This post is the beginning of a new Grackle series, which like all Grackle series will most likely fizzle out after two or three posts, but which for now I am convinced is the most important thing on the internet and God Themself has assigned me to write it. I will be reading and commenting on every single line in every poem in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, following mystical laws of interpretation which I don’t know yet but which I expect to reveal themselves as I proceed. The first law is that all of the poems are 100% perfect, down to the last extravagant semi-colon, not because Yeats was a genius (he was a weirdo and a fascist) but because I’ve found that I have Very Nice Thoughts when I read his poems this way, and so far these thoughts have not turned me into a weirdo and a fascist. (I was a weirdo already.) So here we go:
You’re finally going to meet him. Time and again you’ve heard me praise my good friend The Happy Shepherd and you’d started to wonder whether he wasn’t a figment of my imagination. But I’ve promised you that he’ll be at this party tonight and you’re excited to meet him at his Happiest, well-cheered with the best of food and drink and company.
You haven’t spotted him yet, but I appear at your side and, linking your arm in mine and steering you in the direction of the living room, “He’s here,” I say. I draw you toward the bay window and tap on the shoulder a figure dressed in dusty patchwork garb. In one hanging arm he holds a lute, illuminated by the last golden rays of the setting sun. “Happy Shepherd,” I cry, “let’s hear your song!”
He turns and and, locking his distant eyes with yours, heaves a long sigh, then somberly intones:
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Some Happy Shepherd!
If this scene seems familiar, perhaps at some time in your life you have chanced to pick up a copy of The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats and started reading it from the beginning. The first poem in this collection (as arranged by the poet) is “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”, and it opens with those distinctly unhappy lines quoted above. The first thing Yeats’s poetry wants to say to us, it seems, is that there is no safe haven left in the world for poetry. The simple-hearted dreamer has no home.
The woods of Arcady are dead. What is this saying? Arcady has a mythical reputation as a place of peace, pastoral, and poesy, a place so unwarlike that in order to include it in the Trojan war, Agamemnon was obliged to furnish their people with ships. A land of music and domestic art, but hardly defenseless: Arcady was also home to Atalanta, a huntress raised by a she-bear, who slew not one but two marauding centaurs bent on rape.
It was a safe place, then, for happy shepherds. But this shelter of innocent simplicity is gone, and our Happy Shepherd is a survivor, a literary refugee, with whom we are invited to grieve together the loss of the homeland of dreams.
But here’s the question: how is it that we have time for these lines, if the place of poetry is dead? Especially that poemy second line: “And over is their antique joy;” that’s not how you say that, unless you’re in a poem! And it doesn’t even tell us anything new. Is this a wasted line, a youthful poet just filling out the form to set up a rhyme?
I remind you that my rule is always to read the poetry of Yeats as though it were perfect. So, if this line is a bit precious, I’m going to argue that’s an advantage. The later Yeats wouldn’t write a line like this that doesn’t press the dramatic logic of the poem forward. The younger Yeats lyrically lingers. And this lingering is no mere aimless loitering, but a pious dwelling. We have been invited to dwell with him, as though the Happy Shepherd were saying to us, “Come live with me and be my love.” If we were to accept this invitation, where would we go? Where is it that the poet, lingering, dwells? Not in the woods of Arcady, surely!
But our Happy Shepherd lifts his head now, and perhaps we begin to see the merry twinkle behind the tears in his eyes, as though to say that yes, indeed, it is precisely in the Woods of Arcady that he is dwelling.
“Oh, but”, you interject, interrupting the shepherd’s silent speech, “that’s not really true, of course. It’s just a pun that our friend Amos here was making. You’re ‘dwelling’ in the sense of ‘reflecting pensively’ (about something), not in the sense of ‘living’ (somewhere).”
In my defense, I reply, “Doesn’t it seem to you that thinking is a kind of living? Or is it dead things that think?”
“Perhaps that’s so,” you say, trying not to roll your eyes at my imitation of Socrates. “But still, you don’t literally mean that just by spending an extra line on the woods of Arcady, you’ve physically gone there. Tell the truth now, both of you, and no more of these clever devices.”
The shepherd seems about to answer you, but he falls back into his poetic trance, and gravely sings,
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Now what do you make of that?
The poem goes on for another 50-odd lines and I intend to read them with you. But first, the second Mystical Law of Interpretation (MLI2) has just been revealed to me: the interpretation of Yeats’s poems must happen in community. Therefore, I must ask you to answer me a few questions before we can go on. And I beg you for your patience and indulgence, as these questions are all about the first four lines of a longer poem.
I know that this is weird! Don’t we want to talk about the big picture? But we’re not going to get the big picture by skipping straight over to it. We’ll only grasp the whole if we encounter it within the deep world of themes, questions, problems, and provocations that occasioned it, which it is reasonable to expect will somehow be announced at the beginning. So please, if you trust me or my divine guides, use the comment form below to tell me your thoughts on the following:
- What is the Happy Shepherd saying here about truth? Why is Truth “grey”? And what effect does it have to contrast a “painted toy” with nourishment (“on dreaming fed”)?
- Does this way of thinking about truth seem like a harmless pastime to you, a temporary escape from the dullness of reality? Or is it something serious, even dangerous?
- Is there in these lines, after all, an answer to the questions I put into your mouth above, about whether it’s actually “true” that poetry can bring us back to lost places?
In the meantime, if you happen to see God, tell Them we’re working on the next post.
1. The world is starving, unable to dream. She is left with a pale imitation, unable to delight in the waking world, a dull plaything stripped of dream-state luster. Did the pursuit of ‘cold hard Truth’ kill the woods, the dream, the poetry? Did she abandon some harmony she knew, duped by accusations of the unreal?
2. A rainbow fish looks stunning under water and even out of it for a while. Once it dies, it looks unremarkably like a fish. I think this is a description of a mistaken grasp at truth.
3. It certainly can make present the lostness.
Answering my questions with more questions? But perhaps the thought your questions entertain is not the sort of thing one can say outright. Poetry, doubt, and irony are often at odds with one another, but what they have in common is that each offers a certain respite from that ‘cold hard Truth’ you mention. In posing a question, one may open a window in a mind whose doors are all locked.
But one might argue that the draughts coming in through this window are unhealthy to the rational mind. Dreams and poetry are well and good, one might say, but shouldn’t be taken seriously. And perhaps we should cheerfully agree with this argument. If “being serious” is the harsh, waking atmosphere that kills poetry, then it is obviously harmful to poetry to take it seriously.
Which brings me to your rainbowfish riddle. I think you’re saying that what we experience as life in one isn’t less real because it dies in another. Daylight is useful for many things, and many errors made in the dark are easily spotted in the light. But it also hides from us some things we need. You only see the stars at night. Can we say in the same way that science, logic, and method (which claim for themselves the mantle of “Truth”) are useful for many things in life, but shine too brightly for other purposes?
Your interpretation of the toy is especially helpful to me. Every time I’ve read these lines, I’ve stumbled over “painted toy,” because “painted” suggested color and vibrancy, and toy suggested delight, which didn’t ever sound very “Grey” to me. But I think you’ve understood it better: “painted”, meaning artificially colored, and “toy”, meaning an imitation of the real deal. We’re getting something like the old Platonic switcheroo, where the “real” world is just a shoddy reproduction of the *really* real. Only, of course, we’re at the same time turning Platonism itself upside down here, by giving imagination priority over reason.
In other words,
1. He seems to be saying about the fact that the world which once “fed on dreaming” now plays with Grey Truth: that it is the same world, that man is still upon it, that what man once did nourished it, that what he does now does not; but also that the world has resources (perhaps by virtue of that same nourishment) that allow it to play with the constrained, abstracted truth — that allow it to countenance the death of the woods of Arcady, which is the part of the world that could only be sustained by dreaming. The play may be bitter (having recently read A Tale of Two Cities, I can hear Sydney Carton’s lie that Lucie Manette is a “golden-haired doll” in “painted toy”), but it may also suggest a persistent youthfulness in the world that could, to a certain ear, announce a return in poetry of ancient joy.
2. It’s hard to believe that something can be more dangerous than the “Grey” in “Grey Truth.” But I imagine there are those who think a revivified Arcady would be all sorts of bad and premodern things.
3. In the first four lines, I don’t see anything that suggests poetry can do more than remember, but sometime Dallas-y folks, like Vanderbilt-y folks of old, have suggested that poetic remembering is somehow akin to re-membering. To wit, allow me to quote from certain perhaps-already-ancient peregrinations of speech:
“The irreducibly figurative speech that is poetry asks us to ‘remember this’: it hands over to us its promising but non-self-explicating weight to carry in our musing memory. In a fuller sense of ‘remember,’ it asks to undertake the adventure which allows the figures of poetry to begin to find literal and embodied reality in the transformation of our lives. And (if we may be permitted to take it in this way) in the word’s fullest sense, the figures of poetry instill in us a sense of the strange promised grace bound up in what I know no other name for than ‘the resurrection of the body.'”
Another sense of toy from Ransom’s God Without Thunder: “A machine or a machine product that we possess and use without having any real need of it is nothing but a toy. And in this respect science is a Santa Claus, filling our stockings with objects of this sort.”
What makes me wonder about whether there’s something either frivolous or dangerous about the work of dreaming is a lifetime of being warned by people more cautious and serious than me that the real world would soon teach me a harsh lesson if I didn’t get my head out of the clouds. I think it might take a great deal of magical work to break the anti-magical spell cast on me by those worldly wise partisans of truth. The pattern is this: whenever I have begun to speak of things I would like to accomplish, for the sake of the world’s dreaming, inevitably I would be told that the idea may be beautiful, but that the cold hard truth is not hospitable to such flights of fancy. How I have learned to grovel before this truth!
What Yeats seems to be offering me is a shelter from this onslaught of wisdom, and even a kind of counter-spell. The wise say that dreaming is folly, a game of make-believe, and in saying this many times and through many incantations have put me in thrall to truth; The Happy Shepherd declares that, on the contrary, dreaming is necessary for life, while the study of power is a childish and ephemeral pastime. How far to follow this inversion is a difficult question, because it throws the terms into turmoil. “Toy” is a pejorative in the rhetorical arsenal of Grey Truth, but we’ve puckishly pointed it back at those who wielded it against us. Outside of the context of this conflict, perhaps a “painted toy” would be something congenial to dreamers, maybe even a sacred artifact. It’s shocking, actually, that the Happy Shepherd would deploy the term in this way against the wise. We’d like to think that if the Happy Shepherd calls something a toy, he’s holding out hope for it. But it might be asking too much to expect symbolic coherence from a man on the lam who is not allowed to have his own materials, but must be as resourceful as he can with the materials he finds thrown at him.
A non-dreamer must envy you for the half-lifetime of advice you’ve suffered. No partisan of truth has ever thought to accuse me of having some ancient “magic soaking my spine,” and no one has ever wondered whether I might run off to hide my face “amid a crowd of stars.” (Though I might have once or twice heard: “How his hair is growing thin!”) They talk about Milton’s “credentials” like this, don’t they? At least, I’ve seen one or two critics do so, which makes me assume that Milton, who I do not know, was in some sort of rush to accredit himself, or to properly display his very real credentials by making the proper selections in which to house his inevitably “magical work.” At any rate, does advice of the sort you’ve received afflict only the modern poet, or did it also fret the “antique joy” of the premodern?
I am having a minor struggle discovering what seems the clear truth of your reading in the grammar of the first four lines, or at least in dealing with the inversion you discover. Who is using the word “toy”? The Happy Shepherd seems to offer it as a subject complement identifying Grey Truth, which I’ve assumed is an abstracted object that belongs to the world (as to a child); but you’re saying that in part we might believe that Grey Truth is old truth trying to reclaim its youthfulness? So I suppose my difficulty is the identity of Grey Truth, and not the inversion.
I like “on the lam,” and I assume that poetry on the lam can be as “perfect” (MLI1) as the poetry of the hearth or the poetry of simply wandering in the woods? MLI1 reminds me again of Ransom: “the very first rule to observe in interpreting a myth: not to construe the myth-maker for a fool.”
1. Dreams that were able to “feed” a world of trees, rivers, shepherds, songs, gods, etc. could not have been entirely devoid of truth. But “grey Truth”, the kind of *truth in which dreams die, does not nourish–it is not a thing to feed on and grow young (and die young passionate) on or grow old (die old and full of rich years) on, and grow sad and happy on–as those who feed on dreams do. Instead, it is a thing held by those who are spiritually old, those who have nothing else to do but toy idly with their “truth”–for they are done with feeding, done with dreaming, done with dancing, done with fighting and bearing children, done with finding things to live and die for (and cannot even dream of such a thing to do, or that they once might have wanted to). Perhaps this “Truth’s” greyness even attracts such a generation by distracting them from living hues (full of shadow, depth, and mystery), the way in which a too brightly “painted” face might distract a younger man from a face more deeply interesting.
*”truth” call it, but perhaps only because the world (that now has fewer trees, rivers, shepherds, songs, gods etc.) has called so–perhaps by a an error about what is really real, or about how the really real manifests itself to the mind
2. It seem to me that we should treasure that kind of truth where in which the deepest, liveliest, most fragrant dreams do not die but deepen, a kind of truth that one could never “toy” really, though it might make one playful, moody, or gay, because one’s own being and meaning, one’s less-than-half fathomed dreams, are involved with it. Locating the realm of truth is never harmless; if you start questioning whether it lies where the world has located it, who knows where you’ll end up?
3. I don’t see anything that suggests poetry can do more than remember in these first lines, as Tony says–except that a “joy” still remembered, even if recalled in an antique store, cannot really be said to be entirely “over,” can it?