Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

272The Poetry of William Butler Yeatsinto the heroic orator. “Lapis Lazuli” and “The Gyres” propheticallyenvision a brutal and violent world; but they attempt to alter theprophet’s relation to vision, changing elegiac submission into activecelebration. We should be careful about equating Yeats with one poleof prophecy or the other: insofar as his prophetic lyrics of tragic joyare sublime and not fanatical, they inhabit the psychic and rhetoricalspace of both witness and legislator. The poetic activity of these poemsis “the shooting of the gulf ”—as Emerson defines “power”—betweenspectatorship and creation, which are both essential to prophecy (271).Without the defeated son there can be no father; without the witness,no legislator; and without the elegist, no Rocky Face.Kant warns, however, that the sublime may become fanaticism ifone goes “mad with reason” or, in the terms of Freud’s Group Psychologyand the Analysis of the Ego, if one allows the heroic father or politicianto replace the superego (Kant 116). We have already seen thatYeats’s lyric transformations of the curse approach such an extreme.Other late lyrics come dangerously close to celebrating the fanaticismof complete identification with the father and destructiveness, suchas the canceled “Three Marching Songs.” The apocalyptic impulsein Yeats sometimes approaches this extreme as well; it shares thealchemist’s “consuming thirst for destruction” of the world and the“half-written page,” the longing for a complete integration of self with“the desolation of reality” (Mythologies 269–70; Poems 289).Another group of Yeats’s visionary lyrics strays from the authenticdynamic of the sublime. If we think of apocalypse not as conflagrationbut as the disclosure and totalization of reality, Yeats writes manylyrics that assume an apocalyptic perspective toward history—thepanoramic or god’s eye view that Whitaker contrasts with thedramatic in Yeats’s writing. Poems like “The Valley of the BlackPig” and “Two Songs from a Play” are in a mode of prophecy thatso distances itself from the drama of history that it loses any senseof contingency and vulnerability—historical qualities allied withthe sublime as against the aesthetic necessity of the beautiful. Thesepoems illustrate what we might call Yeats’s prophetic binarism, forthey arrange history according to binary oppositions, much like themythic mind in Lévi-Strauss (“Structural Study” 177–81). In theextraordinary early note to “The Valley of the Black Pig,” Yeats setsup a series of paradigmatic opposites—light/dark, winter/summer,sterility/fruitfulness—a dualistic tendency reflected too in the poem’s