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

Wishfully dreaming of the beloved's death and punning on her name, Yeats's lyrics are "love poems" not because they communicate love to an addressee, but because they dispense with the need for communication by transferring love onto themselves. Yeats accuses himself, as we shall see, of falling in love with his own handiwork. Although we sometimes try to read his poems as if they were love letters that mysteriously transported libido from one subjectivity to another, "The Scholars" (1914-15) warns that the beloved must be deaf to the poems, unable to read them; "ignorant," she renews the "despair" that brings them into existence. We

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That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love's despair

To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

Many of Yeats's love poems describe the economic necessity of preserving for their own life this psycho-linguistic space between the lover and the mind behind beauty's ignorant ear. In reflecting on the absence of the beloved necessary for androcentric poetry to work up love for itself, Yeats develops an assumption intrinsic to much poetry of courtly love, ever since troubadour poets like Guillaume IX and Jaufre Rudel inaugurated the topos of amor de lonh or "love from afar." Analyzing this assumption in troubadour and subsequent love lyrics, Julia Kristeva observes that, neither describing nor communicating, such works signify above all themselves, leaving the woman undefined, a mere pretext for working up their autoerotic intensity.(7) Even as they too eclipse women, Yeats's love poems meditate on the loss that gives rise to their autoerotism.(8)

Early in his career Yeats names the distance necessary for the life of his love poems and other erotic verse; he calls this distance between poet and beloved a "little space." In his understanding of love poetry it plays a role comparable to the gap (beance) that constitutes desire in Lacan. "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time" beckons the beloved to come near, then suddenly reverses the supplication, asking for a space in which to sustain the quest:

Come near, come near, come near - Ah, leave me still

A little space for the rose-breath to fill!

Lest I no more hear common things that crave;

....

And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.

Without a gap between himself and the object, the poet's desire and his language would collapse, annihilated by achieving their supposed goal - call it the Rose, Intellectual Beauty, or (in Lacanian parlance) the imaginary maternal body. As desire in language, the traditional love poem plays in the gap between what is and what it wants, subject and object; it would lose its impetus no longer knowing "Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known" (235). Wary about what Shelley calls the "one annihilation" of the achieved quest, Yeats lays out his fears of apparent success in his youthful dramatic poem The Seeker.(9) His knight dies in a moment of horror on reaching

A bearded witch, her sluggish head low bent