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Knocking on Pluto's Gates: W. B. Yeats, Centaurs, Spirits and a Golden BirdAuthor(s): Henry MerrittSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 1998), pp. 260-271Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484789 .

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Henry Merritt

Knocking on Pluto's Gates:

W.B. Yeats, Centaurs, Spirits and a Golden Bird

In September 1930 a medium told W.B. Yeats, "It is unfortunate that

spiritual change is impossible without illness."1 Yeats seems to have given the thought some considerable weight. Ten years earlier, in October 1920,

when he was composing "On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund

Dulac" ("Black Centaur")2 he had a number of important things on his

mind and one of them was the forthcoming operation to remove his

tonsils. "Black Centaur" marks an important transition in Yeats's poetic career, signalling a pivotal development in his poetic method.

Though he gave little sign of it to Cecil Salkeld (who provided the

poem's immediate catalyst)3 or to Maud Gonne (at whose house in

Glenmalure he was staying immediately before the operation)4 Yeats

had reason to be anxious: he knew he was in danger of dying from the

operation and told John Quinn that he no longer cared whether he lived or died.5 Oliver St John Gogarty, the surgeon who performed the

operation, recalled that Yeats was "to some extent a haemophiliac", prone to bleeding profusely, but with "a strange faculty for resigning himself to such circumstances."6 This had been shown by mishaps during

previous dental operations. The tonsillectomy was the first major surgical

operation that Yeats had. Mrs Yeats, consulting the stars, had come to

the conclusion that there was significant danger for him.

"Black Centaur" is not, strictly speaking, a poem which is a preparation for death: however, it shares several things with the volume Last Poems.

The first is a retrospective summary of what has been done, through a

look at past poetry. The second is a hardened, critical attitude towards

1. Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 322.

2. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter AUt and Russell K.

Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 422. (VP) 3. See Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats 1865-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1942, revised edition

1962), pp. 326-28 (Hone) for Salkeld's reminiscences. Yeats told Salkeld that he was

going to dedicate the poem to him. 4. The operation was performed in Dublin on 13 October 1920. See William M. Murphy,

Family Secrds (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), p. 443. Maud Gonne was reassuring about it, calling it "a very slight thing"; see Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats, Always Your Friend: The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938, ed. Anna MacBride White and A.

Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 412. (AYF) 5. W.B. Yeats, Letters of W.B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis,

1954), p. 663. (Utters) 6. Oliver St John Gogarty, Rolling Down the Lea (London: Constable, 1950), p. 73.

260



W.B. YEATS, CENTAURS, SPIRITS AND A GOLDEN BIRD

what was achieved in that earlier work. Where it differs, of course, is in

its outlook on the future: it plans what is to be done. In this respect it

signals the beginning of the new approach which will mark out The Tower.

Yeats 'read' his tonsillectomy as an illness which prefigured an important

spiritual (and poetic) change. Although Cecil Salkeld did not realise the

phrasing's significance, Yeats had expressed some of his concern during a walk

Suddenly, he pulled up short at a big stone and said: "Do you realise that eternity is not a long time but a short time ...?" I just said, I

didn't quite understand. "Eternity," Yeats said, "Eternity is in the

glitter on the beetle's wing

... it is something infinitely short..." I

said that I could well conceive "Infinity" being excessively small as well as

being excessively large. "Yes," he said, apparently

irrelevantly, "I was thinking of those Ephesian topers ..."

He pulled out of his pocket a very small piece of paper on which he had written 8 lines which had been perhaps ten times corrected. It was almost impossible for me to read a line of it. I only saw one

phrase which I knew was obsessing him at the time?for Yeats was at all times a man dominated

? sometimes for weeks on end

? by

a single phrase: this one was

"Mummy wheat." (Hone, pp. 326-27)

Salkeld described the picture as "a weird centaur at the edge of a dark

wood" with seven Ephesian "topers" in the foreground and "the glory of a great army" passing away into the distance; Yeats told him that an

examination of the picture "made the thing clear" (Hone, p. 328). What it

particularly seems to have clarified is not the iconography of a single

poem, but the way in which a new development might be undertaken

when the provinces of his body were in a state of increasing unrest, if

not in actual revolt. A set of crucial ideas is expressed in this passage:

eternity, in immediate prospect, is brief. This view of eternity is linked to Blake's Milton, in which all of the six thousand years of human history are equivalent to only one "pulsation of an artery", a single instant.7 In

their edition of Blake, Yeats and Edwin Ellis had glossed this passage with an emphatically surgical metaphor:

[The spiritual forces of the sons of Losl form the corporeal, and they divide Time into its divisions and unite it again like a healed wound till six thousand years are seen to be less than a moment.8

The Blakeian statement about the glitter on the beetle's wing reinforces

the impression that Yeats had been re-reading Milton recently or had

7. William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonsuch, 1957), p. 516, plate 28,1. 62 and plate 29,1.3.

8. William Blake, The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), vol. II, p. 287.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

been reminded of the image in recent poetic revision.9 Eternity is

symbolised by both the "Ephesian topers", and "mummy wheat"; they are both symbolic of death, entombment, and then re-birth. He seems to

be aware his death might be near and had already chosen "rebirth" after

death in his mystical system. He later communicated this decision to

Olivia Shakespear when he spoke of his choice of "rebirth" rather than

"deliverance from birth."10

After the operation had been successfully completed and he was able

to be jocular about the experience he wrote to John Quinn that:

George [had] consulted the stars and they said quite plainly that if I went to the London operator I would die, probably of hemorrhage. Then later we did another figure to know if I should go to the Dublin

operator. Then the stars were as favourable as possible

? Venus,

with all her ribbons floating, poised upon the mid-heavens!11

It had been the health-conscious Quinn who had urged the operation's

necessity on him as a cure for rheumatism as early as April 1920. Quinn had taken Yeats to his personal physician, Dr Fleming, in New York and

cautioned Yeats to "consult the best medical authority in London or one

of the very best" for surgery, which he deemed to be essential.12

The autumn of 1920 was a time of both crisis and resolution for

Yeats. Behind apparent indifference to the possibility of death, the

unacknowledged but significant prospect of mortality helped shape "Black Centaur"; moreover, his concerns, as this poem rhetorically 'resolves' them, provide a general and previously unrecognised frame

work not only for Seven Poems and a Fragment (Dundrum: Cuala, 1922) but for The Tower as a whole. They inform The Tower's dialogues and

tensions. Furthermore, "Black Centaur" has a close affinity with the first

and last poems in the volume, "Sailing to Byzantium" and "All Souls'

Night"; it is both proleptic and retrospective. Yeats periodically and

9. He alluded to Milton's phrase about the relationship of eternity and arterial pulsation in "A Meditation in Time of War" (VP, p. 406) which he sent to The Dial in the autumn

of 1920, pencilled on the last sheet of "Demon and Beast" (see Michael Robartes and

the Dancer: Manuscript Materials, ed. by Thomas Parkinson with Anne Brennan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 195). The poem appeared in the issue of November 1920. A gold beetle figures in Milton, p. 513 (plate 27,1.12 of the Keynes edition).

Yeats also recalled the phrase in A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 24. (AV (B)) 10. Letters, p. 720. At that time, October 1927, he made Sato's sword symbolic of his

choice of re-birth.

11. Letters, p. 663. The details of the astrological investigations are confirmed by W.B.

Yeats, Yeats's Vision Papers, edited by George Mills Harper, assisted by Mary Jane

Harper (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. Ill, p. 52. (YVP3) Whitaker's Almanack for

1920 records simply that "Venus, like Mercury, sets in the early twilight, due W at

the beginning of the month, W.S.W. at the end. Magnitude-33.3." 12. John Quinn, The Letters of John Quinn to William Butler Yeats, edited by Alan Himber

and George Mills Harper (Epping: Bowker, 1983), p. 238. Quinn was not confident

about Gogarty's abilities.

262




regularly 're-made' himself. "Black Centaur", originating in the shadow

of death, provides the blueprint for one of the most important of his

changes in artistic method and focus as well as the move towards

"making his soul". As if to illustrate its centrality, when the volume The

Tower was originally printed, "Black Centaur" was positioned at its exact

half-way point, being the eighteenth poem of the thirty-six poems.13 Hazard Adams has noted one aspect of its pivotal nature when he pointed out that it signals an end to "a poetry of psychological crisis and repetition that he has now passed through."14

There have been many discussions of "Black Centaur", most of them

contradictory and of varying plausibility. Interpretations of the centaur

and its accompanying parrots as symbols, while not as extensive as those

involved in "die great sphinx hunt" that "The Second Coming" initiated, have been wide-ranging. None of them, with the exception of Elizabeth

Bergmann Loizeaux's Yeats and the Visual Arts,15 has really considered

the essential nature of this particular centaur and why it should be

especially linked with the artist Edmund Dulac. In its first printing in

Seven Poems and a Fragment its title was simply "Suggested by a Picture

of a Black Centaur"; the link with Dulac ? and the abandonment of

Salkeld ? was established only in 1928 with the publication of The Tower.

Even then, Loizeaux does not consider a centaur's immediate relevance:

it is a composite creature. Indeed, most of the images Dulac created to

Yeats's order were composites: the gold signet ring with its hawk and

butterfly (symbolising logic and intuition?see Yeats's note to The Tower,

VP, p. 827); the portrait of Giraldus for A Vision (which was both Yeats

and Giraldus); the masks for At the Hawk's Well which fused personality and archetype ("Mr. Edmond [sic] Dulac ...

taught me the value and

beauty of the mask and rediscovered how to design and make it"16); and the centaur. Dulac became closely associated with the creature. He

designed male and female centaurs for a bedspread to be embroidered

by Lily Yeats for the bed at Ballylee; he illustrated Hawthorne's

Tanglewood Tales with many black centaurs on the end-papers ?

although Hawthorne's Chiron is emphatically white17 ? and he made many

pictures of centaurs for his own personal purposes.18

13. The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1928). The later edition of "Fragments" brought it to

nineteenth of thirty-seven poems. 14. Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats's Poems (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press,

1990), p. 171.

15. London: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

16. W.B. Yeats, Preface to Four Plays for Dancers, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B.

Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 1305.

17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tanglewood Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America,

1982), p. 1437.

18. See Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts, pp. 137-38 and Colin White, Edmund Dulac

(London: Studio Vista, 1976). Dulac came to adopt the centaur as a personal symbol,

choosing it for his bookplate.

263




As a composite creature from traditional Graeco-Roman mythology a centaur has special resonances. Rodin, in particular, had been obsessed

with specifically black centaurs. It should not be forgotten that in 1903

Yeats had direct exposure to Rodin's work. He was also influenced by his

friend Arthur Symons who was later to write of his personal encounters

with Rodin in Studies in Seven Arts}9 Yeats offered "a little essay called

perhaps 'the black centaur'" to the Duchess of Sutherland.20 Rodin's

The Gates of Hell was originally populated by black centaurs: in one of

the first versions of this work a troop of them formed a decorative frieze

framing the central panels;21 Rodin's The Centauress is likewise an icon

of division. Originally male and entitled VAme et le Corps, it illustrated

the tension between the two. Comte Robert de Montesquiou recorded:

Finally Rodin gave the title The Soul and the Body to this hybrid being like a centaur stretched out; a human torso blending into a horse's

body, as if in a vain effort to separate human nature from the beast's,

thought from animal life.22

Montesquiou also remarked that "The Centauress" would be admirable

for a mausoleum. The centaur's very existence can be seen as an expression of struggle, and of opposition.

Yeats had considered the creature before: a centaur figured prom

inently in his vision at Tullyra Castle in June 1897.23 The Autobiographies' account of the interpretations of the vision by Golden Dawn members

was preceded by a message from a spirit named "Megarithma". Shortly before the centaur/ archer vision (the most extensively described and

annotated vision in his public works), Yeats had been given a spirit message through Olivia Shakespear in a semi-trance state. His account

of this, hard by the description of the centaur, is particularly important:

A certain symbolic personality who called herself, if I remember

rightly, Megarithma, said that I must live near water and avoid woods "because they concentrate the solar ray". I believed that this

enigmatic sentence came from my own demon, my own buried self

19. Arthur Symons, Studies in Seven Arts (London: Constable, 1906), p. 15.

20. WB. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, edited by John Kelly and Ronald

Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol. 3:1901-1904, p. 422. 21. See John L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin (Philadelphia: Philadelphia

Museum of Art, 1976), p. 200. 22. "Enfin Rodin intitule VAme et le Corps cet ?tre hybride qui ressemble a un Centaure

?tir?; un torse d'homme qui se prolongue hors d'un corps de cheval, comme dans un vain effort de separer I'humanite' de la bestiality, la pensee de la vie animate."

"L'Animateur", Altesses Serenissimes (Paris: Society d'Edition et de Publications, 1907),

p. 122.

23. See The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 2:1896-1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John

Kelly and Deirdre Toomey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 658-63 for a full

presentation of the centaur/archer vision and its development in Yeats's thought.

264




speaking through my friend's mind. "Solar", according to all that I learnt from Mathers, meant elaborate, full of artifice, rich, all that resembles the work of a

goldsmith, whereas "water" meant "lunar"

and "lunar" all that is simple, popular, traditional, emotional. But

why should woods concentrate the solar ray? I did not understand

why, nor do I now, and I decided to reject that part of the message as an error. I accepted the rest without difficulty, for after The Wanderings of Usheen, I had simplified my style by filling my imagination with

country stories. My friends believed that the dark portion of my mind

? the subconscious ? had an incalculable power, and even

over events. To influence events or one's own mind, one had to draw

the attention of that dark portion, to turn it, as it were, into a new

direction. (Autobiographies, pp. 371-72)

In his Memoirs Yeats recalled Olivia Shakespear's evocation of these

expressions, adding an important personal phrasing:

Instead of plunging as I would now into the abyss of my own mind,

perhaps in sleep, taking first upon me the form perhaps of some symbolic beast or bird, and only using the seership of another as subsidiary, I

sought the advice of Diana Vernon. She obtained these sentences,

unintelligible to herself: "He is too much under the solar influence. He is to live near water and to avoid woods, which concentrate the

solar power."24

It is almost certain that the image of the centaur at the edge of the dark

wood in "Black Centaur" arises from the same sources and is intended to utilise many of the same resonances. It defines his 'opponent' in this

particular quarrel with himself and has a great deal in common with

"The crafty demon and the loud beast/ That plague me day and night" of "Demon and Beast" (VP, p. 399), a poem Yeats was revising just before

his tonsillectomy. In A Vision Yeats wrote that in his own phase (the seventeenth), when

the intellect is out of phase, it will

be subject to nightmare, for its Creative Mind (deflected from the

Image and Mask to the Body of Fate) gives an isolated mythological or abstract form to all that excites its hatred.25

In "Black Centaur" the centaur is just such a mythological form, one

which has excited hatred until its 'horse-play' has become murderous.

To be true to his phase, with mortality a strong possibility, he must strive more than ever towards unity.

24. W.B. Yeats, Memoirs, edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan), 1972, p. 100.

Emphasis added.

25. W.B. Yeats, A Critical Edition of Yeats's A Vision (1925), edited by George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 77. (AV(A)) (See also pp. 142

43 of AV(B).)

265




The poem's parrots have been seen in almost as many ways as the

centaur, representing, at various times, the dangers of mimetic art,26

popular Irish culture27 (after all, they are green), Yeats's dealings with

the supernatural28 and even "art too full of the otherworldly and of the

intellect."29 Yeats had even acquired a parrot himself in 1920 to amuse

his daughter and was teaching it to speak.30 It might be simplest, how

ever, to see the parrots as defined by opposition to the goldsmiths' work:

they are 'natural', speaking only what is learnt and of what is past, not

of what is "passing or to come". If the poet lives he can guard against the dangers of which "Megarithma" had warned.

If one examines the 'transaction' in "Black Centaur" it is possible to

see the manifesto for The Tower emerge, providing the grounds for his

're-making' of himself. The speaker of the poem has come to two specific and linked decisions: he is now ready to take up a station keeping watch

at the edge of the Dantesque selva oscura while, effectively, bequeathing the centaur to a younger man, Dulac; and he rejects bread, made in the

"mad abstract dark", in favour of "full flavoured wine". In view of the

earlier message from "Megarithma", Yeats seems to be asserting that he

himself is now able to confront "the solar ray" and to come to terms

with "all that resembles the work of a goldsmith". The "system" of his

artifice will not be dependent on the versification, but on systematisation of thought; becoming synthetic, it can leave "the peasantry". In addition,

following the hint of communion imagery, he is dismissing the bread

("corpus") for wine ("sanguina meaf/). The particular struggle for unity of

being between the body and the soul, physically represented by the

centaur, is now to be put aside. The Tower, after all, is largely dedicated

to the theme of the old man "making his soul" and coming to terms

with the decay of the body. There can, for better or worse, be no further

discourse with the creature. Though it has been loved "better than my soul for all my words" (with the word "for" carrying its oppositional

meanings "because of" and "in spite of"), its mask-function, its nature as a living symbol must be suspended. It has outlived its usefulness and

even grown murderous. The ageing man who had once thought "all art

should be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its back and its strong

legs" (Autobiographies, p. 191) has discovered that the metaphorical creature could be positively destructive in its kicks. The offering of wine

to the centaur, with the thought that it will induce a "long Saturnian

26. W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats: The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990), p. 666.

27. John Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to W.B. Yeats (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959),

pp. 189-90.

28. P.ThM.G. Liebregts, Centaurs in the Twilight: W.B. Yeats's Use of the Classical Tradition

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 326-27.

29. Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts, p. 141.

30. See AYF, p. 402.

266




sleep", is a symbolic putting-to-rest of a particular sort of struggle which

has served its important purpose in the past but can do so no longer.

Keeping "watch" is, after all, the chief prerequisite for having a "vision".

The centaur is clearly "lunar" for Yeats. In 1915, in "Lines Written in

Dejection", he had written,

The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished; I have nothing but the embittered sun;

Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,

And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun. (VP, p. 344)

In the poet's 'dejection' the centaur, associated with the moon (and therefore with "simple, popular, traditional, emotional" qualities), had

deserted him; now it can be finally dismissed by him. Yeats the artificer

can, if he survives, accept the "solar" and make use of "all that resembles

the work of a goldsmith" himself.

Chronologically, "Black Centaur" is one of the earliest of the poems in The Tower. Of those poems in the volume that can be dated with relative

precision31 it is antedated only by "The New Faces" (1912), "Owen

Aherne and his Dancers" (1917), and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"

(1919). Yeats needed a new impetus at several crucial points in his life. Richard

Ellmann observed:

the Golden Dawn failed ultimately to supply it because it was too much a part of his old thought. The visions which he could produce

through symbolic manifestations were limited, as he came to realise; the impersonal and inhuman forms which he evoked through

Golden Dawn methods were totally unlike the richly individualised

supernatural beings of the peasant tales. Then too, they became

difficult for him to evoke.32

The dismissal of the mask of the centaur is the signal for the beginning of a new phase. With his mortality in immediate view he is willing

?

and able ? to come to terms with the question of the "solar" and its

implications of artificiality: "there is none so fit to keep a watch" (1.15), even though physically he was far from "fit". He can approach "The

Gates of Pluto". The literal "horse-man" can be passed by.

Following the tonsillectomy (and a post-operative haemorrhage), Yeats

told John Quinn that he had been

preoccupied with my possible end. I was looking, secretly of course, for a dying speech. I rejected Christian resignation as too easy, seeing that I no longer cared whether I lived or died. I looked for a good

31. Only two poems, "Wisdom" and "The Hero, The Girl and The Fool", cannot.

32, Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 194.

267




model (I have always contended that a model is necessary to style), but could think of nothing save a certain old statesman who, hearing a duck quack, murmured "Those young ducks must be ready for the table", and added to that "Ruling passion strong in death".

(Letters, pp. 663-64)

The rejection of "Christian resignation as too easy" and the recollection

of Pope's Epistle to Cobham with its resonance of spiritual indomitability

give strong hints of what was to emerge after the original crystallisation of thought.

After the operation and his return to Oxford, he began work on "All

Souls' Night" (VP, pp. 470-74). It was the first poem he wrote after the

tonsillectomy and follows the lead given by the centaur's recent retire

ment. It is textually linked as well: when it was published as the opening poem of Seven Poems and a Fragment in 1922 (Dundrum: Cuala Press), it

appeared immediately preceding "Black Centaur".

A glass of wine that he had decanted for the symbolic centaur is now

poured out for his three former Golden Dawn associates, W.T. Horton, Florence Emery and MacGregor Mathers. They have died; he, though he had approached death, is still alive. Instead of golden dawn, though, it is deep Oxford midnight and it is one night after Samhain eve, which

signalled Hanrahan's spiritual change.

Scarcely two months before, the Instructor "Diomertes" had heard

the Oxford bells striking midnight and when they had finished had said, "Sounds like that give great pleasure to us" (YVP3, p. 41. The entry is

for 1 September 1920). The bells seem to give great but not unmixed

pleasure to Yeats as well for they mark the time, on Tuesday the second

of November, that he will poetically approach the "Gates of Pluto". This

phrase was to be the title of the last section of the 1925 A Vision, also

concluded by "All Souls' Night". Earlier in that same book Yeats had

written:

I think especially of the 21st Phase which was at times so anarchic, Rodin [in that Phase himself] creating his powerful art out of the

fragments of those Gates of Hell that he had found unable to hold

together ?

images out of a personal dream, "the hell of Baudelaire not of Dante", he had said to Symons.33

Now Yeats, approaching the same centaur-haunted gates, attempts to

bind together his ideas through the two artifices of verse and systemised

thought, to hold together that which Rodin and the Golden Dawn trio

had been unable to. In many ways Yeats himself is now all that is left of

the original Golden Dawn and its early hopes. None of the three 'scholar

33. AV(A), p. 211 (of Yeats's text). Symons's comments on Rodin are in Studies in Seven

Arts (see above), p. 15.

268




gypsies' (unlike Yeats) has chosen rebirth rather than deliverance from

birth and none has left much behind.

Each of the three visionaries had retreated to isolation, loneliness and

literal obscurity, putting a personal vision in place of the larger, brighter vision of the Golden Dawn. Horton was devoted to the momentarily

bright but transitory platonic love of Auclrey Locke (1. 22) after his

"mind's eye" turned to her. Emery/Farr withdrew to the school in Ceylon

"among dark skins" (11.46-48) after seeing wrinkles in her face in a mirror.

And Mathers sank into lonely "unknown thought" (1. 75). In all three cases there was a sort of failure of will, a shrinking from vision, and they have left virtually nothing behind. In "Black Centaur" Yeats himself had

been at the edge of the dark wood but, unlike them, he has not retreated.

He has been to the gates of death, seen a visualisation which literally "made the thing clear" and has returned with "mummy truths to tell."

Now his glance, unlike their inward-turned and self-reflective glances, will run like the path of "Samekh" from Hell to Heaven. Although he is

"unilluminated" in their terms, he is "half contented to be blind" (1. 70), for he can create a poem. He has not had their type of vision; he has

something greater. In "Black Centaur'"s visual terms, he is fit to keep watch.

Though it filled the role of epilogue, both for The Tower and both ver

sions of A Vision, "All Souls' Night" was, in fact, near The Tower's starting

point. It was also the first poem written to the new agenda proclaimed in "Black Centaur". In the poem's transactions the three spirits are

transcended. They have had visions, but Years foresees a vision. Red

Hanrahan shrank from the supernatural offerings on Samhain eve; so

Yeats shrank from full commitment to the world of the spirit. In the end

Hanrahan had, like Yeats, what was left: poetry. It was for this that he

now needed Hanrahan's "mighty memories" ("The Tower", 1.104). That poetry, the vehicle for the incantatory thought, has ecstasy as its

aim. The ecstasy is emphatically not for the three spirits of "All Souls'

Night"; they are already literally "ecstatic", out of their bodies. It is for

the reader and for Yeats himself. The "thought" that the speaker proposes in "All Souls' Nights"'s last stanza will be constructed through sys tematised meditation, transcendentally reaching to both Heaven and Hell

like the arrow-shot of the centaur/archer. This is the same "straight line"

of "thought" (as opposed to the curving, wandering line of "nature") that he calls "the mark of saint or sage" in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae34 and

it is related to the Cabbalistic path "Samekh". It must be "held tight" until it is mastered by meditation and provides an advance public notice

of the system that will follow and will later be described in Explorations

34. W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959), p. 340.

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(p. 394) as "a symbolic system displaying the conflict in all its forms":

the structure underlying A Vision.

Only when we are saint or sage, and renounce experience itself, can

we, in the imagery of the Christian Cabbala, leave the sudden

lightning and the path of the serpent and become the bowman who aims his arrow at the centre of the sun. (Mythologies, p. 340)

In other words, it is only after renunciation of experience that the "solar" can be confronted. "All Souls' Night" is at once a poem of farewell to

three dead friends, explorers of the occult, and a sort of valediction to

the Golden Dawn, following on from the valediction to the centaur in

"Black Centaur". The three friends had flown from artifice; Yeats can

embrace it. All three changed, leaving little but void. Yeats and his wife were very soon to abandon membership of "Stella Matutina" to pursue the forms and concepts that had come through "The Instructors".

What had begun as anxiety about an operation, an interaction between

images and a pivotal thought prompted by Salkeld's water-colour, became one of the main underpinnings of The Tower as a whole.

It was one of the tasks of The Tower's official front door, "Sailing to

Byzantium", to recapitulate his coming to terms with the "solar" and to

re-confirm the centaur's slumber. Although it was written six years after

his tonsillectomy (and after other bouts of illness) it is informed by the same central agenda as "Black Centaur" and, as Jon Stallworthy pointed out, is "conscious of the presence of death".35

When Yeats described his reverie of Byzantium in the 1937 version of

A Vision, it was presented in reference to an artificer, a "philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions".36 Byzantium has a great deal to do with impersonal craft and artifice. It is not surprising that in "Sailing to Byzantium" he should choose such "a form as Grecian

goldsmiths make" (VP, p. 408). It is consonant with "Black Centaur"

and with "Megarithma"'s warning. The poem is a confession of craft, an expansion of "Black Centaur"'s thought, as well as a map for the

whole volume. He can now plunge "into the abyss" of his own mind,

taking "the form perhaps of some symbolic ... bird." The struggle in

which the soul is "fastened to a dying animal" (1.22), reminiscent of the

centaur's nature, is to be resolved through the creation of a golden bird,

through "artifice", as Eternity itself was shaped by Blake's sons of Los.

"Sailing to Byzantium" presents its renunciation of the world of the

"natural" and the oxymoronic "dying generations" in favour of the

eternity of the "artificial" sages in mosaic; instead of the silent scarecrow

35. Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1963), p. 90.

36. AV(B),p.279.

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upon a stick (for the body eventually will be silent) there is to be song. The drowsy emperor, unlike the centaur, is to be kept awake by the bird's

singing; in its self-contained eternity the bird's function is to be more or

less that of Keats's urn, retrospective, monitory and vatic. The wall's

gold mosaic and the sages' straight line of thought offer an escape from

the doom of scarecrow and of declining body. Decrepitude can lead to

wisdom; the old clothes upon a stick that might scare a bird can be

transformed through the exercise of art, of song into the immortal. Mean

while, the centaur can sleep on in its Ephesian slumber, together with

Horton, Emery and Mathers; it has no place in Byzantium. "Unity of

being" can exist only in the soul.

Edmund Ehilac, who had been bequeathed the centaur, recognised this process of transformation through ordering very clearly indeed when

he tried to sum up his experience of his friend:

I don't know much about poetry but I don't think I am far wrong in

saying that Yeats's poetry is, in the main, based on images and

patterns. If he took an interest in occultism, in symbols and in

astrology, if he had a love of ritual, if he liked aristocratic culture, it was because he was always looking for a design into which he could fit the world, his life, his emotions and in consequence his work.37

The "artifice of eternity" in which the golden bird sings is ordered in

these ways. The singing-masters standing in God's holy fire can become

the mentors of the soul in a way that the "natural" fish, flesh and fowl ?

and the centaur ? cannot. "Black Centaur" showed this prototypical

design for the world of The Tower; "Megarithma"'s advice to live near

water and to avoid woods could be safely disregarded, whether at

Oxford, at Ballylee, or even at Merrion Square. The "solar ray" could be

harnessed, focused, and concentrated, to illuminate vision.

37. "Yeats As I Knew Him", Irish Writing (no. 8:1949), p. 78.

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