Yeats\u2019 poem \u201cMemory\u201d has been floating around in my mind over the last few days. I\u2019m not sure why it\u2019s been surfacing now in particular, but it\u2019s a lovely little piece:<\/p>\n
MEMORY<\/p>\n
One had a lovely face,
\nAnd two or three had charm,
\nBut charm and face were in vain
\nBecause the mountain grass
\nCannot but keep the form
\nWhere the mountain hare has lain.<\/p>\n
You barely notice its formal devices as you read but it has a remarkably satisfying shape that becomes apparent when the fully rhyming \u201clain\u201d makes you notice the ABCABC structure of the whole.<\/p>\n
The shape is satisfying because it\u2019s so simple and so perfectly integrated with the development of thought. It\u2019s like a plain, functional cottage alone on a mountain. Every line ending coincides with a syntactical pause, and there are no syntactical pauses except at the end of lines. The argument moves forward strongly with \u201cbut\u201d and \u201cbecause\u201d clearly and emphatically placed at the beginning of lines. The simple, sequential unfolding of rhymes is in harmony with this clear argumentative progression. And because the whole poem is only one sentence and one short stanza the completion of the pattern coincides with the completion of the poem in a much more obvious way than it would with a longer poem or a more complicated stanzaic structure.<\/p>\n
Yet all this simplicity is in strong contrast with other elements. The first line has a songlike lilt, and \u201clovely\u201d is given a kind of energy by metrical stress. Otherwise the language of lines 1 \u2013 3 couldn\u2019t be much duller, more literal, more inert or less evocative. And then suddenly intense, complicated feeling floods the poem as literal statement dissolves into metaphor and our imaginations are filled with the vastness of the mountain, the emptiness of the grass, and the strength, speed, wildness and evasiveness of the hare. We have to intuit that he\u2019s talking about women and realise the contrast of linguistic intensity between the first and second halves of the poem reflects the different kinds of impact that other women and the One Woman have had on him.<\/p>\n
The complications of feeling are obvious. I can imagine someone saying that despite the lovely gathering of meanings in the word \u201cform\u201d, the image of mountain grass as keeping the impression of the hare is a bad way of expressing the constancy of the poet\u2019s love, because grass is a common and obvious symbol of mortality. But that\u2019s what makes this metaphor so poignant. Yeats is simultaneously saying that he\u2019ll never stop loving the woman and recognising that nothing in human life is forever \u2013 if only because human life isn\u2019t. The tenderness of the lines makes the grass\u2019s fidelity a beautiful thing, but behind the beauty there\u2019s a devastating cost: Yeats has neither her love in the present nor (he says) the capacity to move on from it. There\u2019s a kind of pride in the poem (he and she belong to the same order of being \u2013 the wild \u201cmountain grass\u201d with the wild \u201cmountain hare\u201d in implicit contrast to the tame world of ordinary emotions) but there\u2019s also an utter humility in the contrast between the helpless passivity of the grass and the wilful freedom of the hare.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the complications of the poet\u2019s feelings that give the poem emotional depth, but they\u2019re all subsumed within a serene, tender sense of acceptance and ultimately, if in some ways ruefully, of celebration and affirmation. The form comes in again here. I don\u2019t know quite how to express it, but it\u2019s as if the calm formal progression of the whole poem towards the final clinchingly and ringingly full rhyme itself expresses the naturalness and inevitability of his faith, which, given the one-sidedness of the relationship, is a kind of submission (I don\u2019t think I\u2019m projecting this into the poem by knowing the story of his love for Maude Gonne; it\u2019s there in the image of the mountain hare). The final image contains the idea that he and the beloved made love, if only once, but does so with such delicacy and restraint that one\u2019s strongest impression is of a parental, even maternal protectiveness. What a contrast with the coarse boasting of \u201cHis Memories\u201d (section VI of \u201cA Man Young and Old\u201d):<\/p>\n
The first of all the tribe lay there
\nAnd did such pleasure take \u2013
\nShe who had brought great Hector down
\nAnd put all Troy to wreck \u2013
\nThat she cried into this ear,
\n\u2018Strike me if I shriek.\u2019<\/p>\n
That is just depressing. However, some of the other poems of \u201cA Man Young and Old\u201d achieve extraordinary power by giving free rein to feelings of bitterness and resentment, so that conflicting feelings clash head on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yeats\u2019 poem \u201cMemory\u201d has been floating around in my mind over the last few days. I\u2019m not sure why it\u2019s been surfacing now in particular, but it\u2019s a lovely little piece: MEMORY One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain Because the mountain grass Cannot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-form","category-w-b-yeats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522"}],"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=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1391,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions\/1391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}