Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of William Butler Yeats 271the sky in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” prefiguring apocalypticcompletion and stirring the poet to curse his own work:That image can bring wildness, bring a rageTo end all things, to endWhat my laborious life imagined, evenThe half-imagined, the half-written page. . . . (209)Writing is a veil between the poet and integration with the final formof reality—death. The act of cursing his own work assimilates the poetto the destructive “winds of winter,” winds that erase the word and theworld (209). Attempting to evade death, the poet identifies with it.The transcendental impulse of the sublime is ultimately apocalypticand self-destructive—a rage not only against order but also againstthe self and language.IV. PROPHECY, APOCALYPSE,AND THE POLITICS OF THE SUBLIMEAnother modality of the sublime, prophecy has long been thought tobe related to the curse, and it too can help us interpret tragic joy inYeats. 16 Twice in Richard III, for example, Shakespeare tellingly misremembersQueen Margaret’s earlier “prophecies” as “curses” (3.4.15–18,5.1.25–27). James Kugel remarks in his analysis of Hebraic prophecy:“the prophet’s speech had always been powerful, effective; it could besaid of him what was said of the soothsayer Balaam ben Be’or, ‘thosewhom you bless are blessed, and those whom you curse are cursed’(Num. 22:6)” (81). As speech acts that simultaneously announceand transform the shape of reality, prophecy and the curse unite theword with divine authority, the transcendental signifier. But whereasthe curse more obviously alters world and word by disfiguring them,the central difficulty about prophetic utterance, and about Yeats’sprophetic lyrics, is the relation between passive witness and activetransformation. In the tropes of Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry,” a documentthat Yeats quotes extensively and approvingly, is the propheticpoet “mirror” or “legislator”? In the imagery of the sublime, is he thedefeated son or the violent father? The rhetoric of prophecy inevitablydraws on both strands of figure, hoping to turn the interpreter ofreality into its creator, just as the sublime converts the passive victim