Another Yeats Poem,
Yeats envisioned life as patterned after The Great Wheel (a wheel with twenty-eight spokes representing the twenty-eight phases of the lunar month) instead of the more common astrological wheel of twelve houses.
Click here to view a graphic of Yeats's Lunar Phases.
Every soul (and every civilization) passes through all twenty-eight phases of the wheel. Each phase is labeled and illustrated. Phase 19, the "Assertive Man," is illustrated by Byron. Phase 17, "Daimonic Man," includes Dante, Shelley, Landor, and Yeats himself. However, for Phase I and its exact opposite, Phase 15, which represent absolutely pure types, Yeats saw no human counterparts. One historical revolution of the wheel takes two thousand years, and each successive revolution mounts spirally toward the Great Year (26,000 years) which will break out of the wheel altogether.
Yeats also saw that each individual was composed of warring elements, and that this mingling of opposites held true for each country, and each era. He represented this conjunction of opposites as two interpenetrating cones ("gyres"):
___________________________________________________THE GYRES
The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word "Rejoice!'
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.
2 comments:
I'm not sure I understand this, but in a cursory reading: it reminds me of the idea of "eternal recurrence", and also of the psychological term: "depersonalization". A sense of life being dreamlike, unreal, something that's repeated again and again, and feeling detached from it. Also a sense that there is something we need to remember about this dreamlike "reality", to wake up from...(I experience this often, many people seem to find this state frightening, but I kind of enjoy it. It's a free high, so to speak. LOL).
Does that make any sense?
Yeats had a thing for eternal recurrence Kate, and I think your term depersonaliztion is apt and good here, very surreal,, why I like it I suppose. Then he exclaims "REJOICE" and I have to take that to mean he recognized the importance of the Eternal NOW. Since he believed cyclical he would have thought alot was 'inevitable' and knew the importance of rejoicing in the fact that ''All is well with the Universe'' no matter how it appears,, the Maya we must wake up from.... I agree a total Free High. We need to take it all in and "Rejoice".
Makes sense to me.
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