The first stanza of Yeats\u2019 \u2018To a Shade\u2019 ran round my head on my walk this morning (I\u2019d mentioned it in an email to a friend yesterday). Here are the lines I was thinking of:<\/p>\n
If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
\nWhether to look upon your monument
\n(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
\nOr happier-thoughted when the day is spent
\nTo drink of that salt breath out of the sea
\nWhen grey gulls flit about instead of men,
\nAnd the gaunt houses put on majesty …<\/p>\n
It came to mind in the email as just one example of Yeats\u2019 wonderful gift for timing words, using rhythm and metre, syntax and phonetic adjacency to intensify their life in the reader\u2019s mind, to somehow make them be themselves more fully. It\u2019s partly a matter of making them stand out, partly of giving them breathing space. It\u2019s in the last three lines of the quotation that I feel this most strongly and the words where I feel it most are simple and elemental in meaning \u2013 \u2018salt\u2019, \u2018grey\u2019 and \u2018gaunt\u2019. I dimly remember a conversation with my father when I was a sixth former in which he said that Yeats didn\u2019t strike him as a particularly concrete or sensuous writer. I think this is true in the sense that Yeats doesn\u2019t describe physical things in great detail. His evocations are strong but spare and depend on music as much as the meaning of words but how much more vividly concrete is it possible to be than \u2018To drink of that salt breath out of the sea\u2019? Drinking of breath is arrestingly concrete in itself (drinking breath is an old metaphor but drinking of<\/em> it immediately intensifies the sense of a definite quantity of liquid of which you drink a small amount). Metre plays its part \u2013 the coming together of stresses in \u2018salt breath\u2019 both emphasizes the words and creates breathing space around them (adjacent stressed syllables slow the phrase and push apart from each other as one says them). And these aren\u2019t just ordinary stresses. The iambic metre means that \u2018that\u2019 is in what should be stressed position but the stress is displaced onto \u2018salt\u2019. Adjusting stride to accommodate this irregularity makes one \u2013 at least makes me \u2013 throw extra emphasis on \u2018salt\u2019 and the simple physical saltiness of the sea air breathes itself more strongly into the imagination as a result. And then there\u2019s another metrical displacement creating a pause within the line \u2013 the metrical foot is reversed with \u2018out of\u2019. So we have three strongly sounded syllables (\u2018salt breath out\u2019) followed by two very lightly stressed ones. To me that creates an immediate sensation of the space between the human presence (Parnell\u2019s ghost, or the poet imagining him) and the sea itself.<\/p>\n Again, thinking of how cadence can give imagined body to an image, \u2018When grey gulls flit about instead of men\u2019 seems to me almost magically evocative. It\u2019s the line\u2019s rhythm that makes me see and almost feel the gulls\u2019 gliding and swerving flight. In terms of traditional scansion, an iambic foot is followed by a spondee and then another iamb but the rhythm is created by the interplay between this metrical pattern and the movement of the syntax. There are three breath units to the line \u2013 \u2018when grey gulls\u2019 pause \u2018flit about\u2019 pause \u2018instead of men\u2019 \u2013 and I don\u2019t think you can say them without feeling the speeding up in the second and third. This speeding up of the second and third phrases around the pause between them makes me picture not the gulls but their movement very clearly.<\/p>\n Though it doesn\u2019t have the physical immediacy of \u2018salt\u2019, \u2018breath\u2019, \u2018grey\u2019 and \u2018gaunt\u2019, the notionally abstract noun \u2018majesty\u2019 packs quite a punch too. It isn\u2019t physically concrete in the sense of relating to the sensory apprehension of something outside the body, but I think strong emotional sensations are almost physical in their nature, affecting the brain in the same kind of way as physical ones do, and the word \u2018majesty\u2019 carries strong emotional associations. Yeats heightens this effect by his metaphor of the houses putting on<\/em> majesty, as if it were a garment. However, he leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions around this direct, vivid impression \u2013 leaves it to us to take or not to take the houses\u2019 gauntness as suggesting the destructive effects of English rule, for example (in which case the look of majesty they take on in the twilight might suggest Parnell\u2019s hope for a freer and better future) or to take or not to take the illusoriness of the look of majesty as sarcastically suggesting the people\u2019s unworthiness of Parnell, in line with the question whether the builder has been paid. This combination of forthright power with a sensitive, ambiguous play of suggestions (sometimes even of contradictions) seems to me typical of how Yeats works.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve wandered a bit from my main point, though. What I\u2019ve really tried to do is pin down why \u2018salt\u2019, \u2018breath\u2019 and \u2018grey\u2019 make such an impact on my own impression of the poem. All three are words Yeats makes vivid use of in other contexts, and like the word \u2018cold\u2019 they clearly meant a lot to him at some fundamental imaginative level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first stanza of Yeats\u2019 \u2018To a Shade\u2019 ran round my head on my walk this morning (I\u2019d mentioned it in an email to a friend yesterday). Here are the lines I was thinking of: If you have revisited the town, thin Shade, Whether to look upon your monument (I wonder if the builder has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-w-b-yeats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2771,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770\/revisions\/2771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}