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"A little space": the psychic economy of Yeats's love poems - William Butler Yeats
Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Jahan Ramazani
A traveller saw Majnun sitting all alone in the middle of the
desert.
Using a flat surface of sand as a sheet of paper and his fingers
as a pen, he was writing the name of his beloved Leyli over
and over again.
The traveller said: O mad Majnun! what are you doing? If writing
a letter, who is to receive it?
Majnun replied: I practice the name of Leyli; since I cannot
reach her in real union, I make love [literally "love-play"]
with her name.
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Yeats indicates in a letter that all of his poetry is in some sense love poetry: We are at our Tower and I am writing poetry as I always do here, and as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it."(1) But Yeats also writes elegies, self-elegies, epitaphs, curses, dramatic monologues, and verse plays, as well as poems of tragic joy, prophecy, ekphrasis, and the sublime; why does he consider love poetry the paradigmatic genre? If all poetry becomes love poetry, then the formal love poem thematizes the love constitutive of itself and of poetry in other modes. On this view, love is both the subject and stuff of the love poem, the genre closest to the psychological base of the poetic process. Whom Yeats's love poems are for now becomes a more difficult question than we usually consider, since their "love" may be as much for their own production as it is for Maud Gonne or any other woman. As we shall see, Yeats even suggests that a male poet cannot possibly achieve both forms of "love": possession of the woman and of the poem are mutually exclusive, if the poet must lose the beloved to gain the desire that sustains his poetry - an economic trade-off that Yeats foregrounds in his work. He often implies that the beloved must be absent, incapable of reciprocating or receiving his desire, so that he may work up the poetry's desire in language. Much androcentric love poetry since Petrarch and Dante, including the Decadent love poetry of "the tragic generation," has tended to represent the beloved as absent or even dead, and Yeats's poems reveal how they generate their own love out of such absence and death. In poem after poem Yeats answers the famous question of The Tower: "Does the imagination dwell the most/Upon a woman won or woman lost?" (197). Although the poems often protest the loss of the beloved, they also betray an awareness that this loss creates the "space" of desire that engenders them.
Conscious that they depend on loss to produce their desire, Yeats's love poems depict the psychic economy of traditional love poetry: erotic loss results in aesthetic gain, at least in an economy based on the loss, lack, absence, or death of woman. Rather than resort to the biography for the master-text of Yeats's erotic life, I propose reading his poems for their understanding of the relation between loss and desire, since some of his early, middle, and late poems portray their own psychic economy and that of the larger tradition of male erotic verse. Many critics continue to insist on reading the love poems mimetically, as documenting Yeats's love relationships and picturing the women he knew. While such treatments offer social and historical insight, they risk turning Yeats's dense and self-absorbed poems into transparent windows. Most critics would concede that Petrarch's love poems tell us less about Laura than about the poet and poetic convention, that it would be unprofitable to read Sidney for information about the real Stella, that it would be naive to read Shakespeare for a record of his relationship with the Dark Lady; yet a lack of historical distance from Yeats and reductive assumptions about his "autobiographical" poetry scatter theoretical caution to the winds. Yeats's love poems reflect not only the women they address but the generic codes and psychological structures through which they address them; that is, long-standing patterns of male love poetry mediate Yeats's representations of women. Whereas historio-biographical critics posit that the love poems are "about" Laura Johnston, Maud Gonne, Iseult Gonne, Olivia Shakespear, and other women, "about" the "new" and "traditional" women Yeats befriended or loved, I hope to show that Yeats's love poems are in large part about themselves: they occlude the beloved in bringing forth a dream, a poetic dream that, supplanting the supposed object of desire, "soon enough / . . . had all my thought and love" (347). Hesitantly, but also with intermittent candor, Yeats is willing to admit that many of his erotic poems are ultimately autoerotic - a view incompatible with normative approaches to these texts as illustrations of Yeats's love relationships.
1
The absence of the beloved takes one of two forms in Yeats's love poetry. She is sometimes the telos that draws the poet on his quest, accessible only after apocalyptic destruction; as such, she is the Rose, Wisdom, Sophia, la belle dame sans merci, or any unattainable woman. But sometimes the psychic energy of the quest is directed in the opposite temporal direction, toward the past rather than the future. Reversed, quest becomes elegy, and the poet mourns for the loss of love, with the beloved represented as Forgotten Beauty, the ancient Rose, the descended Shekinah, or any lost woman. The love poem is in either case the inscription of an absence, whether as figura of the approaching Rose or as epitaph of the woman gone. Seemingly opposites, quest and elegy are two variants of the same libidinal economy in Yeats, with both forms of poetic desire born of erotic lack. For Freud and Lacan, this temporal ambiguity arises because loss is the occasion of (masculine) desire - a loss that begins when the (male) child separates himself from the pre-oedipal mother and enters the substitutive system of symbolic language.(2) Already for Dante, whom Yeats consciously imitates, lamentation and desire are inextricable, since Dante mourns Beatrice as dead and quests after her immortal form.(3)
