The Makings of a Music

Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats

What interests me is the relationship between the almost physiological operations of a poet composing and the music of the finished poem. I want to explore the way that certain postures and motions within the poet’s incubating mind affect the posture of the voice and the motion of rhythms in the language of the poem itself. I want to see how far we can go in seeking the origins of a poet’s characteristic ‘music’.

I chose the word ‘makings’ for the title because it gestures towards the testings and hesitations of the workshop, the approaches towards utterance, the discovery of lines and then the intuitive extension of the vital element in those lines over a whole passage. If you like, I am interested in the way Valéry’s two kinds of poetic lines, les vers donnés and les vers calculés, are combined. The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. It is my impression that this haunting or donné occurs to all poets in much the same way, arbitrarily, with a sense of promise, as an alertness, a hankering, a readiness. It is also my impression that the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his donné. If he surrenders to it, allows himself to be carried by its initial rhythmic suggestiveness, to become somnambulist after its invitations, then we will have a music not unlike Wordsworth’s, hypnotic, swimming with the current of its form rather than against it. If, on the other hand, instead of surrendering to the drift of the original generating rhythm, the poet seeks to discipline it, to harness its energies in order to drive other parts of his mind into motion, then we will have a music not unlike Yeats’s, affirmative, seeking to master rather than to mesmerize the ear, swimming strongly against the current of its form.

Of course, in any poetic music, there will always be two contributory elements. There is that part of the poetry which takes its structure and beat, its play of metre and rhythms, its diction and allusiveness, from the literary tradition. The poetry that Wordsworth and Yeats had read as adolescents and as young men obviously laid down certain structures in their ear, structures that gave them certain kinds of aural expectations for their own writings. And we are all used to the study of this kind of influence: indeed, as T. S. Eliot has attested, we have not developed our taste in poetry until we can recognize with pleasure the way an individual talent has foraged in the tradition. But there is a second element in a poet’s music, derived not from the literate parts of his mind but from its illiterate parts, dependent not upon what Jacques Maritain called his ‘intellectual baggage’ but upon what I might call his instinctual ballast. What kinds of noise assuage him, what kinds of music pleasure or repel him, what messages the receiving stations of his senses are happy to pick up from the world around him and what ones they automatically block out—all this unconscious activity, at the pre-verbal level, is entirely relevant to the intonations and appeasements offered by a poet’s music.

We have developed methods for tracing and expressing the relevance and significance of the first kind of influence, the literary influence, and much of the illuminating work on Wordsworth has been in this area. I remember with particular gratitude the late W. J. Harvey’s inaugural lecture at Queen’s University, in which he analysed the opening lines of The Prelude to show how those lines were influenced by the closing lines of Paradise Lost. Once it has been pointed out to us that Wordsworth’s joy in open country and his sense of release from the bondage of the city are consciously set in the penumbra of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, and that the language of Wordsworth’s lines invites us to read his freedom in the context of that expulsion, then the whole lift of the passage is increased, and the wave of Wordsworth’s feeling is rendered seismic by one discreet literary allusion.

But I seek my text a little further on in that passage, where the poet tells us that his poetry came to him on this occasion spontaneously and that he poured it out, told it to the open fields. Then come these four lines, precise, honest, revealing:

My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind’s

Internal echo of the imperfect sound;

To both I listened, drawing from them both

A cheerful confidence in things to come.

Although Wordsworth is here describing the activity of composing aloud, of walking and talking, what the poetry reaches into is the activity of listening. ‘My own voice cheered me’—in the words of the old joke, he is entranced by the exuberance of his own verbosity. The act of composition is a cheering one. But even though he is listening to the sound of his own voice, he realizes that this spoken music is just a shadow of the unheard melody, ‘the mind’s internal echo’. He is drawn into himself even as he speaks himself out, and it is this mesmerized attention to the echoes and invitations within that constitutes his poetic confidence. We need only recall for contrast the way W. H. Auden addressed himself to the discussion of the act of writing, always tackling it in terms of metre, stanza forms, philology, always keeping in front of us the idea of the poem as ‘a verbal contraption’, to see how intimately and exactly Wordsworth is touching into the makings of his music in those lines.

What we are presented with is a version of composition as listening, as a wise passiveness, a surrender to energies that spring within the centre of the mind, not composition as an active pursuit by the mind’s circumference of something already at the centre. The more attentively Wordsworth listens in, the more cheerfully and abundantly he speaks out.

We have ample evidence of Wordsworth’s practice of composing aloud. In The Prelude he tells us how he paced the woods with his dog running a bit ahead of him, so that the dog’s barking would warn him of strangers and he could then quieten his iambic drone and not be taken for an idiot. We have also the evidence gathered by the Reverend Canon Rawnsley among the peasantry of Westmorland that he was not always successful in passing undetected:

But thear was anudder thing as kep’ fwoaks off, he hed a terr’ble girt deep voice … I’ve knoan folks, village lads and lasses, coming ower by t’auld road aboon what runs fra Grasmer to Rydal, flayt a’most to death there by t’ Wishing Gate to hear t’ girt voice a groanin’ and mutterin’ and thunderin’ of a still evening. And he had a way of standin’ quite still by t’ rock there in t’ path under Rydal, and fwoaks could hear sounds like a wild beast coming frat’ rocks, and childer were scared fit to be dead a’most.

And elsewhere Rawnsley’s informant told of Mrs. Wordsworth’s difficulties also:

Mrs. Wudsworth would say, ‘Ring the bell,’ but he wouldn’t stir, bless ye. ‘Goa and see what he’s doing,’ she’d say, and we wad goa up to study door and hear him a mumbling and bumming through hit. ‘Dinner’s ready, sir,’ I’d ca’ out, but he’d goa mumbling on like a deaf man, ya see. And sometimes Mrs. Wordsworth ’ud say, ‘Goa and brek a bottle, or let a dish fall just outside door in passage.’ Eh dear, that maistly wad bring him out, wad that.

But the most instructive account of the poet’s habits is surely the one given by Hazlitt, who visited the Wordsworths at Alfoxden in June 1798. Hazlitt heard the poetry read first by Coleridge and then by Wordsworth. Admittedly, he does not actually witness Wordsworth in the process of composition, but he does tell us about the quality and sway of the poet’s speaking voice in his essay ‘My First Acquaintance with the Poets’:

We went over to Alfoxden again the day following, and Wordsworth read us the story of Peter Bell in the open air; and the comment made upon it by his face and voice was very different from that of some later critics! Whatever might be thought of the poem, ‘his face was a book where men might read strange matters,’ and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic tones. There is a chaunt in the recitation of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgement. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment. Coleridge’s manner is more full, animated and varied; Wordsworth’s more equable, sustained and internal. The one might be termed more dramatic, the other more lyrical. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.

Wordsworth’s chaunt acted as a spell upon the hearer, whether that hearer were Hazlitt or Wordsworth himself. It enchaunted. It was ‘equable, sustained, internal’, three adjectives which we might apply to the motion of Wordsworth’s blank verse also. The continuity of the thing was what was important, the onward inward pouring out, up and down the gravel path, the crunch and scuffle of the gravel working like a metre or a metronome under the rhythms of the ongoing chaunt, those ‘trances of thought and mountings of the mind’ somehow aided by the automatic, monotonous turns and returns of the walk, the length of the path acting like the length of the line. And I imagine that the swing of the poet’s body contributed as well to the sway of the voice, for Hazlitt tells us that ‘there was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell.’ The poet as ploughman, if you like, and the suggestive etymology of the word ‘verse’ itself is pertinent in this context. ‘Verse’ comes from the Latin versus which could mean a line of poetry but could also mean the turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he finished one furrow and faced back into another. Wordsworth on the gravel path, to-ing and fro-ing like a ploughman up and down a field, his voice rising and falling between the measure of his pentameters, unites the old walking meaning of versus with the newer, talking sense of verse. Furthermore, Wordsworth’s poetic voice, the first voice of his poetry, that voice in which we overhear him talking to himself, the motions of this voice remind me powerfully of the motions of plough-horses as described by the poet Edwin Muir:

Their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill

Move up and down, yet seem as standing still.

The high moments of Wordsworth’s poetry occur when the verse has carried us forward and onward to a point where line by line we do not proceed but hang in a kind of suspended motion, sustained by the beat of the verse as a hanging bird is sustained by the beat of its wing, but, like the bird, holding actively to one point of vantage, experiencing a prolonged moment of equilibrium during which we feel ourselves to be conductors of the palpable energies of earth and sky:

                              Oh, when I have hung

Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass

Or half-inch fissures in the slippery rock

But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed

Suspended by the blast which blew amain,

Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time,

While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,

With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind

Blow through my ears; the sky seemed not a sky

Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds.

This is perhaps an obvious moment, when the wind of heaven and the ‘corresponding mild creative breeze’ of inspiration sustain the voice and suspend the consciousness in its hovering. But it does not always require such extreme sensation to generate the trance. For example, at the end of that ‘equable, sustained internal’ narrative ‘The Ruined Cottage’, what Wordsworth calls ‘the calm oblivious tendencies/Of nature’ pervade the music, a music of coming to rest, of understanding:

She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.

I well remember that those very plumes,

Those weeds, and the high spear grass on that wall,

By mist and silent raindrops silvered o’er,

As once I passed, did to my mind convey

So still an image of tranquillity,

So calm and still, and looked so beautiful

Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,

That what we feel of sorrow and despair

From ruin and from change, and all the grief

The passing shows of being leave behind,

Appeared an idle dream that could not live

Where meditation was. I turned away

And walked along my road in happiness.

We know that the phrase ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ will apply to this, but it is too abstract, not kinetic enough. There is a cumulative movement in the Pedlar’s lines that does not so much move the narrative forward as intensify the lingering meditation, just as the up and down walking does not forward a journey but habituates the body to a kind of dreamy rhythm. And in this entranced state, the casual concerns of the mind, the proper sorrow for the wounded life of Margaret imaged in the overgrown cottage garden, such things are allayed by apprehensions of a longer, deeper tranquillity. To put it another way, ‘the one life of Joy’ imbues the music, is intoned by it, and can be apprehended from it. And nowhere do we experience this more potently than in the eight lines of ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

    I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

    The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

    She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

    With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The music begins with ‘slumber’ and ends with ‘diurnal’, and the eight lines turn on the poles of those sturdy vowels as surely, slowly, totally as the earth turning. Unless we can hear the power and dream in the line ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course’, I do not think we can ever properly hear Wordsworth’s music. The quintessential sound of it is in ‘diurnal’, a word that comes up again at the end of the skating passage in The Prelude:

Not seldom from the uproar I retired

Into a silent bay, or sportively

Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,

To cut across the reflex of a star

That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed

Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,

When we had given our bodies to the wind,

And all the shadowy banks on either side

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still

The rapid line of motion, then at once

Have I, reclining back upon my heels,

Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs

Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled

With visible motion her diurnal round!

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,

Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched

Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

The exhilaration of the skating, the vitality of the verbs, ‘gleaming’, ‘sweeping’, ‘spinning’, ‘wheeling’, the narrative push, the cheerfulness, to use one of the poet’s favourite positive words—all these things have their part to play in the overall effect of this writing. But what distinguishes it as Wordsworthian is the gradual allaying of the sensation which is not, however, a diminution of awareness. It is as if a lens of apprehension opens wide and holds open. It is achieved by pacing, a slow, gathering but not climactic movement, repetitive but not monotonous, a walking movement. We might say, in fact, that Wordsworth at his best, no less than at his worst, is a pedestrian poet. As his poetic feet repeat his footfalls, the earth seems to be a treadmill that he turns; the big diurnal roll is sensed through the poetic beat and the world moves like a waterwheel under the fall of his voice.

I introduce the water metaphor because any account of Wordsworth’s music must sooner or later come to the river, but before we do so, I want to linger in the wood above Dove Cottage where the poet occasionally composed. At the moment all is quiet there, but it is an active quiet, the late morning of 29 April 1802:

We then went to John’s Grove, sate a while at first. Afterwards William lay, and I lay in the trench under the fence—he with his eyes shut and listening to the waterfalls and the birds. There was no one waterfall above another—it was a sound of waters in the air—the voice of the air. William heard me breathing and rustling now and then but we both lay still and unseen by one another. He thought it would be as sweet thus to lie in the grave, and hear the peaceful sounds of the earth and just to know that our dear friends were near.

Dorothy and her brother are as intimate with process here as the babes in the wood, and if there is something erotic about the rustling of those leaves, there is something cthonic about the energies fundamental to the whole experience. Phrases like ‘diurnal course’ and ‘diurnal roll’ are underwritten by sensation and take their lifeline from moments like this. The couple listen, they surrender, the noise of water and the voice of the air minister to them. The quick of this moment is like the quick of the poem ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’: it dramatizes the idea of ‘wise passiveness’ and makes the listening ear as capable of gathering might into itself as Yeats’s ‘gazing heart’. All the typical Wordsworthian verbs have been guaranteed: powers sink in, mould, impress, frame, minister, enter unawares.

Wordsworth had to grope along the grains of the language to find the makings of a music that would render not so much what Hopkins called the inscape as the instress of things, known physically and intuitively at such times. His great strength and originality as a writer came first of all from his trusting the validity of his experience, from his courageous and visionary determination to ériger en lois ses impressions personnels. But the paraphrasable content of Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature would remain inert had he not discovered the sounds proper to his sense. Nature forms the heart that watches and receives but until the voice of the poet has been correspondingly attuned, we cannot believe what we hear. And so we come to the beautiful conception of the River Derwent as tutor of his poetic ear. The tongue of the river, he implies, licked him into poetic shape; the essential capacity was, from the beginning, the capacity to listen:

                                          Was it for this

That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,

And from his alder shades and rocky falls,

And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice

That flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou,

O Derwent, travelling over the green plains

Near my ‘sweet birth place’, didst thou, beauteous stream,

Make ceaseless music through the night and day

Which with its steady cadence tempering

Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts

To more than infant softness, giving me

Among the fretful dwellings of mankind

A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm

Which Nature breathes among the fields and groves?

Beloved Derwent, fairest of all streams,

Was it for this that I, a four years child,

A naked boy, among thy silent pools

Made one long bathing of a summer’s day,

Basked in the sun, or plunged into thy streams,

Alternate, all a summer’s day, or coursed

Over the sandy fields, and dashed with flowers

Of yellow grunsel; or, when crag and hill,

The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,

Were bronzed with a deep radiance, stood alone

A naked savage in the thunder shower?

As in the other passages already quoted, the movement of this one also enacts the insights it presents. The river flows into dreams and composes. The passage flows, shifts through times and scenes, mixes, drifts and comes to rest with the child composed into a stilled consciousness, a living tuning fork planted between wood and hill, bronzed in the sunset.

Moreover, in that original cluster of sound and image which Wordsworth divines at the roots of his poetic voice—a river streaming hypnotically in the background, a stilled listener hovering between waking and dreaming—in this cluster of sound and image we find prefigured other moments which were definitive in his life as a poet and which found definition in his distinctive music. I am thinking of the soldier whom he encounters at dawn in Book IV of The Prelude, and of the Leech Gatherer; and, in particular, of the way his listening to their speech becomes a listening in and sounding forth of a something else, that something which deeply interfuses silence with sound, stillness with movement, talk with trance, and which is radical to the sound and sense he makes as a poet:

The old Man still stood talking by my side;

But now his voice to me was like a stream

Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;

And the whole body of the Man did seem

Like one whom I had met with in a dream;

Or like a man from some far region sent,

To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

I hope I am not indulging in special pleading when I draw attention to the rhyming of ‘stream’ and ‘dream’, and notice that shortly after this ‘feet’ is rhymed with ‘repeat’, and then ‘me’, ‘silently’ and ‘continually’ are harmonized. I am convinced that these words are conducting us towards something essential to the poetry.

I have been talking about the ‘first voice’ of Wordsworth’s poetry, as that term was defined by Gottfried Benn and approved by T. S. Eliot, that is ‘the voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody’, the voice that is found to express ‘a dark embryo’, ‘a something germinating in him for which he must find words.’ Admittedly there is another voice in Wordsworth, which he was conscious of himself and which comes about, when, as he says in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the poet

bring[s] his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short periods of time perhaps … let[s] himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound[s] and identifies his feelings with theirs.

‘Peter Bell’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘The Thorn’ come to mind, yet in these poems I suspect that there was nothing fundamentally dramatic about Wordsworth’s surrender to the speech of the character. It was not a question of the poet’s voice performing a part but of the poet’s voice being possessed; it was not a question of technical cool, of finding a dramatic pitch, rather a matter of sympathetic warmth, of sinking into a mood of evocation. And in this the Wordsworthian process differs radically from the Yeatsian, just as the satisfaction and scope of their musics differ.

Both Yeats and Wordsworth liked to speak their lines, both intoned, yet both had difficulty in the actual writing of the poem. I have stressed the primary generating surrender that Wordsworth seems to have made to his donnés because it seems to me that that was definitive of his music. Yet it is also true that Dorothy’s Journals are full of evidence that the composition of long poems like ‘Michael’ affected him nervously and physically; he became sick and exhausted by the strain of the writing, and Mary Moorman even speculates that he may have felt his career as a poet menaced by these symptoms. Nevertheless, the strain does not show in the verse and Wordsworth continued to think of the poetic act as essentially an act of complaisance with natural impulses and tendencies.

It is otherwise with Yeats. With him, the act is not one of complaisance but of control. In fact, one of the earliest references to Yeats’s habit of composing aloud is in a letter written by his father in 1884, and there the father speaks of his son’s procedure as ‘manipulation’. ‘His bad metres arise’, J. B. Yeats wrote, ‘from his composing in a loud voice manipulating of course the quantities to his taste.’ Where we can think of Wordsworth going into a trance, mesmerized by the sound of his own voice, we have to think of Yeats testing and trying out different voices and deciding on which will come most resonantly from the mask. Consider, for example, his performance in the following passage, written near the end of his career:

Every now and then, when something has stirred my imagination, I begin talking to myself. I speak in my own person and dramatize myself, very much as I have seen a mad old woman do upon the Dublin quays, and sometimes detect myself speaking and moving as if I were still young, or walking perhaps like an old man with fumbling steps. Occasionally I write out what I have said in verse, and generally for no better reason than because I remember that I have written no verse for a long time.

The self-consciousness of this little scene is very different from the unselfconscious Wordsworth making his turns on the gravel path. There is something roguish in the passage, a studied, throwaway effect—the impetus behind the writing, for example, being put down casually to the fact that the poet happens to remember that another lyric is due about now. Nevertheless, we feel that Yeats’s account of himself acting out the poem’s origin, turning the donné into display, is proper to the Yeatsian posture. Yeats does not listen in but acts out. The origin of the poetry is not a matter of sinking in but of coming up against, the mature music is not a lulling but an alerting strain. Padraic Colum once spoke of Yeats’s poems having to be handled as carefully as a blade, and the image reminds us of Yeats’s own ambitions for the work, poems ‘the poet sings them with such airs/That one believes he has a sword upstairs’; poems ‘cold and passionate as the dawn’; plays where he hopes ‘the passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are holding down violence or madness—down, hysterica passio. All depends on the completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath.’ It is just such a note we hear in the major poems, as in ‘The Tower’:

Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worst evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades,

Or a bird’s sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades.

This is theatrical in its triumph, and many of the high moments in the Collected Poems share its rhetorical cast. At its worst that rhetoric is bragging; at its level best it has, to use Denis Donoghue’s finely tuned adjective, an equestrian authority, which arises from Yeats’s certainty that ‘all the old writers, the masculine writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung, and in a later age to be read aloud for hearers who had to understand swiftly or not at all.’ This Yeats who declared himself impatient with ‘poetical literature, that is effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain moments of strained lyricism’, sought a music that came ringing back off the ear as barely and resonantly as a shout caught back off a pillar in an empty church. It is indeed the music of energy reined down, of the mastered beast stirring:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast …

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned …

Grant me an old man’s frenzy,

Myself must I remake

Till I am Timon and Lear

Or that William Blake

Who beat upon the wall

Till Truth obeyed his call …

In Yeats, the voice muscles its way over the obstacle course of the form and flexes like an animated vine on the trellis of its metric and rhyme scheme. We are aware of the finished poem as an impressive thing in itself but somehow more impressive because of a threshold of difficulties now overcome. Those difficulties, of course, he exulted in: ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ complains of more things than the toil of artistic creation, but its rebounding utterance is won out of that central struggle:

The fascination of what’s difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt

That must, as if it had not holy blood

Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,

Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt

As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays

That have to be set up in fifty ways,

On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,

Theatre business, management of men.

I swear before the dawn comes round again

I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

The words fly off there like stones in a riot; this is not a region to wander in but a combat zone where rhymes collide and assertions strike hard music off one another like quarter-staffs striking. ‘My curse on plays/That have to be set up in fifty ways’—yet it is one of Yeats’s remarks, in Explorations, about the revision of his plays which throws light upon an important element in the makings of his music:

I have written a good many plays in verse and prose and almost all those plays I have re-written after performance, sometimes again and again, and every re-writing that has succeeded upon the stage has been an addition to the masculine element, an increase in the bony structure.

We can see how the bony structure has grown in this instance when we compare the sonnet with the first jottings in Yeats’s notebook:

Subject To complain of the fascination of what’s difficult. It spoils spontaneity and pleasure, and wastes time. Repeat line ending difficult and rhyme on bolt, exalt, colt, jolt. One could use the thought that the winged and broken colt must drag a cart of stones out of pride because it is difficult and end by denouncing drama, accounts, public contests, all that is merely difficult.

For Yeats, composition was no recollection in tranquillity, not a delivery of the dark embryo, but a mastery, a handling, a struggle towards maximum articulation. Paradoxically, one can employ George Bernard Shaw’s dictum on style—‘Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style’—to suggest the direction and endeavour of Yeats’s writing. Paradoxically, because Shaw’s arguing voice was anathema to the young poet who was to write later in Autobiographies that Shaw discovered it was possible ‘to write with great effect without music, without style either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional implication and prefer plain water to every vintage’. Yet it is this virtue of ‘effectiveness of assertion’ that is common to both.

There is a relation between the process of composition and the feel of the completed poem all through Yeats’s work. From the beginning things had to be well made, the soul had to be compelled to study, the images had to be masterful:

         A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these …

Scrubbing pavements, breaking stones—these things are contrasted with the craft of verse only to partake of its nature in the context of the poem itself. The abrasive and unyielding are necessarily present in the creative encounter, the mill of the mind has its work to do, for, as the lady affirms a little later in ‘Adam’s Curse’, ‘we must labour to be beautiful’. Thoughts do not ooze out and into one another, they are hammered into unity. ‘All reality’, Yeats notes in a ‘Diary Written in 1930’, ‘comes to us as the reward of labour.’ And at the end of his life, in ‘A General Introduction to my Work’, the theme of labour and deliberate effort comes up again: ‘I compel myself to use those traditional metres that have developed with the language.’ Yet even traditional metres had to be subdued to the Yeatsian element:

It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking; I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a more powerful and passionate syntax, a complete coincidence between period and stanza.

The concern is for syntax the controller, the compelling element that binds the constituent elements of sense into active unity.

But it is not only in Yeats’s writings about composition that this urge to mastery can be discovered. It becomes most obvious in his manuscripts, in the evidence there of relentless concentration and self-criticism, in the evolution of driving verse from metrical monotony and, in many cases, plain ugly sentences. It is clear that the unwavering ceremonious procedures of his verse depend upon the way he wrought strongly for finish in the act of composition itself. One is reminded of a phrase by that other ‘masculine’ talent, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who spoke of ‘a strain of address’; and Hopkins also spoke of ‘that feeling of physical constraint that I want’.

All this is relevant to the success of a poem like ‘Death’. ‘Death’ does not depend upon the way words woo themselves; the consonantal music and the short line work against any collusion between the vowels, the consonants and line-breaks acting as forcing agents, ramrodding the climax rhyme by rhyme:

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again.

A great man in his pride

Confronting murderous men

Casts derision upon

Supersession of breath;

He knows death to the bone—

Man has created death.

Again, it is that accumulating pressure in the movement, the sense of passion held down, that we are responding to. The poem’s arch is built on repetitions that strain away from one another by reason of the sense they are making, but press in upon one another by reason of the repeated vocable. Dread, hope, man, many times, death—the weight of the utterance forces these words against themselves and the rhymes on died/pride and breath/death form the unshakeable arch of the structure. Affirmation arises out of oppositions.

‘Long-legged Fly’ is a poem that is absolute in its poetic integrity, that commands us both by the stony clarity of its sounds and the deep probes of its images, though ‘images’ is too weak a word, is somehow inaccurate: it is more that every element in the poem is at once literal and symbolic. It is a transcendent realization of the things I was trying to get at: what is the relationship between the creative moment in the life of an individual and the effect of that moment’s conception throughout history?

That civilization may not sink,

Its great battle lost,

Quiet the dog, tether the pony

To a distant post;

Our master Caesar is in the tent

Where the maps are spread,

His eyes fixed upon nothing,

A hand under his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child

That nobody looks; her feet

Practise a tinker shuffle

Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find

The first Adam in their thought,

Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,

Keep those children out.

There on that scaffolding reclines

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

The creative mind is astraddle silence. In my reading, the long-legged fly has a masculine gender and while there is a sense of incubation permeating the whole poem, there is also a sense of intent siring. The image recalls the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, where God the Father’s mind moves upon chaos, and the image functions within the poem like the nerve of a thinking brain, a brain that concedes the clangour and objectivity of historical events, the remorselessness of action, the unstoppable flow of time. It concedes all this but simultaneously affirms the absoluteness of the moment of silence, the power of the mind’s motion along and against the current of history. The poem dramatizes concentration brought to the point of consummation. The act of the mind, in Michael Angelo’s case, exerts an almost glandular pressure on history and what conducts that pressure is the image in the beholder’s eye. In a similar way, as I have tried to show, poetry depends for its continuing efficacy upon the play of sound not only in the ear of the reader but also in the ear of the writer.

The first Kenneth Allott Memorial Lecture given at Liverpool University, January 1978