Rise and Shine

Something about Harvard, and I'd wager college in general, is that the pettiest problems in life get magnified to the point of absurdity. In the absence of real-world concerns--for instance, where to eat, where to sleep, how to afford a comfortable lifestyle--matters that would elsewhere be completely meaningless take on disturbing gravity.

For instance:

Why should I care about the cochlea and the basilar membrane? Why should I care whether the world is more or less stable in a bipolar system of state power? Why should I care about the political ramifications of Puccini's Tosca? The most direct answer is that knowing these things is imperative to getting good grades. But why should I care about getting good grades?

For that matter, why should I care about being accepted by a social club? Why should I care about which house I live in next year? Why should I care about gossip, who's fucking whom and who's jealous about it? Why should I care about success in this strange game of college, with its mysterious rules and ridiculous value systems? Soon enough I'll just leave and the only things that will really matter are my friendships and how well prepared I am to work for a living.

Maybe after graduating high school I was just unusual in desperately wanting to go live in the real world. So many of my Harvard friends say they would be living their dream if they could just stay in school forever. This horrifies me. Where have I come, anyway? Is this some sort of refuge from reality? Some dreamworld where the trivial is made serious so that the serious can stay trivial? Everything seems turned on its head, here, and my peers love it.

But I don't. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hate it. I would hate living on the street. I would hate killing people in the military. I would hate working in an office so I can scrape together enough money to own a mediocre bachelor pad and keep up a steady buzz. But I do find it intolerable. I can't wrap my head around it. I can't comprehend the social mores here. I can't seem to cope with this endless lottery of meaning. Here's what I mean by that:

For an hour, or a day, or three weeks, one thing can feel like the most important thing in the world, and then in an instant it's gone. Class ends. The book is finished. The high wears off. Hearts change. And then you grasp at the straws of the rest of the world, which so recently you were content to blur out of focus. You look for something else. Some other fix. Only you know the same thing will happen again; it will up and vanish as quickly as it came. So you grow some brakes, conditioned now to invest yourself less and less in anything. Then you're safe. Then you're numb. Then you're centered around a black hole that is your insatiably hungry self.

Maybe two weeks ago I had some sort of a nervous breakdown. I couldn't write anything. I couldn't think straight. I couldn't focus on a damned thing for more than a few seconds. My memory was shot, my creative reservoirs were dammed or dried up, my speech was erratic and slurred. And I had a paper to write--my final paper--about poetry, of all things.

I went to the hospital. I just wanted to talk to someone. They told me I needed more sleep. Three hours a night was not enough. They prescribed me Valium's little sister. I never picked it up. I managed to get an extension on my paper. They set up an appointment to talk to someone. Then, when the day rolled around, the sewers underneath Harvard Square exploded and all the buildings were shut down. I went out with my friends and got drunk, and found a girl who would lie down with me and not ask any difficult questions. I seemed to be doing all right. But I sure as hell couldn't write a paper about poetry.

Of course, I needed to write a paper about poetry. I didn't want to. I couldn't do it well. But I had to turn something in. And I wanted to leave Harvard. I wanted to get out, catch my breath, and look at it from a distance. I wanted to go to New York. So I just bit down hard on my lip, started banging away at my keyboard, and came up with enough ideas to hopefully fill up ten pages.

Then my computer broke. It wouldn't plug in anymore and the battery had 13 minutes on it. I sent away my most important files, turned it off, and locked myself in an underground computer lab until my whole universe was that LCD screen and the pile of books scattered around the cubby. And I wrote, and wrote, and wrote until I knew I'd be burnt out forever, and then I just kept writing.

Then yesterday morning I was finished. I had a mess. A shameless, meaningless mess. And I handed it in, packed my bag full of some clothes and my journals, and bought a one-way ticket to New York City. On the bus a boy wearing a Harvard t-shirt sat down next to me and worked on homework for the whole five-hour ride. I didn't say a word to him. There was no name on my shirt. I wasn't wearing school colors.

For all anybody knew I could be anybody.

I'm writing this on Eli's computer, in Eli's room fourteen stories above Eli's campus. It seems to me Eli doesn't want his name attached to any of these things anymore, and I don't blame him. I understand. We weren't meant to be cooped up in this dream, and now we're both scratching at the walls, trying desperately to wake up. And sooner or later, it's going to happen.

But first, I suppose, we need to take our exams.

...

Tim Lambert

Nikki Skillman

English 152

5/8/08

Waking from the Dream:

“The Sad Shepherd,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Lapis Lazuli,”

and The Transformative Power of Art

“Art is but a vision of reality,” wrote Yeats in “Ego Dominus Tuus,” but the bulk of his art complicates this seven-word Ars Poetica. Over his decades of composing poems, the nature of this “vision” seems to have changed dramatically, and the relationship between art and reality proved more dynamic than this definitive-sounding statement would suggest. A close reading of three poems, “The Sad Shepherd,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and “Lapis Lazuli,” illuminates Yeats’ developing knowledge of how art and reality affect each other. The three poems trace the lineage of this idea, and their diverse stylistic devices demonstrate its application, from the sad shepherd’s nebulous and misguided perception of art as a dream-tinted filter for reality, to the more sophisticated understanding, discovered in “The Wild Swans at Coole” and at last exercised in “Lapis Lazuli,” of art as a means of waking from the dream of self-fragmentation and mastering reality though self-creation.

"The Sad Shepherd" presents a decidedly unsatisfying relationship between man and art, but the heart of the problem remains elusive. Its sister poem, "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," presents an optimistic view of art's capacity to comfort and heal. The speaker of that poem tells his audience, "words alone are certain good" (43), indicating, it seems, art's ascendancy over action; in practically the same breath, furthermore, he seeks to overturn the dichotomy of dream and reality, as he exhorts the reader "dream, dream, for this is also sooth" (57). In "The Sad Shepherd," however, this optimism breaks down. The title character, evidently following the happy shepherd's advice, looks to a shell to relieve his pain. If we understand the shell, as numerous critics have, as a "symbol for the transformation of reality achieved through art" (Murphy 16), the conclusion of "The Sad Shepherd" demands certain questions. Instead of the promised "melodious guile" (1.39) the sad shepherd finds his words transformed into "an inarticulate moan" (2.27); art has failed completely to fulfill its transformative function. What has caused this failure? One explanation centers on the shepherd himself. Edward Engelberg argues that Yeats, by concluding the poem with the bleak image of an indifferent world, intended to condemn the shepherd and make some implicit normative statement. Yeats, according to Engelberg, does not approve of the shepherd's "simplistic attempt" to push his sadness upon others in "a kind of art-as-therapy" (76). John Unterecker holds a similar sentiment, stating that the shepherd "fails because he is not an artist" (Murphy 19). But the text itself does not bear out such a harsh reading. A softer alternative, proposed by Murphy, suggests that the happy shepherd "represents the dreamer" whereas the sad shepherd represents "the disillusioned realist who is eager to dream but is denied its limited consolation." (19) Perhaps the sad shepherd's attempt to use the shell—that is, to use art—to ease his suffering is not foolish, simplistic, or inherently misguided and therefore doomed to failure; instead, art itself—the dream—is powerless in the face of a persistent, bleak reality.

The sonic composition of "The Sad Shepherd" helps to direct our reading of the outwardly ambiguous ending. Throughout the poem the most dominant and significant sounds seem to be "s" and "w," which, it is worth noting, begin and end the name of the poem's first active character, Sorrow. Early on the "w" sound surrounds the shepherd; indeed, the "s" sound starts out conspicuously absent from his arena. Outside of the title, the main character is never referred to as a shepherd, and is never described as sad. Rather, he is called "a man whom Sorrow named his friend" (in lines 1, 8, and 17) a turn of phrase that not only renders the character the object of his mood, but contrives to place a "w" adjacent to his neutral title. Furthermore, this same curious identifying phrase appears three times throughout the poem, seemingly pinning it together. Yeats' verb choice early in the poem seems dominated by the "w" sound; the shepherd "was" (1) then "went walking" (3) and the "windy surges wend" (4). Meanwhile, most of the other 'characters' in the poem—that is, those objects the shepherd encounters and entreats to listen—all alliterate with a common "s" sound: "stars," "sea," "shell," and even the "sands" to which Yeats reallocates the epithet "humming" that described the sea in "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" (35). The one exception is the dewdrops, which have their own distinct sound—an appropriate choice given their characterization as self-obsessed, "listening…for the sound of their own dropping" (15-16). If it is possible to associate a single sound with a particular quality, Yeats does so in this poem by repeatedly using "s" for untrustworthy and indifferent things.

In the second half of the poem, however, the shepherd begins to resemble, at least sonically, these indifferent objects. It begins in line 9, when the shepherd cries out, "Dim sea, hear my most piteous story!" an appeal which seems to hold a suggestion of kinship—as if the sea should be interested for no other reason than the sonic connection it bears to his tale. The sea, of course, does bear a resemblance to the shepherd—like him, it "cried" (10), but still it does not care. The shepherd's identification with the sea seems to be his fundamental mistake; he confuses a superficial resemblance for a promise of a legitimate connection. In his monologue the shepherd loads his language with "s" sounds—"story" (19), "shall send" (20), "sadness" (21), "shall sing" (22)—but the subjects of these sentences are "words" (20), "whispering words" (23), and he reiterates the word "own" three times, almost obsessively. The reason for the sad shepherd's artistic failure lies first in his mistaking the similar for the sympathetic, as second in the reflexive nature of his efforts; he looks at art as a means of changing himself and his plight in his own eyes. But art is not really capable of that. His looking to art as a way to make reality more artistic, more dreamlike, was always bound to backfire.

Gender comes into play in strange and discomforting ways in "The Sad Shepherd." The shepherd is clearly identified as male, as is Sorrow, who calls him "his friend" (1). The word "her" however, reveals both the sea (in lines 10 and 12) and the shell (in line 28) as female. The stars and dewdrops remain sexless groups, though perhaps due only to the gender-neutral nature of plural pronouns. The rhymes, however, complicate this split. The shepherd's first action—beyond simply existing—occurs in lines 2-3, which feature feminine endings, while Sorrow and the windy surges occupy male lines that embrace the shepherd's couplet. The man is surrounded by nature and supernatural, personified moods, which impose on him a sly sexual inversion. Impotency cripples the shepherd; the female objects reject his advances and the male mood essentially forces himself upon him. He has no stable sexual identity and he consequently suffers at the hands of both male and female forces. The man's passiveness is asserted more concretely in this quatrain by the preponderance of present participles that describe him—"walking" is parallel to "dreaming" (2-3) and subordinate to the fairly weak verb "went" (3)—which contrast sharply against the strong, short, perfect verbs of Sorrow ("named" in line 1) and the surges ("wend" in line 4). Participles help put a subject in a suspended state, continuously acting without completion; the poem is written in the past tense, but we appreciate that the shepherd's problem remains in the present; he is stuck with this undeveloped artistic understanding.

Yeats wrote “The Wild Swans of Coole,” his mediation on love and aging, some thirty years after “The Sad Shepherd,” and the poem not surprisingly strikes a much different tone. Whereas the shepherd of the previous poem finds himself in the throes of passionate despair, the speaker in “The Wild Swans of Coole” grieves precisely because he seems to have lost his capacity for any passionate emotion. He is depressed, paradoxically, because he has grown numb to his former depression. Nevertheless the speaker of the latter poem bears some resemblance to the shepherd of the former, in that both have to confront a seemingly insurmountable kind of sorrow, and both attempt to do so through art. "The Wild Swans of Coole" reflects a more effective approach than the shepherd's so-called "art-as-therapy," and this is largely due to the poet's more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between dream and reality.

The final stanza, in its swirl of dreams, death, and transcendent life, provides a second view into Yeats’ interpretation of art as a reality-transforming device. This stanza is also the most hotly-contested piece of the poem, not least of all because Yeats' drafts show that late in the poem's development he moved it from the middle of the poem to the end (Bloom 191). The final image of the poem is the speaker awakening, traversing the boundary between different types of consciousness, but the nature of each consciousness has confounded critics. According to Harold Bloom, "awakening here is not death but the end of antithetical consciousness" (192), by which he means the perpetual conflict between "soul and self, mind and heart" (12); Richard Ellmann, meanwhile, supposes that Yeats' "awakening would be his death" (192). Murphy argues against Bloom's interpretation on the grounds that the speaker "has already experienced heart-weariness and loss of passion," (148) but still speaks as though his final awakening has not yet happened; "When is it to happen?" he rightly demands of Bloom. No explanation for the speaker's awakening seems satisfactory when it dwells only on the poet's intellectual development, and the tone of the final passage contains more than just a hint of optimism. To focus on what the speaker has lost or outgrown, rather than the delight "other men's eyes" enjoy (29), results in an unnecessarily dark and limited reading.

Despite the tension expressed explicitly and implicitly in the text, many of the poem's stylistic features endow it with a pervading sense of peace. According to Murphy, "the whole mood of the poem is one of incompleteness, or more specifically, of near-completeness" (146). In defense of this reading he cites the numerology of the poem; nineteen years is just short of a round two decades, and fifty-nine swans is just short of a round, even number. As they paddle, "lover by lover," he reminds us, "one swan, at least, lacks a lover" (147). Furthermore, he notes how the swans scatter "in great broken rings" (his emphasis). He skips over still more evidence that could support his view; for example, the swans "all suddenly mount" (10) even before the speaker "had well finished" (9) counting them. Murphy's point is sound; nothing about the setting is satisfying or stable. The speaker even says, hyperbolically, "All's changed" (16). Yet the mechanics of the verse curb and contain this instability. Helen Vendler describes how a peaceful quality is inherent to the particular lyric form, which Yeats created for the poem: "The closing couplet, with its asymmetrical rhyming lines, is somehow deeply solacing, as the "ballad" stanza—overbrimming both its quatrain-base and its tetrameter-trimeter metric—extends itself into completion" (118). The syntax enhances this effect and adds to it a sense of stability and regularity by lining up consistently with the line lengths; the majority of lines end in some punctuation mark, and every stanza ends with a period.

This relationship, in which the poem's structure overrides its semantic content, holds significant implications for the relationship between art and reality. Yet another critic, Jahan Ramazani, weighs in on the final stanza of "The Wild Swans at Coole," but his explanation does not get hung up on forms of consciousness; instead, he traces the transformation of the swan’s symbolic meaning and arrives at a surprising conclusion:

Re-described in aesthetic terms ("Mysterious, beautiful"), the swans come to resemble the very object of mystery and beauty that the poet has just fashioned. Like the poem, they will soon leave the compass of his vision to delight other eyes in ways he could never predict. Overcoming the sad thought of loss, Yeats celebrates indirectly his aesthetic gain….[T]he miseries of self-division have given rise to the joys of self-creation." (145)

This interpretation casts out the vague and troublesome reading of the swans as emblems of youthful passion in favor of a more cohesive reading of the swans as roughly analogous to the "whispering words" of the sad shepherd. The speaker, after all, can still see and count the swans just as he could nineteen years before; he looks forward--with more curiosity than apprehension--to a time when he will no longer be able to do so. His sore heart derives from his inability to identify with the swans, whose "hearts have not grown old" (22) in his middle age; their presence mocks him and aggravates his obsessive thoughts on aging. He will be glad to awake and find they have flown away; he is appreciative at the thought of their delighting "men's eyes" elsewhere. Whereas the shepherd hoped his "own words, re-echoing" could travel through a filter of a lifeless, "hollow, pearly heart" (21), spreading "their sadness" (21), and return to him as a "comforting" (23) song, the speaker of "The Wild Swans at Coole" acknowledges that the swans will leave him forever, and "delight" (29) human audiences. The shepherd hopes to console himself by hearing a more artistic version of his reality; the speaker by the lake will find solace by turning his reality into art and relinquishing it. This is art's true transformative power--not to dress up reality to make it less intolerable, but to convert one's internal reality into an external work--to achieve "self-creation" through "self-division."

By the time Yeats wrote “Lapis Lazuli,” about two decades after “The Wild Swans at Coole” and fifty years after “The Sad Shepherd,” death had overtaken aging as the poet’s principal anxiety. And with another impending World War, Yeats felt compelled to defend art from the prattle of “hysterical women,” the vulgar crowd that minimized its relevance in the face of international catastrophe. The presentation of art in this poem may seem a far cry from that presented in “The Wild Swans of Coole,” but in a certain sense it is its logical extension. Yeats makes a claim that at first glance should strike the reader as strange—that art and characters within art, including the eminently tragic “Hamlet and Lear,” are “gay” (16). He claims, furthermore, that when all features of civilization fall apart, “those that build them again are gay” (36). Vendler describes this final claim as the poem’s “own hysteria of alliance with the new victors” (237), but such a dismissal might be unfair. The term “gay” does not simply denote happiness or merriment, but a lack of—or even incapacity for—seriousness. In the sense that those who rebuild civilization cannot hold any ties to the destroyed predecessor, similar to the sense that an actor does not actually have a personal connection to his fictional character, the rebuilders will actually conduct themselves with some level of detachment—a sort of gaiety. It is with this meaning in mind that we should approach the fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem, in which Yeats switches his focus from the absurdly wide arena of history to the minutiae of a broken lapis lazuli medallion.

This instance of ekphrasis adds a curious twist to the relationship between art and reality established by the previous two poems. If we accept that art is the conversion of a subjective, fluid reality into an objective, stable text, then ekphrasis could be called the opposite—the extrapolation of a subjective reality from a static object. At the same time, however, the imaginative, subjective effort involved in ekphrasis produces its own object. ONE CRITIC argues that Yeats uses ekphrasis to rehearse “death in the ruin of the artifact, as if to master death by repeatedly challenging himself to embrace fragmentation” (158-159). Death aside, “The Sad Shepherd” described a character unwilling to embrace fragmentation, preferring to hear his “own words, re-echoing” (20); the close of “The Wild Swans at Coole,” described the poet’s thoughts just before the moment of fragmentation—before he awakes from the ‘dream,’ the absolutely internal experience of artistic conception. We would expect, then, that the ekphrasis in “Lapis Lazuli” would show the completion of this exercise.

The meticulously ordered world of the lapis lazuli contrasts sharply against the chaos of Yeats grand historical vistas, but Yeats does not emphasize its tranquility to imply that it is a refuge. The structure of the six-line stanza, in which Yeats describes the medallion, more or less objectively, evokes a sense of stability:

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument. (37-42)

Vendler has commented on how the punctuation at the end of each line helps to slow the “tetrameter-advance,” and notes that “the compositional unit of the poem, the quatrain, is ‘reduced’…to end-punctuated two-line syntactic units” (238). Ramazani adds that this breakdown briefly gives the poem “a lapidary stillness and objectivity, each pair of lines built as a complete syntactic unit on the earlier pair” (155). He also points out the orderliness evoked by the use of numbers (“two,” and “third”) and “spatial indices” (“behind,” “over”), and finally argues that “the reliable social and semiotic structures mirror one another: the servingman is subordinate to his masters, the bird subordinate to its [symbolic] meaning” (154-155). The fragmentation of the quatrain is driven home by the stanza’s break after six lines, mid-quatrain. This split also demonstrates the facility and spontaneity with which Yeats launches past objective description and into imaginative creation in the following stanza.

This last stanza shows a remarkable turn on Yeats part, as he uses ekphrasis not only as a means of “rehearsing” death, but as an opportunity for self-creation. The first lines (44-45), point out the deteriorating condition of the lapis lazuli, (“Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent”) and the adjective “accidental” reminds us that these literal fragmentations are the result of pure chance. The following lines, however, transform these accidents into effective artistic choices; each “[s]eems a water-course or an avalanche, / Or lofty slope where it still snows” (46). In the following lines, Yeats’ imagination creates a “little half-way house” (48) from nothing, and he says “I / Delight to imagine them seated there” (49-50). The enjambed verb holds a special significance; “delight” last appeared in “The Wild Swans at Coole,” when the swans delighted other men’s eyes. In “Lapis Lazuli,” Yeats has managed to find some delight for himself in the imaginative act. This delight, perhaps, stems from the gaiety he finds in this exercise of detached fragmentation, this rehearsal of death through another medium.

Yeats’ artistic sensibilities developed drastically over the fifty-years that these three poems span, and this development seems to follow a coherent and continuous strand. Regardless of how much Yeats personally identified with the title character of “The Sad Shepherd,” the man whom Sorrow named his friend exemplifies the immature artist—lost in “dreaming” (2), looking for comfort from his “own words” (20). His search for an audience would inevitably result in feelings of betrayal and “persecution” (12), for his ideal audience is himself. The wisdom of Yeats later poems confirms that the sad shepherd is hardly an artist at all; he has no intention of waking from his dream or transforming his sadness into a song with “melodious guile” by his own devices. The speaker of “The Wild Swans at Coole,” by contrast, looks forward to waking from this dream, when his sorrow, the fuel for his art, shall fly away and delight others. Yeats, as an old man imagining the affairs of other old men carved into stone, finds delight for himself as he simultaneously experiences and creates art. Art possesses great transformative power, but the thing it really transforms is the artist; it takes his internal reality and externalizes it into something he can, ideally, release. Once the artist recognizes this, he can delight in the process itself, and confidently view life and death with a cold, detached eye, knowing art has endowed him with the final authority over his reality.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press. 1970.

Engelberg, Edward. “’He too was in Arcadia’: Yeats and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall.” Critical Essays on W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard Finneran. G.K. Hall. 1986.

Murphy, Frank Hughes. Yeats’ Early Poetry: The Quest for Reconciliation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1975

Ramazani, Jahan. Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1990.

Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2007.