibility, in Bloom's phrase, it " per suades us of our powerlessnes

aim. Its power is not a power over me, nor a power held up portentously before me, but a feeling of power which in
some way I share. Furthermore, I think that this response—my participation in a sense of power generated by the
poem—is typical for many readers, and is an important factor in this poem's enormous impact on readers of the last
five decades. " The Second Coming," I will argue, is a powerful poem because it imparts a sense of power. Why this
should be so is not immediately clear. " The Second Coming " presents a vision of cultural de struction, or
disintegration, that has made a nearly authorita tive claim on the imagination of twentieth century readers shaken
again and again by a history of anxiety and viol

red, the subjective postures through which the poem confronts the reality it imagines. The vision of history that the
poem articulates is shaped significantly by unconscious factors that were deeply rooted in the poet's mind long
before the poem was written, and which are intimately implicated in our response, as readers, to it. I will attempt to
show that " The Second Coming " builds upon a deeply repressed fantasy of omnipotent, destructive rage, called into
service to master an experience of intolerable, in fantile helplessness. This fantasy underlies and enforces the poem's
meaning as historical myth. Our collaboration in this fantasy, as readers, enables the poem to impart a sense of
power. That "The Second Coming" can also enforce our sense of "powerlessness" is an apparent paradox that may
be better understood once the place of the poem's unconscious signifi cance within its total meaning has been
further explored.

his vision of cultural destruction mirrors an inner experience of impending psychic catastrophe. " Fear for oneself,"
WTites Weston La Barre, provides " the pattern of fears for the world." 4 The inner anxiety conveyed in these lines
was shaped by situations independent of the social, historical conditions that bring it to expression in the mode of
poetic prophecy, how ever appropriate that anxiety may be in conveying the quality of experience in catastrophic
historical conditions. The crisis of self presented in the first section of the poem has its roots in crises of early
infancy, when the psychological range of the experience of power swings from omnipotence to utter helplessness

This list indicates feeling states that are central to the poem's first section. Those lines depicting external chaos
convey the fragmentation of symbiotic unity into a perceived reality of terror both imminent and immanent.

y be added that the external reality of " anarchy " and " the blood-dimmed tide " has been stripped of its capacity to
offer reassurance, though the importance of that transformation of benign reality in an infant and in that part in all of
us that remains infantile can scarcely be overestimated. The crumbling historical world of " The Second Coming "
builds on this infantile situation of utter helplessness experi enced as fear of annihilation

her. Sadistic fantasies of this stage are generated by frustration and newly perceived separation, and mobilize
powerful aggressive protests. This aggression is directed against the offending object, the mother, or mother's breast
or mother as feeder, since the mother

as a separate, whole person does not yet exist in the infant's awareness

The mother's breast, mutilated in the child's aggressive fantasy, responds in this fantasy not with the desired love and
milk but with a " blood dimmed tide " which threatens to overwhelm or swallow up the aggressor. " The cermony of
innocence," the benign situation of fulfillment and fusion at the breast, is lost, and the life-sus taining succor
becomes a means of overpowering the infant. The " drowning " of " the ceremony of innocence " is a male volent
transformation which parodies the " oceanic feeling " that Freud traced to the experience of oneness in which self
and mother (world) are as yet undifferentiated.

That fusion is the center which " cannot hold," which fragments into the anarchy of uncontrolled aggressive drives
turned against the vulnerable infant self

t. Each registers a separate response to the failure of maternal symbiosis. As the first of these controlling images,
that of the falcon " turning and turning in the widening gyre," gives way to the second, the image of the "
blood-dimmed tide," the centrifugal gestures of spiralling flight and things falling apart give way to a concentration
of malevolent forces which converge on the "ceremony of innocence"

rless. The image of flight defends against this situation of powerlessness within a hostile world. But in the order of
the poem, flight precedes violence, the de fense precedes the situation that calls it into being

In the schizoid state, all sense of coherent, human self is for feited

The incantatory force of these lines imposes ritualistic stasis on the frenzied energies of the first section and evokes
the image about to make its appearance
y. The poem's gaze first takes in the vague and barren spatial orienta tion " somewhere in sands of the desert," then
perceives the bestial and masculine features that give the image s

lds, Yeats develops images that bind intimately the sight being presented with the subjective states demanded of the
viewer. As the beast stares out with blank and pitiless gaze, we are invited to look intensely, as if fasci nated, at this
terrible gaze. The shadows of desert birds which circle about the shape are made to convey—particularly through the
force of " reel "—the sense of recoil into uncontrolled dizzi ness or giddiness imparted by the visi

e. This ponderous slowness, the slowness of the centuries, then gives way to the whirling protests reflected in the
shadows of the desert birds. All this is taken in by the perceptual movement which first focuses vaguely on the
desert, then moves in to view the beast itself, and its gaze, and finally recoils from this view, to end abruptly when "
the dark ness drops again

em. The concrete image of the terrible beast " moving its slow thighs " recalls the more abstract " mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world." The reeling shadows of desert birds recall " turning and turning in the widening gyre," and
an abstract image made concrete in the image of the falcon reeling out of contrl

The following properties of the image are particularly important: the beast emerges out of the dark ness, as an
intruder, bringing into the night the terrible desert sun; only its visual properties are presented—shape, gaze, and
movement—and these convey its power; the power conferred on the beast is intensified by its " blank and pitiless "
gaze; the entire movement of the beast is represented by the movement of its thighs; it is surrounded by shadows of
reeling desert birds, smaller creatures that look on in helpless, indignant protest; the beast has the shape of a sphinx.
A heavy emphasis on acts of looking connects many of these elements. The poet looks on and is troubled by what he
sees; the birds look on also, with indignation; the beast itself looks out with " gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

he sphinx-like beast is a composite image which builds unconsciously on the fascination and the threatening power
of parental sexuality for the child's ego

act." 0 The danger ous, destructive associations of sexuality are stressed in the beast image of the poem, but
sexuality does not appear directly at all—although it informs the image of the crouching beast " moving its slow
thighs." The very slowness of the beast tends to remove the image from the violence of the primal scene fantasy out
of which it grows. This slowness serves a purpose similar to that of complete stillness in the wolf dream of Freud's
famous " wolf man " patient, which also disguised a primal scene fantasy.10 The wolf dream, however, conveyed a
terror for Freud's patient that was not reflected in its manifest form, which represented an attempt to hide the
violence of the latent content. The poem, while disguising latent content, carefully intensifies the power of the image
to convey terrible

eye. Temporally, too, the image is removed from its roots in the continual present of the unconscious and becomes
an omen of future calamity, of some thing that has not already happened, or is happening, and which may, therefore,
be anticipated. A child's animism, which Fenichel cites as one source of confusion in primal scene fan tasies,
appears in the creature's lion body

the ego is identified with the rough beast as destroyer of a world which has become intolerable. This second
meaning belongs primarily to the deeply regressed oral stage, and represents an alternative defense against the
failure of symbiosis which is so important in the first section of the poem. Instead of passive helplessness before a
separate, hostile reality, or schizoid flight from that reality, the beast image in this con text represents the total rage
of the child forced to perceive separateness through frustration. The destructive force invested in the image of the
beast expresses what Marion Milner calls the " hate that is inherent in the fact that we do have to make the
distinction between subject and object." 12

In the context of this unconscious meaning—that of a total, destructive attack on a frustrating world, the world
perceived as hostile other—it is important that Yeats invests the sphinx like beast with male features, since the image
expresses an ag gressive wish elaborated through the development of infant into boy into man. The " gaze blank and
pitiless as the sun " not only suggests unconscious word play (sun/son), but reflects the vital role played by the eyes
and looking in the oral stage of development

An unconscious identification with the beast image, felt as an expression of deeply repressed rage or hatred, enables
the poem to impart a sense of power to its readers, the sense of power this paper set out to trace. Into this
unconscious identifi cation with the destructive power of the beast flows another source of gratification. The primal
scene fantasy is threatening in large part because of its projective content; it expresses Oedipal wishes which have in
themselves become sources of anxiety. The release of the aggressive wish against the frustrat ing mother carries with
it also the force of the sexual wish for the Oedipal mother and gives the beast (as son) the envied power of the
Oedipal father

The anxiety state conveyed in " stony sleep " thus extends, in the form of dread, both unconscious contexts inferred
above with regard to the sphinx-image, the Oedipal anxiety of tprimal scene fantasy and the oral anxiety of
separation. But the era of stony sleep will be displaced by the era of the rough beast, born in the same city of
maternal love. What rough beast? The rough beast here carries the trans forming power of infantile rage and Oedipal
triumph discussed above. What the beast will bring, besides omnipotence, is not stressed in the poem, and is not
important to the fantasy. Its function—in the arena of history and in the arena of inner con flict—is to supersede the
vexing nightmare brought on by the " rocking cradle." If the beast is, in Ellman's words, " particu larly frightful "
because it promises to destroy the world of " passive infancy and maternal love," it is especially gratifying because it
releases an aggressive wish to destroy the inner tor ment created in response to the failure of maternal love. The
aggressive beast as projected, destructive ego supplants passive infancy when passivity comes to mean helplessness
and intoler able separateness rather than the fulfillment of omnipotent oneness.

readers off quite so easily as this analysis suggests. The total rage or hatred that is expressed unconsciously is
common, potentiality, to all people. But such massive aggres sive longings necessarily jepardize ones very place

henomena, p. 25). Guilt, in this sense, results from the necessary turning back of that hatred against the self in which
it originates. " The Second Coming " evades this guilt, momentarily, by discrete parts
prophetic visionary, able to glimpse and record in advance an approaching historical catas trophe. But what happens
to the everyday self that lives in and is bounded by a uniquely troubled phase of historical reality? It is, I think, for
the moment abandoned, or its claims consid erably muted, and plays little or no part in the affective state I have
described as participation in a sense of power. But this essential part of the self can hardly be abandoned completely,
for a long time, in the total relationship one develops with the poem and the history the poem addresses

" The Second Coming " and the range of mean ing the poem claims for itself as we place it in our experience. In
order to place the poem in the context of our own confronta tion with history, we must dissolve " the fusion or
merger of self and book " that Norman Holland sees at the heart of literary experience (Dynamics, p.67)

poem. The awe we feel for the poem—which we express as admiration for the extraordinary technical mas tery it
embodies—conveys in part our gratitude for the sense of power that the poem has let us share

The prophetic insistence on historical helplessness becomes a part of our experience of the poem as we relinquish
our identification with the poem's destructive fantasy

hen the wish to destroy an intolerably frustrating world confronts the recognition that we only exist in and through
that world, which is the same world that provides love and security

he unconscious meaning of the sphinx-image blends into the unconscious situation that lies behind the earlier image
of the blood-dimmed tide. Infantile helplessness before the force of one's own projected rage is generalized into the
powerlessness of a whole culture before the force of destiny

rsuade us of our powerlessness." The split that Bloom sees between " exultation on the speaker's part " (Yeats, p.
321) and powerlessness on the part of the reader I have de scribed as

The fantasy of help lessness overcome by rage is primary to our experience of the poem's power, but the resolution
of this fantasy into a sense of powerlessness before history is only one possible psychological outcome.

Bloom regrets that Yeats made his visionary power serve a conception of history that is controlled by fate rather than
by human freedom. He applies to Yeats Martin Buber's criticism of the dogma of gradual process,' by which the
quasi-historical thought of our time has worked ' to establish a more tenacious and oppressive belief in fate than has
ever before existed ' " (p. 470). Such a presentation of history as fate serves a defensive purpose in " The Second
Coming." The powerlessness that the poem con veys is justified by its place in an historical cycle that makes it
necessary. The very experience of individual powerlessness pro vides, paradoxically, an avenue to a larger power,
understood as fate. The threat of separation and psychic disintegration pre sented in the first section of the poem
resolves into a parody of lost " omnipotent oneness.
y. An order of meaning is restored in which the agonies of " anarchy " find their neces sary place.

elease. It also serves similar defensive pur poses: it places the self, as merged with historical necessity, within the
larger context of an active, aggressive relationship to a frustrating world; and it defends against the defense of
schizoid flight from the world—a defense that poses dangers greater than the situation that called it into service

r lives. This identification is more closely linked to the sense of mastery conveyed by the poem's prophetic voice
than to the forces that the prophecy discloses

The final psychic purpose I would point to in " The Second Coming " is simply a purgative one. The poem releases
rage in a context that at least partially frees this release from the cycle which doubles back on the self as guilt. The
venting of anger and hatred may lead to a kind of peace—indeed, for an infant, may lead beyond frustration back to
fulfilling partici pation in the mother's goodness that was lost in the conditions leading to rage

e part, by a purgative logic of released rage presented in " The Second Coming," and com pletes one important
strand of a rhythmic experience of frus tration and fulfillment begun in the earlier poem. Benard Levin has
suggested, in a very different critical context, that " The Second Coming " should " be read as proof of the speaker's
journey toward psychological equanimity." 1T I think that such a " journey " is one trend that the poem develops.
This reading of " The Second Coming " as a move ment toward self-affirmation within a higher order understood as
" Heaven's will " seems clearly to contradict my earlier at tempts to show that the poem may lead to the experience
of powerlessness or to participation in the reassuring power of fate. But all three possibilities are valid

Each possibility is there, and each is grounded in the core situation of infantile helplessness and separation
overcome by a fantasy of omnipotent rage

Classicism and Colonial Retrenchment in W B.Yeats's "No Second Troy

Martin McKinsey

Yeats's poem allies itself with the epic tradition first and foremost through classical allusion, and through
micropoetic effects that Elizabeth Cullingford labels "poetic 'manliness."'4 But it is also a matter of struc- ture, the
way the poem yokes together private and public turmoil, the individual and the transhistorical. The effect is
something like a Renais- sance portrait: in the foreground we see an aristocratic beauty possessed of classical poise;
from the word misery, we surmise that this is Maud Gonne, the only woman, it appears, with the power so deeply to
trouble the poet in life
8).When Gonne acted the role in its 1902 debut, she was Ireland. Six years later, as the dark lady of "No Second
Troy," she was arguably still Ireland, but a very different Ire- land. As we shall see, the distance between these two
visions of the po- et's homeland can serve as a gauge of what those intervening years had meant forYeats.

ce. Until that de- fining question-"Was there another Troy for her to burn?"-she is a classic Petrarchan object of male
desire, as notable for "being what she is" as for what she does, and for her effect on the men around her: the misery
she causes the poet (which in turn causes the poem to be writ- ten), and the violence she induces in others. It is a
catalytic quality she shares with Cathleen ni Houlihan-and, of course, Helen of Troy5- but in terms of literary
genealogies and nationalist implications, Yeats's 1902 and 1908 heroines could not be farther apart

1). In "No Second Troy," he borrows not only the figure of Helen but also something of Ronsard's classical restraint,
that "severe discipline of [the] French" that earlier he had prescribed for Irish playwrights (Explorations 80)

). But in "No Second Troy," the allusion to a bow, coupled with attributes like "solitary" and "stern," takes us back to
the object of Iseult's burnt offering: Artemis. As the goddess of the mountains and the wilds, Artemis was a deity of
"high and solitary" places. A virgin goddess, she shared Gonne's professed "horror and terror of physical love"
(Gonne qtd. in Foster 203), and was "most stern" in punishing male intruders like Acteon. As Edna Longley has
observed, "Yeats was reluctantly com- pelled to recognize Gonne as Amazon rather than icon" (207)-Ama- zons
being "mortal byforms" ofArtemis (Pomeroy 5)

. Though the poet's apotheosis of Ascendency figures like Swift and Burke was still to come, the classicism of"No
Second Troy" was substantially the classicism of their eighteenth century, "that one Irish century that escaped from
darkness and confu- sion" (Explorations 345). In "No Second Troy," Maud Gonne is made willy-nilly to represent
that tradition and to body forth its ideals. As a statuesque sister to the goddess Diana, the presiding deity of
Renaissance pastorals, this most urban of women serves as emblem for the rural charms of the Anglo- Irish country
estate. The tightened bow to which Gonne is likened in- vokes the hunt that was for Yeats an integral part of that
culture. (Yeats first associated archery with Coole Park in the title poem of his previ- ous collection, In the Seven
Woods: "while that Great Archer / Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs / a cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee"
[Poems 77].)8 In addition, Gonne's beauty is described in terms suggest- ing the aristocratic virtues of that class,
asYeats conceived it: self-control, elevation, nobility. As such, she represents for Yeats (as had, differently, Niamh
and Cathleen before her) "that ideal Ireland, perhaps from this point out an imaginary Ireland, in whose service I
labor," as he wrote in the 1907 essay "Poetry and Tradition" (Essays 246). In the process of defining an ideal Ireland
through its Helen-Gonne figure, "No Second Troy" simultaneously profiles the real (or "natural") Ireland that
constitutes its opposite: if Helen-Gonne is "high," the latter must be "low"; if she is "solitary" (Yeats would later
write of an "Anglo- Irish solitude"), it is populous; where she is "most stern," it, presumably, is "lax." Low,
populous, lax of habit-one suspects that the portrait that emerges of the "natural" here owes something to
Anglo-Irish stereotypes of those products of "mean rooftrees,"9 the unwashed Catholic majority

In the end, however, "No Second Troy" is Gonne's writ of absolu- tion. The blame is not hers, the poem tells us, but
the times--or Time itself. For like Oisin in St. Patrick's Ireland, Gonne was out of phase (as Yeats would come to
think of it) with the world around her. "[B]red to be a hero's wage," her "eyes set upon far / magnificence / upon
impos- sible heroism," she found herself in a place and age bereft of heroes, with only a "drunken, vainglorious lout"
like MacBride to claim her.11 If she was now "solitary," this was the reason

If Yeats was able to sympathize and forgive, this was in large mea- sure due to the way the predicament of his
one-time Petrarchan tor- mentor mirrored his own as an artist. For just as there was no other Troy for a Helen to
burn, so was there no other Troy for a would-be Homer to write about. The "brainless patriotic force" Yeats so often
locked po- lemic horns with in Dublin was not the stuff of epic; here he could not hope to find "Character isolated
by a deed / To engross the present and dominate memory" (Yeats qtd. in Foster 365; Poems 347). A few years later,
in the poem "September 1913," Yeats would pronounce Roman- tic Ireland "dead and gone" (Poems 108); in "No
Second Troy" he had already buried heroic Ireland.

No Second Troy" commences with an unmediated lyric "I"-the "I" of a thousand Petrarchan recriminations. The
earlier poem had, in its epic modality, rehearsed the consolidation of the state; its tex- tual extensiveness figured that
of a free and independent polity. "No Sec- ond Troy," by contrast, is an allegory of epic curtailment. Its verbal
musculature records the Laoco6nian effort to wrestle the epic impulse into a lyric mold. That this mold should
consist of 12 rather than 14 iambic pentameter lines further accentuates the poem's excruciating sense of limitation:
"No Second Troy" is a sonnet in search of a concluding couplet, a poem about frustrated desire that enacts its own
unfulfillment.

"No Second Troy"-title, last line-serves to damn rather than to re- deem, heightening the contrast between then and
now, here and there, ideal and actual. In the peculiar reverse perspective of classicism, what should be the temporal
foreground-modern Ireland-is dwarfed by its classical parallel, reduced to a Lilliputian world of "little streets"
inhabit- ed by knaves and dolts, Paudeens and Biddys. Only Maud Gonne is mag- nified; she alone inhabits the
mythic frame the poet has constructed in order to show her true dimensions as "a woman Homer sung." All else "at
one common level lies."12 In the relative universe into which Yeats's post-Nietzschean thought was advancing, each
half of the analogy illu- minated the other. AgainstYeats's vision of present entropy, Homer stands as an unrepeatable
poetic event: to say "No Second Troy" is to say of Ireland, in bitter retraction, that it is "No Second Greece."
Colonial be- latedness is affirmed

"No Second Troy" represents a strategic retrenchment, a digging-in be- hind more defensible boundaries: the
boundaries of the country demesne. (Twenty years later, this instinct would find its purest and most concen- trated
expression in the emblem-both textual and concrete-of a Nor- man tower.) W

n, "No Second Troy" uses Greece to disguise its ori- gins in sectarian feuding, displacing social reality into myth.
This subterfuge allows Yeats to advance his attack as universalist critique, and at the same time diffuses the object of
that attack into an abstract func- tion of history: "an age like this." Anglo-American critics intent on the transnational
scope of literary modernism long took this tactical maneuver more or less at face value, a simplification that under
the circumstances the poet might have welcomed.The truth is thatYeats's imagination con- tinued to be enmeshed in
the material "complexities of mire [and] blood" that defined the Irish culture wars at the start of the last century. If
Yeats summoned the figure of Helen to his side
After all (as the youngYeats had written),"without her possibly mythical siege of Troy, perhaps, Greece would never
have had her real Thermopy- lae" (Jeffares, W B. Yeats xii). By such relatively quiet means, and for all her encoding
of traditional prejudice, Helen made the case for cultural openness, for making room within Ireland's narrow borders
for the ethni- cally impure and the historically tainted. In pardoning Helen ("Why should I blame her ... ?")Yeats
argued by analogy for the pardoning of his class.

h. The doubleness of the poem's structure-Troy/No Troy--is exactly the gap between "What [he] had hoped ... and
the reality." Helen stands first and foremost for the "imaginary Ireland" Yeats had under- taken, in romantic
arrogance, to conjure into being. He had imagined Ireland's reconstitution as a kind of Arnoldian cultural eugenics: a
splic- ing of the best of Ireland with the best of Europe, the lion's share of which he located in ancient Greece

s. In "No Second Troy," his vision reemerges in distilled form, strained of its Celtic admixture. Now Greece became
Ireland's spectre: a haunting by lost pos- sibilities.Yet another two decades would elapse beforeYeats had the cour-
age to attempt a new rapprochement, a metaphysical merger of Hellas and Hibernia that would accommodate (even
if it could not efface) the contradictions of his self and his world.

TEXTUAL/SEXUAL POLITICS IN YEATS'S "LEDA AND THE SWAN" WILLIAM JOHNSEN

"Leda and the Swan," a sonnet depicting a rape as a welcome sign of a better future.

To follow out the dynamic of bird and lady dispossessing all the politics that Yeats knows, across published versions
of the poem, gives evidence for the progressive intellectual labor of poetic thinking. T

Although it is difficult to corroborate Yeats's claim that Russell ever requested the poem, the recklessness of "Leda
and the Swan" at least is there to see, especially in its earliest versions. The political turbulence of Yeats's
imagination at this time was better suited to "a wild paper of the young which will make enemies everywhere and
suffer repression, I hope a number of times."6 Yeats gave Leda to such a paper, To-Morrow, in 1924, and his support
for "a first beginning of new political thought" (Letters, 707). Yet the note from The Cat and the Moon quoted
above, which accompanied The Dial publication of the poem as well, 7 admits that bird and lady drive all that Yeats
recognized as politics out of a poem that had confidently called up the Swan's address to Leda de haute en bas as
metaphor for the iron law of a new political order overcoming an older one, a fated rearrangement of history to be
explained and maintained by "40 pages of commentary" (Letters, 709) in A Vision (1925).

The answer of the first version to the question of Leda's consent to this Act of Union (pace Heaney), implied by the
poem's phrasing, all but assumes that Leda abandoned thighs and body to the mastering rhythms of Zeus's strange
heart and feathered glory.
Yeats is now more attentive to the violent than to the sacred nature of Zeus's annunciation. For the first time since
Yeats began writing this poem, 10 the rape of Leda begins as a violent attack, not as the wonder of an annunciation
from above.

Her thighs caressed I By the dark webs" focuses rather on Zeus's chilling attention to the requisite details of amorous
conquest, spreading his clawed toes wide enough to caress her thighs "just with the web."

How could any woman's thighs but serve such an apotheosis of manly nature. But the syntax of questioning, no
matter how rhetorical or unquestioning, which at first seems solely to enlarge upon Zeus's feathered glory, always
must bear a potential resistance to the politics of the poem the more that Yeats, or any reader, poses it. The Tower
(1928) version of "Leda and the Swan," which begins Yeats's final textual practice of marking these lines as
questions, indicates the future of this revisionary labor: it is impossible to ask a question repeatedly without, sooner
or later, wondering what other answers might be possible. Even if the question is answered, it is not always possible
to give the same answer, even to the same question. The history of various prior representations of Leda's rape
(which have perhaps preoccupied Yeats scholars as partially hidden sources more than as public predecessors), in
sequence with Yeats's revisions of this poem, collectively indicate Leda now, by virtue of Yeats's late modern
version, as the point of indeterminacy from which Zeus's history can be questioned more and more comprehensively
in future versions.

Any answer based on the surviving instances of Leda in Greek mythology must be "no"; in mythology, as in the
poem, she is nothing-the mere pivot of Zeus's power to make his own history. The only possible "yes" could be that
Leda "puts on'' in the sense of"being dressed in" Zeus's power: whenever we see Leda we "see" what Zeus already
had foreseen.

I imagine the annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering that they showed in a Spartan
temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an unhatched egg of hers; and that from one of her eggs came Love and
from the other War.

Yeats admits that he cannot answer the questions posed by his own poetic thinking. What civilization is "refuted" by
Leda? It could be either the civilization that her civilization refuted, 4000-2000 B.c., perhaps even 2000 B.C. to
A.D. 1, where Leda already serves as an expression of Zeus's history, a complicit or communicable symbol of Zeus's
refutation of her own culture.

The poem's questions without answers are not permitted by the commentary to propose further thinking. Ignorance
merely gives evidence for the symmetry of one gyre refuting another.

It was this Discord or War that Heraclitus called 'God of all and Father of all, some it has made gods and some men,
some bond and some free' and I recall that Love and War came from the eggs of Leda." 14 For Yeats, Zeus's
violence proves his divinity and Leda's mortality; his freedom, her bondage; violence fathers Love and War on her.
All things are by antithesis.
losing ground to the defender (Paraclete) of victims. The West's progress is marked by the gradual weakening of
matrimonial and culinary taboos, the desymbolization of all differences-even the father as differentiating principle
(depaternalization)

his poem possible. How are we implied, in the work of this poem, toward a future? "Leda" itself is evolving in the
context of Judea-Christian writing from a violent to a nonviolent reciprocity of greater theoretical and moral
comprehension.

Even if Yeats was a Fascist15 committed to the sexual/political bond of all-minus-one of sexist/nationalist
victimization, fascism cannot account for Leda.

This prose revision in the face of the poem's revisions admits the civilization blotted out as Leda's, but without her
complicity; this civilization ;as rejected, not refuted, by Zeus's action.

Here, in A Vision (1938), a rejection rather than a refutation, attributed to Zeus, not Leda, further emphasizes the
change from one age to another as an issue of power rather than knowledge. Thus, "Leda" joins company with
another great poem of historical transformation, "The Second Coming," quoted a few pages earlier in A Vision.

If mere anarchy is now loose, order surely develops out of disorder, as second comings surely follow first ones

Drawn into violent reciprocity, they pay back one movement of resentment with its monstrous double. There is no
way for any postmodern reader to dodge the prescience of Yeats's metaphor for Bethlehem,

Yeats was serious when he put "The Second Coming" and "Leda" to work within the orbit of his system. Yet these
metaphors resist Yeats's system, engendering a hypothetical potential equal in seriousness but superior, both
intellectually and morally, to the iron law of antithesis and the "poetics of hate." 17 To recognize the pattern of a new
age replacing an older one as a movement of rejection and of resentment is to recognize history as human, not fated,
except insofar as humans refuse to understand the history that they have made for themselves by surrendering
responsibility to the instincts, the gods, or the gyres. If Zeus's annunciation rejects, rather than refutes, Leda's
culture, if the cradle vexes, rather than supercedes, "paganism," these poems of historical change imply movements
of power, not knowledge

If Zeus's history is a rejection of Leda, then this rejection constitutes Zeus's knowledge. Patriarchal culture is
founded on rejecting a matriarchy it will never know, which perhaps never existed in the form we imagine, except as
a patriarchal nightmare. 18 Each revision -each reading of the poem - strengthens the structure of inquisition, of
resistance, precisely at the point of indeterminacy, of its own limits. Why can we not see? What does our blindness
signify? To repeat, with increasing emphasis, the questions of this poem, is to ask why we have not yet imagined the
revolutionary possibility of a modern Leda who brushes this amorous bird aside
n his own time, is allocated to a future that, it is to be hoped, will be ours: the imagining of a Leda who can (at the
very least) refuse consent to Zeus, the positive equalizing of the sexes in a nonviolent society, where religion, if it is
to have a future, means that all are ligated to each other through the imitation of love (not war) without exception.

Charlotte Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" LEE OSER

modernist critics have tended to ig- nore Charlotte Eliot, a minor writer in the New England tradition and the mother
of T S. Eliot

Charlotte Eliot appears in works by Peter Ackroyd, Lyndall Gordon, and Herbert Howarth as a compelling figure
and a considerable influ- ence on her son's artistic developmen

y significant for the author of "Prufrock," however, is the review's dramatic sense of "divided allegiance" between
"duty" on one

side of the Atlantic and Europe, with its associations of poetry and art, on the other. The composition of "Prufrock"
dates from 1910, when Eliot was pur- suing his master's degree at Harvard. He finished the poem the next year in
Europe, at the age of twenty-two. Among other themes, the conflict between duty and love of European culture

I associate "retreats" with poetry because the urban setting of "Prufrock" evokes Eliot's study of French models.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" records his altered social and emotional responses to his native sur-
roundings as well as an accompanying shift from moral to aesthetic concerns. Where in "Prufrock" "streets" "follow
[you] like a tedious argu- ment," in "The Wednesday Club" "pleadings" of conscience "follow the mind's sublimest
flight." Charlotte's "pleadings" constitute a call for self-sacrifice that rings throughout the religious, literary, and
political writings of late-Puritan America-a call that is vigorously seconded by "The Wednesday Club."'0 Using the
plural of the first person, "we," she confidently assumes that the solitary mind in its "sublimest flight" will respond
to duty's command. By contrast, Prufrock's address, "you and I," bespeaks authorial self-division. Like a guilty
conscience, the "argu- ment of insidious intent" has the effect of separating "us" into "you" and "I." Eliot's
description of Laforguian irony as "a dedoublement of the per- sonality" is often cited by critics of "Prufrock" to
explain the poem's

motif of self-divisio

the Eliot of "Prufrock" encountered an incessant clash between his thought and his feeling. The failure of inherited
sys- tems of thought, especially in the areas of morality and religion, to arouse the required emotions in him
compounded the lack of accom- modation in those inherited systems for the emotions and feelings that he did
experience, no doubt intensely. The result was Eliot's early in- terest in Laforguian dedoublement. Self-division-a
psychic tug of war between duty and the self-indulgence of art-became his subject. Resuming the comparison of
"Prufrock" and "The Wednesday Club," we note that, after the parallels "retreat"/"retreats" and "follow"/"fol- low,"
there is another close likeness between the poems in the words "leads" and "lead." Where the Wednesday Club
"leads" in its "action," the "argument" of "Prufrock" is said to "lead" to an unspecified "over- whelming question."
Though Prufrock's "argument" and his "question" remain as vague as their setting, a clue for tracking his movement
of thought is provided by the systematically inverse parallels with "The Wednesday Club." Charlotte Eliot in effect
admonishes: "Do not re- treat; follow your conscience; we shall lead together in our action." Prufrock may be said to
mutter: "Let us retreat; a tedious argument will follow automatically, and it will lead to self-division."

Eliot in "Prufrock" was responding to his mother's argument for self-sacrifice, an argument for surrendering one's
private desires on behalf of a great Christian ideal. Of course, an argument for self-sacrifice need not be understood
in terms of crucifixion, but, like his mother, Eliot makes prominent use of the sacrificial themes of crucifixion and
mar- tyrdom in his writing.1

e poem's opening hinges. When he wrote "Prufrock," the poet T. S. Eliot, in some sense the Prufrockian "I,"
registered his resistance to the sacrifice of European poetry and culture on which his identity as an American Eliot,
conversely the Pru- frockian "you," was contingent

n. Rebelling against his heritage, Eliot takes wry aim at all things churchly in "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock."

0. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" the prophet no longer prophesies in the American wilderness; instead he
is silenced and somewhat comically disfigured. With the image of Prufrock's "head . . . brought in upon a platter,"
Eliot disrupted a long tradition of American Puritan iconog- raphy and implicitly repudiated a legacy of mission and
prophetic calling that survived within his immediate family

Prufrock's self-portrait of weeping, prayer, and fasting (line 81) recalls the ritual day of humiliation that Puritan New
England had formerly observed in response to social di- saster

4 Like the allusion to John the Baptist, Prufrock's fasting bespeaks an intimate knowledge of the reli- gious
traditions of New England, and implies the breakdown of those traditions. Much of the poem's skewed sermonizing
is directed by the author at his own heritage. Prufrock's parody of the biblical "Preacher" in Ecclesiastes shows Eliot
in full revolt against his ancestors. 25 In the fol- lowing passage, references to time evoke a missing narrative of
history and its homiletic expression, an attempt to reclaim a sense of "pur- pose under heaven" (Eccles. 3:1). F

A mock preacher celebrating a eucharist of "toast and tea," Prufrock lampoons the biblical idiom with sonorous but
empty phrases of mur- der and creation.26 Eliot is suggesting that the American Puritan er- rand, the legacy of
theocratic preachers, has failed to find present-day continuators: "all the works and days of hands / That lift and drop
a question on your plate" implies a momentous inheritance of others' time and labor that, in the trivial setting of
genteel society, can no longer inspire a spirit of self-sacrifice. The situation has its devilish side for the poet, who
found his epigraph in Dante's Inferno. In the persona of Prufrock, Eliot cannot in good conscience accept the solace
of aesthetic pleasure: to escape, self-indulgently, into the subjective time of the poem, the vehicle of his wordplay
and imagery, is to admit the loss of a redemptive history that it is his duty to realize.
But to claim this is not to re- ject other approaches to interpreting the poem, even though Charlotte Eliot's literary
influence on her son, and the entire issue of Eliot's Americanness, have generally been neglected by modernist
critics. To discover a new dimension in "Prufrock" is to bolster the case for the work's permanence