"A little space": the psychic economy of Yeats's love poems - William Butler Yeats

It is not alone the beloved's absence and death, however, that Yeats has mourned in his poetry. He says in "The Living Beauty" that he loves bronze and marble statues not because of the living woman's inadequacy but because of his own - "we are old" (139). Just as the poet passes his self-love in a detour through the women in his poetry, so too he sometimes passes through their blankness the libidinal energy of self-mourning. Turning from affectionately mourning a woman to mourning himself, some of the love poems even suggest that the absent woman has in part been a figure for the poet's lost youth and coming death. "Broken Dreams," for example, opens with the statement "There is grey in your hair," and then generates its poetic work by evoking her former beauty, until the poet is lost among the "Vague memories, nothing but memories" that suffuse his love poems (153-54). But by the end of the poem, nothingness and death are more the property of the poet than of the beloved, as the repeated line comes to signify that he, not she, is mere memory:

The last stroke of midnight dies.

All day in the one chair

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged

In rambling talk with an image of air:

Vague memories, nothing but memories.

Representing her absence, the poet has also managed to consign himself to the realm of absences, words, memories, images. Although he fixes the beloved in lifeless, pictorial images in "Men improve with the Years" and "To a Young Beauty," both poems turn from the beloved's aesthetic to the poet's real death: in one case he is an old, "weather-worn, marble triton," in the other a self-canonized poet, who "may dine at journey's end / With Landor and with Donne" (136, 140). The love poems are sometimes disguised self-elegies, articulating a psychic journey through the beloved to a final moment of narcissistic self-embrace - though the self embraced is the dead or dying poet.

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It may be useful to review synoptically the role of the woman lost in the psychic economy of Yeats's love lyrics. His love poetry resembles much androcentric love poetry since Dante and Petrarch in requiring the loss of the beloved that it may generate its figurative work of mourning and questing, but it also betrays a guilty awareness of wishing her absent for its own life. The love poems describe the absence of the beloved as the precondition for preserving a psycholinguistic space for the poems to fill. They fill it with libidinally charged verbal patterns that negate the beloved by making her a redundancy. In their mythology of the economics of desire, the love poems portray the expenditure of libido in art and in life as mutually exclusive alternatives. They testify to the transfer of referentiality and love onto themselves, and they sometimes use the female alter ego to mourn the poet's approaching death.

But this economic model of psychic redistribution risks suggesting that such psycho-linguistic losses and gains are for Yeats painless, even mechanical. I have focused on the disturbing effacement of women in the love poems because it remains largely unexamined. While describing the proper choice, like Pygmalion's, to be love for art over love for women, Yeats's love lyrics also articulate the self-inflicted suffering that attends their deferral and sublimation of desire. The diversion of love into aesthetic creation incurs a high cost, as the later Freud argues, and Yeats confronts this cost-guilt and the death drive - in one of his most powerful meditations on love and death.(23) Upon recalling unacted and deferred desires, the speaker of "The Cold Heaven" shivers with guilt. Memories of sexual renunciation lead directly to speculations about his own death: