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"A little space": the psychic economy of Yeats's love poems - William Butler Yeats
Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Jahan Ramazani
As we have seen, Yeats's love poems acknowledge the double movement by which they deface the living beauty to bring into existence the ivory artifact, offering all their love to the woman resurrected as a self-sufficient icon. Yeats depicts himself as the love poet who lives off absence and death, but in poems like "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" and "The Cap and Bells," he also seems to sacrifice himself to give women eternal life.
Woman in Yeats's love lyrics therefore seems to occupy two incompatible positions. She is the absent object of poetic mourning and questing, but she also seems to contain all life, a dancing Image that outdances death, pitiless in her demand for the poet's life. Although I have focused on the neglected problem of woman's absence and death in the love poems, many critics have shown that Yeats sometimes represents woman as a powerful being in his work - witness her incamations as the dancer, the Rose, Helen, Salome, Crazy Jane, and so forth. This duality should remind us of an historical analogue, since the systematic exclusion of woman from male social structures paradoxically made her imaginary counterpart, as Nina Auerbach has argued, the powerful repository of men's mythical and religious impulses. The self-sufficient woman suppressed by this culture attained in literary works the status of a metaphysical being.(25) Yeats comments in his love poems upon this suppression and mythologization even while reproducing it. "He wishes his Beloved were Dead" so that he may transfigure her into white Beauty, her hair bound about the stars (72-73). The historical grounds of this double movement obviously extend beyond Yeats and his moment. According to Simone de Beauvoir, patriarchy defines woman as both negative other and omnipotent mother, which results in an "alliance between Woman and Death."(26) But we can also recognize in Yeats's poems the cultural archetypes of his period: woman is at once the passive, dead Ophelia and the sublimely egotistical Salome, Herodias, or female narcissist.(27) She is both Choice and Chance, the object of desire that one chooses, but also Fate itself - he even wonders if Daimon and sweetheart may have "some secret communion" (Myth, 336). Her dual role as the inflicter of death on the poet and origin of the poem's life recalls the Romantic dualism by which Keats's Moneta, for example, is at once a life-giving poetic muse and a death-demanding Fate. The "great Mother" in Shelley's Alastor is similarly the origin of all life and love, even though she also casts a "shadow" in which "black death" lurks.(28) Aware that his theories "come in the end to a kind of mythology," Freud recasts these Romantic myths in a psychological story about the contradictory roles of woman in a man's life. Woman bears him, but, as Mother Earth, she also destroys him; the mother grants all life, but she is also the "Goddess of Death"; she is the absent, repressed mother that originates desire as man seeks a substitute "after her pattern," and she is also the self-contained icon that escapes substitution.(29)
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