Curing Oneself of the Work of Time: W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory

Abstract

Curing Oneself of the Work of Time: W. B. Yeats’s P u rg a to ry Natalie Crohn Schmitt In a world overcome with realism and the logic of science Yeats wrote religious drama. He wrote for people who had no communal mythology and for those for whom mythology had lost its religious significance. Christianity, Yeats believed, had be­ come a doctrine of the church, not an affirmation of religiousness. Yeats’s history as a playwright is one of tireless confrontation with the fact that there were no terms given to him in which he might convincingly write dramas conveying the religious ex­ perience. His continuing effort was to invent them and to try to infuse conventional dramatic forms with the dynamism of re­ ligious experience. This was no easy task; to accomplish it Yeats had to overcome the logical reasoning processes of his audience. Yeats wrote a dance play about a swineherd who, after being be­ headed, sang—and reason leads us to assume that Yeats did not believe that beheaded men can sing and that the story is purely fanciful, at best emblematic. 1 Yeats wrote a more realistic prose play about Christ’s resurrection—and reason provokes us to ask whether Yeats did or did not accept the Resurrection as fact.2 In both instances Yeats was trying to give account of and to pro­ vide his audience with a religious experience; to assume that he intended the one story as merely symbolic and to ask whether he believed the other to be objectively true is to misunderstand both stories in equal but opposite ways. With both stories Yeats wanted to express a state in which thought and reality become one. Seeing the resurrected Christ, a character in The Resurrection expresses the mystery in these words: “The heart of a phantom is beating.” In The Only Jeal­ ousy of Enter it is expressed thus: “A dream is body.” Natural and supernatural, living and dead, image and reality come to310 Natalie Crohn Schmitt 311 gether as one. The experience of that confluence is for Yeats, in the later years, the religious experience. His central dramatic problem was not to argue the truth of the religious perception— that truth defies argument—or even, as in The Resurrection, to show characters having the religious experience, but to provide that experience for his audience. “Man,” he said, “can embody truth but he cannot know it. . . . You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.” Poetry “is a revelation of a hidden life, and . . . painting, poetry, and music the only means of conversing with eternity left to man on earth.”3 With his plays Yeats sought always for the dramatic correlative: the song—or rather, the action—that could provide the religious experience.4 Generally the central figure in the plays is in his person an ex­ pression of the religious experience: Cuchulain is half god, half man, natural-supernatural. The central figure is also generally exemplary: he has an experience of the unity of being and this experience concludes the play’s action. But not always: some of Yeats’s most successful religious plays are those in which the central figures fail to experience this unity: The Dreaming of the Bones, Calvary, and Purgatory. The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Player Queen, The Herne’s Egg, and The Words Upon the Window-Pane can also be understood to take this form. Purgatory is a religious drama, a ritual of rebirth—which fails—expressed wholly in terms of the archetypal images and actions for that rite. At the same time it is a play written wholly in the vernacular: the action is accessible to us in psychological terms and the language, it is often observed, while set on the page as poetry, gives the effect of natural speech.5 The play functions on the levels of both the sacred and the profane, and by bringing together these two realms, which he had so often in earlier plays shown in unresolvable conflict, Yeats most dramati­ cally expressed his later understanding that the religious experi­ ence is the experience of all contraries come together as one. On the anniversary...