This post is the part of a 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:
Last time we did this together, we met a peculiar character: a “happy shepherd” with a solemn bearing and a sad tale to tell. This fish out of water belongs in a pastoral about wisps of mist veiling the rills and ridges of a distant bluff as sheep tenderly bleat and wood doves warble all around. But his lyrical home has burned down and he’s fled, a man on the lam, to take shelter in an elegy:
The woods of Arcady are dead,
W. B. Yeats, “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”, lines 1-4
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Arcady’s primary export, it seems, before it died, was dreams, the food of the world, its real substance and nourishment. Wherever we are now that isn’t Arcady, we trade mainly in “Grey Truth”, which doesn’t feed the world—it provides none of the stuff she needs for her health—but idly entertains, in a mere imitation of sustenance.
We might wonder now what’s so bad about an imitation. We might inquire with the partisan of dreams and poetry why food is better than a toy. After all, isn’t a plaything something like a dream? But first we should ask, why would the world have “fed” on dreams in the first place? And why grieve the loss of these dreams? Who needs dreams anyway? Sure, you want to “follow your dreams,” but when any one of those dreams escapes you, won’t you shrug with wise indifference and reflect that “after all, it was only a dream”? You might tell someone to “dream on” in a tone enthusiastic, but isn’t it more likely you were being sarcastic? You like it when people in movies or inspo-content live out their dreams, but when the rubber hits the road, you’ve never had any regard for your own dreams.
You have to be realistic! Here in the real world, dreams are poor currency. And what matters more than currency in these (the current) times? There’s money to be made and bills to be paid and only the right-now, the present moment, this little ark in the flood of history in which we live, this here-now opening-up, this is where contracts get signed! Wake up from your foolish dreams and your fawning over the past! Carpe diem! Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, for soon they will be buying (from your competitor)! Get out there and sell! sell! sell! my hearties! Lay into that CRM, you lubbers! Lay into it, my precious little office-lobsters, lay in and sell! Hah! Dreams? (as they say) In this economy?
Nothing is what you dream it could or should be, and the sooner you recognize that, the better off you’ll be. Maybe, child, you dear heart, maybe you find it depressing to exist in a world deliberately and exhaustively drained of all life and meaning? Is that sad for the poor little baby? Does icky baby wish the world were more magical? Well, when you’re ready to grow up and join the adults, we’re all over here having a sales conference under the shadow of this red rock where we killed God. We’re the adults. We know what’s real and we can’t be fooled.
And what’s real? Whatever gives you power. And what is power? Control over the future. That is the “Truth”: the only thing you can have or want to have is in the future, and only the cunning who live beyond dreams have the wherewithal to lay their hands upon it.
Does anybody actually think that way? Perhaps not in so many words, or in any words at all. But tell me if you don’t feel that “Grey Truth” sinking into your bones whenever someone tells you to “be realistic.” It’s in the atmosphere of modern life, the post-Romantic air we breathe; and this is how we know that we are modern people, that when we’re being serious and facing facts, we know that the sun is just a lifeless system of chemical reactions; that a river is just the way matter in a liquid state interacts with the force of gravity; that history itself is the inevitable, mechanical unwinding of the taut spring of power dynamics. And if we like a little poetry in our diet all the same, poetry that tells us the sun is our brother, that river gods rage, or that a choir of beneficent voices sings our destinies to us from the end of time, that’s because we know that in our weakness, now and then, we need a little diversion from the terrible weight of being alive, as a treat, or for our “mental health,” say, and not because we ever actually believe such childish nonsense. We know that in poetry we’re not getting anything we can use, and that soon we will have to put away our toys and get back to the grind that we call “life.”
Knowing this contempt we have for play, the shepherd must be speaking with some irony. As an outsider, a believer in dreams, he knows that he cannot speak to us on his own terms, and that in addressing a realist, the harshest thing you can say is that they’re only playing. Rhetorically, it’s something like telling a “men’s rights activist” that misogyny is girly. Maybe the only condemnation of realism that a realist has ears to hear is that realism is a childish game, played by a demented old woman.
And if we in reading the poem find that this rhetorical strategy moves us, then we may in this discovery realize how deeply runs our own suspicion of dreams.
But the line delivering this ironical zinger ends with a semicolon; there’s more:
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Lines 4-10
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
If you will indulge me again as you did last time, I would like your thoughts on the following questions:
- The word “yet” announces some kind of rejoinder, and after all the grief over the loss of dreams, we might expect something like “Yet not all dreams are dead,” but that’s not what we get. The tone of “still she turns her restless head” is hardly upbeat. So how does it act as an opposition to the morose and mournful reflections we have read so far?
- Would it violate Mystical Law of Interpretation #1 (All of the poems are 100% perfect) to observe that we are now mixing metaphors (Modernity as child’s play, modernity as sickness, modernity as the later steps of a “dreary dance”)?
- What do words have to do with any of this?
1. You, my goodly, morose and mournful friend promised a meeting with that Happy Shepherd, and at first blush your dream dead famished truths have been confirmed. But soon thereafter we are wrinkled into unfinality by this grand semi colon, whereupon the Shepherd “turns”. A turn amalgamizes an antidote to these Grey Truths even as restless is become the singular accompanying attitude for we sick children of the world. A turn connotes a moment of meeting. The Shepherd’s eyes are dark yet pierce me to the core. I turn to meet those eyes.
2. You have undoubtedly read ahead so I must trust as you say that Modernity is the countervalent replacement to Antique joys. But as a newcomer only 10 lines in, I feel no reference to chronological time yet in the Shepherd’s lament. What else then might be inferred by these sick children’s dances to cracked tunes? Some deep perennial problem, to be sure, that was here long before Modernity arose to offer its heft and shape. Something that could rob even antiquity of its joy… of which the solution could be found only in….
3. Words. Not just words. But … words alone. As they might occur at a time of turning, when two eyes meet. This is where I feel I’m being led to inquire as I await patiently line 11 and on.
Thank you for answering in such a poetical mode. I believe that you have seen (or been seen by?) something about the situation in which poetry happens, which you’ve described as “a time of turning, when two eyes meet.” A word spoken at such a moment does have something auspicious about it.
It is good to be reminded, while we are still at the beginning of this work, that we will accomplish nothing with our paraphrases and analyses if we don’t give the poetry what it needs to take place: a moment of turning, a meeting of eyes; whose eyes? Whom must we meet? Not the shepherd, who is fictional; nor the poet, who is dead; not a god, because gods are both fictional and dead! Or does every poem have a secret god of the poem that escaped the general cataclysm?
Speaking of gods, is it really much of a leap to suppose the shepherd is speaking of the unfolding of chronological time when he names “Chronos”? I don’t think Chronos has ever been ritually worshipped as a deity; he’s a pure creature of allegory, just a macramé person-suit for the concept of time. At any rate, all I mean by modernity at this point is the post-Arcadian world, in which the relative values of dreams and truth have been reversed, and words are empty tokens for reality, which I think is a pretty good caricature, at least, of what people usually mean by “modernity.”
Amos! You’re back!
1. “Yet still she turns her restless head” to look for something better than the grey toy in her possession… Focusing this way on the fact that the world is dissatisfied with her toy shifts everything in the poem (especially those first lines) from bleakness to reassurance – or at least to the expectation of something to hope for.
2. Naw. Mixing metaphors is tricky and often a bad idea, but it can be done in a 100% perfect poem.
3. Yeats seems to suggest that words and dreams are the same thing, or at least that words are what dreams are made of, and “words alone are certain good”!
Thanks, Tara! This is solid reading. I especially like your “or at least.” One says those words when one has hoped for too much out loud and so retreats a bit–but still holds onto some new ground won. And perhaps reassurance, being comforted, is too much to ask of our Happy Shepherd.
1. The fact that her head is still “restless”, i.e. searching, inquiring … in spite of her sole plaything now being “Grey Truth” intimates that there is something more to be discovered despite her provisional acceptance of the circumstances. The apostrophe to the “sick children of the world” assures us that whatever will finally quell this restlessness – to be found among “words” – is not merely real and freely available to us, but also a “certain good.”
2. Well, we could speedrun through a thousand sophistical explanations for the mixed metaphors and then praise or condemn them and be correct in doing either in equal measure – reduce the stronger argument to the weaker, ad infinitum. “Perfect” is a stretch, but I have no reservations about calling Yeats il miglior fabbro and putting the matter to rest with that.
3. Not words, but the Word is everything. Logos as word, account, reason, story.
As far as “story” is concerned, it seems appropriate to provide some comments on the role of dreams here, as the ability to dream and view reality through the optics of dreams is absolutely central to personhood. Pindar (Pythian 8) already knew it well:
Ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ’ οὔ τις;
Σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος.
“Creatures of today! What is anyone?
What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow is man.”
And how far removed is Pindar’s man from our own! Ages upon distant ages! And even that is an understatement. Yet this hard kernel of dreamlike truth – or perhaps dreaming unto truth – is something we still share, even if its fundamental acceptance is slandered at every which turn under the guise of apathy, irony, or some profane and opaque combination of both borne out of laziness (1, see footnote). It is also worth noting that the antonym of onar is hupar – strangely enough, the same root which gives us hypnos: sleep! Now why should the antonym of dream itself be derived from its most proximal cause “sleep”? The Greek’s distinction is perhaps too subtle for our blunted, that is to say, apathetic and ironic ears: an onar is the unreliable dream, a thing of strange chimeras and kobolds, whereas the hupar is the true dream, of created, fantastic, but believable forms, that is, what we moderns bloodlessly term “reality.” Forms, noumena, das Ding-an-sich, the self-realization of the World Spirit, Dasein, ad nauseam. We can cast this dipody in the black gravitas of academic language, but this fundamental distinction along with all of its problems are already poignantly captured in the most candid of terms in the Archaic Greek imagination. Let us be satisfied with that: reality as a “true dream.”
Now – to speak of reality by itself: what does it then say about the status of our personhood when what is “real” (our hupar) is so grievously divorced from 1) what births it, i.e. sleep, by extension, the unconscious (modernese: “irrational”) mind, the whole mysterious economy of our drives and impulses, and 2) what is Real (the marriage of onar and hupar and their common origin)? This thicket of distinctions may seem confounding (I urge you to read through them again carefully and slowly until the triune is visible) but it only demonstrates how terribly our modern, i.e. wrong ideas rape any semblance of organic life’s complexity out of the matter, driven by that selfsame laziness.
It is clear to me that this divorce negates our personhood. Or perhaps we are mistaking causes for effects? Have we not first negated our personhood and then effected this divorce ourselves? Certainly the latter, accepting that the part proceeds from the whole. That being said, there is no universally reliable formula for the negation of personhood as such. You may be reduced to a factor influencing market trends; a band of marauders may erase your cultural legacy and leave you rootless; or a friendly officer of the CPC might hold a pistol against your forehead as you penitently confess to crimes you’ve never committed (2). What these all have in common is that they don’t merely normatively limit expressions of subjectivity by necessary restrictions discovered through the free exploration of subjectivity (Law), although they often insidiously claim to do this, but instead, seek to altogether erase certain aspects of subjectivity and with it the dream-unconscious constituent parts of reality. What is “real” is the product and its consumers; the history of the class struggle; Xi Jinping Thought. Here the unconscious is sublimated by material or ideology into a grotesque parody of belief under the impression that it has been cleansed from the new world they believe to have created. Much like the idea that these things are Lawful (see above) is false, so is the notion that they can be erased. This, too, is an interesting topic, but beyond the scope of this essay.
So while the essence of negating personhood is the same, its means are culturally and historically unique. My approach here will be much the same, exploring a general example from antiquity, then returning with this knowledge to a few specific considerations about modernity.
While atheism in the modern sense is an impossibility in the ancient world, we see something comparable at the moment when the foundation of what would become our natural sciences came into existence, i.e. in Milesian natural philosophy. The pantheon of the epics must be brought down from Olympus and set fast to earth. But this demystification or demythologization of the divine in the form of mechanical-naturalistic explanations among the Hellenes was just soon accompanied by a re-mythologization of their findings, driven by an inborn need that cannot be quashed. In other words, we witness the transformation of divine figures, previously understood and worshipped as such, into elements endowed with numinous power—fire, water, heat, cold, etc. This marks the transition from numen phasmatos to numen elementi—or as Aristophanes jokingly put it, from Zeus to the “ethereal whirl” (aitherios dinos). For as much as Thales may have considered himself primarily an objective natural philosopher (physikós), the good Hellene could not shake the impression in all his investigations that “all things are full of gods” (panta plere theon). Let us take, for example, Anaximander, a student of Thales, and his cosmological concept of the apeiron (“the infinite”), which is a kind of reasoned abstraction of his master’s claim that water is the first and only principle of the cosmos. According to Anaximander, the primordial substance of the universe was a divisible unity from which various basic elements emerged. As naturalistic as this explanation may seem at first glance (and, incidentally, remarkably close to our modern Big Bang cosmology), what fundamentally underlies it—and thus also the basic principle of his teacher—is the need, if not compulsion, to trace opposing parts back to an original, eternal, and eternally moving whole. In other words, it’s a refusal to accept the parts in their discrete, material nature. Anaximander’s cosmology is, in truth, a moderate example of this desire for wholeness: consider his student Diogenes (divine air as eternal and unique principle), not to mention the almost compulsive monism of the Eleatic school. Let these examples suffice for the moment.
And to modernity: we in the West still inhabit the cultural malaise of nihilism that Nietzsche prophesied and that naive interpreters of him actively propagate. The popular application of scientific materialism to every aspect of life is a pale, but understandable answer to the void left by this – and one more attainable than the Overman, at that. Our understanding of what constitutes the base unit of humanity in the world described above is, in a happy, if instinctual (because it is true!) adaptation of one of the central psychological truths of the Gospel: the individual. But what kind of individual? An individual divorced from any participation in the divine, in collective identity or membership. In the absence of any consistent metaphysical grounding in a historical and shared reality, reality emerges as an ex nihilo “being thus and so” – the solemn dirge “this is just the way things are.” And with strictures this pinched, this individual’s freedom – the same one that will lead him back to himself, to the divine in him – is severely limited. This conception of personhood and freedom is totalitarian and, above all, designed to stifle men of any great will. It tolerates, but only small men, last men. It claims to safeguard the rights of man, but, in truth, it only protects the rights of the last man. The last man is allowed to do anything, yet in spite of his mounting passions, he is unable to do anything – and that is “just the way things are!” I believe the despair inherent in this view must eventually reach a fever pitch, explode that narrow “freedom” and unearth again the same need for the divine that was so natural to antiquity. The key word here is despair. As it is written:
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
So come all you naive to yourselves, guided by the Spirit of Truth, the treasury of all good things, to savage and salvific Life, to the unknown depths of yourselves – forty days and three temptations a mere drop in eternity! – and know that it is there that you will find your Cross.
“O sages standing in God’s 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.”
Master then thyself and others shall thee bear. But, above all, know that the hour is never too late to come and see:
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.”
The ultimate reality is and forever shall be the Triune God and all His vestigia: The Father (organic life), the Son (onar – unreliable dream), and the Holy Ghost (hupar – reliable dream) who proceeds from the Father’s energies.
Salvation lies in this God. With His acceptance, the reclamation of the dream from the claws of Grey Truth is sure to follow.
I close with a remark from St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who writes that in humans there is “a great universe within the smaller one” – the smaller one of the stars, planets, and of infinite space. And no – that is not a copyist’s error! – the greater universe and the greater mystery is us if we dare to look inward, to personally encounter the passion of the Cross, and to seek God in ourselves.
Footnotes
1. This kernel of truth is not merely a shared cultural idiosyncrasy, but very well universal. As a brief example, Chinese philosophy has comparable notions. The story of Zhuangzi’s “butterfly dream” in which the philosopher dreams himself as a butterfly, but is suddenly wrested from this dream state back into wakefulness, only to find himself as the same flesh and blood Zhuangzi as before. But, still freshly awoken, on the cusp between dreaming and wakefulness, he asks himself if it is not possible that he is now a butterfly dreaming itself as Zhuangzi. His response to this dilemma is 無為 (wú wéi) or “non-action” or “action free of intention”, literally “not-having-action/doing/making.” In other words, what we might colloquially call the “acceptance” of these two divergent states in perfect unity with the Tao, the Way. It is noteworthy that in this vision, these states are so fluid as to be interchangeable and thus the supposed necessity of distinction – but also the intermediary state where Zhuangzi’s question has its root – and that seemed to render them intelligible are exploded. This is poetic, but misses the mark by overshooting it.
2. Or, more innocuous on the surface, but just as sinister in essence, someone might say “Man, AI is becoming more human-like! Now that’s progress!”, translated: “Man, the mind of man is becoming so deformed that it more and more resembles the attempts of a machine he designed to replicate it! Now that’s something that conforms to my unchallenged prejudices about what constitutes human flourishing!”
Aaron, I’m thrilled to have provoked such an outpouring of thoughts, many of which touch on what my post left unsaid, and most of which I will be unable to equal. Perhaps eventually I wil
The Pindar quotation is especially appreciated. It’s one that has often crossed my mind (like the shadow of a cloud passing over the ground behind me), but which I had not thought of in relation to this theme of realismania.
To bring all of this back to the poem, though, you and Tara have similar interpretations of line 5: the world’s turning head is set in motion by a not unhealthful dissatisfaction with its clumsy plaything. The world and its children are ever drawn away from mere Grey Truth to chase those “many changing things” that time in its ordinary passage (Chronos) wheels our way. Could I go so far as to say that when new things arise around us, be they fashions, inventions, or even AI-generated images, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction,” our attention wandering away from Truth in a restless mood?