Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve heard this much: that Yeats’s best stuff came late. So you pick up the 1950 edition of the Collected Poems and start from the back. The last few lines in the book are the first you see.
And now my utmost mystery is out:A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner:Under it wisdom stands, and I alone —Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone —Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.
Forty years ago, when I first read those lines, I had to remind myself to start breathing again. They still hit me with the same force, and I still can’t fully understand them. But I began to understand them when I realised that putting together a phrase like ‘dazzled by the embroidery’ was something hardly anybody could do. ‘A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner’ is something an averagely gifted poet might fluke, although not often. To write ‘dazzled by the embroidery’, however, you have to possess the means to put ordinary- sounding words together in an extraordinarily resonant way.
That was what Yeats really meant by his seemingly twee talk of ‘articulating sweet sounds together’. In his earlier poetry that richly combinative capacity was always operating, if only intermittently condensing to full force, and in his later poetry —say from ‘Responsibilities’ onwards — it attained incandescent fusion more and more often, until, with The Tower and all the poetry that followed, far into his old age, he was tremendous all the time.
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