In Memory of...: Politics in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Langston Hughes Shavonne W. Clarke
Politics: it is both the title of the last poem in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats and a constant source of antipathy in Yeats’ work. Indeed, much of what Yeats wrote centers on the effects of political engagement, from “September 1913,” where the refrain becomes a reference to John O’Leary, the Irish nationalist who was imprisoned and exiled, to “Easter 1916,” in which Yeats discusses the Irish nationalist revolt of 1916. Often Yeats takes on a condemnatory tone, as in “No Second Troy,” where he sardonically says of Maud Gonne: “Why should I blame her that she filled my days/ With misery, or that she would of late/ Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways…” Similarly, in his final poem, “Politics,” the speaker indicates that he would prefer to be young again, holding a girl in his arms, rather than bothering himself with “Roman or…Russian or…Spanish politics.” In this way, “Politics” seems to act as a warning not only to potential Irish nationalists of the future, but of any culture. Roman, Russian, and Spanish are just the same to the speaker: each presents the same snare of losing one’s days to misery and the lack of joy or love that result from such engagement. Much in the same way that the speaker of “Politics” reflects sadly on his foregone life, Yeats’ politically-minded poems are often elegiac in nature. His sentiments towards politics often seem to arise as a result of the loss of a respected or close figure. George Mayhew describes Yeats, as a result of the Irish revolt on Easter, 1916, as having been “struck by the irreversibility of the event, by a sense of something old having ended, of something new being born.” These sentiments were embodied by Constance Markievicz, a childhood friend of Yeats’s and a conspirator in the uprising who was sentenced to death, but later pardoned for her gender. Mayhew’s reading of Yeats’s reaction to the uprising becomes directly applicable to the lives of Constance Markievicz and her sister, Eva Gore-Booth. In Spatial Form in the Poetry of Yeats, Marjorie Perloff asserts that, for Yeats, the sisters became representative of “the Great House, of the Irish aristocracy, of tradition and beauty,” and their destruction by means of politics meant, in turn, the destruction of all that they represented. In the poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” Yeats states that, following the years of political activity on the part of the two women of Lissadell, Constance, the older sister, “drags out lonely years/ Conspiring among the ignorant.” Here, Yeats’ aforementioned condemnation of Maud Gonne in “No Second Troy” serves to clarify his beliefs regarding Constance’s behavior: she brings “ignorant men” to ruin by her lifelong conspiring. Furthermore, Yeats makes explicit his feelings regarding the effects of politics on youth when he describes the younger sister, Eva, whom he formerly imagined as a “gazelle” clad in a silk kimono, as “withered old and skeleton-gaunt,/ An image of such politics,” referencing her involvement in the campaign for women’s suffrage. What she fights for is reduced in the poem to a dream of “some vague Utopia”--certainly, in Yeats’ view, nothing worth the loss of once-held youth and beauty. Thus it is that the title words of the poem, “In memory of…” speak not for the memory of Eva and Constance as they were during their later, politically-oriented lives, but only in that early time before “a raving autumn shears/ Blossom from the summer’s wreath.” Rather than mourning their recent passing (only shortly before the composition of the poem), Yeats speaks of their early lives, as though there exists a tangible—and perhaps life and death--divide between the women in their states of pre- and post-political awareness. What comes across most clearly in Yeats’s poem is his regret—perhaps even resentment—that these things are lost as a result of political-mindedness. Perloff asserts that, as seen in poems such as “A Prayer for my Daughter,” and “Easter 1916,” the theme of this poem—overt in nature—reveals itself as “the destruction of feminine beauty and innocence by ‘abstract thought’ or revolutionary fervor.” The passage of time, which Yeats proposes to be the enemy of the innocent and the beautiful, appears to be another consequence of one’s involvement in politics, as though one remains ageless—forever youthful and blooming—until that innocence regarding the world’s affairs is removed. In Yeats and the Poetry of Death, Jahan Ramazani associates these images of youth and innocence with light, stating: “the poet’s task, as so often in the English elegy and the Romantic lyric, is to override darkness with a consoling image of light.”. In the poem, Yeats reminisces on the lost youth of the sisters, imagining a time when their home, Lissadell, was “the light of evening.” As that light has become lost in the midst of the sisters’ lifelong political ties, Ramazani states that Yeats finds his purpose in fighting “to rescue Markievicz and her sister from the death of politics.” Ultimately, Yeats intimates that this death of politics will come about by his own hand, comparable to the lighting of a gazebo—which the poem’s footnote associates with the nationalist movement in Ireland—with a struck match. The “conflagration” suggested serves a dual purpose, both of ridding Ireland of politics as a destructive and aging entity, and also as a substitute for the lost light of Lissadell. In this way, the elegy becomes a vehicle for the redemption of the two sisters. In the second stanza, Yeats appears to address the women when he speaks to the “dear shadows,” and states that they now “know it all,/ All the folly of a fight/ With a common wrong or right.” Thus, by their deaths and the first stanza of the elegy, the sisters have become aware of the futility of their actions. “Where I drank of the bitter river In this case, the speaker conveys a fervor that results from painful feelings of worthlessness. The word “dream,” which was also used by Yeats to derogatorily describe Eva Gore-Booth’s campaigning, in this instance becomes significant of the internal state of the speaker himself. The speaker states that the “taste of the water” from the bitter river is in his own mouth, as though he were comparable to the lynched boys. In the third stanza, he further asserts that he has been forced by the “you” of the poem to “drink of the bitter cup/ Mixed with blood and gall.” By this gruesome image the speaker relates the intimacy of the lynching: he has drunk of the bitter river so that the blood of the murdered boys is in his veins, also. But there are others: the Scottsboro boys, Lewis Jones, the “voteless share-cropper,” the “labor leader,” the “soldier thrown from a Jim Crow bus,” even the “girl who sells her body. By drinking of the bitter river, the speaker binds himself—by blood and gall—to all African-Americans who have been oppressed in the South. “Concentration on only the political landscape of the lynched boys and on the unreflected light would confine the poet to the depiction of the id or to that of people at their worst. An emphasis on form alone would mean the naïve neglect of the social and human prices to be paid.” Rather than directly addressing the poem to the white race, Hughes uses the pronoun “you” to initially refer to the bitter river, stating: “With your taste of blood and clay,/ You reflect no stars by night,/ No sun by day.” In the third stanza, however, the “you” is given speech—the words of the oppressor. By this point, Hughes has interwoven the river into the poem in such a way that one metaphor is no longer sufficient for its definition. It is at once the blood of murdered and oppressed African-Americans, which acts as the binding force between the speaker and the rest of the race, and also the means by which the speaker and his people are kept under the proverbial thumb of their oppressors. Furthermore, the river is the visual representation of the tragedy of what has passed. In this way, Hughes uses metaphor—the intermingling, flowing waters of the river—to represent at once the human aspect of the poem as well as the impetus for political engagement. The primary question of this essay, however, still remains to be addressed. That being, what are Yeats and Hughes ultimate political prescriptions, as interpreted through their poems? Of the last line in Yeats’ poem (“Bid me strike a match and blow”), Perloff states that it is intentionally ambiguous: “does it mean that the fire will be blown up or blown out?” Yeats calls for the shadows—presumably the sisters—to “arise and bid,” as though the destruction of the nationalist movement may only be by their own will rather than that of the poet. I would argue that Yeats leaves himself poised, at the final line, match in hand, waiting for the bidding of the sisters. It is clear from the rest of the elegy that he desires such a thing: the end of that which has destroyed lives, youth, and innocence, but he cannot perform the act without the recognition of the two women themselves that their fight was “folly.” With poems such as “A Prayer for my Daughter,” “Easter 1916,” and, of course, “Politics,” in mind, the interpretation of Yeats as anti-political becomes easier to imagine, as does his intention with the unstruck match in the final stanza. Much in the same way, the last stanza of “The Bitter River” finds the speaker poised for action. In the previous stanza he relates the water of the bitter river to “steel” in his blood, which plays on the concept of “steeling” oneself in preparation for an event of some sort. The speaker goes on to state in the last two lines: “I’m tired of the bitter river:/ Tired of the bars!” The only other use of an exclamation point at any place in the poem is when the “you”—presumably the white race—taunts the speaker with cries of, “Disrupter! Agitator! Trouble maker!” The last line of the poem seems to be a reaction to these calls, where the speaker responds emphatically, unafraid of the consequences of his outspokenness. One can imagine his balled fists and lined forehead as the last words issue from his mouth. In both cases, the poems of Yeats and Hughes submit to the reader a final call for action. For Yeats, this manifests itself as the destruction of the political sphere. It is uncertain as to what extent politics should be extinguished, but Yeats certainly indicates that he would spare the youth and their innocence from such affairs. Hughes’s poem, by contrast, reads almost like a rallying cry, as though he is urging his people to activity. His words are impassioned with the fervor of a man who has suffered injustice after injustice, and his consequent actions, which Hughes seems to suggest take place shortly after the narrative ends, are influenced by his emotions. Where Yeats seeks an end to political involvement, Hughes encourages, through his writing, a greater engagement, which ultimately places each of these poets on separate ends of the scale in their respective elegies.
Works Cited Hughes, Langston. “The Bitter River.” Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. V.1: 694-96. Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Perloff, Marjorie. “Spatial Form in the Poetry of Yeats.” PMLA Vol. 82, No. 5 (Oct., 1967). Ramazani, Jahan. Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol.1. Third edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003. ---. Yeats and the Poetry of Death. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Yeats, W.B. “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.” Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. V.1: 126-27. ----. “No Second Troy.” Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. V.1:101. ----. “Politics,” Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. V.1: 143.
|