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Dan Chiasson on William Butler Yeats ("Among School Children")
2.4k Plays1 year ago
"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" You may know the line, even if you don't know the poem it ends. I had the great pleasure of talking with one of the most accomplished poetry critics of our time, Dan Chiasson, about that poem, William Butler Yeats's fascinating "Among School Children."
Dan Chiasson was born and raised in the city of Burlington, Vermont, and received a BA in 1993 from Amherst College and a PhD from Harvard University in 2002. He has written regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Chiasson is the author of six books, including five books of poetry, most recently The Math Campers (Knopf, 2020), and one book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (Chicago, 2007). He is at work on a study of politics and change in American life, Bernie for Burlington: His Rise in a Changing Vermont, 1964-1991, based partly on his own close observation of Sanders since Chiasson was nine years old. Dan Chiasson is Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dan Chason and Yeats
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's a great thrill for me today to be talking to Dan Chason, a writer and critic poet who, as we were saying before we started recording, we feel like friends. I don't think we've met in person, though surely we will. But you know how things go in our virtual world of connection and social networking.
00:00:29
Speaker
Dan is here today to talk about a poem by William Butler Yeats, and the poem is called Among School Children. This poem, as is always the case for us, you'll find available to you via a link in the episode notes. So if you'd like to be looking at a text of the poem as we talk about it, just look there and you should be able to find it there.
Dan Chason's Background and Literary Work
00:00:55
Speaker
We'll have lots more obviously to say about Yeats and to kind of set up the poem a little bit for people who are unfamiliar with it, but this is a real treat. It's one of those great and canonical works of the 20th century, and it's a thrill for me to get to talk about it with a critic whose work I admire as much as I do Dan's. So let me tell you a little bit about Dan before we start.
00:01:20
Speaker
Dan Chason was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont, and he received his BA from Amherst College and his PhD from Harvard. Dan is the author of six books,
00:01:34
Speaker
Five of them, books of poetry, collections of poetry, and one, a work of literary criticism. That book, to start with that one, is called One Kind of Everything, Poem and Person in Contemporary America. And that was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007.
00:01:53
Speaker
I won't give you the titles here of all of Dan's books of poetry, but I will certainly make them available to you via links with the information that comes up at the show. His most recent book of poems, though, is called The Math Campers.
00:02:07
Speaker
And that was published by Knopf in 2020. And I'll say more about that in just a moment. But right now, Dan is at work on a very different kind of project and an exciting one. He is working on a study of politics and change in American life. The book is called Bernie for Burlington, His Rise in a Change in Vermont, 1964 to 1991.
00:02:32
Speaker
And the book is based partly on Dan's own close observations of Sanders, Bernie Sanders, that is, obviously, that Dan has been making since he was nine years old.
00:02:45
Speaker
So I think even there might be some occasion to hear more during this episode about Yeats, to hear more about Bernie Sanders and how it happened that Dan Chase, a poetry critic, found himself writing this book.
00:03:04
Speaker
listeners to the podcast will no doubt already know and have read Dan Chason in the pages of The New Yorker where for many years Dan was a regular and has been a regular reviewer of poetry and also will have read Dan in the New York Review of Books where he has frequently contributed as well.
00:03:27
Speaker
Dan Chason is the Lorraine Chow Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College where he teaches and where he has revealed to me he has just finished teaching for the semester and is now bound for sabbatical, a glorious thing.
Kamran on Dan's Approach to Criticism
00:03:46
Speaker
So I want to say just a word about the kind of critic that I found Dan to be. I first got to know, I mean, to the extent that I know him, I got to know him in the pages of The New Yorker, where I was always very pleased to see a new piece by Dan on a poet, sometimes a poet I knew very well, sometimes a poet I didn't know until I read the piece.
00:04:12
Speaker
Now I can think of pieces that Dan has written on, you know, like for me, an important early review of Citizen, Claudia Rankin's Citizen, Dan wrote. Pieces on poets who are quite close, I get the sense quite close to Dan personally, poets like Jory Graham.
00:04:30
Speaker
Dan wrote a beautiful piece after the poet W.S. Merwin passed on Merwin. So I've just been naming some big name heavy hitters in the poetry world, but another thing I've come to appreciate about Dan is that he's always been quite interested, enthusiastic, and open to writing about poets at earlier moments in their career or more obscure moments in the history of poetry and in bringing those
00:04:58
Speaker
to the readers of that magazine. He seems to me to be a critic who's aware of his own situatedness, of his own tastes, of his own background. For people like me and Dan and for many of the guests we've had on the podcast, particularly critics and scholars of poetry in the 20th century and the 21st century,
00:05:23
Speaker
It's a kind of commonplace to observe that that period, our period, historical period in poetry studies in particular, is a kind of divided one. A one in which poets and critics settle into opposing camps and know the work of their camp very well, but have no interest in things outside of that or feel a kind of animosity.
00:05:52
Speaker
often this story gets exaggerated and maybe leaned on to heavily
00:05:59
Speaker
I think in reading Dan Jason's work in The New Yorker and elsewhere, I've always had the sense of, I know where he's coming from. I feel that that's true, but I feel like his curiosity is always leading him well beyond the sort of safe walls of any particular garden. And that's a pleasure to see. I get the sense reading Dan that he's always trying things out.
00:06:28
Speaker
trying out a new book, trying out a new way of thinking about poetry and inhabiting those positions with great sympathy and imagination.
00:06:38
Speaker
You know, and part of this is I think the product of a poet's imagination. I mean, Dan is a poet. The math campers, for instance, his last book, it's just a beautiful book, is a book that I picked up and read. And it's kind of funny story and a personal one, but a book that I picked up and read just as I was heading to the place from which Dan wrote much of it. So many of the poems in that book sort of are set. I mean, it's hard to say where a poem is ever set.
00:07:06
Speaker
But, you know, maybe we could talk about that. I think we actually we should talk about that in this episode. But, you know, to put it plainly, some of those poems seem to have been written while Dan was a resident at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, and are sort of about that setting.
00:07:22
Speaker
or describe that setting. So I was on my way to the James Merrill House and I had Dan Chason's book and poems in mind with me as I went there. And the book inhabits that space in a, I mean, it can feel like a haunted space, like a space that's sort of layered with memory, because for those who don't know,
00:07:45
Speaker
Merrill, who's a poet that we talked about way back in the earliest days of this podcast, and I hope we'll get to have more episodes on soon, didn't just live in this home in Stonington, Connecticut, but himself wrote about it and had sort of spooky experiences within it and wrote about those spooky experiences. So his poetry is full of thinking about the afterlife
00:08:10
Speaker
Dan's experience in that space seems to have been one that was full of haunting of various kinds as well.
00:08:18
Speaker
But it's also a playful kind of inhabiting. And there's a beautiful kind of innocence in the work of Dan. He's a writer, in short, whom I value because he always seems to me to be also, and first and foremost, a reader. And so it's a great pleasure for me to have Dan Chason on Close Readings. Dan, how are you doing today?
00:08:42
Speaker
I'm good, Cameron, but I'm actually going to go now because I just showed up to be introduced. Mission accomplished. That was so lovely. You are a writer that I admire so much. Your own curiosity, your own generosity, your own just insight and it's
00:08:58
Speaker
You know, it's been transformative to read you over the years and to recently tune into many of these episodes, which have been terrific. And so I'm really honored to be here. First of all, it
Why 'Among School Children'?
00:09:11
Speaker
is eerie. It does feel like we're friends. I guess we were, you know, sort of nursed on the self same Hill as Milton says. Yeah, sort of like adjacent Hills adjacent Hills.
00:09:20
Speaker
But I guess I'd forgotten that, that you were headed to Stonington to take up residence at the Merrill House. You gave me very good advice about what to pack and how I should prepare for that setting. So I was thinking to you while I was there.
00:09:41
Speaker
One is in demand there, so you have to do, I don't know, gentle, kind, good fences make good neighbors type of thing. Yeah, yeah, as someone once said. Right, right, right. Okay, so, well, I won't let you go having just been introduced. The price of the introduction is that you need to stick around.
00:09:59
Speaker
and talk about a poem for an hour. So Dan, tell me, you know, for people who are, again, maybe this is your first episode, I invite a guest on, someone who's writing about poetry I admire, and then I tell them to, you know, they're free to choose the poem.
Yeats' Transition and Themes
00:10:16
Speaker
And I give, you know, very few sorts of parameters beyond that.
00:10:19
Speaker
So how did she come to think about Yeats for this and this poem in particular? And maybe by way of giving an answer to that question, Dan, you'll also see opportunities for telling listeners who don't know much about Yeats at all or about where this poem might fit into his career to tell us something about those things too.
00:10:37
Speaker
Oh, sure. Thank you. Yes. Well, I chose it on a whim, to be honest with you. I think I had a couple drinks. But I love the poem, of course, and have a long, long, long, I mean, it's one of the first great poems that I, you know, came to know and love and partly memorize when I was in high school. So it goes, I go way back with it.
00:10:58
Speaker
I don't understand it as a single contour. I'm interested in my own incomprehension of this poem. And so it's an opportunity really just to talk over this poem with somebody like you who's
00:11:15
Speaker
sense of it will be enlightening. So that was the thought. It's a strange, you know, everyone knows the famous finale of the poem. How can we know the dancer from the dance is a phrase that has its own life in the culture.
00:11:34
Speaker
It's the name of an important novel by Andrew Holleran that I have not read, but I sort of know where it sits in the culture. It's broken off from the poem in fascinating ways. So yeah, I guess I understand it in parts, but not as one slope. And so that's one of the reasons, selfish reasons I want to discuss it.
00:11:59
Speaker
I'll say a little bit about what it means to me and then I'll just tell you what little I can tell you about Yates and about the crossroads that he had met when he wrote the poem. Very good.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah, so the poem is set in a convent school in Waterford in the south, southwest of Ireland, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy. It just so happens that another great poet, Dan Chason, was educated by the Sisters of Mercy. No kidding. It was educated by the Sisters of Mercy, but it was uncanny to me
00:12:37
Speaker
in high school at Catholic school, having already been in Catholic school since I was three years old, to come upon this poem about nuns. And it's been poignant for me. The opening scenario has always been poignant for me for that reason. So it's a poem I first read in high school, not in a high school class, but I was
00:13:02
Speaker
giving myself an education during the summers. I was going up to the UVM library, University of Vermont library, where they had, you know, nice stacks to rifle through. And I just put a little curriculum for myself together and this poem was on it and I discovered it there on August day, probably in 1986 or seven. And so it's sort of uncanny, personal resonance for me is something that's
00:13:30
Speaker
I've held with me all along and also it's sort of positioned within popular culture, within literary culture. It's a modernist poem that uses the word modern. I think it's interesting to think about where it sits within modernism. So those are some impetuses for choosing the poem.
00:13:54
Speaker
Yeats. Let's see.
Yeats' Public and Private Life
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeats tells us in the poem that he is at this point a 60-year-old smiling public man. The poem was
00:14:06
Speaker
written and begun in 1926 and published in 1928 in Yeats's volume The Tower. Yeats at this point is as distinguished a literary figure as any country really has ever known. He won the Nobel Prize in 1923.
00:14:29
Speaker
He is elected senator of the Irish Free State in 1922 and serves for six years as a senator of this new sort of nation. And in that role, he's on a committee in the Irish Senate that has him going around and inspecting schools. So in 1926, he goes to Waterford, Ireland with his wife, George,
00:15:00
Speaker
and they are taken around this convent school run by the Sisters of Mercy. There's a really amusing letter, caddy letter by George Yates, which I can read you sections of if we get to that. But it's- Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, there was a big reception. The Yateses were plied with port and whiskey. George
00:15:27
Speaker
refused to go back for the, it was a two-day visit and she refused to go back for the second day and wrote a letter about how revolting she found the nuns to be, how life denying and pleasure denying and so on. So other moments, other just elements of this moment in Yates's career, he's just published his really
00:15:51
Speaker
out there treat us called a vision, which is based on his- Speaking of the occult, right? Speaking of the occult, right. Strong precursor for our friend, J.M., James Merrill. It has been sent out in an edition of 500, mainly to friends and associates, and it's gotten a very lukewarm response from people. So Yeats is very self-conscious, I think, about his own
00:16:17
Speaker
eccentricity at this point and about the mismatch between outside and inside, the inside percolating with all these occult ideas and arcane scenarios and the outside being this distinguished gentleman acting as an official of the state.
00:16:39
Speaker
So that's the setup, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So that's all really helpful, Dan. And it tells me things that, to be honest, didn't know going into this conversation. So I personally appreciate the context.
Reading and Analyzing 'Among School Children'
00:16:57
Speaker
One thing you mentioned sort of in passing was that Yeats is a modernist poet. And that term itself, modernist or modernism, is one that's
00:17:09
Speaker
by no means has it kind of settled once and for all meaning, but just in a kind of ordinary sense or, you know, uncontroversial view of what the term might be taken to designate. Maybe it's worth noting that, like,
00:17:26
Speaker
You know, when you think of other modernist poets, we just had an episode on William Carlos Williams, and I hope that we'll have other episodes on some of the leading lights of modernism, and you think of poets like Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Pound, poets of that generation. Yeats is a bit older than all of them, and perhaps closer in generation, I don't know,
00:17:49
Speaker
You know, he begins as a 19th century poet in the kind of story I've always had in mind, the kind of thumbnail sketch of his career that I've always had in mind, and that there's something sort of very romantic about the early Yeats and that his career sort of spans into this more kind of politically engaged and then kind of realist mode or something like that. No doubt that's an overly crude narrative and one could tell more nuanced versions of it.
00:18:18
Speaker
That's my sense of it too. I mean, if he'd stopped writing after the year 1900, he would still be remembered for poems done at the end of the 19th century. So you might think of poems like The Lake Isle of Innisfree or something. Yes, exactly. And then Yeats is very helpful in that every time he makes a shift in his
00:18:37
Speaker
aesthetics, he announces it as a shift and kind of celebrates it and makes it an icon. So I believe it's 1914. He publishes a book called Responsibilities that has the famous epigraph. In dreams begins
00:18:54
Speaker
responsibility. Or is it in dream begins responsive in dreams begins responsibility. Delmore Schwartz picked that title right and altered it slightly and made it a very famous short story.
00:19:08
Speaker
But the sense that Yeats is conveying is that the period prior was a long elaborate dream in which he discovered a political commitment. Yeah. Part of the reason why I raise it, just that sense of the development of a career or something like that in the case of Yeats and with respect to modernism, maybe as a movement or other literary movements that, you know,
00:19:38
Speaker
with whose spans Yeats's life coincides is because as you noted, this is a poem in which he's sort of dating himself and kind of hyper-conscious it seems in a way of this question of aging and phase of life and so on.
00:19:56
Speaker
Well, surely that's part of what we'll want to talk about as we dig in. But I guess with that as preface, I would love to ask you to read the poem into the record, as it were, for our conversation. And again, just to remind people, you can look on at the text that's linked to in the episode notes. The poem is perhaps somewhat on the longer end of poems that we've considered here.
00:20:25
Speaker
made up of eight, eight line stanzas. So it's a 64 line poem. But Dan, I'll turn it over to you to read the poem. Okay, great. Yeah, it's an eight numbered stanzas, each one written in a top otava Rima, which we can talk about. And the question, a reader of the poem, a reader allowed of the poem must
00:20:48
Speaker
initially answer is whether to read the numbers of the sections. And I will read the numbers of the sections. I love the way that in certain passages, the syntax kind of vaults over the interruption of the number. So I will read the numbers. Okay.
00:21:08
Speaker
among schoolchildren. 1. I walk through the long schoolroom questioning. A kind old nun in a white hood replies. The children learn to cipher and to sing.
00:21:21
Speaker
to study reading books and history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the best modern way. The children's eyes, in momentary wonder, stare upon a 60-year-old smiling public man. Two.
00:21:42
Speaker
I dream of a Lidean body bent above a sinking fire, a tale that she told of a harsh reproof or trivial event that changed some childish day to tragedy. Told, and it seemed that our two natures blend into a sphere from youthful sympathy, or else to alter Plato's parable into the yoke and white of the one shell.
00:22:10
Speaker
Three. And thinking of that fit of grief or rage, I look upon one child or the other there and wonder if she stood so at that age. For even daughters of the swan can share something of every paddler's heritage and had that color upon cheek or hair. And thereupon my heart is driven wild. She stands before me as a living child.
00:22:40
Speaker
Four. Her present image floats into the mind. Did quatricento finger-fashionate hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I, though never of Lidean kind, had pretty plumage once. Enough of that. Better to smile on all that smile and show there is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. Five.
00:23:10
Speaker
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap, honey of generation had betrayed, and that must shriek, sleep, shriek, struggle to escape as recollection or the drug decide, would think her son, did she but see that shape with 60 or more winters on its head, a compensation for the pang of his birth, or the uncertainty of his setting forth,
00:23:41
Speaker
6. Plato thought nature but a spume that plays upon a ghostly paradigm of things. Solider Aristotle played the toz upon the bottom of a king of kings. World-famous, golden-thied Pythagoras fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings what a star sang and careless muses heard. Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
00:24:11
Speaker
7. Both nuns and mothers worship images, but those the candle's light are not as those that animate a mother's reveries, but keep a marble or a bronze repose.
00:24:27
Speaker
And yet they too break hearts. O presences that passion, piety, or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolize, O self-born mockers of man's enterprise. Eight.
00:24:45
Speaker
Labor is blossoming or dancing where the body is not bruised to pleasure soul, nor beauty born out of its own despair, nor bleuride wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bowl?
00:25:09
Speaker
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
00:25:19
Speaker
So that's Dan Jason reading our poem for today, Among School Children by William Butler Yeats. Dan, you know, sometimes when we have a recording of a poem, and I've heard some recordings, as I'm sure you have too, of Yeats reading some of his poems, you know, sort of later in his life, and he's very...
00:25:42
Speaker
They're interesting recordings. Maybe we can make some more. I'm on high, right? Yeah. So what I was going to say is I sometimes ask after we've listened to a recording for my guests to talk about just what they were hearing in the way the poem was read. But I found myself wanting to ask you, and particularly to ask you as someone who has become well-practiced, no doubt, at doing poetry readings, reading your own poems,
00:26:12
Speaker
What was the experience like of taking on this poem that you've known, as you've told us since you were a child, that you memorized at some point? To read it in its entirety out loud without interruption, what did you find yourself thinking about or noticing that maybe came as a surprise or that you hadn't really thought of in those terms before?
00:26:33
Speaker
Thanks. That's a wonderful question. There is a double consciousness actually, even though I affect absorption in the poem. I was monitoring it even as I was reading it. Partly that just comes from knowing the poem so well and knowing what's coming in the poem. How do you set up? Who could be worthy of that amazing finale?
00:26:54
Speaker
And I have mixed feelings actually about the shape of the poem and how it manages the coming, the amazing finale, the crescendo that's coming. So that was on my mind how to kind of manage the effects leading into that fireworks show at the end. You know, also each, I think it's fascinating, each stanza manages
00:27:20
Speaker
the Atavarima in a different way. It manages its apportioned eight lines in a different way, syntactically, organizationally.
Themes of Aging and Education
00:27:29
Speaker
And you really, to read it aloud, I mean, I think by far, and it is the stanza that I screwed up, the hardest one to do aloud is the fifth stanza. It's just a single exquisite sentence. It has some of the most
00:27:46
Speaker
subtle and sort of baffling syntax that you can imagine. Don't be too hard on yourself. But in that third line where I almost hate to mention, yeah, I know what you mean, where it happened, it gives you that sort of list of three things that begin with the letter S that are easy to misorder or something like that. Yeah, it does. And you really need to give a sense of the shape of the meaning
00:28:14
Speaker
you know, in a sentence of that length and of that complexity of that obscurity, it's not obscure, it's crystal clear, it's just its clarity is difficult. So I feel, you know, I would I read, I can't, you know,
00:28:27
Speaker
I was conscious of putting stakes down for emphasis where I felt meaning was dependent upon the way I pitched a certain word or phrase. What Gates's contemporary frost would call the sentence sound. Exactly. Letting us hear that. Yeah. Wow, what a sentence. Eight lines long and tons of
00:28:53
Speaker
work with clauses and so on. So I was quite aware of that problem. Yeah, and as I say, each stanza sort of requires a different... Yeah. Yeah, just a sort of different verbal disposition, I think. It does. I mean, it strikes me that it's a poem that really
00:29:16
Speaker
I mean, though the stanzas are, in some sense, uniform in scheme, though not, as you pointed out, even with respect to meter rhythm executed in identical ways. In terms of, and all of these things work together, of course, but in terms of tone and content and even kind of rhetorical register, the stanzas are kind of wildly different from each other. Wildly different.
00:29:44
Speaker
Ripping the first up before he gets to the second, you know, right right in stanza 6 which is sort of montage of Montage summarized Like ancient philosophy in philosophy right in three in three quick flashes, right? that's one method of organization which he doesn't repeat and then of course the
00:30:07
Speaker
The poem ends with the only example of a sentence which goes across stanzas leading. The finale is really two stanzas long, both section seven and eight. And that feels like an innovation by that point in the poem. We've gotten used to settled into a certain rhythm and that suddenly is turned over.
00:30:33
Speaker
You know, we sometimes like to say that poems teach their readers how to read them, right? Yes. And they do so sometimes the first line of a poem can teach you sort of what are the rules for this poem? How is it going to work? Sometimes it could be the first stanza of a poem. But often, as you point out here, I mean, it's unusual to have a poem that's sort of proceeding with, oh, I didn't know the poem knew that it could do that. Yeah, it's like it learned it somehow
00:31:00
Speaker
on its own and you know what what was interesting to me before you started reading den was when you said i mean i knew what you were going to say when you said a reader of the poem has to decide whether i knew what you were going to say it has to read the number you know the numbers out loud and then i was surprised to hear you say that you wanted to because of the moment of bridging which you know i think for other readers and other minds might be an argument against doing so that's fair that's totally fair i can imagine the argument against doing it and might
00:31:29
Speaker
on another day and another mood choose not to reason. To be clear, I wasn't making that argument. I was interested because I thought it might reveal something to us about your view of the kind of constructedness of the poem or the poem's own self-awareness of its, you know, organization. If one can be modest enough to say that they've been influenced by such a poem,
00:31:51
Speaker
I do have a long poem in numbered sections that I was thinking, have I ever actually gone to this poem in the midst of composing a poem to figure out how to do something? And I did do that one time, and that had to do with a poem called Where's the Moon, There's the Moon, and it has long poem in numbered sections where I want the syntax
00:32:13
Speaker
to leap over the number that breaks. Good, good. Well, let's back all the way up and I have a question that is laughably sort of all the way back. So the first word of the title.
00:32:27
Speaker
Among. So it's a preposition, it sort of situates the poem with respect to others, or it situates the, as it were, the speaker of the poem or the eye in the poem with respect to these other human beings that populate the poem. Do you have any thoughts about the preposition among and sort of how the poem performs or enacts or thinks through the sort of state of being among as a
00:32:57
Speaker
That's a way of being. Yeah. That's a great question. And we're on the same wavelength because I was thinking in preparing this afternoon about the preposition and other prepositions in Yates's titles like Under Ben Bolbin, for example, something he does, you know, fairly often. But yeah, what does a monk do to us? It puts us, well, it puts us in society. We're
00:33:24
Speaker
And we're in the society of school children. So that means that a certain kind of propriety, a certain kind of respect is called for on their part and on our part. The last thing you want to do when you're among school children is disclose the contents of your lurid mind. And yet that's where the poem almost immediately goes.
00:33:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's contemplating the rules of amongness of being a social person in a social world. There's a moment where Yeats decides better to smile upon all that smile. And that feels like a sort of synopsis of the rules of this world, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was thinking, that's all beautifully said. I was thinking that,
00:34:15
Speaker
you know, to be among is like to be with. But for me, I don't know if this feels legit to you or to others, but to be among schoolchildren, I think carries with it some consciousness of
00:34:30
Speaker
the kind of provisional nature of this arrangement, you know, I'm among them now, but I won't be, you know, but it's only for the time being or something like that, you know. That's right. Right. And it makes you wonder, we talked about the setting of the poem. Right. Yeah, yeah. You know, and the poem keeps returning to the outward, outside facing setting, even as it keeps pivoting inward and the difficulty
00:34:58
Speaker
as it sort of buries itself farther and farther and farther into Yates's interiority, is how to maintain that amongness, it seems to me, how to maintain that position. As his mind is leading him far afield or whatever. The first word of the first line is the first person pronoun, I. Yes.
00:35:26
Speaker
I was tracking it. I think I've got this right. I hope I do anyway. I'm about to read it. I'm about to say something for posterities. I think the I appears in each of the first four stanzas and none of the final four.
00:35:39
Speaker
makes a lot of sense. You can see that as an important trajectory, I think, right? Yeah. And you've gestured also to the iconic status of the poem's final lines, though I think for me, maybe to a slightly lesser extent, but nonetheless, the first line of the poem has its own kind of echoing status.
00:36:03
Speaker
I walk through the long school room questioning, and then for people who aren't looking, that line ends with a semicolon. So it sort of ends and doesn't end in a way. It's so beautiful. In fact, it's so beautiful that it was taken up as the title of an important essay and volume by Alan Grossman called The Long Schoolroom. It's a wonderful essay for our listeners who want to seek it out. It's a meditation on poetic vocation.
00:36:32
Speaker
the stance of walking through poetry itself, a long corridor from
00:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, fellow practitioners and fellow questioners. Yeah. Yeah. Well and for you know for real devotees to the podcast remember also we've had an episode on Grossman Yeah, yeah, you got it got to go back and get it Dan with with Orin Eisenberg who was a student of Grossman's and yes voted to him. So Orin's brilliant. So I'm gonna listen to that right away. Sorry to miss that one. Yeah, remember which poem that
00:37:06
Speaker
Yeah, of course. The Life and Death Kisses, which is a strange poem, but related to even the very brief kind of glimpse into Grossman's sensibility that you just gave us, Dan. So why is the school room long? I was just going to ask you that. Well, I asked first. Yeah.
00:37:26
Speaker
Well, I mean, maybe it just was, right? Long is a word that has both spatial and temporal meanings. So I think what Grossman picks up is the notion of the, you know, just the duration of poetry. And, you know, we're picturing some
00:37:50
Speaker
enormous, enormous room with children seated in orderly rows and orderly desks and so on. And there's a kind of review as the great man walks down and steps in, interviews, observes one child after another. So
00:38:11
Speaker
There's a lot in this first stanza that's kind of just, I would say that's sort of filmable. I don't know if Yates had seen many films at this point, but it's beautifully stationed and blocked out in a way. So I think that's one reason for Long and the other is just the resonance of the word Long and how
00:38:32
Speaker
We're at 60 years now. Yates is 60 years old and he's measuring his own aging and the kind of ironic ratios of the outward and the inward. The inward is still full of passion and grief and unsettled energy and the outside has become this proper respectable man. So
00:38:57
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess the brilliant, simple thing about long is that it pertains both to distance and duration. And with respect to duration, I think the very clear implication I'm hearing you offer here is that it's long enough to include a student of his age. Yes. Or he's still in it in some sense. Yeah, he's still a student. Right, he's still learning. Yeah, I mean, this first stanza. Yeah, say whatever you like about it.
00:39:27
Speaker
Well, I think the poem
00:39:34
Speaker
is about pedagogy. It's also an act of pedagogy, so that the establishment of the 60-year-old smiling public man as that forceful final line of the opening stanza, in a way, kind of gives Yates the mic or the platform. And so in a way, the lesson from here on out will be his to give.
00:40:04
Speaker
at the beginning of the stanza, right? He's a questioner, but by the end of the poem, you know, he's
00:40:12
Speaker
giving us definitions. Labor is blossoming, right? Yeah. Yeah. Not to keep looping back to the very beginning, I promise we'll make better progress soon, dear listeners and dear guests. Dan, how would that first line be different in your ear if it were, other than perhaps less good, if it were
00:40:36
Speaker
I walk comma questioning comma through the long school room. There's something kind
Yeats' Imaginative and Philosophical Journey
00:40:45
Speaker
of awkward sounding to me about the way that it is now actually, that it kind of, it almost feels like it sort of runs something unusual about that syntax or not idiomatic and maybe I'm not picking up on some peculiarity of what would have sounded
00:41:01
Speaker
perfectly idiomatic to the Irish or English ears. I'm with you. I'm with you. And it's if you look at the very or very aura, he struggled with the punctuation there. There was a magazine version in the dial, I believe, that had a comma. There's also an un-punctuated version. It is it's curious, isn't it? I mean, it puts questioning in the terminal position, I guess, you know. Yes.
00:41:27
Speaker
And then the nature of the questioning is sort of interesting because we don't actually know what the questions were. And we are told that the kind old nun in White Hood replies
00:41:43
Speaker
we're not really told what the questions were or what the replies were. And maybe we don't know because they're sort of, what, perfunctory and they don't really matter. They're polite and, oh, what's this child doing? It's possible. I mean, although this very funny letter from George Yates implies that the nuns were much more
00:42:06
Speaker
kind of ribbled and raucous than you would imagine. So maybe it's propriety that keeps it out. It could be, it could be. But right, and then again, we have this sort of filmable sequence where the, you know, the children learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading. I imagine that these are the
00:42:31
Speaker
These are the answers given by the kind old nun to the perfunctorally questioning senator. They're interesting in and of themselves, these actions, right? The children want to cipher and to sing in a way they're sort of like poets, right? Poets work in numbers and they also, of course, work in song. And cutting and selling is a,
00:42:57
Speaker
an action that Yates associates with writing poetry and Adam's curse. Stitching and unstitching. Stitching and unstitching, right. So it's a strange passage because he appears to be derogating these actions as kind of trivial or
00:43:17
Speaker
or conservative in some way. And yet they are in some primal sense bound up with what it is to be a poet. Oh, I love that. I love that.
00:43:33
Speaker
I love also how Cypher and Sing, you know, they start with the same consonant sound, though one is the C and one is an S, and then that's repeated and cut and so, except now the sounds are different, you know? Yeah, that's great. There's a kind of interesting kind of parallel there. And in between, we get to study reading books in history. Reading books is a funny word. That must be a term of art that, you know, books, I mean, aren't all books reading books, but
00:44:01
Speaker
It's a funny word. Actually, there's a little thought in Hugh Kenner's book, and partly on Yeats, where he talks about how reading books are
00:44:12
Speaker
designation for books that one would otherwise never read. We're entirely in the realm of obligatory, fine reading. Oh, I guess the same could be said of textbooks and for the same reason. Aren't all those textbooks... I've never thought of that before. Why have I never thought of that before? It's good to... The spectacle of this kind of cook,
00:44:37
Speaker
compulsory forced reading to these docile, obedient students.
00:44:46
Speaker
sets up the kind of spasms that follow in the poem, I think. Well, and speaking of which, or sort of speaking of which, I mean, you pointed out earlier that this is a modernist poet with the word modern in the poem. So here it is, to cut and sew be neat and everything in the best modern way. That use of modern doesn't sound like what we associate with the kind of upheavals of modernism. So that word is meaning something else here. It's meaning what?
00:45:14
Speaker
I think literally what it meant is these nuns were practicing a kind of Montessori method, believe it or not. It was a very liberal school in order at the time.
00:45:29
Speaker
the pedagogy had been modernized, but there's disdain in that seems to me the best modern way. Yes, for sure. One could characterize, varyingly, the kind of disdain or the mutedness of it or the implied
00:45:49
Speaker
extent of it, but I agree with you absolutely. And I actually have a question sort of about tone, which I feel as though you've already begun to address, but I just want to press on it a little harder. So what are those children doing? The children's eyes in momentary wonder stare upon, and then the final line of the stanza is in its entirety,
00:46:10
Speaker
a 60-year-old smiling public man. I think I heard you say earlier, Dan, that you took that last line to be signaling something of the kind of authority or gravitas that in that moment Yates might be seen to assume. I hear that, and I hear also in that line there's something
00:46:34
Speaker
He feels a little ridiculous. Yes, that's right. Is that right? Are you hearing that too? Sure, sure. And elsewhere in this volume, The Tower, he has, I believe it's in the poem, The Tower, he has this image of himself as, I think he calls himself an absurdity, right?
00:46:52
Speaker
old age has been tied to me as to a dog's tail. I think those are the lines. Right, so yes, the absurdity of the role that he's been consigned to play, agreed to play. I think I hear it more your way than mine, really, because
00:47:14
Speaker
it motivates the next move in the poem. Well, right, so I was gonna ask about that. So we move from his body to a very different kind of body. So say more, yeah, but so now we move into stanza two.
00:47:25
Speaker
Well, it's a simpler point than that, but I'd love to know. But the very simple thing is to say that the outward appearance gives no sense of the inner tone and turmoil, layering, depositing imagination. Just one quick aside that the
00:47:46
Speaker
several of the students that were there that day were interviewed by Roy Foster and his biography. And they all report that this was really a non-event to them. That's perfect. This 60-year-old guy come through, which is just so true to, I don't know, we had dignitaries and politicians coming through our
00:48:09
Speaker
Schools as kids i don't know if you did but yeah well actually i was thinking of it of course but you know who visited my school was buzz aldrin no kidding buzz aldrin which i made an impression on me then but i kind of wish i could go back to ask him some questions right you know right winger i believe.
00:48:27
Speaker
Is that right? Oh, I didn't know that. So that's not what my questions would have been. I know he's fond of punching people who say that the moon landing was a hoax. Oh, yeah. That part I know. Didn't punch any of you kids out, though? No, no. He did not. Anyway. It is pretty funny. I mean, it's very, as we say, relatable that suddenly you look up and your teacher is introducing you to somebody who is apparently an eminence, but you're eight or nine or something.
00:48:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, and so what that reveals, I mean, in a way, is, you know, what we have in the poem is the, you know, I don't want to call him the older man, the sort of self-consciously older man who's in this room with these children and who describes their attitude in viewing him as momentary wonder. Now, even that might mean
00:49:16
Speaker
I don't know who is this ridiculous, strange looking old guy, you know, or whatever. But he's kind of imagining their imaginations of him. And right, as you say, the implication here is that
00:49:36
Speaker
Oh, they must have no idea of the kinds of wild thoughts that are swirling around in my head. And so let's talk about some of those thoughts. He dreams of the Lidean body. Other people might know another famous poem by Yeats, Leda and the Swan. So he's told that story once. But Dan, what should we notice about this dream of the Lidean body? Right, well, it's interesting.
00:50:06
Speaker
The poem that you mentioned, which is really a companion of this poem, is also in the tower, and it's just two pages away. It comes first. We read Leida and the Swan, and then there's another poem on a picture of a black centaur by Edmund Dulac, a poem I don't really know. And then we get to Among Schoolchildren. So try as you might wish to to
00:50:34
Speaker
moderate the content of Among School Children and sort of take some of this inappropriate sexual sort of shadings of it out, you really can't because it's clear he wants you
00:50:48
Speaker
at least in the volume where it was published, to come to this poem with the shock of Leda and the swan still in your mind. And for people who don't know that poem, that poem is the mythological story of the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan, right? Yes, and it is a poem I for years taught.
00:51:11
Speaker
but have stopped teaching because it's too traumatic actually. If there are students in the class who have had a background with trauma or sexual assault, the poem is just simply too graphic. It's too good in a way. It's just...
00:51:26
Speaker
you are asked to imagine a woman being raped by an enormous bird. And you're given all the sensory apparatus and tools to make that picture in your mind. So it's very, very, very frightening and disturbing poem. And so that's not directly in this poem, but you're suggesting and it's right, it's a totally reasonable suggestion that the reader of the poem would remember the other poem or in any case would know the story.
00:51:54
Speaker
might well know the story. And so the dream of a Lydian body is that body is presumably one that is in Yeats' imagination, sort of.
00:52:04
Speaker
vulnerable, but I don't know how to phrase this from, again, from Yates's point of view, perhaps inviting of a kind of lurid, rapacious gaze. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, literally, it's his muse and obsession mod gone. There's a whole other branch of the story that we could go down there, but
00:52:33
Speaker
The simplest thing to say is that this is now a decades long obsession with a very beautiful, very wealthy, very politic. It's very important to understand also that she was a political radical who had in Yates's view sacrificed the pleasures of the body, the pleasures of improvisational thought.
00:53:02
Speaker
the necessity of feeling full response to the world. She'd given all those things in his mind.
00:53:15
Speaker
out of a devotion to Irish national politics. So, right. So this is, and it's, there's almost, it is a comical scenario. He proposes to her, I don't know how many, five, six times. It just turned out every time. They sleep together once. He writes a poem back. But at this point, yes, he's
00:53:35
Speaker
In his mind, he's made a leap that is uncomfortable to track when teaching the poem in the classroom. He sees the children and then he goes to this extremely sexualized, I think, image of Modgon. I dream of a Lidean body bent above a sinking fire. And then he remembers, right, that she has told him some casual story about a day in her childhood when she was
00:54:02
Speaker
scolded a tale that she told of a harsh reproof or trivial event that changed some childish data tragedy told
00:54:11
Speaker
And it seemed that our two natures blend into a sphere from youthful sympathy or else to alter Plato's parable into the yoke and white of the one shell." So that thought then takes him back into the classroom in one of the strangest passages, I think, in the poem, is where he kind of reenters with the sort of overlay of the image of Mod Gawne's childhood and of her
00:54:38
Speaker
trivial torment as a child, he then kind of reframes or reshoots the scene in the classroom. I'm just babbling on. No, you're doing so beautifully. I actually wanted you to keep going, but let me see if I can take the baton for a moment and help us get there.
00:54:59
Speaker
Right. It's really odd, right? So he's in the classroom or he's in the school room and looking at the children. Suddenly his mind is thinking of this woman with whom he was obsessed. Then he's thinking of a story she told in which she was a child, presumably like the age of the children whom he's among. And
00:55:24
Speaker
And remembering that the stories, you know, there's this bit about Plato's parable and that's a reference to the, I mean, you can find it, it's listeners, but it's a reference to the symposium and to this theory offered in the symposium that would sort of explain sexuality or erotic love between men and women. But okay, he's thinking of that moment and then he's,
00:55:49
Speaker
looking around again as those sort of blinkingly looking around at the children in the room. And he's putting her at sort of trying to imagine Ma Gunn or whomever. I mean, he doesn't name her in this poem, but that's right. You know, trying to put her into the school room and wondering about her.
00:56:12
Speaker
Yes, it's super odd. I don't know. So we're into the third stanza of the poem right now. This is the way that stanza ends, though, Dan, maybe if you want to say something higher up in the stanza, please feel free. And thereupon my heart is driven wild, she stands before me as a living child. Yeah, yeah, it's wild. It almost sounds like a kind of
00:56:40
Speaker
Like a doll come to life or something. A living child is, even on its own, such a strange phrase. Very weird. Of course, and the parallels are drawn between the first stanza where the children behold him as the aged, decrepit old man. I'm maybe 52 next week, so I won't say six-year-old. Is it old man? But anyway.
00:57:03
Speaker
But then that that focalization is reversed so that now suddenly he's the one beholding.
00:57:12
Speaker
the child as manifestation of his great erotic dream. If you get this just a hair wrong, just a fraction wrong, the poem becomes just bad, it seems to me. What do you mean by that? Say more. Well, again, maybe because this is such a poem about pedagogy and because I have taught the poem many times, though never written about it,
00:57:39
Speaker
Um, I'm always thinking about what would the response be to my gloss on this stanza. And I, from a, from my students, I should mention that I teach at a, we say historically women's college. So, you know, most of the students in my class identify as women and, um, they're rightly, they would be rightly skeptical of such a quite sexist, what might appear, um,
00:58:08
Speaker
passage at sea. But yeah, I don't know. The logic I think is very important to track to evade that critique because I wouldn't want the poem to shut down at that moment.
Imagery and Philosophical Depth in Yeats
00:58:30
Speaker
I mean, it... It doesn't shut down, I don't think.
00:58:33
Speaker
Yeah, no, it doesn't. In the fourth stanza, her present image floats into the mind. Right. Here she is, Padman, herself in her 50s at this point. And again, by Yates's account, has practically starved herself and self-flagellated herself into a state of disarray.
00:59:04
Speaker
Right. Her present image floats into the mind. Did Quattrocento, 14th century painters, he had da Vinci in an earlier draft. Did Quattrocento finger fashion it hollow with cheek as though it drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for its meat? He has a lot of images of folks who are sustained only by political commitment. They don't have the sustenance of the body or of the intellect.
00:59:35
Speaker
and appear to be almost starved by their political commitments. I think that's where this is coming from. Yeah, yeah, well, right. It seems to me also like her, as you've described it for us, her image in his mind is something that he's like constantly working over and refashioning and reimagining through, you know, sort of back and forth and back and forth through ages of life, but as a kind of,
01:00:02
Speaker
I mean, the example, perhaps because you mentioned Da Vinci, what I have in mind as I say this is a kind of sketch with its contours that are kind of searching for the form that the artist has in mind. It's as though, I mean, to me that's what
01:00:31
Speaker
the image of her is like in his imagination. And then we sort of emerged from that to enough of that, better to smile on all of its smile and show there was a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. Right, and those were the obligations of the social sphere reasserting themselves as though you could, this is this powerful sort of technicolor fantasy, but he could sort of just shut it off, just kind of,
01:01:01
Speaker
turn the switch off and walk out that room and back into reality. This comfortable kind of scarecrow is of course before the Wizard of Oz scarecrow. There's another comfortable one. But of course what's almost comical about it is that that effort to dismiss the internal reverie is
01:01:29
Speaker
will fail is really because that's the last really that we hear of the kind of filmable scenario of Yates in the classroom, the poem from that moment forward. Yeah, right. So like as I said earlier, that's where the eye makes its exit, in other words. And now he's sort of thinking about
01:01:53
Speaker
his mother or a youthful mother or, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, he's thinking it did occur to me rereading this poem. My own mom was very good friends with the Sisters of Mercy and she used to go and hang out with them. And it struck me reading this poem that it is taken as
01:02:21
Speaker
commonplace and normal, but it is very odd that there are people in modern society who absent themselves from the pleasures of the body, who vow chastity, who vow celibacy. And somehow he has to think about that paradox that in
01:02:47
Speaker
Here he is this figure of almost embodied passion and desire walking among women who have foresworn all of those essential human feelings and activities. So I guess he's thinking about his own mother because the question in the simplest form that he asks is if my mother could see me now looking all haggard and defeated and discouraged and weathered and so on.
01:03:18
Speaker
Would she still have done it? Would it be compensation? For the pang of my birth, of his birth, right? Right. So the simplest version of the question is what youthful mother seeing the baby upon her lap would, if she saw this older guy,
01:03:45
Speaker
think that the pain of giving birth and the worry and anxiety of watching a child grow up and become independent, if the outcome is only old age and decrepitude and weatheredness,
01:04:03
Speaker
why go through that ordeal in the first place? And yeah, you know, what this is making me think of, Dan, is like the, to go back to that, one of the earliest points you made is like the length of the school room. It's long in the way, what I'm imagining now, sorry, I'm making my hand gestures here, is long in the way like an accordion is long, like it stretches out, but then it kind of compresses, you know, keeps sort of,
01:04:29
Speaker
moving back and forth. Like, you know, he's done it with Mod Gun, right? Imagining her, then imagining her as a child, then putting that child in the school room, then imagining her again. And now he's doing it with himself. He's a baby. He's a 60-year-old man. He's imagining his mother sort of
01:04:53
Speaker
having a view of that whole progression in a way. And this sentence is that kind of long schoolroom. It manages to comprehend and include both the child, the baby, the infant, and the current present weathered decrep itself, manages to organize it into one really complex sentence. This is a famous, so just a baby to back up from the line by line explication for a moment.
01:05:22
Speaker
I was going to ask you a question, which is prompted by the only note in my copy of the poem. The note is on the phrase, honey of generation. Oh, yeah. And I remember actually in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which I carried around with me, I remember that there was a note on that phrase in that volume as well.
01:05:50
Speaker
And it's Yeats's own gloss on the phrase, and it sends you down an unbelievable rabbit hole where you encounter a Neoplatonist philosopher named Porphyry. And the Cave of the Nymphs. Cave of the Nymphs, right. And you can find that online in a 1917 translation, which is I'll bet
01:06:13
Speaker
the one that Yeats read. But it's a long, wild, arcane digression upon a very obscure passage in Homer that describes- This is an explanatory note in the style of like Eliot and the Wasteland in a way, right? That's where I was going. Like a MacGuffin. Yeah, exactly, a MacGuffin. So why is this one
01:06:36
Speaker
I don't know. Honey, it's a hard to parse moment in the poem, even if you're not troubled by illusion or whatever. My youthful mother is shaped upon her lap, honey of generation had betrayed. Yeah, it's connected, I know this only from
01:06:56
Speaker
scholars and critics, but it's, you know, that honey of generation is thought to be the, you know, semen is thought to be the, right? And it's, you know, it's connected with the generational substance of, of procreation. And I guess betrayed has an old sense of, um, of, um,
01:07:25
Speaker
I don't know, how do we put it? How do you take betrayed? Well, I don't know. Sorry, so I was not taking it in the first, so cards on the table here. The line is sort of obscure to me, so I'm struggling with it a bit. But having said that, I mean, I'm happy to think about it in real time.
01:07:46
Speaker
I had not taken betrayed in the sense of a kind of ethical betrayal, but as a kind of revelation, you know, when you sort of betray your, you know, I don't know. Revelation is the best word I have for it. Yeah. Or even a softer sense of it is just it's an outcome, right? How do you have betrayed, had presented. Right.
01:08:09
Speaker
Honey of Generation also seems to me like, I mean, it's sort of anticipating perhaps that kind of famous final, I mean, this stanza in a way is linked for me to the final stanza because of, you know, the pangs of birth and then labor, which comes up, which is the first word of the final stanza. But also Honey of Generation sounds like, I wasn't aware of the semen thing though, I'll trust the Yeats scholars on that.
01:08:38
Speaker
It seems to me like, I don't know, honey seems like the sort of sweet byproduct of a kind of, this is getting very lurid, but of a kind of creative act or something. That's what I'm picturing. Yeah, our minds are in the gutter, I guess. Yeah, I guess so.
01:09:05
Speaker
But it's made no simpler by the following line, of course. And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape as recollection or the drug decide. There's some complex. That sounds like a wriggling writhing baby who's fussing or something. Totally. It does to me. It needs Harvey Karp in the five S's. Get that baby on its side.
01:09:31
Speaker
Right, right, exactly. Anyway, go on. Again, there's some complex nested layered arcana here happening that draws us right back into the treatise by Porphyry that I don't have a mastery of, but it is, we will duly note that these are very difficult lines. And then suddenly a very arresting, I think, thought would think her son did she but see that shape
01:09:58
Speaker
the shape on her lap, the baby, the infant with 60 or more winters on its head, a compensation for the paying of his birth.
01:10:08
Speaker
or the uncertainty of his setting forth. And those lines are just as clear as can be and are very moving to me. Totally. Yeah. And it's like a moment where in the mother's imagination that those years compress, right? Right. And yeah, it's sort of granting to her a kind of vision of a life sped up and all at once or overlaid, the old age overlaid on youth. Exactly. And then he kind of launches into this,
01:10:37
Speaker
very different stanzas we were saying earlier, a kind of rapid fire narration of Plato to Aristotle and so on. Yeah, and he'll do that often. I mean, there are a lot of poems at the stage of Yeats's career where there's just
01:10:52
Speaker
you know, passages with sort of ironically or sort of disrespectfully summarized wisdom. And the sort of, I guess, the sort of payout of it is the final line of the stanza, old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird, which implies that, you know, no matter how impassioned one's philosophical system or how, how
01:11:22
Speaker
diligently worked out once thought is bodily decrepitude is wisdom as Yeats says in another poem, really, it all ends up in the same, thinking always ends up embodied and bodies always age and bodies finally die. So that is the return of our scarecrow to disparage the great classical philosophers.
01:11:48
Speaker
Right, right. And Yeats is always thinking about old age and tattered clothes and sort of, you know, or I think of the line, there's more enterprise in walking naked, right? Right, right. From the circus animals desertion. The seventh stanza, not to skip too swiftly over the sixth, but the seventh stanza starts with this
01:12:13
Speaker
I mean, it's like the opposite of the difficulty we were having before. It's such a direct and kind of plain and a resting line. Both nuns and mothers worship images. Right. Yes. It's like a shocking line in a way. I know. Well, partly, it's so helpful in reframing the murk that we've just passed through. Really, he's surfacing and he's helping us to surface in his thinking, I think. Yeah.
01:12:42
Speaker
I think the sixth stanza is, this sounds disrespectful, but it's in some ways the weakest stanza. But we need a lull there. I think we need some light refreshment. We need sort of a palette cleanser or something before we get to this just astonishing finale. And you're right, the thinking there is so arresting and so clear. And
01:13:09
Speaker
we're in the position of having something very complex explained to us, which is a great pleasure, I think. That's a lovely way to put it, and it returns us in a way to what you were describing earlier as the pedagogical
01:13:24
Speaker
You know, mode of the poem or what you might be intimating now are the pedagogical pleasures of the poem. Either to explain a thing, a delicate or a complex thing well brings a kind of pleasure.
01:13:51
Speaker
But to have it explained to you might bring a kind of commensurate sort of pleasure. And it's not normally what we think that a poem would do. I think there's a kind of instinctive thing to say that a poem that's being pedagogical, it's
01:14:15
Speaker
Misunderstanding its its primary task or it's doing something too simple or over explaining. Yeah Yeah, but um, but the lesson here is a
01:14:26
Speaker
a strange and mysterious one, so maybe that saves it from that particular complaint. Now as we move into the final stanzas of the poem, which are again to remind people the two stanzas that as Dan was pointing out earlier suddenly span
01:14:45
Speaker
where a sentence sort of leaps over the gap, as it were, between stanzas seven and eight. So I think it makes sense to think of these as a unit, at least in some ways. Say more about how that lesson begins or how it's set up, or I'm gonna follow you here, Dan. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that
01:15:09
Speaker
It's a moment where you realize that your own errancy and waywardness and just being slightly lost in the logic of the poem, Yeats has anticipated that problem.
01:15:26
Speaker
he's set up a very difficult acrobatics for himself in this poem, I think, and he, you know, not to be too cheesy, but he wants to kind of stick the landing, you know, I mean, his, his leaps of thought and sort of leaps of rhetoric and leaps of image really
01:15:49
Speaker
uh, depend on their being this spectacular finish, I think. And so I don't want to fall too much into just explication, but it is such a hard poem that you find yourself. I think so. I think some of it is worthwhile here. So, so let's, let's, let's say a little bit about, well, we've been, we've been introduced to the,
01:16:16
Speaker
deprivations of the nuns, the negations of sex and of desire, and also of the necessity of disappointment of mothers. And so maybe nuns roughly correspond to a cautious relationship to desire and to passion, just ruling it out from the start.
01:16:46
Speaker
mothers who go through the drama of desire and procreation have as a result the almost certain disappointment of seeing their children's lives unfold in ways that fall short of their first hopes and expectations. So those are two zones that we've been introduced to in the poem.
01:17:12
Speaker
And it seems as though for Yeats, what's required of motherhood is such an intense kind of care or attention or love that it
01:17:29
Speaker
that it almost inevitably leads to the production of an image of the thing you love rather than the thing itself which has its own life and is going to wriggle away eventually. So that even if the life isn't disappointing, it's a disappointment perhaps to you at some level.
01:17:50
Speaker
That's the mother. I think that's beautiful. And then the important intervention here is when Yeats says, both nuns and mothers worship images, but those that the candles light are not as those that animate a mother's reveries, but keep a marble or a bronze repose. And then here's the intervention. And yet they too break hearts. And that leap, that insight, I think is what kind of catalyzes the
01:18:20
Speaker
remarkable conclusion of the poem where you have this sort of compound apostrophe, you know, you've five, I think, five O's in quick succession. O, presences that passion, piety or affection knows and that all heavenly glory symbolize. O, self-born mockers of man's enterprise.
01:18:44
Speaker
And then the apostrophe sort of pause while the lesson starts coming in, right, or the thing he wants to say. Right, he's almost invoked the presences that will speak the lesson through him, maybe? Is that how you hear it? Yeah. Yes, maybe. I think that's right, now that you put it that way. I hadn't
01:19:06
Speaker
I'm not sure that I would have said that, but that feels right. Yes, that he's all, you know, in a way that's not perhaps too dissimilar from the way one might invoke a muse or something like that at the beginning of an epic poem or whatever, right, yeah. Right, right. You're invoking the presences to speak through you in some way and what they have to convey is the final stanza of labor
01:19:34
Speaker
Dan, why don't you read the final stanza for us once from beginning to end and then we can talk about it. Yeah, I'll read the last two actually. Both nuns and mothers worship images, but those the candles light are not as those that animate a mother's reveries, but keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts. Oh, presences that passion, piety or affection knows, and that all heavenly glory symbolize
01:20:04
Speaker
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise! 8. Labor is blossoming or dancing where the body is not bruised to pleasure soul, nor beauty born out of its own despair, nor bleer-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
01:20:23
Speaker
Oh, chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer. Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bowl? Oh, body swayed to music. Oh, brightening glance. How can we know the dancer from the dance? Yeah. So I want to think about labor and what labor means to Yeats here.
01:20:50
Speaker
Labor is what a mother undergoes to deliver a child, but it's also, of course, the work that goes into the stitching and unstitching or the cutting and sewing. Well, yeah. I mean, I was going to say, since you brought up Adam's curse earlier, but then you just did again, yeah. In that poem, there are the lines, again, are they mud guns or her friends? Sorry, to be more in woman is to know
01:21:15
Speaker
though they do not speak of it at school, that one must labor to be beautiful. And that's a poem also about the biblical curse. And for those who aren't up on their Genesis, what Eve's punishment from God in Genesis
01:21:32
Speaker
is that is labor pain, which is bad enough in itself, but presumably emblematic of all other kinds of diminishment or fall. But for Yeats, labor sounds different here, right? Labor is blossoming or dancing where the body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
01:22:00
Speaker
And then he's telling us what it's not, but that presumably what we might have mistaken it to be, right? Nor beauty born out of its own despair.
01:22:11
Speaker
Nor bleer-eyed wisdom. I mean, I'm emphasizing the negations here, but not because I think that's how it ought to be read, but just to draw out some of the logic of it. Nor beauty born out of its own despair. Nor bleer-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. So it's none of those things. Dan, do you have a way of sort of glossing what those things amount to? Like, what should we be disabused of, according to Yates? Well, I guess my sense of it is that the
01:22:42
Speaker
natural process of giving birth is not a staged process that a scholar or a poet might go through. A poet has to feel heartache, has to feel disappointment.
01:22:59
Speaker
in order to…
01:23:17
Speaker
just a wearing down, a wearing out of the self in order to create the end product. But this is some different conception where the outcome is already present at the start or there is no sort of temporal phased process of gradual learning or gradual labor or gradual
01:23:44
Speaker
commitment that that ruins you that makes you into a 60 year old smiling public man, you know, all the all the evidence of where and all the evidence of work and all the evidence of disappointment and discouragement that Yates is just mean evidences. This is the opposite of that somehow. And we look for examples of it, maybe not in
01:24:13
Speaker
poets or philosophers, but in nature or in an entirely physical
01:24:22
Speaker
medium where the body is itself the medium like a dancer. Right. Yeah, that's beautiful. So I love that. Yeah, so right. So to bring us back. So we had those earlier invocations, Oh, presences, Oh, self-born mockers. And then the beginning of the, you know, again, not to oversimplify things, but the kind of delivery of the lesson.
01:24:46
Speaker
Yeah. And then it's interrupted again with additional invocations, the ones that Dan was just referring to. Oh, chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer. Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bowl? Oh, body sway to music. Oh, brightening glance. I loved what you said earlier just a moment ago, Dan, about the about dance as a kind of art form in which the
01:25:13
Speaker
It's true. I had not thought of it in these terms apart from now, I guess, in this poem, which I've known for almost forever, it seems like. But dance is the art form in which the
01:25:26
Speaker
in which the labor, you know, a poet sits down and writes and scribbles and scratches their head and so forth, and then they give you the poem and the poem is sort of separate from them. A musician plays the music, but it's sort of projected out into the world, you know, apart from them. The dancer is the canvas, right? But is also the artist, you know? So there's a kind of lack of separation between those two things. Yeah, yeah, I think we're given all of these tableau of, you know,
01:25:58
Speaker
artists and practitioners who deny the evidence of the body in order to get to beauty or to get to wisdom. And then we're given this alternate idea, whether it's the body of the tree or the body of the dancer, that
01:26:18
Speaker
the correct route, if we're going to get back to sort of pedagogy and lesson delivering, the correct way to think about maybe poetry is, yeah, it's not those frustrated pursuits, but this very natural exfoliation of the self into
01:26:42
Speaker
into movement. In a way, I think the best thing in the poem is, oh, brightening glance. I was just about to ask you about that because that's what I was noticing this time. Well, to me, that's the moment of insight that we're thinking about thinking as being like dancing.
01:27:07
Speaker
And there's the moment when a dancer's body turns in a particularly crisp or particularly
01:27:14
Speaker
sumptuous way and the equivalent in thought is that brightening, that glance, that epiphany, that realization. In a way, yeah. Sorry, go, go, go. Yeah. No, no, that's both a necessary part. It's not separate from the process, but it's a highlight of the process.
01:27:38
Speaker
Yeah. What I was going to say, yeah, is that in a way it's like as you started to say, you know, oh, what I think the best thing in the poem is, and I felt myself knowing slash hoping I knew what you were about to say because I was feeling it too. I mean, what's funny is that in a way what was... About that same phrase? Yes, about that same phrase. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And what's funny about it is that in a way that
01:28:06
Speaker
like what we were experiencing there was our own version of the brightening glance. I mean, to me, it's that moment where you're talking to somebody and they're saying something and you suddenly anticipate what's coming and it's a beautiful thing and you feel a kind of recognition because a glance is something that has to happen between people, I think. Right. Right, it does.
Reflections on the Discussion
01:28:29
Speaker
That's right. Yeah.
01:28:32
Speaker
Yeah, and brightening the kind of gerundive form there makes it sort of magically happening in the present, you know? Right, yeah, the present, right. And yeah, and then the final, you know, those final two, you know, of course, all of the stanzas share a rhyme scheme, but the, you know, that the brightening glance, that glance rhymes on dance, you know?
01:28:59
Speaker
I don't know, something kind of just right about it, that it's sort of capturing, it's both kind of capturing a dancer's pose, but also kind of giving the impression that it's in a kind of motion. It's like a tree that's swaying, a body that's swaying in the breeze. It's sort of rooted, but moving. Yeah. I don't know. I feel
01:29:27
Speaker
The first question you asked, which is sort of what did you feel when you were reading the poem aloud? And I said, well, I was kind of monitoring my own performance because I knew what was coming. I knew that we had to do something with this great
01:29:40
Speaker
Very famous conclusion, maybe it's the most famous line in all of Yeats or lines. And, you know, there's something curious about how beautiful they are, but how, I don't know, it's like a song you've heard too many times or something, you know, it's, I have trouble lifting it into thought. Yeah. It's, it's intuition, it's instinct, it's bodily in a way. Yeah.
01:30:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's beautifully said. And in a way, that's expressing the difficulty that Yates is describing as a great mystery of the separation of the vehicle from its tenor somehow. Totally.
01:30:27
Speaker
Dan, Jason, I'm so grateful for the chance to have talked with you about this poem, which I feel like I know in a different way having had the conversation with you. And I really appreciate that. That was so much fun. That was so much fun. Thank you. And yeah, no, thanks for inviting me. And thanks for doing this. We're creating this archive of really spectacular discussions. So thank you.
01:30:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, and it's just happening because I'm talking to people that I want to talk to. So it's been a revelation to me and I'm so grateful that I got to include you in it. So thank you and thanks to our listeners for hanging out with us for the last 90 minutes. So we went long. And yeah, again, thank you so much and stay tuned. We'll have more for you soon. Be well, everyone.