The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
W. B. Yeats · a run of lyrics and two song sequences, “Words for Music Perhaps” and “A Woman Young and Old”, gathered as one book · Macmillan, London, 1933 · the book as published; the smaller book of the same name printed in New York in 1929 and the later revisions of the Collected Poems are context, not the unit · scored on Yeats’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
A lyric book gathered by its poet: the great public and visionary poems in ottava rima and other eight-line stanzas, the dialogue, the numbered sequence of “Vacillation”, short occasional pieces, and two sequences of songs in tetrameter and trimeter with refrains
Mythos
The tower and its winding stair as the soul’s ascent and the nation’s half-dead summit; Sato’s sword wrapped in silk as the emblem of the Self; Byzantium as an afterworld the poem builds; Crazy Jane as a made archetype, the wise fool against the Bishop; Coole Park as the last house of a tradition, and its swan
Phase
Late Yeats, the poems of the years after The Tower and the Nobel, published by Macmillan in 1933 and carried into every Collected Poems since
Presentation
A run of lyrics, among them “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”, “Blood and the Moon”, the elegy for Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, the two Coole Park poems, “Swift’s Epitaph”, “The Choice”, “Byzantium” and “Vacillation” in eight numbered parts; then “Words for Music Perhaps”, with the Crazy Jane poems, the Tom the Lunatic poems and “After Long Silence”; then “A Woman Young and Old”
Register
From the visionary sentence carried across a stanza of long and short lines to the plain monosyllable, the refrain used as a hammer, the coarse word set in a lucid song, and the voice of a man in argument with himself
Scale
One soul in quarrel with itself; the body, sex and age; friends and the dead; the Anglo-Irish house and the nation, with Swift, Burke, Berkeley and Goldsmith; the sacred, from the Bishop to Plotinus; the river, the swan and the moon
Governing Proposition
A poet past sixty sets the soul that would refuse the world against the self that would live it again, and gives the quarrel two keys: the high stanza of the dialogue, of Byzantium and of the Coole poems, and the plain ballad of a mad old woman who answers a Bishop. The wager of the book is that the soul’s refusal and the body’s affirmation are each true and each require the other; that a life is to be affirmed whole, its folly and its shame included, rather than redeemed out of; and that the strictest made things, a long sentence held in a stanza or a refrain struck like a hammer, are where that antinomy can be held.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book is named for a stair. The Winding Stair and Other Poems was published by Macmillan in London in 1933, five years after The Tower, and it climbs inside the same house: a particular tower at Ballylee, with a winding stair, from which every voice in the book speaks. The work scored here is the volume as published, in Yeats’s English: a run of lyrics, then the sequence “Words for Music Perhaps”, then the sequence “A Woman Young and Old”. A smaller book called The Winding Stair, printed in New York in 1929, and the revisions Yeats made later in the Collected Poems are context, not the unit.
In “Blood and the Moon” the tower is made a figure of the nation. It is “Half dead at the top”, a summit of the Anglo-Irish line that has outlived its life, and the poem calls up the men of that line, Swift, Burke, Berkeley and Goldsmith, who are named again in “The Seven Sages”. The politics is asserted more than uncovered, and the poem’s argument leans on the tower’s emblem rather than on what it shows. But the emblem is built, not borrowed: a real house becomes the soul’s ascent and the nation’s broken height in the same figure.
Swift stands at the centre of that line, and the book gives him his own poem. “Swift’s Epitaph” makes a translation into an English poem of six lines with its own weight, and its “Savage indignation” is the bitter register that runs under the book’s height. The same bitterness speaks in a phrase that passed into common argument in Ireland, “Great hatred, little room”. The book begins its climb from there: from a tower half dead at the top, from inherited bitterness, toward a self that will refuse to be redeemed out of its own life.
Movement II
“A Dialogue of Self and Soul” is the book’s argument set as a quarrel. Its first half is in eight-line stanzas, and in it the Soul speaks for the ascetic ascent, the tower’s darkness, the world refused. The Self answers with Sato’s sword: a real gift, wrapped in silk from a court lady’s dress, made the emblem of a life lived in the world against the Soul’s tower of darkness. The poem needs both halves. The Self’s reply is earned only against the refusal; given only the Self, the affirmation would be cheap.
The reply is an inventory of humiliations. The Self goes back through a life, its folly and its shame, and the plainness of the high poem shows in the line “A blind man battering blind men”. Then it turns: “I am content to live it all again / And yet again”. The poem ends in “Everything we look upon is blest”. The claim is that a life is to be affirmed whole rather than redeemed out of, and it holds because the poem has first set down everything that would make the affirmation hard.
“The Choice” states the same condition as a law of making: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work”. Many artists have lived by that proposition and against it. Set beside the “Dialogue”, it is the other side of the quarrel: the Soul’s refusal and the Self’s affirmation, the life and the work, are each true, and the book will not let either win outright. That antinomy is its inner law.
Movement III
“Byzantium” is the book’s height. Its stanza of long and short lines enacts the movement between the mire and the image: the dome that disdains all that man is, “The fury and the mire of human veins”, the flames that cannot singe a sleeve. The poem constructs its own afterworld, a smithy of spirits carried on dolphins across a sea of images, and the stages of a purgation bear its weight. No stanza could go without the poem losing one of them.
Its syntax runs one sentence across lines of very different length without losing its hold, and the rhymes, full and off, are placed with complete control. In the last stanza the spirits and dolphins pile up until the sea floods the form, and the last line is that sea: “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea”. The making is the meaning here. The poem is a sentence of artifice set against the mire it names, and the strain between them is audible in the lines.
The poem has been glossed for ninety years without settling. Whether the golden bird and the images are triumph or sterility, whether “those images that yet / Fresh images beget” are the poet’s or the world’s, is still argued; it is among the most argued poems in modern criticism, and its stanza repays scansion as much as gloss. Part of the difficulty is Yeats’s system, which stands behind the poem and at times outside it, scaffolding a reader must bring in. The poem does not need all of it. Its afterworld is built in its own lines.
Movement IV
“Vacillation” is eight numbered parts in different measures, and its form is the vacillation it names: “Between extremities / Man runs his course”. Its fourth part is one of the book’s heights, and one of its plainest: a man of fifty sits in a London shop, and for twenty minutes his body blazes with happiness. Its seventh part is a dialogue again. The sequence keeps turning between affirmation and renunciation, and it does not come to rest.
The Coole poems carry the same quarrel into history. “Coole Park, 1929” and “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” make Lady Gregory’s house the last house of a tradition. The second, in ottava rima, turns from the river under the tower to the house and its people with no strain at the joins, and the stanza carries the aristocratic decorum the poem mourns: “We were the last romantics”. The swan on the water there is the soul, and it is one of the book’s heights.
The elegy for Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz sets two lives of the Rising against the picture of their youth: “Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle”. The poem sets that picture beside what came after, and it comes to a plain sentence: “The innocent and the beautiful / Have no enemy but time”. Friends and the dead, the house and the nation, are held in the book under the same law as the soul and the body; history is one of the places the antinomy is fought.
Movement V
Then the book changes key. “Words for Music Perhaps” is a sequence of songs in tetrameter and trimeter, with refrains, and its chief voice is Crazy Jane, a mad old woman who argues with a Bishop. Against his sophistication she has the ballad measure, plain words and the body’s case: “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent”, and “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement”. The coarse matter is set in a lucid form, and the plain form is the argument. Crazy Jane is the Self of the “Dialogue” in another key, a made archetype, the wise fool and harlot, as load-bearing as any figure in Yeats.
The sequence holds more than Crazy Jane. “After Long Silence” states the paradox of age in four words, “Bodily decrepitude is wisdom”. “The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus” carries the songs toward the sacred and the system, and the Tom the Lunatic group and some of the lighter songs repeat what the Crazy Jane poems have already won. “A Woman Young and Old”, older in part, follows as a third group, of the body, sex and age once more. It sits beside the second sequence rather than inside one design, and with the occasional pieces of the first part, “Statistics”, “Spilt Milk”, “The Results of Thought”, it marks where the book is a collection rather than one instrument.
The reach came after. Auden’s elegy for Yeats in 1939 answers this late manner, and Theodore Roethke’s late poems take the trimeter song and the body’s argument from these sequences. Against the free verse of the decade the book showed that rhyme, stanza and the ballad could carry metaphysics, politics and sex in one modern voice, and “Byzantium” became the century’s model of the visionary poem in rhyme. The book’s two keys, the stair and the song, make one claim between them: that the soul’s height and the body’s rent are each true, and that a life lived between them is to be lived again.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, taken on the poems and then on the book. The great poems pass it inside themselves: no stanza of “Byzantium” could go without the poem losing a stage of its purgation, and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” needs both the Soul’s ascetic half and the Self’s long reply, since the reply is earned only against the refusal. The book has a governing need too: the tower and its stair are the place every voice speaks from, and the two song sequences answer the high style with the body. What holds the axis is the rest. “Statistics”, “Three Movements”, “Spilt Milk”, “The Results of Thought” and “Oil and Blood” are notes rather than parts, and in “Words for Music Perhaps” the Tom the Lunatic group and some of the lighter songs repeat what the Crazy Jane poems have already won.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The book discloses a condition and states it so that it holds: a life is to be affirmed whole, folly and shame included, rather than redeemed out of. The Self’s answer to the Soul, “I am content to live it all again / And yet again”, ends in “Everything we look upon is blest”, and the claim is earned by the inventory of humiliations before it. Against the Bishop, Crazy Jane says what English verse had rarely said so plainly about body and soul: “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent”. “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work” is a proposition artists have lived by and against. What holds it below the top is the share of the disclosure that is Yeats’s private system, and the politics of “Blood and the Moon”, asserted more than uncovered.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height and frequency both. “Byzantium” is among the highest flights in modern English: the dome that disdains all that man is, “The fury and the mire of human veins”, the flames that cannot singe a sleeve, and the last line’s “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea”. The book rises again in the fourth part of “Vacillation”, where a man of fifty sitting in a London shop finds his body blaze with happiness for twenty minutes; in the close of the “Dialogue”; in the elegy for the Gore-Booth sisters, from “Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle” to “The innocent and the beautiful / Have no enemy but time”; and in the swan of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”. The register is often dreadful or bitter, Swift’s “Savage indignation” among it, and the axis is indifferent to that. What holds it from the top band is the second and third parts, which rise less often: the songs are sharp rather than elevated.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built here, not evoked. The tower with its winding stair is a particular house at Ballylee, and it becomes the soul’s ascent and the nation’s summit, “Half dead at the top” in “Blood and the Moon”. Sato’s sword, wrapped in silk from a court lady’s dress, is a real gift and becomes the Self’s emblem against the Soul’s tower of darkness. “Byzantium” constructs its own afterworld, a smithy of spirits carried on dolphins across a sea of images, and the structure of purgation bears the poem’s weight. Crazy Jane is a made archetype, the wise fool and harlot against the Bishop, as load-bearing as any figure in Yeats. Coole Park becomes the last house of a tradition, and its swan the soul. What holds the axis a step down is the system behind “Byzantium” and “The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus”, which at times stands outside the poems as scaffolding the reader must bring in.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The departure is real, but the larger turn was taken earlier. The great swerve of late Yeats, from the Celtic Twilight to a hard, syntactic, public speech in traditional stanzas, belongs to Responsibilities, Michael Robartes and the Dancer and The Tower. What is new here is the doubling of that mastered grand style with its opposite: songs in the ballad measure, given to a mad old woman and a lunatic, coarse in matter and lucid in form; and a turn from the tower’s bitterness toward affirmation in the “Dialogue”. The stake was real: past sixty, with the Nobel behind him, Yeats risked the dignity of the high style on songs of sex and excrement, and on a poem whose central claim is that one would gladly live the shame again. What holds the axis at the gate exactly is the rest of the wager, rhyme and stanza against the modernism that had moved off them, which was placed before this book.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The forms know things. In “Byzantium” the stanza’s long and short lines enact the movement between the mire and the image, and the last stanza piles its spirits and dolphins until the sea floods the form. The “Dialogue” is a dialogue because the knowledge is the quarrel: given only the Self, the affirmation would be cheap. “Vacillation”, eight numbered parts in different measures, is itself the vacillation it names: “Between extremities / Man runs his course”. The Crazy Jane poems need the ballad and the refrain, since the plain form is the argument against the Bishop’s sophistication. The ottava rima of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” carries the aristocratic decorum the poem mourns: “We were the last romantics”. What holds it below the top is the order of the whole, which is that of a collection, its parts set side by side rather than formed into one instrument.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is long and thick. “Byzantium” has been glossed for ninety years without settling: whether the golden bird and the images are triumph or sterility, whether “those images that yet / Fresh images beget” are the poet’s or the world’s; it is among the most argued poems in modern criticism. The “Dialogue” and “Vacillation” keep turning between affirmation and renunciation on every return, and the Crazy Jane poems yield to readings of gender, the sacred and the body that their first readers did not make. Formal depth counts as well: the stanza of “Byzantium” and the refrains of the songs repay scansion as much as gloss. What holds the axis from going higher is the lesser pieces, “Statistics” and its kind, which are exhausted at a reading.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is English poetry of the twentieth century, a field The Waste Land redirected. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the traditional stanza and the ballad could carry metaphysics, politics and sex in one modern voice, against the free-verse settlement of the 1920s, and “Byzantium” became the century’s model of the visionary poem in rhyme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Auden’s elegy for Yeats (1939) answers this late manner; Theodore Roethke’s late poems take the trimeter song and the body’s argument from Words for Music Perhaps; “The Choice” and the phrase “Great hatred, little room” became common property in Irish writing and argument. What holds the axis is that the reach is shared with The Tower and the last poems, and that it lies in the lyric of affirmation and the late style, not in a reorganisation of the art.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival over ninety-three years, in the span from seventy years to two centuries, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1 and the widest presence earns 9.2. The text survives whole, printed without break and carried into every Collected Poems since 1933, with minor revisions only; nothing in its form or fabric is charged. Presence is wide: “Byzantium”, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”, “Swift’s Epitaph” and the Gore-Booth elegy are taught and anthologised wherever English poetry is, and lines from the book pass into common use. What keeps it off 9.2 is the unit and the surface: as a volume it is read mostly inside the Collected Poems, and less often as a book than The Tower, and some of its private system and its Anglo-Irish politics date.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Yeats’s English, and at the height of his command. The syntax of “Byzantium” runs one sentence across lines of very different length without losing its hold, and its full rhymes and off-rhymes are placed with complete control. The ottava rima of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” turns from the river under the tower to the house’s last romantics with no strain at the joins. The songs show the opposite skill: plain diction, monosyllables, refrains used as hammers, and the high poem has the same plainness at need, “A blind man battering blind men”. “Swift’s Epitaph” makes a translation into an English poem of six lines with its own weight. The making bears the meaning: the affirmation of the “Dialogue” would not hold without the rhythm that carries it. What holds it a step off the top is that some lesser pieces are perfunctory and a few of the songs mannered.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, “Byzantium”, all spirit and artifice, and Crazy Jane’s “place of excrement”. They obey one law, the antinomy that “Vacillation” states and the “Dialogue” plays out: the soul’s refusal and the body’s affirmation are each true and each require the other, and Crazy Jane is the Self of the “Dialogue” in another key. The Coole Park elegies and “Blood and the Moon” come under the same law through the tower and the Anglo-Irish house, sites of that quarrel in history. The range the law covers is wide. What holds the axis lower than the others is that the book is a collection: the run of short occasional pieces, “Statistics”, “The Seven Sages”, “The Results of Thought”, is governed by the law only loosely, and “A Woman Young and Old”, older in part, sits beside “Words for Music Perhaps” rather than inside one design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a lyric book holds, and for a lyric book it holds much, and holds it together. Consciousness and the soul, in the “Dialogue”, “Vacillation” and “Byzantium”. The body, sex and age, in Crazy Jane, “After Long Silence” and “A Woman Young and Old”. Friends and the dead, in the Gore-Booth elegy and the Coole poems with Lady Gregory. The state and the nation, with history, in Swift, Burke, Berkeley and Goldsmith in “Blood and the Moon” and “The Seven Sages”, and in the Rising and its women. The sacred, in the Bishop, “The Mother of God” and Plotinus. The natural order, in the river, the swan and the moon. These are integrated through the tower and the antinomy, not listed. What holds the axis is what barely appears: labour and the common life, and the family only as lineage. The lyric form sets the ceiling; within it, the reach is high.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3. One sentence carried across the long and short lines of “Byzantium” without losing its hold, the ottava rima of the Coole poems turning with no strain at the joins, and the opposite skill of the songs, plain words and refrains used as hammers; the making bears the meaning. Next to it, The Sublime at 9.2, the height of “Byzantium” and the further heights of the “Dialogue”, “Vacillation”, the Gore-Booth elegy and the swan of Coole, and The Imperishable at 9.1, ninety-three years in print without break and taught wherever English poetry is.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3, held by the slighter pieces: “Statistics”, “Spilt Milk”, “The Results of Thought” and their kind are notes rather than parts, and some of the songs repeat what Crazy Jane has won. Next to it, The Encompassed at 8.4, where labour and the common life barely appear; The Swerve at 8.5, where the larger turn had been taken in the books before; and The Inner Law at 8.6, where the occasional run and the third sequence stand beside the design rather than inside it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly, at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below The Inevitable at 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 105.8, and the work stands at 8.8, a tenth below The Tower at 8.9; it is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of W. B. Yeats’s The Winding Stair and Other Poems, Macmillan, London, 1933: the book as published, a run of lyrics followed by the sequences “Words for Music Perhaps” and “A Woman Young and Old”, scored as one body. The smaller The Winding Stair printed in New York in 1929, the separate printing of “Words for Music Perhaps”, and Yeats’s later revisions in the Collected Poems are context, not the unit. Every axis is judged on Yeats’s English, with no translation between. The poems weighed most, “Byzantium”, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”, “Vacillation”, “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”, the elegy for Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”, “Blood and the Moon”, “After Long Silence”, “Swift’s Epitaph” and “The Choice”, are known closely, most of the lesser poems well, and nothing is argued from the particulars of those known less well. No text was in hand and nothing was measured on a text. English is quoted only where its words are certain. Facts that could not be verified are not given: among them the month of publication, the running order inside the first part and the poem that opens it, the number of poems in the book and in each part, the first and last poems of “A Woman Young and Old”, the date of the separate printing of “Words for Music Perhaps”, the dates of composition of single poems, the exact shape of the stanza of “Byzantium”, the wording of the close of the “Dialogue”, the critics who have written on “Byzantium”, and the particular poems and essays in which later poets answered the book.