More Than True

by Robert Bly

  Yeats for his part often accepted a partial identification of himself and the swan. In “The Tower,” as he thinks of writing his will, he offers to younger men his pride:

  Pride, like that of the morn …

  Or that of the hour

  When the swan must fix his eye

  Upon a fading dream,

  Float out upon a long

  Last reach of glittering stream

  And there sing his last song.

  Yeats’s beloved Lady Gregory had swans at her country estate and Yeats, noticing that it was nineteen years since he first saw them, is aware that, now being fifty-three, part of him is no longer swan, has become human, vulnerable, open to grief. Yeats wrote in “The Wild Swans of Coole”:

  I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

  And now my heart is sore.

  All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

  The first time on this shore,

  The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

  Trod with a lighter tread.

  Unwearied still, lover by lover,

  They paddle in the cold

  Companionable streams or climb the air;

  Their hearts have not grown old;

  Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

  Attend upon them still.

  We’ll call the swan bewitchment the first stage, that of leaving with some complaisant woman for some magic land where he would possess this woman exclusively, as we all once possessed, or were possessed by our mothers in the womb, and live in a kind of Paradise, though separated from the human. During this time Yeats, as the young male, remains passive in his fantasies; he endures what happens to him, as the six swan boys in our story remain receptive. They do not plot their freedom themselves and live in a kind of birdlike resignation that can last for years.

  From Yeats’s poem we can reconstruct a little of how Yeats felt at that very early time in his life. “The Six Swans” is brilliant, and yet it works primarily to make us aware of what “the daughter” feels, what the first and second King feel, what the witch feels. Did Yeats free himself from the swan-boy hut through his poems? Probably. The poems the soul creates are, in fact, a kind of heart-shirt, at the other end of things from what the witch made for her magic.

  But how does the swan boy in the hut actually feel about his enchantment? I lived in the sea hut for many years and each detail seems to me precise. He feels lonely, helpless, and angry. He feels himself somehow to have acquired a high destiny that doesn’t allow him to express anger, and so the anger falls below, where he cannot retrieve it, the evidence of it appearing accidentally and confusing him. He knows well that something bad has happened to him, but not what it is, or who caused it, or why. He is remote, distant, elevated, intellectual, cold, self-conscious, awake in the cold heavens. For fifteen minutes a day he is warm and human, and you have to catch him at that time if you want to talk to him.

  The swan boy’s father loved him but let the witch find him. The remoteness from the father means that the boy is cut off from the male support and knowledge that lie beyond the father, or in the unoccupied space between himself and his father.

  The young male in his swan hut does not feel his swan nature as luck then, nor as an aspect of happiness. His transformed nature draws certain women to him, who find his unearthliness attractive and a contrast perhaps to an obsession in their own families with the daily round. His nature draws people who long for spirit and hope for a spirit companion. But the young male’s automatic body system, to which he devotes much attention, his moods, and his thought-factory, usually make him feel himself mechanical, so he is not attentive spiritually to others and does not have enough will to move powerfully forward against inertia.

  Many women mistake the unexpressed grief of the young male in this circumstance for a congenitally cold personality, or they believe he is carrying hostility toward women, or a calculated and conspiratorial cunning that results in damage to others. If a woman tries to help such a man, she will be wasting her time.

  It is the activities of his own soul that he will have to turn to in order to find his way back to himself, keeping a long silence from both talk and laughter, not looking to others to find himself reflected. And he will have to give constant and honest attention to the minutest workings of his own heart. With such attention to those practices, he will again be able to be connected to the earth at last and to earn the return of his own humanity.

  TWO

  THE FROG PRINCE

  In earlier times, when wishing still helped a traveler who sat down next to a well, there lived a King whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone on her face. Close by the King’s castle stood a great dark forest.

  There under an old lime tree was a well. When the day was very warm, the King’s child went out into the forest and sat down by the side of the well. When she was bored she took a golden ball, threw it up high, and caught it. This ball was her favorite plaything.

  Now it so happened that on one occasion the Princess’s golden ball did not fall into the little hand that she held up for it, but onto the ground beyond, and it rolled straight into the water. The King’s daughter followed it with her eyes, but it vanished, and the well was deep, so deep that the bottom could not be seen. At this she began to cry. She cried louder and louder and could not be comforted. As she cried someone said to her, “Why are you crying, King’s daughter?” She looked around and saw a frog stretching its big, ugly head up from the well.

  “You cry as if your heart were breaking. What’s wrong?”

  The girl said in a small voice, “Well, you see, I’ve lost my golden ball. It’s fallen into the well.”

  “Do you want it back?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do! I want it back.”

  “What will you give me if I bring up your plaything?”

  “Oh, I’ll give you anything! Anything you like. I am a Princess. You can have my jewels. I’ll give you my rings. I’ll even give you the little crown that I have.”

  “What good would your crown and your jewels be to me? But if you will let me sit on your little chair, and eat from your little golden plate, drink from your little golden cup, and sleep in your little bed, in other words, let me be your companion and play-fellow, I will go down and bring you your golden ball again.”

  “Yes, yes,” she replied. But to herself she said, This is ridiculous. He is just an old splasher. He can’t be a companion to a Princess.

  So the frog popped back down into the water and came up with the golden ball in his mouth. He spat it out on the grass. She picked up the ball and ran right back to her father’s castle. The frog hopped after, calling, “Wait! Wait!” But she ran very fast and there was nothing he could do but go back to his well.

  That evening, the Princess was having dinner with her father in the dining room of the castle. A little knock came at the door. The Princess went out to see. “It’s the frog!” She closed the door quickly and sat down with her father.

  “Why are you looking so pale?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Go ahead. Tell me!”

  “Well, I lost my golden ball in the well and I wanted it back. Then this frog appeared and said that he would bring it to me if I would let him sit on my little chair, eat from my little plate, drink from my little cup, sleep in my little bed.”

  “Did you promise that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is promised should be performed.”

  The Princess didn’t want to let the frog come in, but she could hear it calling.

  She went to the door.

  “Princess, listen to me. Have you forgotten the words you spoke to me by the cool water? Open the door.”

  She opened the door for him and he jumped up the marble stairs to the dining room—squissh, squissh, squoossh, squoossh. The Princess lifted him up on the table and he began to eat a little
bit from her plate. She instantly lost her appetite. But it wasn’t over yet, because after supper came bedtime. When she started up the stairs to her room, the frog said, “Don’t forget to take me along with you.”

  “This is so ridiculous,” she said.

  Her father scolded her. “If someone helped you when you were in trouble, it’s not right to despise that person.”

  So she took the frog by two fingers, brought him upstairs, and put him on the corner of the bed. She changed for bed, slipped inside her smooth, clean sheets, and laid her head on her freshly aired pillow.

  “Aren’t you going to bring me to your pillow? If you don’t, I’ll tell your father.” That was too much for her. She reached down, grabbed the frog, and threw him against the wall as hard as she could—fffaaoow!

  A handsome Prince appeared.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I was turned into a frog by an old sorcerer,” he said. “You are the only one who could have released me. Now we can return to my father’s kingdom and be married!”

  She said, “I like that idea.”

  The next morning, a carriage with eight white horses pulled up. So now there were four beings: the Princess, the Prince who was the frog, the carriage—which in old times people thought of as the body—and a being called Faithful Henri, who rode on a step at the back of the carriage. These four then set out. When they were a mile or so out of town, they heard a twang from something breaking, and the Prince said, “Is this the wheel of the carriage breaking?” And Faithful Henri said, “All the time that you were a frog and speechless, all the time that you were living in the dark, I felt so much grief that I had to wear three iron bands around my chest to keep my heart from breaking. You just heard the first band break.”

  They went a few more miles and they heard another loud sound, and the Prince said, “Is that the carriage wheel breaking?” Faithful Henri said, “It is not the carriage wheel breaking. All the time that you were reduced to a frog, unable to be a human being, unable to speak, I felt so much grief that I had to put three iron bands around my chest to keep my heart from breaking. You just heard the second breaking.”

  After another mile or so, they heard a similar sound. The Prince said, “Is that the carriage wheel breaking?” Faithful Henri said, “No. All the time that you were cold and alone, unable to be with others, I felt so much grief for you that I put three iron bands around my chest. You just heard the third band break.”

  The three of them kept on in the carriage until they came to the kingdom of the Prince’s father. It was time to be married. They had a wonderful wedding. There was so much joy that the neighbors and the castle people danced for three or four days. The wedding pair gave food to the poor and sent gifts to all the people who were sick and suffering in that area. In fact, the wedding was so wonderful, it has been talked about ever since.

  * * *

  So let’s look at what the story says. If the story says that the two got married, it means that the male and female parts inside the single psyche are united, and the marriage is an image for that unity. In this story we can imagine the movement toward unity in stages. Let’s say there are seven of them: loss of the golden ball; the Princess’s promise; learning to live with the frog; the Princess has had enough; the frog becomes a Prince; Faithful Henri is released from grief; and the Prince and the Princess are married.

  The golden ball suggests the sun, an integrated, round, golden energy, but also that kind of wholeness that we had in us when we were three or four or five years old. To some extent, the golden ball is the energy that radiates in all directions off a young child. When you take that child and force him to sit still and become socialized, a lot of that energy is suppressed, and by the time the child is eighteen, the golden ball is down in the water. When this happens to you and you get the feeling that something is wrong, then you spend the next ten or fifteen years trying to get the ball back.

  Here’s a poem that touches on that loss:

  The fall has come, clear as the eyes of chickens.

  Awkward sounds come from the sea,

  Sounds of muffled oarlocks

  And swampings in lonely bays,

  Surf crashing on unchristened shores,

  And the wash of tiny snail shells in the wandering gravel.

  My body also is lost or wandering: I know it,

  As I cradle a pen, or walk down a stair

  Holding a cup in my hand,

  Not breaking into the pastures that lie in the sunlight.

  This sloth is far inside the body,

  The sloth of the body lost among the wandering stones of kindness.

  Something homeless is looking on the long roads,

  A dog lost since midnight, a box-elder

  Bug who doesn’t know

  Its walls are gone, its house

  Burnt. Even the young sun is lost,

  Wandering over earth as the October night comes down.

  I wrote that when I was about thirty-four, I think. Walking downstairs, I had that feeling that something was wrong. Some great loss had happened. Kabir, a Hindu poet from India, says he has lost a “small ruby”:

  The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.

  Some say it is East of us, others West of us.

  Some say “among primitive earth rocks,” others “in the deep waters.”

  Kabir’s instinct told him it was inside, and what it was worth,

  And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.

  As the story opens, the Princess is disturbing her securely walled castle-world by playing with her golden ball. Some would say she is playing with all her possibilities. It is that playfulness and her error of letting the ball fall into the well that bring the frog into the story. The frog is a natural choice for its ability to transform from tadpole to adult frog. Why not to a Prince then?

  I was brought up to believe that the golden ball was in the hands of angels. In the story we learn that it is up to us to retrieve our own potential through our instinct, sometimes the swampy dark side, the ugly frog side, which could bring the ball back but will insist on something in return. I like to think of those four frog gods of Egypt who were said to live in the time of chaos and primeval waters even before the creation of land and light. It was from those waters that the sun god rose in the form of a great golden ball.

  The frog in the story comes up out of the otherworldly well with a golden ball and demands something in return for what he returns to land. He wants the nice, orderly, and beautiful Princess to take him into her father’s nice, orderly castle to live closely with his ugly, slimy self. She would prefer not to. But it is really an all-or-nothing situation. Either she allows him to go plopping up the stone stairs to her room and lets him settle down on her nice clean pillow, or she lives out her aversion, dividing things, judging them and removing herself to the side of order and predictability, as if she had never heard of the swampy little fellow. If she does this, she doesn’t get the return of the perfect sphere of golden metal that is so dear to her. And that sphere contains all the potential of land and light she has yet to realize. Luckily, her father reminds her of her promise, and if she accepts his advice, she will be open to frog-energy that’s outside the small circle of her delight.

  In Buddhist and Hindu literature there is a lot of discussion of the worth of this golden ball. You also find it mentioned in a few of our poets—in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wordsworth, Blake. But Westerners don’t describe the stages of the promise very clearly, nor is the loss clearly defined. People in the sixties and seventies had the optimistic belief that if they just loved each other, everything would be wonderful. But they also took it for granted that life is for growth. Rilke described this growth as moving in spirals. He says:

  I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

  and I have been circling for a thousand years,

  and I still don’t know if I am a falcon,

  or a storm, or a great song.

  Some
one in the Princess’s place will have to leave her aversions behind if she is to have any hope of learning what her life could be made of. It’s all right, though—she is probably a bit curious about what will happen when this frog moves into the castle with her. The Princess’s experience so far has been only in the father-ordered world. A good way to learn about something so completely foreign as a frog is to get into a conversation with it, though he’s not easy to talk to, not a courtier in her father’s court. He does know how she can heal what has put her in the awkward position of not having the golden ball in hand.

  Most people, when the frog says, I can return the ball, will say, I do not need you. But the frog insists. He wants her to join him. He wants to join her. He wants to eat from her little plate and so forth, and sometimes this closeness nauseates her. He is not a brilliant thinker. He likes to splash around in the muddy water of feeling repressed by castle-dwellers. If she lets herself know him, the Princess will open into a new dimension, know more of her own nature. She will muse about her own chaotic and murky aspects, and she will be emotionally alive, as happens in so many good fairy stories. This is not to say she will see herself in a new form, but rather she will find some ancient part, perhaps allowing herself to see into the blind spot that developed when her mother disappeared.

  The frog in the story makes demands and more demands. He even asks to be set on the Princess’s little pillow. Outrageous! The Princess has had enough. She throws him against the wall. In very early religions a sacrifice precedes transformation. This is not a description of such a rite, but it might be a reference to an earlier view of the way those things worked. As for me, when I saw the darkness in me beginning to come forward, I wrote this poem, welcoming the new view of things:

  CHINESE TOMB GUARDIANS

  Oh yes, I love you, book of my confessions,

  Where what was swallowed, pushed away, sunken,

  Driven down, begins to rise from the earth

  Once more, and the madness and rage from the wells.

  The buried is still buried, like cows who eat

  In a collapsed strawpile all winter to get out.1