Consider Yeats’s extraordinary visionary exclamation ‘The Cold Heaven’. He once described it as a poem about the mood produced in him by looking at the sky in wintertime, but the poem carries things far beyond mood and atmosphere. It is as much about metaphysical need as it is about the meteorological conditions:
Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?
This is an extraordinarily vivid rendering of a spasm of consciousness, a moment of exposure to the total dimensions of what Wallace Stevens once called our ‘spiritual height and depth’. The turbulence of the lines dramatizes a sudden apprehension that there is no hiding place, that the individual human life cannot be sheltered from the galactic cold. The spirit’s vulnerability, the mind’s awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they represent – all of this is simultaneously present. The poem could be described in Hopkins’s phrase as ‘the swoon of a heart … trod / Hard down with a horror of height’, for Yeats has clearly received what Hopkins in another context called a ‘heaven-handling’. He too has gone through his ordeal on the mind’s mountains, on those ‘cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’. But the difference is that in Hopkins the terror has its given co-ordinates; the Deity, doubted though He may be, does provide a certain theological longitude and latitude for what is unknown and unknowable. In ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘The Terrible Sonnets’, Hopkins’s intensity is the intensity of dialogue, of blame and beseeching: a ‘thou’ is being addressed, a comforter is being called upon (or else a false comforter is being rejected, the carrion comfort, Despair). In Yeats, on the other hand, this personal God has disappeared and yet Yeats’s poem still conveys a strong impression of direct encounter. The spirit still suffers from a sense of answerability, of responsibility, to a something out there, an intuited element that is as credible as the ‘rook-delighting heaven’ itself.
There is, for example, this marvellous sense of both physical visitation and intellectual apprehension in the phrase ‘riddled with light’. Light as strobing rays and light as spiritual illumination are here indistinguishable. The ‘I’ of the poet as a first person singular, a self-knowing consciousness, is brilliantly and concretely at one with the eye of the poet as a retina overwhelmed by the visual evidence of infinity and solitude. And this is only one of several instances where the poem’s stylistic excellence and its spiritual proffer converge. When, in one place, the verb ‘to quicken’ is rhymed with the participle ‘stricken’ and still manages to hold its own against it; and when, in another, the rhyme word ‘season’ sets its chthonic reliability against the potentially debilitating force of ‘reason’ – when such things occur, the art of the poem is functioning as a corroboration of the positive emotional and intellectual commitments of the poet. To put it in yet another and perhaps provocatively simple way, ‘The Cold Heaven’ is a poem which suggests that there is an overall purpose to life; and it does so by the intrinsically poetic action of its rhymes, its rhythms, and its exultant intonation. These create an energy and an order which promote the idea that there exists a much greater, circumambient energy and order within which we have our being.
The ghost upon the road, the soul’s destiny in the afterlife, the consequences in eternity of the individual’s actions in time – traditional concerns like these are profoundly relevant to ‘The Cold Heaven’ and they are also, of course, typical of the things which preoccupied Yeats for the whole of his life. Whether it was fairy lore in Sligo or Buddhism with the Dublin Hermetic Society or spiritualist séances or Noh dramas which imagined the adventures of Cuchulain’s shade in the Land of the Dead, Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side. His studies were arcane, his cosmology was fantastic and yet his intellect remained undeluded. Rational objections were often rationally allowed by him, if only to be imaginatively and rhetorically overwhelmed. Yeats’s embrace of the supernatural, in other words, was not at all naïve; he was as alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual. He was, moreover, as complicated as the rest of us when it came to the nature of his beliefs in a supernatural machinery, and nowhere more engagingly so than in his introduction to A Vision, that thesaurus of arcane information and speculation which was in part dictated to him by beings whom he liked to call his ‘ghostly instructors’.
Some will ask whether I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon … To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.
This is both sonorous and moving, but I would like to supplement it with another, very different illustration of the provisional nature of Yeats’s thinking about last things. This comes from Lady Dorothy Wellesley’s recollection of the poet’s conversation in old age, and is an almost deadpan account of one of their sessions:
I once got Yeats down to bed-rock on these subjects and we talked for hours. He had been talking rather wildly about the after life. Finally I asked him: ‘What do you believe happens to us immediately after death?’ He replied, ‘After a person dies, he does not realize that he is dead.’ I: ‘In what state is he?’ W. Β. Υ.: ‘In some half-conscious state.’ I said: ‘Like the period between waking and sleeping?’ W. Β. Υ.: ‘Yes.’ I: ‘How long does this state last?’ W. Β. Υ.: ‘Perhaps some twenty years.’ ‘And after that,’ I asked, ‘what happens next?’ He replied, ‘Again a period which is Purgatory. The length of that period depends upon the sins of the man when he was upon this earth.’ And then again I asked: ‘And after that?’ I do not remember his actual words, but he spoke of the return of the soul to God. I said, ‘Well, it seems to me that you are hurrying us back into the great arms of the Roman Catholic Church.’ He was of course an Irish Protestant. I was bold to ask him, but his only retort was his splendid laugh.
The laugh was not really evasive. The laugh, in fact, established a conversational space where the question could move again. It was the social expression of that frame of mind which allowed the venturesomeness of a supernatural faith to co-exist with a rigorously sceptical attitude. It was the comic expression of the tragic perception which Richard Ellmann attributed to Yeats in his important essay entitled ‘W. B. Yeats’s Second Puberty’. Ellmann wrote that the poet, in his old age, ‘was obliged by his inner honesty to allow for the possibility that reality was desolation and justice a figment.’ ‘The image of life as cornucopia,’ Ellmann continued, ‘was relentlessly undermined by the image of life as empty shell.’ Yet it is because of Yeats’s fidelity to both perceptions and his refusal to foreclose on either that we recognize in him a poet of the highest attainment. Towards the middle of the twentieth century, he continued to hold the tune which ‘the darkling thrush’ announced to Thomas Hardy at its very beginning. The thrush’s song proclaimed that th
e basis of song itself was irrational, that its prerogative was to indulge impulse in spite of the evidence; and Hardy, in spite of his temperamental inclination to focus his attention upon the dolorous circumstances, for once allowed his heart in hiding to stir for that particular bird:
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
We might say that Hardy, at this moment, experienced what Yeats says he experienced in the writing of A Vision: he too was simply overwhelmed by miracle whilst in the midst of it. But this, for sure, is not the Hardy to whom Larkin was converted after the strong enchantments of Yeats had failed for him. At that crucial point in his artistic development, Larkin turned to Hardy, the poet of human sadness, rather than to Hardy, the witness of irrational hope. It was the ‘neutral tones’ rather than the ‘ecstatic carolings’ that attracted him; the disenchantment of Hardy’s ‘God-curst sun, and a tree / And a pond edged with greyish leaves’ carried far more weight and cut more emotional ice with Larkin than any illumination that a positively ‘rook-delighting heaven’ could offer. At any rate, it is surely a God-curst sun that creates the glassy brilliance at the end of his poem ‘High Windows’. Certainly it is the opposite of whatever illuminates the scene where Yeats’s protagonist ‘cried and trembled and rocked to and fro’. Yeats’s cold heaven, as I have tried to demonstrate, is neither frigid nor negative. It is, on the contrary, an image of superabundant life, whereas Larkin’s sunstruck distances give access to an infinity as void and neuter as those ‘blinding windscreens’ which flash randomly and pointlessly in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. ‘High Windows’ concludes:
And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
When Larkin lifts his eyes from nature, what appears is a great absence. Neither justice nor injustice is to be sought in the skies; space offers neither illumination nor terminus. Out there, no encounter is possible. Out there is not our business. And all we have to protect us against these metaphysically Arctic conditions is the frail heat-shield generated by human kindness. Larkin is to be taken very seriously when he writes, in his late poem ‘The Mower’, ‘we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.’ But this minimal shield is insufficient to ward off the enormous No which reality pronounces constantly into the face of human life. Naturally, we would like him to answer back with the enormous Yes which love and art might generate, but he is unable to do it because he insists on taking full account of the negative evidence and this finally demoralizes the affirmative impulse. The radiance of a poem like ‘Solar’ is always going to be qualified by the pallor of one like ‘Sad Steps’.
And this, of course, is why Larkin’s poetry at its best is read with such gratitude. It too is sensitive to the dialectic between the cornucopia and the empty shell, obliged to try to resolve the imagination’s stalemate between the death-mask of nihilism and the fixed smile of a pre-booked place in paradise. As Czesław Miłosz has observed, no intelligent contemporary is spared the pressure exerted in our world by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning, all of which are part of the intellectual atmosphere we subsist in; and yet Miłosz notices this negative pressure only to protest against a whole strain of modern literature which has conceded victory to it. Poetry, Miłosz pleads, must not make this concession but maintain instead its centuries-old hostility to reason, science and a science-inspired philosophy. These views were recorded by Miłosz in an article published in 1979 in Poetry Australia, and they are intrinsically challenging; but the challenge is all the more pointed because they were made in conjunction with remarks about Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, the poem to which I’ve already alluded and which I would now like to consider in more detail. Miłosz praises the poem as ‘a high poetic achievement’, yet even that approbation may seem mild to those who remember coming upon it in the TLS, two days before Christmas, 1977:
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realization of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
It would be hard to think of a poem more opposed than this one to the life-enhancing symbolism of the Christ child in the Christmas crib. It is as if the mid-winter gleam and promise of medieval carols had been obliterated completely by the dread and dolour of a medieval morality play like Everyman. In fact, Larkin’s terror here is very reminiscent of the terror suffered by the character Everyman; and Everyman’s summoner, the presence whom Larkin calls ‘unresting death’, stalks the poem every bit as menacingly as he stalks the play. There is, furthermore, a specially vindictive force to the figure of death in ‘Aubade’ because the adjective ‘unresting’ had been employed most memorably by Larkin in an earlier poem celebrating the opulence and oceanic vitality of leafy trees, their lush power to revivify both themselves and us, year after year. The last stanza of ‘The Trees’ reads:
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Finders Keepers Page 37
