“Man has created death,” Yeats wrote, and his last collection of poems with its stark title represents the poet’s increasingly baffled attempt not only to create his own death but also to stage-manage his memorial from beyond the tomb. The effort demanded the erection of a perfected effigy of himself. Through poetry he would dictate not merely the idealized contours of his own image but even the mundane details of his funeral and interment. “Under Ben Bulben,” the superb testamentary poem which opens the collection, stipulates both his epitaph and his final resting place. Yeats intended through this poem to prevent a state funeral; as he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley, a few months before his death, “I write my poems for the Irish people but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral.” We all know, of course, what happens to the best-laid plans. Yeats died in France in January 1939 and was buried there. A decade later, his remains were exhumed and returned to Ireland to be buried in Drumcliff churchyard under the promontory of Ben Bulben; and yet, there is to this day some doubt as to whether it was in fact Yeats’s mortal remains that were re-interred in his native soil or those of some other, unknown deceased. To complicate matters further, as James Pethica magisterially demonstrates in this latest volume of the Cornell Yeats,[1] there is even some question as to whether Yeats’s celebrated epitaph was not in fact accidentally truncated. In certain manuscripts there occurs another opening line, thus:  

Draw rein; draw breath.
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horse man pass by.

The addition of “Draw rein; draw breath” completes the rhyme, and its absence is felt in the poem as usually printed; but was this an oversight on the part of Yeats or an unexpected way of accentuating the epitaph —not a lapse, that is, but a master-stroke? In addition, the poet’s wife, George, altered the arrangement of Last Poems so that “Under Ben Bulben,” which Yeats had deliberately placed first, came last; from her viewpoint it made perfect sense that Yeats’s epitaph conclude the collection, but as Pethica and others before him have pointed out, Yeats had wanted the poem to lead off the book, so that all the ensuing poems would read as though they came from the Great Beyond. Having communicated so often, to his own satisfaction at least, with those who were dead and gone, this posthumous impresario of himself could not imagine a cessation of communication after he too had crossed to the other side.

Yeats’s poems are to the highest degree marmoreal; the best seem to have been hewed and chiselled out of some more than travertine material to an incisive finality of expression. The later poems may revel in the colloquial but theirs is an everyday speech already set in stone; indeed, it is this constant counterpoint between the vernacular and the lapidary that gives many of the later poems their unusual force. A glance at Yeats’s drafts shows that this impression of monumentality is often misleading. The Variorum Yeats of 1957 (revised 1966) had already revealed the extent of Yeats’s own revisions, and the commendable works of Jon Stallworthy, Richard J. Finneran, and others have explored this in detail. The Cornell Yeats, an exemplary edition which has already progressed through seven volumes of the poems and four of the plays, lays bare not only the author’s own revisions, as well as his hesitations, false starts and about-faces, but also those inadvertent alterations wrought by the hand of chance: words or phrases or whole lines swallowed up between fair copy and proof; misarrangements of sequences; and worst of all, the pious intentions of the author’s amanuenses, especially his wife. In reading through the present volume, one begins to see certain masterpieces not as inevitable, as they appear to be on a printed page, but rather almost as felicitous escapees from the machinations of contingency.

Inevitably, it is what is missing, what must be missing, that most tantalizes; namely, that which took place in the poet’s imagination between one draft and the next to bring a line or a stanza to perfection. What decisive leap, for example, occurred between “The old bones shake among the rocks” in an early draft of “The Black Tower,” and the finished refrain: “Old bones upon the mountain shake”? Of course, it is not the editor’s task to relume those flashes between finished and unfinished verses which must always intrigue us, but rather to compile an exhaustive and meticulous account of the process as it can be known through the surviving manuscripts themselves. At times, in puzzling over the drafts, it may seem as though we were glimpsing only the take off and landing spots of a high jumper, and not the leap itself, but there is much to be learned even from such traces.

The Cornell Yeats provides every bibliographic tool that one could need for a fresh study of the last poems. Thus, Pethica has drawn up an authoritative census of manuscripts that leaves no physical detail of the successive drafts or their provenance unmentioned. He has also contributed an introduction that is at once erudite, perceptive, and rather unexpectedly witty. The manuscripts are given in sharp photo facsimiles on the lefthand page and the transcription stands en face, in plain or italic or bold type, depending on the medium of the original (pen, pencil, or typewriter). Every squiggle, doodle, cross out, and second thought has been transcribed with a bibliographic meticulousness that at first seems labyrinthine but in the end clarifies nearly every pen or pencil stroke Yeats made. (The complex typography is impossible, alas, to reproduce in such a review as this.) At moments we seem to come upon a page from which Yeats has just lifted his hand. The retention of the poet’s execrable spelling throughout reinforces this spooky illusion; in an early version of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” for example, we read, “I saught a theme & saught for it in vain/ I have saught it daily for sicks weeks or so …” Inevitably, given Yeats’s appallingly illegible handwriting, harder to puzzle out than an Ottoman Turkish chancery script, there are lines in transcription that remain wholly conjectural, thus: “[?held] [?the] [?] [?that] the [?] of” from the earliest surviving draft of “Under Ben Bulben,” and which sounds more like Jorie Graham on a good day than Yeats on his worst. Needless to say, each facsimile and transcript is graced with apposite footnotes. In toiling through the facsimiles and their renditions, search as I might, I could not identify a single wrongly transcribed word or letter. Like its predecessors, the book itself has been beautifully designed and printed and is a joy to read.

Still, what is the use of all this—not only the well nigh maniacal reproduction of each jot and tittle of an old man’s faltering hand but also the spiny thickets of annotation? One can see the importance of facsimile editions for a specialized group of textual scholars, but what about the rest of us, lovers of Yeats’s poetry or poetry readers at large? What about students or even the fabled “general reader?”

Such editorial accomplishments as the Cornell Yeats are eminently worthwhile for their own sakes and probably need no further justification, but I have come to believe (though I am not a teacher of poetry) that Last Poems, along with its six predecessors in the series, may represent ideal instruments for the teaching of poetry (or rather, what actually can be taught of poetry). The volume is expensive but probably not much more so than the latest leaden English textbook. True, the inventories, transcriptions, and analytical descriptions of manuscripts, however masterful, are unusually dry and it may not matter that such inventories have a dusty glitter all their own. But once their bristling strangeness, created by all manner of filigreed brackets and sigla, becomes a bit familiar, the fastidious transcriptions are oddly satisfying in that they demonstrate with exactitude just what we can ascertain about the literal writing of the poems. As such, they represent an ultimate extreme from the gassy pontifications of literary theorists which inevitably, and by design, distance us from the original texts themselves; these by contrast bring us as close to them as we can get. Indeed, such painstakingly literal scrutiny of the poems serves to remind us that poems are physical arrays of meaningful sounds before they are anything else. To draw on an example from an earlier volume, in “The Wild Swans at Coole,” Yeats initially wrote, “The woods are in their autumn colour/ But the lake waters are low… .” He then revised this to read, “The trees are in their autumn foliage/ The water in the lake is low” and later still, “The trees are in their autumn foliage/ The woodland paths are dry.” It was only after four or five such revisions that he hit upon: “The trees are in their autumn beauty,/ The woodland paths are dry… .” Why did Yeats first choose “colour” and then change it to “foliage” and then settle on “beauty?” Through a study of such revisions, students are obliged to recognize that words have weight and cadence, and that one word may be distinctly superior to another in a given place. Yeats is an ideal master for such study since in the greatest poems of his randy old age he combines passionate—indeed, almost primitive—feeling with cold but passionate craft in equal measure, and one can observe raw impulse grappling with disciplined expression throughout the drafts. If anything, Yeats’s passions (famously fueled by injections of monkey glands) became more insistent as he aged; “lust and rage” had become his chief “spurs” to writing poetry. Thus, in a late essay, he approvingly quotes Boccaccio who said of Dante, “Always both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for lechery.”

What the drafts demonstrate most compellingly is that for Yeats composition did not entail the elaboration of “ideas;” indeed, all his ideas were conspicuously second-hand. Rather, the writing of a poem involved the discovery of a musical argument. The propositions of the poem to be written were inordinately clear (for at least one poem Yeats even wrote a prose summary beforehand); it was the music that remained to be discovered. We witness this process often in the nineteen Last Poems, even if some of them—“Cuchulain Comforted,” in particular—were composed with a swiftness unusual for Yeats.

In the May 11 issue of The New York Review of Books, Denis Donoghue dismissed “Under Ben Bulben” as “mainly rant.” (Yeats has only himself to blame: Why didn’t he write, “Irish critics, learn your trade?”) Rant or not, the poem provides some sense of how Yeats set about building a longer poem from the first rough and ungainly words to triumphant melodic articulation. In the early drafts of “Under Ben Bulben” (impossible to reproduce here), only the lengths and arrangement of the lines, broken into arbitrary units, resemble poetry; otherwise, the lines contain jottings or notations of ideas as yet undeveloped and there is little if any rhyme. Thirteen or so pages later, the rhymes begin to appear; what was inchoate before slowly assumes shape. In following Yeats as he affixes his rhymes, one is reminded of a spider spooling out a web, for the rhymes act as pegs on which the spun strands of the lines hang as they form. Once the rhymes appear, and Yeats refines them, the poem begins to tauten visibly. There is a sense of incipient music. A line or stanza will suddenly appear to lift, to take on a cadence of its own, as though by a process of tuning. You might even call it a sort of gradual incarnation, whereby the words grow ever more physically present, more palpable, as the poem develops. To understand a poem means first and foremost to come as close as is possible to a grasp of its complete configuration as a physical pattern in which sound, sense, and objective reality seamlessly coincide. The minute descriptions of paper and watermarks—those notations of “off-white or faded cream unruled typing paper” and “BANQUE-VIDALON” watermarks—that at first acquaintance may appear at once vertiginously picayune and obsessively fussy are in fact precious clues to a fuller grasp of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work itself.

Whatever affords a privileged glimpse of the actual process of composition brings us closer to the poems themselves. What the poet excluded or altered, here lovingly resurrected, enables us to understand what he included and left untouched. Out of the welter of competing and crossed-over phrases and fits of inchoate rhyme in such a masterpiece as “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” the famous closing couplet suddenly emerges, perfect and entire, as though ex nihilo; and yet, it too comes from the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” The “Manuscript Materials” of Last Poems bring us as close as we will ever get to that hidden place within us, at once bestial and enchanted, “where all the ladders start.”

Notes
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1. Last Poems: Manuscript Materials, by W. B. Yeats, edited by James Pethica; Cornell University Press, 527 pages, $89.50. Go back to the text.