Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

260The Poetry of William Butler YeatsThe Other of the Yeatsian sublime is that mind beyond our minds,Anima Mundi, the Daimon, the Mask, what we might also call (asYeats occasionally does) the sub- or unconscious, labeled the Reasonby Kant, the divine possessor by Longinus. In Yeats’s sublime poems,words and images seem to have an “independent reality,” invading themind from beyond it, each like an “emblem” that “sails into the sight”(Mythologies 284; Poems 244).Nevertheless, interpretations of the sublime that overemphasize thisthreat to the identity of the subject risk turning the sublime into mysticism,dressed up in Lacanian garb. 5 The sublime poet and the mysticshare the conviction that, as Yeats puts it, “the borders of our mind areever shifting,” but whereas for the mystic the energy flows in one direction,from Other into self, the sublime poet also reverses the direction,in a reaction-formation, believing that the self has produced what it hasheard (Essays 28). However hard Yeats tries to be a mystic, the lyric selfin his poems is rarely the passive vessel of the Daimon. Self asserts itsprerogatives over mystic Soul in many more lyrics than “A Dialogueof Self and Soul,” and poetic identity is generated by their agon. EvenSoul does not speak consistently in the rhetoric of self-abnegationbut instead opens the dialogue with a favorite Yeatsian command, “Isummon,” much as the seemingly mystic speaker of “All Souls’ Night”repeatedly asserts his provenance with the phrase “I call” (234; 228–29).In a declamatory poem that summons past and future, “To Ireland inthe Coming Times,” materia poetica is said to come “from unmeasuredmind,” but the paradox is that the poet’s imposed “measure” gives accessto the measureless Other (50). Without such heroic self-assertion, thepoet would remain, like Sappho in Longinus’s treatise, broken-tongued,in the same condition as Soul in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” whose“tongue’s a stone” (235), or as Soul in “Vacillation,” “[s]truck dumb inthe simplicity of fire!” (252). In the dialectic of the sublime, the poetmust rise from this momentary death, the tongue recover from itsmuteness. By analyzing the formal strategies of Yeats’s sublime lyricswe can concretize this general understanding of the poems’ to-and-frobetween psychic annihilation and assertion, terror and joy. 6II. STRUCTURE, IMAGERY, SOUND, AND RHETORICBecause the Yeatsian sublime often compresses the moments of itsdialectic, it does not always follow the clear Kantian stages of assertion