YEATS'S CONCEPT OF IMAGE D. C.

AGARWALA Lecturer in English, Rajasthan University

The word image is not merely a recurring symbol in the poetry and prose writings of W.B. Yeats; it is central to the entire poetic metaphysical system which he sought to formulate. This concept is, however, not destructive of the antinomies; as a matter of fact there would be no need of image-formation had the physical forms and shapes not been subject to decay and death. If beauty and youth were eternal, metaphysics and philosophy would cease to exist. It is only to make eternal what is transitory that the need of image may be realised. Thus it is not surprising that a word should accomplish so much; Yeatss symbols often exhaust the levels on which the poet contemplates. The word image, in its non-referential meaning, has connotations whose application to Yeatss metaphysics has as much validity as to his poetics. The aesthetic religion that the poet envisaged for himself and which was to him the legacy of the pre-Raphaelites and of the nineties could be effected by the area of suggestiveness covered by his use of the word image. In this paper I shall attempt to suggest the relevance of the multiple meanings that this word is made to yield in the context of Yeatss poetics and also how Yeats offered a different and altogether new approach to the problem of art-metaphysics relationship which had confronted Plato and Aristotle and to which each philosopher had his own answer to offer. To say all this is to suggest that Yeats had a theory of image; having suggested this one is faced with the problem of comparing and contrasting Yeatss theory with the theory of image or imagism preached and practised by Hulme, Ezra Pound and others of that group. I Before actually attempting the task outlined in the introductory paragraph, it is relevant in the interest of a better understanding of Yeatss concept of image, to digress a little and to work out a more subtle distinction: the one between a symbol and an image. Yeatss name is inextricably associated with the modern development of symbolism in English literature. He began his career as a poet with an utter disregard for rhetoric as against symbols and symbolismthe powerful agents of imagination and poetic creativityaccording to Yeats. At all stages Yeats, in his efforts to define symbolism, is keen to suggest the poeticmetaphysical implications. He writes: A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame! (Symbolism in Poetry: Essays and Introduction, London. 1961. p. 163) Yeats distinguishes between allegory and symbol also: I find that though I love symbolism, which is often the only fitting speech form some mystery of disembodied life, I am for the most part bored by allegory, which is made, as Blake says, by the daughters of memory; and coldly, with no

wizard frenzy. (Essays-1924 p. 474) Yeatss illustration of the concept of symbolism from Burnss poet does not exclude the metaphysical overtones: There are no lines with more meloncholy beauty than these lines by Burns:

The white moon is setting behind the white waves, And time is setting with me O! And these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness of the moon and the wave, whose relation to the setting of time is too subtle for the intellect and you take from them their beauty. But, when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. A little later in the same essay Yeats writes: All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us, certain disembodied powers whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions. (Ideas of Good and Evil. pp. 241, 242 and 243) For Yeats, as for all symbolist poets, symbols help to solve the poeticmetaphysical dilemma. Through symbols these poets hint, however, indistinctly, at the deeper and imperceptible reality. Thus, for Verlaine, poetry is like the blue eyes behind the veil (les bleus yeux derier du voil) and Baudelaire dwells meditatively on the suggestive correspondences between the real and the make-believe. This is not to suggest that Yeatss theory of image is, in any essential point, different and a departure from his idea of symbolism. It is at best a further development of his concept of symbolism and this may be deduced from a reading of his poetry and of his philosophic system A Vision. For the purpose of our present study the distinction suggested between a symbol represented by the figure of 1, for example, and an image as something vague and irrational is too mathematical and not serviceable. In Yeatss sense, an image has more metaphysical connotations than a symbol; accordingly, an image is largely representative of the spiritual reality and it achieves a philosophic sanction too without being deprived of the poetic suggestiveness of a symbol. Images, thus, more appropriately, form the content of which symbols are the only fitting and successful medium of communication. It is possible, writes Yeats, to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the image that calls it up and gives it expression. This is ably stated by a critic: what can be announced in the pulpit is not that for which the altar was built and symbolism is most often the only possible language for the expression of spiritual realities. (Graham Hough: The Last

Romantics. p. 228) Philosophically an image is an abstraction and corresponds to the universal idea or reality behind the flux of things. It is the eternal essence which exists in the mind or the memory; the phenomenal world is its expression. In his poem Among the School Children Yeats conveys the idea succinctly: after arguing what mother would congratulate herself for the pangs of her child-birth when she sees her son at the age of sixty (a lean old man), Yeats resolves the dilemma by suggesting that mothers, lovers and nuns worship images only. Thus an image, though only an idea, is not destructive of the phenomenon which suggests it. The concept of Yeatss image may now be distinguished from the imagism of Ezra Pound and others. It will presently be discovered that there is little common or corresponding between the two: nothing can be imagined to be more distant from Yeatss ideal than Ezra Pounds ideal of an image concrete, sharply delineated, hard and clear, not blurred or diffuse, which in Platos words would perhaps mean the imitation of an imitation after sufficient allowance has been made for the poetic sensuousness in its presentation. The imagism of Hulme and Pound was a reaction against the vagueness and haziness of the Romantic poetry; Yeatss theory of image is, to that extent, a reaction against the rigid inflexibility of the imagist movement. The image, according to Pound, was more or less a counter devoid of suggestiveness and idealism. On the contrary, an image to Yeats, is something which is super-terrestrial. In this article I shall attempt to show that with this concept of an image Yeats seems to resolve the poetic metaphysical dilemma which he faced squarely and this he is able to do without at the same time denying the significance of the phenomenal world. II The term image in Yeatss poetics acquires an unmistakable extension of meaning as a result of the poets attempt to identify art with religion and metaphysics. Yeats thus created not only a new concept of art but also a new theology highly developed and extremely complex because it accounted for the passage of entire time and history. The poet, quite early when he chose to be a symbolist poet, had rejected the possibilities of his accepting a conventional religion. What was commonplace and conventionl was inartistic and had little appeal to the exotic and mystery loving mind of Yeats. Identifying his religion with Blakes, Yeats wrote: He (Blake) announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world he knew....In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination, but they made their souls by listening to sermons and by doing or not doing certain things...In our time we are agreed that we make our souls out of some one of the great poets of ancient times or out of Shelley or Wordsworth or Goethe or Blake or Flaubert or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser order or out of Mr. Whistlers pictures, while we amuse ourselves or at least make a poorer sort of soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things. (Essays. 1924. p. 137) Finally Yeats succeeded, through the agency of his wife, to create a new and complex mythological order, based on the cyclic concept of history. This new mythology was highly personal and religion, sorcery, art, philosophy went into

the making of it. With the help of it Yeats was largely successful in evolving a poetic-metaphysical concept of art. Accordingly the artist, on this creativeontological plane, was the saint also who, in order to achieve an image of his own, had to undergo the same kind of fleshly or physical dissolution as the Byzantium saints did for their spiritual purification. Decidedly the artistic process to Yeats was analogous to the spiritual one. The poet therefore implores the Byzantium saints in the holy fire of the mosaic wall to teach him to consume the complexities of mire and blood so that he too is enabled to achieve his spiritual-poetic expiation:

O sages standing in Gods holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing masters of my soul. Consume my heart away, sick with desire, And fastened to a dying animal. It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

Clearly the word image to Yeats is synonymous with soul and Yeats used the one quite frequently to suggest the other. In an early poem Youth and Age Yeats assures Augusta Gregory that he loves the fleeting soul in her so that he alone of all her lovers will continue to love her even though she grows old and dyes her hair and uses other devices to look young. In another beautiful lyric Before the World was Made the beloved employs all sorts of artistic devices in an attempt to recapture her conceptual or abstract loveliness and thus seeks to reduce herself to her original Image: If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanitys displayed: Im looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

One could even go farther and suggest that the beloved, in an attempt to change herself into an art-image, is anxious to reduce herself to the picture of the single lovely woman which Platos philosopher contemplates. III An image, as Yeats viewed it, is an artifice of eternity; it alone, like the soul, is eternal and triumphant over the change and flux. Hindu mind which seems to have considerably and materially influenced Yeats, has pondered deeply on the nature of human soul. In this section it will be pointed out how parallelistic to Hindu conception of soul is Yeatss idea and nature of image. The soul, so long as it dwells in this world, is unable to realist its significance and greatness; it is entangled and absorbed into what is known as the mystery of the five senses or what the Hindus term it as Maya or Prapanchjal. The unpurged images of the day, according to Yeats, are likewise embedded into the blood and mire of human veins. By consuming the lusts and desires of the flesh into a kind of holy fire, the image, according to Yeats, acheives its purity. So long as his heart is tied to the dying animal, the poet or the would-be saint will fail to realize his antithetical self as well as the abstract purity of the image-soul. He cannot acquire that objectivity or serenity of mind which is absolutely desirable for poetic creation. So long as the flesh is powerful and the image is slave to it, the image is in the state of impurity and will be born again and again into its impure state until by some conscious effort perhaps it achieves its expiation and finally enters the purgatory of pure art. It is true that this art-image achieves its redemption by being purged into the glowing intensity of the supernatural fire; it is, like the soul as Hindus conceive of it, is immortal and invulnerable. As Yeats himself suggested, the supernatural form of the image is purified by a fire which is itself kept by the glow and intensity of t purified images: Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flames, Where blood-begotten spirits come And complexities of fury leave Dying into a dance Into agony of trance. An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. Moreover, the image has been compared by Yeats to the Hades bobbin as it is freed from temporal needs and physical decay and shares the wisdom of the ages: For Hades bobbin bound in mummy cloth May unwind the winding path,

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the supernatural; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. The impersonality of this aesthetic image is created by the poet by undergoing an extreme type of restraint and rigorous discipline. The annihilation of the lure of senses is the first requisite for the piety of the soul-image. Discipline and restraint are the attributes which distinguish a saint or an artist from an ordinary mortal. A dancer, for example, by constant and regular practice of rhythmic movements disciplines his body so perfectly as to render it impossible for others to distinguish the dancer from the dance. All thoughts and desires get themselves merged into the supreme achievement of the antithetical self. Yeats wrote: Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every loved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knows nothing of desire, for desire implies effort, and though there is still separation from the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its own existence. As all effort has ceased, all thought has become image...and every image is separate from every other, for image were linked to image, the soul would awake from its immovable trance. This idea has been poetically rendered in the following line of Yeatss poems:

O little did they care who danced between And little she by whom her dance was seen So she had outdanced thought Body perfection brought.

It is by this kind of rigorous process of fieshly mortification that the artist is objectified into an art-object. The images on the marble floor in the city of Byzantium dance and burn themselves into an agony of trance. Once the process of poetic impersonalisation is complete and the image realisation is effected, i.e., once out of nature the image may or may never take a bodily form. It then seeks identity and bears close correspondence with other art objects such as the birds and trees which

...Gracian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing or to come.

Only by thus reducing himself to art-image does the poet seek to achieve his own impersonality and universality in poetry:

By the help of an image I call to my opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon. The idea that the poets opposite or his antithetical self will result from an objectification of experience and personality is suggested by Yeats with the help of his theory of Mask. Yeats wrote: ...and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary inhabitants, half planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of The Mask which hat convinced me that every passionate man...is, as it were, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the nationalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman Emperors image in his head and some Condottiers blood in his heart. (Autobiographies.p.152). It may however be added by way of comment that the accoount of the poet as a medium or vehicle only for achieving poet impersonality as suggested by Yeats is more satisfying than one attempted by T. S. Eliot who wrote: .my meaning is, that the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Eliot, here seems to postulate a duality of poetic personality; though the poet is only a medium while absorbed in the process of poetic creation, he yet expresses experiences and impressions which, in all probability, are his own irrespective of the fact that they are gathered from all sides and directions. Otherwise, one is tempted to know as to whose experiences these are that the poet seeks to express when reduced to a poetic medium. Yeats seems to have conceived of the poet as a medium only and the poetic process begins not by expressing his ideas and experiences for at this stage he has none of his own. The poet, while engaged in the poetic process, makes himself an abstraction and thereby participates in the abstract life lying behind the phenomenal flux.

The poet is thus a medium only for conveying those abstract images which his own soul lives and associates with. Yeatss explanation of the poetic medium and of the impersonality of the artist has the merit of being more satisfying and conclusive. Iv Closely related to the idea of the depersonalisation of the image is the question of universality in poetry. It may be pointed out that universality in Yeatss poetics extends not only in space but in time also. It is both vertical as well as horizontal. Largely dependent on the horizontal nature of the universality of Yeatss image is the poets cyclic concept of history. The image, like the soul, once it enters the purgatory of a poem, can summon other souls and images as pure and intense as itself. Thus a purged image Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow and then there rush spirits after spirits and. Those images that yet Fresh images beget. The idea suggested seems to be that once the poet has disembodied and depersonalised himself, the whole universe becomes dematerialised for him. The poet then looks into the nature of things and every soul pours out, as it were, its secret to the poet. As to the man in Baudelaires sonnet Correspondences who moves through a forest of symbols where each pillar nods familiarly, so to the poet the entire universe, dematerialised and decomposed, seems to participate in the intense creativity of a poem. If there are still some unpurged images, the marble of the dancing floor breaks bitter furies of complexity. Each shade then becomes more of an image and each corporeal bird more of a miracle. Thus the poet and the abstract universe are one. Over the communion of the individual with the universal, the poet comments: Anyone who has any experience of any mystical state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound symbols, whose meaning...one does not perhaps understand for years. Nor I think any one has known that experience with any constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some old monument, a strange or intricate image, that floated up before him, and to grow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world and mens thoughts age after age... (Essays. p. 96) Yeatss view of history suggests that there is a cyclic growth of civilization and that according to the correspondence of the period between the two civilizations the image of the one may be born into that of the other. The correspondence of these images is, however, conveyed with the help of

symbols. Helen, the symbol of beauty and destruction, may be reborn in the person of Maud Gonne to destroy another Troy or it may be reborn in that peasant girl Mary Haynes referred to in his poems The Tower and Dust Hath Closed Helens Eyes. Yeats, for all one can say, is himself the last of the Romantics mounting once

.in the saddle Homer rode, Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood. Or the Homer-image may be reborn in the blind poet Raftery: Strange but the man who made the song was blind; Yet now I have considered it, I find That nothing strange; the tragedy began With Homer that was a blind man And Helen hath all living hearts betrayed. There is another poem by Yeats in which the whole Irish scene is visualized as one on Olympus and each Irish figure corresponds to an important key-image from the Greek civilization of about 2,500 years ago. Yeatss belief in magic and magical practices has contributed not a little to the creative-metaphysical theories. In the essay The Magic Yeats recorded three doctrines which are the foundation of magic and poetry. These doctrines are (1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature itself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols (The Ideas of Good and Evil. p. 29)

V Yeatss attitude to philosophy seems to have been unfavourable for a long time. He whipped Plato, Aristotle and the later Platonists for ignoring the fact of physical decay: Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle stick or strings What a star sang and careless muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scarce a bird.

Yeats, in his early study of these philosophers, had thought that philosophy as propounded by these philosophers is all transcendence and not emanating from perceptual reality. As it took no account of physical decay and suffering it was largely unsatisfactory. Philosophy as such, it seemed to Yeats, did not account for the antinomies but sought to resolve them:

And I declare my faith I mock Plotinus thought And cry in Platos teeth Death and life were not Till man made up the whole. I have prepared my peace With learned Italian things And the proud stones of Greece, Poets imaginings And memories of love, Memories of the words of women, All those things whereof Man makes a superhuman Mirror-resembling dream, Later on Yeats adds a note of correction to these lines: When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus, I forgot that it is something in our eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence. Has not Plotinus written: Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the

author of all living things. Evidently Yeats readjusted his attitude to philosophy (cf. It is myself I remake) which he subsequently considered as the; only relevant compensation and occupation for the old age. In order to remake his soul Yeats turned to philosophy and he sacrificed his youthful nostalgic desires for the greater need of studying monuments of magnificence. Yeatss theory of image is thus not only aesthetically and metaphysically significant, it is an answer to the problem of art-reality relationship posed by Plato also. There are resemblances between Plato and Yeats: the formers doctrine of soul and Yeats concept of image. The parallelism between Platos concept soul as a spindle and Yeatss notion of image as a perne in a gyre weaving and unweaving the thread of experience can hardly be missed. Yeatss idea of the cyclic movement which is counted differently by different philosophers corresponds closely to the Hindu concept of Kalpa and the Magnus Annus of the Platonists. At the end of each civilization the Christ or Dionysus form will emerge to teach the process of unwinding the thread. Both Plato and Yeats emphasize reality as abstraction. It is an idea or essence. Like Plato, Yeats also believed that the idea reality is the sole survivor; all other objects are imitations manifestations of this reality. It is however in his conception of art and art-objects that Yeats seems to differ sharply from Plato and suggests an altogether new approach to the Platonic problem of art-reality relationship. Plato exalted the philosopher at the expense of the artist. Whereas the philosopher occupies a conspicuously prominent place in Platos Republic, the poet is banished from there for he, it is presumed, is at the farthest removes from reality and as such his output has only a pernicious effect on the life of the Republic. Aristotle, Platos disciple, improved on his masters fallacy by arguing that the poet is a creator. He faces reality directly and creates new forms and shapes which are the mimesis or imitation of reality. Thus he established that the poet is not a servile imitator that Plato imagined him to be but truly a creator in the Greek sense of the word. Yeats seems to have gone farther and to improve upon the Aristotelian argument by eliminating altogether the idea of imitation in the context of art. The poets concern, according to Yeats, is to create images; and though the worldly images are often unpurged the poet, before employing them in art, purges by reducing them to their original concept. The artist thus deals with the ideas or abstractions. In this sense art parts company with life or mere living. It neither creates life nor imitates it. The question of verisimilitude to life will be absurd to think of in the present context. Yeatss attitude to life is one of characteristic indifference. Borrowing a phrase from Leconte de LIsle, Yeats also said Live! No doubt our servants will do that for us. Art, according to the poet, has a life of its own; it teems with intensity. Thus the poets concern is the same as that of the philosopher. Plato exalted the philosopher-king; Yeats exalted the poet to the philosophers status. The poet is moreover the goldsmith of Byzantium who breaks the flood and after purifying the images sets them on a golden bough. All images of the past are thus associated and merged with the purified images: All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there Lear Thats Ophelia, that Cordelia,...

To live like an image is to live the life of poetry. Contrasted with the life of poetry or imagination is, according to Yeats, the life of rhetoric, of

Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn Cradle upon cradle and all in fight and all Deformed because there is no deformity But saves from a dream.

Opposed to this life of rhetoric again is the life of the dreamer, of the man of imagination and of crazy man, of the fool or the philosopher who, contemplating of reality, endeavours to be the reality himself. This is the life of the artistpainter, musician, dancer and poet, of the young lovers and the saint and the nuns and the mothers who are anxious to achieve their antithetical self worshipping images and by endeavouring to be that which they love and adore.

Sailing to Byzantium Symbolism: The use of symbolism is very important throughout the poem. The title of the poem Sailing to Byzantium contains 2 important symbols-: (a) Sailing which depicts a metaphorical journey and gives substance and a physical aspect to what Yeats is trying to achieve. (b) Byzantium symbolizes a world of artistic magnificence and permenance, conjuring up in the mind of the reader, a rich and inclusive culture such as that associated with the Byzantium empire. The images of birds, fish and young lovers used by Yeats in the first stanza symbolises transience and mortality. Yeats highlights this aspect of the world he lives in, so that the world which he seeks i.e. Byzantium, becomes more clearly focused. In the second stanza Yeats uses the symbol of a scarecrow to represent the decrepitute of old age. The scarecrow is a repulsive lifeless image symbolising everything that Yeats wants to reject in his mortal existence. The symbol of music and song runs through the poem providing a unified motif between the worlds of intellect and sensual worlds. In the opening stanza the song is that of the birds in the trees, a sensual though transient song. In the second stanza he projects an image of a singing school a

suggestion that the joy experienced in this artistic paradise is more comporable than the joy of song. This idea is again repeated in stanza three. In the final stanza the song of the golden bird which entertains the lords and ladies of Byzantium represents the intellectual joy to be experienced by Yeats. The golden bird of the final stanza is a chosen image of the permenant form Yeats wishes to take, in essence it represents durability which one associates with the untarnishing quality of gold, by virtue of its physical permenance there is the understood contribution of its song, thereby providing what Yeats hopes will be the representation of the artistic existence he yearns for.