E L I O T , H I S T O R Y , A N D C O N T E M P O R A R Y C U L T U R E D. E. S. MAXW ELL York University the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. (“Little Gidding” ) old stones that cannot be deciphered. (“East Coker” ) L aw ren ce and Pound were like Yeats, omnivorous readers, but not, also like Yeats, systematic thinkers. They had a faculty that colludes more readily with imaginative expression. It is marked by an intense apprehension of crucial moods, which may be personal, or moments of historical change mani fest in and transmuting a scene, an episode, a character, which to another observer might seem merely commonplace. An example is the first paragraph of Aaron’s R o d : There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. It was Christmas Eve. Also the war was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air. Also there had been another wrangle among the men on the pit-bank that evening. Yeats, unlike Lawrence, did devise a “system” to put history in its Yeatsian place. All the appearances of the system are rigorously objective, all its assumptions cavalierly personal. Its “phases” are occupied by individuals — Dante, Shelley, Pound — to whom Yeats arbitrarily assigns appropriate char acters. Pound was promoted from Phase 12 for good conduct. The system depends upon an anthology of notions. History was for Yeats of little account —■as a mere record of facts — until he had imposed himself upon it. He admired Vico because Vico had discovered “in his own mind, and in the European past, all human destiny.” 1 Vico’s procedure, as interpreted by Yeats, was Yeats’s own: “observed facts do not mean much until I can make them E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, vi, 2, Summer 1980 part of my experience.” 2 Alluding to Marx, he conceded that “History is necessity” ; but only “until it takes fire in someone’s head and becomes free dom or virtue.” 3 On such premises Yeats proposed eccentric connections amongst his pantheon of great individuals: Lenin and Pius X become “ two great men” preparing “two great movements purified of modernism” ;4 Marx and Swift join to preach “a return to a primeval state.” 5 The verve and independence of Yeats’s prose often win us over to such idiosyncrasies. His poetry always does, though there is not much outside Yeats’s own mutable requirements to identify Maud Gonne with Helen of Troy, nor to account for The Divine Comedy as “ Ego Dominus Tuus” does. Yeats treated history, in short, as a stock of portable properties. The destina tion of its parts, from which it took meaning, was the cosmology of his imagination. The transference of the “observed facts” from there to a poem might halt them short of the title, or admit them beyond it. Whichever, they are then less facts than creations of their observer. In “ September 1913” Yeats dislodges the specific historical occasions — the Dublin lock-out, Irish foot-dragging on the offer of the Lane pictures — into images (“a greasy till,” not “marrow from the bone” ) which, though concrete, do not designate the actual events. “Parnell’s Funeral” draws our attention by its title, hardly at all by its opening stanzas, to the very particular historical event. The poem moves from the briefest glimpse of an obliquely identified Dublin crowd under a stormy sky, to a shooting star, to sacrificial death. It is the deaths of Balder, of Apollo, slain to be re-born. The cycle here is interrupted. Parnell’s death is without succession or renewal. The lonely god surrenders to “the contagion of the throng.” “Easter 1916” enters its historical detail into the poem, beginning in anonymity and an inappropriate (as it turns out) derision: “vivid faces,” “grey / Eighteenthcentury houses,” “ a mocking tale.” The martyrdom entails a rigidity. The...
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