Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats 9783110810455, 9789027905109

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS L I T T E R A R U M edenda curat C. H . VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

Series Practica,

5

RHYME AND MEANING IN THE

POETRY OF YEATS by

MARJORIE PERLOFF The Catholic University of America

1970

MOUTON THE HAGUE PARIS

© Copyright 1970 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 78-102959

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

To Nancy and Carey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the following persons who helped to make this study possible: G. Giovannini, who devoted countless hours to the critical review and discussion of the manuscript at various stages, and whose brilliant classroom lectures at Catholic University first made me develop an interest in the style of Yeats's lyric poems; James Craig La Driere of Harvard University, who guided my work in the realm of literary theory and linguistics; James Hafley of St. John's University, Jamaica, L. I., teacher and friend for many years, who taught me, more than anyone else, how to read a literary text. My biggest debt is to my husband, Dr. Joseph K. Perloff, who has had to live with Yeats's rhymes almost as long as I have.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

7

Abbreviations

11

Introduction

13

I.

The Phonetic Function of Rhyme in Yeats's Poetry

19

1. The Distribution of Rhyme and Epiphora 2. The Classification and Distribution of Yeats's Approximate Rhymes

20 29

II. Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats

43

1. The Relation of Rhyme to Meaning

43

2. Semantically Neutral Rhymes in Yeats's Poetry

50

3. Rhyme and Semantic Congruity in Yeats's Poetry . . . . a. Symbol-Rhyme b. Causal-Rhyme c. Synonym-Rhyme d. Metonymy-Rhyme e. Symbolic Association-Rhyme

57 57 63 67 71 78

4. Rhyme and Semantic Disparity in Yeats's Poetry . . . . a. Antithesis-Rhyme b. Irony-Rhyme c. Pun-Rhyme

84 84 93 99

5. The Distribution of Rhymes Involving Semantic Relationships in Yeats's Poetry

107

6. The Correlation between Approximate Rhyme and Meaning in Yeats's Poetry

Ill

10

CONTENTS

III. The Rhyme Structure of the Byzantium Poems

122

Appendix

144

Bibliography

243

ABBREVIATIONS

Variorum

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats ed. Peter Allt and Rüssel K. Alspach (New York, 1957). Autobiography The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958). Vision W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York, Macmillan Paperbacks, 1961). Essays W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York, 1961). Wade The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (New York, 1955). Wellesley Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London, Oxford Paperbacks, 1964).

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the extensive publication and study of Yeats's revisions1 has given us a more accurate conception of Yeats the meticulous craftsman, who weighed carefully every word, every caesura, every syntactic form. Although examination of the revisions has prompted interesting speculations about the evolution of Yeats's poetic style in general, the sound features of the lyric poems remain largely unexplored.2 Yeats's rhymes, for example, have never been examined in any detail, even though Delmore Schwartz wrote as long ago as 1942 that a hypothetical "adequate" book on Yeats would have to analyze the poet's "use of line lengths, of repetition, of off rhymes, and similar devices of versification", and to try to answer the question why "when he gave up rhyme, his metrical mastery disappeared".3 Although Yeats's own theory of poetic style is never systematic, his incidental comments do make clear that he considers stylistic problems of the greatest importance. In 1899, for example, Yeats wrote to Mrs. Clement Shorter, who had sent him her poems for critical comment, "You must not mind my having found so many little faults but I always 1

See especially Curtis Bradford, Yeats At Work (Carbondale, 111., 1965) and "Yeats's Byzantium Poems: A Study of their Development", PMLA, LXXV (1960), 110-25; Marilyn Denton, The Form of Yeats's Lyric Poetry, unpublished dissertation (University of Wisconsin, 1957); Thomas Parkinson, W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic (Berkeley, 1951) and W. B. Yeats, The Later Poetry (Berkeley, 1964); Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: W. B. Yeats's Poetry in the Making (Oxford, England, 1953). 2 A useful but very general treatment of sound patterns in the later poems is found in Chapter V of Parkinson's W. B. Yeats, The Later Poetry. David I. Masson has discussed word repetition and phonemic patterns in "Word and Sound in Yeats's 'Byzantium' ", ELH, XX (1953), 136-60. For discussion of Yeats's style in general, aside from the works cited in note 1, see Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York, 1954); Josephine Miles, "The Classical Mode of Yeats", Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley, 1957), pp. 178-202; John Holloway, "Style and World in 'The Tower' ", in An Honoured Guest, ed. Denis Donoghue and J. R. Muliyne (New York, 1966), pp. 88-105. 3 "An Unwritten Book", Southern Review, VII (1941-42), 486-87.

14

INTRODUCTION

myself think criticism is helpful just in so far as it is minute and technical" (Wade, pp. 322-23). In the same year he wrote to Ellen O'Leary, "Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words" (Wade, p. 109). Yeats describes his personal struggle with rhyme in his Autobiography: "Metrical composition is always very difficult to me; nothing is done upon the first day, not one rhyme is in its place, and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day" (p. 135). His care in selecting rhymes is revealed in many passing remarks about his poetry, such as the following: "My 'Casement' is better written than my 'Parnell' because I passed things when I had to find three rhymes and did not pass when I had to find two" (Wade, p. 869). The letters on poetry exchanged between Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley in the thirties contain many references to rhyming practice. For example, Yeats altered an early draft of Dorothy Wellesley's unrhymed ballad "The Squire, the Dame, and the Serving Maid" by supplying a rhyme scheme. Not satisfied with his first rhymed version, he wrote a second: "Here is another version of second & third stanzas. I start changing things because the rhyme of 'lord' and 'loud' etc. is not admissible in any prosody" (Wellesley, p. 71). When Dorothy Wellesley made further revisions, again using unrhymed stanzas, Yeats was extremely displeased: "I was certain you either intended or could be persuaded to add rhyme I sent you a first version with rhymes — I thought you would use it as quarry for rhyme .... Regular rhyme is needed in this kind of work" (pp. 81-82). Later, he apologized for his severity but still insisted that the poem be written in the traditional abcbdb ballad stanza: I have been a fool. I was so put out at not finding the rhyme which I thought and still think essential that I read with impatience and only half got your meaning. I re-arranged the poem round that half meaning and thought it a masterpiece. Now I have read your poem patiently and get its whole meaning which I like even better. I send you the poem with my corrections. I changed it as little as was compatible with putting in the rhymes which as I think the ear demands .... (p. 95)

In his own poems, Yeats consistently uses stanzas with fixed rhyme schemes. Despite the "experimental" nature of his mature poetry,4 4

On this point, see Ellmann, Identity, Chapter VHI; T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (New York, 1952), Chapter XV.

INTRODUCTION

15

he never came to like free verse — the "American vice" as he called it (Wade, p. 825). In "A General Introduction for my Work" (1937), he explained his distrust of free verse as follows: Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. Ezra Pound, Turner, Lawrence wrote admirable free verse, I could not .... If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion and foresee the boredom of my reader. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional. (Essays, pp. 521-22) Blank verse, on the other hand, was repudiated not because Yeats disapproved of it, but because he found it somehow uncongenial or unsuitable for his own particular themes; of the three hundred and eighty-six poems in the Variorum, only sixteen are in blank verse.5 As early as 1889 Yeats wrote, "Blank verse is the most difficult of all measures to write well" (Wade, p. 104). By 1937, he had not changed his mind: When I wrote in blank verse I was dissatisfied; my vaguely medieval Countess Cathleen fitted the measure, but our Heroic Age went better or so I fancied in the ballad metre of The Green Helmet. There was something in what I felt about Deirdre, about Cuchulain, that rejected the Renaissance and its characteristic metres, and this was the principal reason why I created in dance plays the form that varies blank verse and lyric metres. (Essays, p. 524) This comment does not really explain why Yeats rejected blank verse; if he "must choose a traditional stanza" (e.g., ottava rima which Yeats uses in some of his most famous poems), why not the "characteristic metres" of the Renaissance? The answer is that Yeats's poetry depends more heavily than he himself realized upon the control of rhyme. Delmore Schwartz was probably the first to notice this fact; the scholars who have recently studied Yeats's revisions have come to the same conclusion. In The Form of Yeats's Lyric Poetry, Marilyn Denton writes that "Yeats had trouble with blank verse because, to write his particular kind of poetry he needed rhyme" (p. 155). Similarly, Thomas Parkinson says, "One of his [Yeats's] habits in composing was to establish his possible rhymes and write to them, fill out the design thus offered" (Later Poetry, p. 199); Curtis Bradford observes that "Choosing his rhyme words or rhyme sounds was a standard practice with Yeats when 5

According to the number assigned to each poem in the Variorum, the blank verse poems are 5, 9, 19, 78, 80, 120, 163, 171, 188, 189, 190, 207, 246, 259, 318, 366.

16

INTRODUCTION

blocking out a stanza" (Yeats at Work, p. 10); and Jon Stallworthy concludes: ... it seems from his manuscripts as if Yeats had, at least in later life, the benefit of a great natural gift ... a facility in selecting rhymes. He seems as a rule to have determined his rhyme-scheme before beginning his stanza.... Having decided on his rhymes, however, he is quite prepared to drop them all if the stanza's substance fails to satisfy his critical standards. (Between the Lines, p. 244)

Unfortunately, none of these studies makes clear why Yeats revises certain rhymes and not others, or what, precisely, rhyme does for his poetry. Marilyn Denton seems to have the euphonic value of rhyme in mind when she comments on the rhyme scheme (abbaccaddaeea) of "The Fascination of What's Difficult" that "The particular effectiveness of this rhyme scheme lies in the counterpointing of the couplets' twice stated but changing rhymes against the -ult rhyme [i.e., the a rhyme] which is each time singly stated but unchanging" (p. 12). But why is such "counterpointing" so "effective"? And why does Yeats drop the originally projected rhyme word "exult" (see Denton, p. 12), which would have been just as "effective" phonetically as the other -ult rhymes? Stallworthy is no less obscure when he writes of the six-line poem "Memory" (its rhyme words are "face", "charm", "vain", "grass", "form", "lain"), "Rhyme and rhythm are muted to assist the meaning. Only in the last line is this finally unfolded, and it is there clinched by the repetition of 'mountain' and the one full rhyme (vain/lain)" (p. 206). The implication of this statement is that Yeats intentionally uses approximate rhyme in lines 1/4 and 2/5 so that the rhymes will not distract from the meaning of the poem. Parkinson shifts the emphasis slightly and argues that such approximate rhymes "admit the presence of a world of divided imperfection and the language of that world" (p. 198).6 But if the poet does not want rhyme to distract from the meaning of the poem, or if he wishes to suggest "the presence of a world of divided imperfection", why does he use rhyme at all?

6

Cf. D. S. R. Weiland, "Half-rhyme in Wilfred Owen: Its Derivation and Use", RES, I (1950), 238-39. Weiland writes that "Half-rhyme is perfectly suited to the inconclusive nature of much of Owen's work, the unanswered questions, the ghosts that are so movingly raised but never laid". Half-rhyme reflects better than rhyme the disintegration of values in the world around him .... It offered a unique and perfect expression to that hesitancy and lack of self-confidence which all who knew him record". Weiland suggests, as does Parkinson, that exact rhyme implies a belief in an orderly universe. This seems to me to be a dangerous generalization.

INTRODUCTION

17

My own conviction, upon which this study rests, is that there is an important relationship between rhyme and meaning in Yeats's poetry. Rhyme words, because they are coupled phonetically by the correspondence of their terminal sounds, are automatically placed in potential semantic relationship, and it is this relationship that Yeats exploits in a poem such as "Memory": One had a lovely face And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain Because the mountain grass Cannot but keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.'' Stallworthy comments, " . . . face and charm were not enough to sustain his [the speaker's] permanent love, or make a more lasting mark upon his life and character than the hare makes upon the mountain .... he knows, and the readers know, that the mountain grass cannot keep even the form indefinitely: in time face and charm will be forgotten" (pp. 205-06). But Stallworthy's reading (which is, incidentally, the only available explication of "Memory") ignores the crucial word " b u t " in the fifth line: the grass "cannot but keep the form/ Where the mountain hare has lain". The speaker is, in other words, unmoved by the surface beauty and charm of other women because his inner being or soul (the "mountain grass") bears the indelible imprint of his beloved (the "mountain hare"). 8 The imagery of the last three lines is extremely suggestive: like a mountain hare who has rested briefly in the mountain grass only to move on, the daring, unfettered woman has evidently briefly accepted the speaker as her lover, only to leave him soon afterwards with nothing but her "Memory". The rhyme words "face" and "grass" are, then, antithetical in meaning: the "lovely face" or the bodily charm of young women is contrasted to the ' 'mountain grass" or soul of the speaker. In the case of the second rhyme " f o r m " / "charm", a different semantic relationship is established. The word " f o r m " literally means "physical shape" in the context, but the poem also implies that "charm" is just a " f o r m " — an empty 7

Italicized rhyme words here and throughout this study are mine. This reading is supported by the first version of lines 3/6 of "Memory", cited by Stallworthy, p. 205: I could not change for the grass Cannot but keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain. 8

18

INTRODUCTION

gesture. When "form" is rhymed with "charm", a pun on the word "form" is thus created. Finally, the word "lain" is semantically dependent upon its rhyming partner "in vain" because a cause-and-effect relationship exists between the two: "charm" and "face" are "in vain" because the "mountain hare" "has lain". The semantic pattern created by the rhymes may be diagrammed as follows: face charm in vain . .grass . . form has lain'

ANTITHESIS PUN CAUSAL ASSOCIATION

The rhymes "face"/ "grass" and "charm"/ "form" do not, then, seem to be "muted to assist meaning"; on the contrary, certain semantic relationships are emphasized precisely by the phonetic coupling of rhyme. It is appropriate that both [feys]/[graes] and [caHm]/[foHm] are examples of consonance rather than of full rhyme, not because approximation suggests " a world of divided imperfection" — such generalization seems unwarranted — but because the phonetic tension reenforces the semantic tension (antithesis and pun respectively) of the two rhymes. Similarly, the third rhyme "in vain"/ "lain" is appropriately an exact rhyme: the rhyming partners are causally associated and hence semantically congruent; moreover, the final rhyme does, as Stallworthy observes, resolve the whole meaning of the poem. Is the rhyme structure of "Memory" typical of Yeats's poetry? The aim of the present study is to answer this question by describing, as precisely as possible, both the phonetic character of Yeats's rhymes and the relation of rhyme and meaning in his lyric poetry. Such an examination can be of value, not only in characterizing an important element of Yeats's style, but in its larger implications about the relation of a particular sound feature — in this case rhyme — to meaning in poetry.

I THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

In the Preface to his Bards of the Gael and Gall, Yeats's acquaintance Dr. George Sigerson gave the following description of rhyme as a device in Gaelic verse: They [the Gaels] introduced rime into European literature, for its sporadic occurrence in Greek and Latin writings counts for nothing; but they did far more than the word now suggests. They made it the most refined and delicate instrument of artistic structure which the ingenuity of human intelligence could invent to charm, without fatiguing the ear, by the modulation of sound. They avoided in Gaelic the tinkle of repeated words regularly recurring at the ends of lines. They had echoes and half-echoes of broad and slight vowels, and of consonants, differentiated into classes so that it was not necessary to repeat even the same letter ... -1 This would be an excellent account of Yeats's own rhymes. "I must choose a traditional stanza", Yeats insisted, "even what I alter must seem traditional" (Essays, p. 522). As a "traditional" poet, he uses regular rhyme schemes, but he "alters" the rhymes themselves by experimenting with every variety of approximate rhyme of "echoes and halfechoes". Richard Ellmann writes of Yeats's Last Poems: His rhyming is increasingly impatient; the perfect rhyme is infrequent and usually employed for some special effect, imperfection of rhyme being almost the rule ... In general he prefers assonance and consonance to rhyme, probably because he secured in them effects more subtle and free; in such devices, and in his syllabic variations on common rhythms, he took a satisfaction that must have been like that the aged Milton had in free verse ... (Identity, p. 192) Precisely at what point in his career did Yeats begin to experiment with approximate rhyme and what kinds of approximate rhyme did he favor ? How frequently did he substitute epiphora for rhyme ? The aim of this chapter is two-fold: (1) to determine chronologically the incidence of exact rhyme, approximate rhyme, and epiphora in Yeats's poetry, 1

3d. ed. (Dublin, 1925), pp. 2-3.

20

THE PHONETIC F U N C T I O N OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

and (2) t o establish a classification o f Y e a t s ' s approximate rhymes, determining chronologically the distribution o f e a c h subclass.

1. THE DISTRIBUTION O F R H Y M E A N D EPIPHORA H o w widespread is the use o f rhyme i n Y e a t s ' s p o e t r y ?

Table A ,

A p p e n d i x , provides the following information about each p o e m in the Variorum

text: (1) the number o f lines, (2) the n u m b e r o f lines e n d i n g

with a R H Y M I N G UNIT,2 (3) the number o f lines containing E P I P H O R A , 3 (4) the total number o f rhymes, 4 whether exact or approximate, a n d (5) the number o f approximate rhymes. 5 2

T o illustrate the m e t h o d I have

Although I generally refer to the two rhyming partners in any one rhyme as the term RHYME WORD is misleading when one wishes to describe the precise phonetic character of a rhyme, because the rhyming entity may consist of one syllable of a disyllabic or a trisyllabic word ("punishmerit"/"sent"), of a whole word {"tent"¡"sent"), or of more than one word ("take it"¡"naked"). I therefore adopt Roman Jakobson's term RHYMING UNITS (see "Linguistics and Poetics", in Style and Language, ed. Thomas A Sebeok [New York, 1960], pp. 367-68) to refer to the two entities that are involved in any one rhyme. 3 LINES CONTAINING EPIPHORA are defined throughout this book as lines that contain word repetition in final position IN PLACE OF a rhyming unit. For example, in Stanza 1 of "The Cloak, the Boat and the Shoes": 'What do you make so fair and bright?' a 'I make the cloak of Sorrow: (b) O lovely to see in all men's sight [a] Shall be the cloak of Sorrow (b) In all men's sight.' [a] only lines 2 and 4 are, strictly speaking, lines containing epiphora for although "sight" occurs twice (lines 3 and 5), it rhymes with "bright" in line 1; lines 1, 3, and 5 are therefore counted as RHYMED LINES. The stanza thus has three rhymed lines and two lines containing epiphora. The notation (b) means that lines 2 and 4 have epiphora rather than rhyme. The notation [a] means that lines 3 and 5, although counted as rhyming lines, end with the same word. The notation ( ) and [ ] is used in this manner throughout this study. 4 In cases where a rhyme includes more than two words, I use the following system of counting the number of rhymes. In, let us say, an ottava rima stanza rhyming abababcc, line 1 rhymes with line 3, line 3 with line 5, and line 1 with line 5 — there are, therefore, strictly speaking three a rhymes. The b rhymes are counted in the same way. Thus the stanza has seven rhymes. A count according to group identity, which would indicate that there are only three rhymes (i.e., a, b, and c), is not accurate for it ignores the fact that the a rhyme in lines 1/3 may be exact rhyme and the a rhyme in lines 1/5 approximate rhyme or vice-versa, etc. Not only does a count according to group identity obliterate important phonetic distinctions between the two a or the three b rhymes; it also obliterates important semantic distinctions: there may be a particular semantic relationship between the a rhymes in lines 1/3 which the a rhymes in lines 1/5 or 3/5 do not have. 5 The distinction between exact and approximate rhyme will be made clear in Part 2 of this Chapter. RHYME WORDS,

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

21

used in counting the items in each of these categories, let us take the second stanza of "Byzantium": Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

This stanza has eight lines and six rhymed lines, since all but the first two lines end with a rhyming unit. There are two instances of epiphora, lines 1 and 2 both ending with the word "shade". The stanza contains three rhymes: "cloth"/ "path", "breath"/ "death", and "summon"/ "-human". Of these three rhymes, two are approximate: "cloth"/ "path" and "summon"/ "human". Table A also gives a brief description of the rhyme scheme and meter of each poem. No attempt is made here to establish an accurate classification of Yeats's verse forms;8 the Table merely provides a general idea of Yeats's versification, with particular reference to the type of rhyme alternation and the length of the intervals between rhymes. As Table A indicates, Yeats uses an astonishing variety of verse forms. Every possible rhyme scheme is explored, while the meters range from the dimeter of "A Cradle Song" (26)7 to the heptameter of "The Indian upon God" (6). The most common rhyme scheme is CROSS-RHYME,8 used with a variety of meters. "The Dolls" ( 1 4 7 ) , for example, is in trimeter cross-rhyme, "To a Wealthy Man" (121) in tetrameter crossrhyme, and "To Dorothy Wellesley" (345) in pentameter cross-rhyme. QUADRATE RHYMING,9 very common in Yeats's poetry of the 1890's, begins to disappear after 1900, although Yeats later employs an eight-line stanza, consisting of two quadrate rhyming units, abbacddc, for such 6

For an attempt at making such a classification, see Marilyn Denton, The Form of Yeats's Lyric Poetry, passim. 7 Throughout this dissertation, the number in parentheses following the title of a given poem by Yeats is the number assigned to that poem in the Variorum text. 8 CROSS-RHYME refers to the scheme abab; this type of quatrain is called a ballad quatrain if it is written in common ballad metre (a4b3a4b3); it is called an heroic or elegiac quatrain when written in iambic pentameter. See Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New York, 1965), p. 114. 9 QUADRATE RHYMING refers to quatrains rhyming abba; it is also known as the envelope stanza. See the article on the Quatrain in Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, 1965), p. 684.

22

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

major poems as "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" (250). The common four-line and six-line ballad stanzas, 04630463 and 04630463^463, occur frequently throughout Yeats's poetry, as does the eight-line "double" ballad stanza, 04630463^403/403- Although he avoids such conventional verse forms as the sonnet and terza rima, the former occurring only four times (112, 149, 228, 319) and the latter once (384), ottava rima is one of Yeats's favorite stanza forms. He began to use ottava rima in 1926 when he wrote "Sailing to Byzantium"; the form was subsequently employed in such important poems as "Among School Children" and "The Circus Animals' Desertion".10 In ottava rima, rhyme is, of course, particularly prominent because there are seven rhymes but only three rhyme sounds (o, b, and c) in the eight-line stanza, the rhymes culminating in the clinching couplet of lines 7-8. With respect to verse forms, Yeats's later poetry is, surprisingly, less experimental than the poetry of his middle years. The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), written at the height of the Pound influence on Yeats,11 is his only volume that contains poems whose meters are so irregular and whose rhyme schemes so varied that the results often look like free verse. Richard Ellmann talks of the "nonchalant" and deliberately "improvisatory" verse forms of Yeats's later poems (Identity, p. 292), but there is in fact nothing in Last Poems quite so nonchalant as "Lines Written in Dejection" (164) in Wild Swans. The meter of this poem fluctuates between trimeter and pentameter, and rhyme alternates with epiphora in a highly irregular scheme:12 a b a b c a (d) [a] (d) c [a] on, bodies, moon, ladies, tears, gone, vanished, sun, vanished, years, sun "Broken Dreams" (174) has lines ranging from four to eleven syllables, meter ranging from dimeter to hexameter, and a completely variable rhyme scheme with a number of five-line intervals between rhymes, and epiphora often substituted for rhyme. The total structure is closer to free verse than that of "Beautiful Lofty Things" (343), the poem Ellmann cites as his example of the late "loose" manner (Identity, p. 292), because the latter uses hexameter and heptameter lines throughout. 10

There are eleven ottava rima poems in the Variorum: 211, 213, 220 (Part I), 230, 262, 312 (Part I), 330, 363, 367, 381. 11 Marilyn Denton (op. tit., p. 93), discusses Pound's influence on Yeats's verse forms. See also Ellmann, Man and Masks, Chapter 4, passim; John Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York, 1959), pp. 116-17. 12 Note that "tears"/"years" and "on"/"gone" are exact rhymes; "on"/"moon", "gone"/"moon", "on"/"sun", "moon"/"sun" and "gone"/"sun" and "bodies" "ladies" are approximate.

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

23

With respect to rhyme, the main point to bear in mind regarding Yeats's versification is that the intervals between rhymes are rarely long. The rhyme scheme abcabc, in which all the intervals are three lines, is used only occasionally, as for example in "Memory" (169). In The Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats sometimes uses oddly long intervals: "A Thought from Propertius" (173), for example, has a five-line interval between the rhyme words "line" and "wine". Generally, however, the intervals fluctuate between one and two lines. "At Algeciras" (265) may be taken as typical: it contains three stanzas, each rhyming ababcc, so that there are altogether six two-line and three one-line intervals. The shortness of the intervals means, of course, that the first rhyme word is firmly established in the listener's ear (or the reader's eye) when the second one appears. Table I below summarizes the facts recorded in Table A, Appendix, with respect to the incidence of rhymed lines and of lines containing epiphora in the poems. In this and subsequent Tables, I divide the poems into four periods: Early, Middle, Mature, and Late, according to the generally accepted period division.13 EARLY MIDDLE MATURE

LATE

13

From The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) to The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) : From In the Seven Woods (1904) to Responsibilities (1914) : From The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) to Words for Music Perhaps (1933) : From A Full Moon in March (1935) to Last Poems (1939)14

:

All Yeats scholars would agree that The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) is the culmination of Yeats's early manner; similarly, all would agree that The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) ushers in a new period in Yeats's poetry, it being the first volume written after Yeats's marriage and subsequent invention of the root symbols of A Vision. One might, however, quarrel with my distinction between "Mature" and "Late"; some critics refer to the poems in The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933) as "late", but some of these poems were actually written in the early twenties and it seems best to distinguish them from Yeats's final poems of the thirties, as Ellmann does in The Identity of Yeats. I list Words for Music Perhaps as a separate volume, because the poems in Words strike me as a self-contained sequence which it is best to treat separately; they were originally published as a separate volume in 1932, but all references in this study are to the definitive text of 1933 in the Variorum. 14 The dates given for each volume are those appearing after the title of each volume in the Variorum text. Allt and Alspach state, "The definitive edition of Yeats's poems, the one from which the text of the poems in this book was taken and the one with which all other printings are collated, is the two-volume signed edition published by Macmillan of London in 1949" (p. xxix).

24

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY TABLE I

The Percentage of Rhymed Lines and Lines Containing Epiphora in Yeats's Poems Volume

Rhymed Lines

Epiphora

Oisin & Crossways, 1889 The Rose, 1893 The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899

87% 86% 82%

•5% 0% 3%

Total for Early Period :15

86%

1%

In the Seven Woods, etc., 1903-04 The Green Helmet, 1910 Responsibilities, 1914

67% 97% 75%

1% 1% 2%

Total for Middle Period:

75%

2%

The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919 Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1921 The Tower, 1928 The Winding Stair, 1933 Words for Music Perhaps, 1933

66% 90% 78% 90% 86%

3% 2% •3% •5% 5%

Total for Mature Period:

79%

2%

A Full Moon in March, 1935 Last Poems, 1939

72% 67%

8% 9%

Total for Late Period:

68%

8%

The main conclusion to be drawn from Table I is that rhyme is almost always present in Yeats's poetry, the percentage of rhymed lines per volume never falling below the 66% of The Wild Swans at Coole and rising to 90 % in The Winding Stair and 97 % in The Green Helmet. Lines that do not contain terminal sound repetition (i.e., rhyme or epiphora) occur chiefly in the few blank verse poems, such as "The Old Age of Queen Maeve" (78), all of the 154 lines of this poem falling into this category. Aside from the blank verse poems, Yeats uses lines with no terminal 15

Here and throughout this study, the TOTAL for each Period is found, not by taking the average of the percentages listed for each volume, but by adding up, in this case, the number of Rhymed Lines and of Lines Containing Epiphora for the whole period, and then determining what percentage of the total number of lines these constitute.

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

25

sound repetition chiefly in his ballads (e.g., the abcb form) and in a few poems with irregular rhyme schemes such as "The Wild Swans at Coole" (150), which has the scheme 5 X : cubsabzdsdz1* (a four-line ballad stanza plus a couplet), there being ten lines without terminal sound repetition in all. Such rhyme schemes, it must be emphasized, occur very rarely in Yeats's poems; in The Winding Stair, for example, 90% of the lines are rhymed and a further .5 % contain epiphora, so that only 9.5 % of all the lines have no terminal sound repetition. Epiphora has almost no significance in Yeats's poems except in the Late Period. Before Words for Music Perhaps, the percentage of epiphora per volume is never greater than 3 %. Yeats uses epiphora as a replacement for rhyme proper chiefly in the refrains of his late ballads; in Last Poems, 9% of the lines contain epiphora. "Colonel Martin" (358), for example, has the scheme: 8 x : DOUBLE BALLAD STANZA AND REFRAIN (a); out of seventy-two lines, thirty-two are rhymed, eight have epiphora, and thirty-two have no terminal sound repetition. To take another example, in "I Am of Ireland" (295), the five-line refrain with which the poem opens is repeated twice so that there are in all three repetitions of the rhyme pair, "she"/ "charity", and nine repetitions of the word "Ireland". Interspersed between the three refrains, there are two eight-line stanzas, rhyming ababcdcd. These rhyming stanzas contain the narrative portion of the poem, while the refrain is a general statement, ironically counterpointing the narrative. 17 Richard Ellmann, in his discussion of the late ballads, observes that the Yeatsian refrain generally fulfills one of three functions: (1) it reinforces the theme, (2) it opposes or questions the theme, or (3) it sets up a general aura of mystery (Identity, pp. 202-03). Epiphora assumes greater significance in a few poems such as the famed "A Deep-sworn Vow" (175): Others because you did not keep That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine; Yet always when I look death in the face, When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, Suddenly I meet your face. The repetition of the word "face" has a number of functions here. First, it intensifies the persistence of the speaker's preoccupation with 16

The notation 5x: means "five stanzas with the following rhyme scheme". For an excellent analysis of this poem, see Walter Houghton, "Yeats and Crazy Jane: the Hero in Old Age", Modern Philology, XL (1943), p. 234. 17

26

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

the image of his beloved — try as he may, the lover cannot escape her memory, and his mind circles round and round, always returning to her "face", just as the poem itself returns to the word "face" in the foreshortened last line. Secondly, the repetition of "face" is ironic, for two meanings of the word are referred to: looking "death in the face", and "your face". The repetition implies that love and death are somehow inseparable. In "A Deep-sworn Vow", the epiphora is surely the most striking qualitative sound feature, although the rhymes "keep"/ "sleep" and "mine"/ "wine" and the internal rhymes "deep"/ "keep" and "deep"/ "sleep" certainly contribute to the total effect of the poem. Such striking use of epiphora is, however, very rare in Yeats's poetry, and on the whole one concludes that epiphora is of minimal importance compared to rhyme in the sound structure of Yeats's poems. Table I indicates that rhyme is an almost constant feature of Yeats's poetry. But the rhymes found in his later poetry have little similarity to those found in the early volumes. Most critics have noted the preponderance of approximate rhyme in the late poetry. Jon Stallworthy, for example, writes, "In later years Yeats came increasingly to experiment with half-rhymes which, because they fall less heavily on the ear than full-rhymes, contribute largely to the free colloquial movement of his verse" (Between the Lines, p. 245). Similarly, Thomas Parkinson comments that "The general design of his [Yeats's] later prosody suggests that his primary aim was to effect a passionate syntax that would allow the voice to move in proximity to authentic patterns of speech. His steady use of off-rhyme is one indication of this motive ..." (W. B. Yeats, The Later Poetry, p. 200). One gathers from such statements that approximate rhyme is a peculiarity of Yeats's late poetry. Table II on p. 27 summarizes the findings of Table A, Appendix, with respect to the incidence of approximate rhyme in the poems. Table II indicates that, although the percentage of approximate rhyme increases in nearly linear fashion in the course of Yeats's career, the most sweeping change in the phonetic character of Yeats's rhymes comes, not between the Middle and Late Period, but between the Early and Middle: a 22% increase in approximate rhyme. In The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), only 8 % of the rhymes are approximate; in In the Seven Woods (1904), 22% are approximate. There is thus a 14% increase within a five-year period. The next sharp rise comes between 1921 and 1928: 10%. After 1928, the percentage of approximate rhyme per volume remains fairly constant. There is an 8% decline from The

27

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY TABLE II

The Incidence of Approximate Rhyme in Yeats's Poems

Volume

Oisin & Crossways, 1889 The Rose, 1893 The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899 Total for Early Period:

Total No. of Rhymes 706 258 223 1187

No. of Approx. Rhymes 16 20 17 53

%of Approx. Rhymes 2% 8% 8% 5%

In the Seven Woods, etc., 1904 The Green Helmet, 1910 Responsibilities, 1914

208 153 392

46 39 121

22% 26% 30%

Total for Middle Period:

753

206

27%

The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919 Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1921 The Tower, 1928 The Winding Stair, 1933 Words for Music Perhaps, 1933

418 243 624 484 217

137 87 288 230 87

33% 36% 46% 48% 40%

1986

829

42%

A Full Moon in March, 1935 Last Poems, 1939

155 696

54 330

35% 48%

Total for Late Period:

851

384

45%

4777

1472

31%

Total for Mature Period:

Grand Total:

Winding Stair (48%) to Words for Music Perhaps (40%), no doubt because the many ballads in the latter volume were cast into conventional ballad form with regular rhyme schemes and exact rhyme. As Yeats told Dorothy Wellesley: ... look through any old book of ballads & you will find that they all have perfectly regular rhyme schemes ... Regular rhyme is needed in this kind of work. The swing of the sentence makes the reader expect it .... In narrative verse we want to concentrate the attention on the fact or the story, not on the form. The form must be present as something we all accept — 'the fundamental sing-song'. (Wellesley, pp. 80, 82)

28

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

The decrease in the percentage of approximate rhyme in A Full Moon in March — 13% less than in The Winding Stair — is again at least partially due to the fact that Full Moon contains a number of ballads, but it is also interesting to speculate on a possible relationship between the use of approximate rhyme and overall poetic value in Yeats's work, when one remembers that Full Moon was the only volume of his poetry that Yeats himself openly rejected. "I don't like it", he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley, "it is a fragment of the past I had to get rid o f " (Wellesley, p. 40). Critics have generally agreed with Yeats that Full Moon represents a period of relative sterility between the poetic triumphs of The Winding Stair and Last Poems.1* It will be interesting to observe, later on, whether the relationships between rhyme and meaning in Full Moon are also less frequent than those in the adjacent volumes. Richard Ellmann's observation that the rhyming in Last Poems is "increasingly impatient" (Identity, p. 192) is an accurate one; in Yeats's final volume the percentage of approximate rhyme is no higher than that of The Winding Stair — 48 % in both cases — but, whereas 90 % of the lines in The Winding Stair are rhymed lines and only .5% of the lines contain epiphora, in Last Poems only 67% of the lines are rhymed lines and 9% contain epiphora. In his final volume, Yeats maintains the fixed stanza patterns of his earlier poetry, but the combination of approximate rhyme, epiphora, and unrhymed lines often obscures the basic stanza form. In "Sweet Dancer" (333), for example, the seven-line stanza is basically a four-line ballad stanza (abcb) plus a rhyming couplet (dd) and a refrain line (e): The girl goes dancing there On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth Grass plot of the garden; Escaped from bitter youth, Escaped out of her crowd, Or out of her black cloud. Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!

If strange men come from the house To lead her away, do not say That she is happy being crazy; Lead them gently astray; Let her finish her dance, Let her finish her dance. Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer! 18

See, for example, Unterecker, Reader's Guide, pp. 241-54.

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

29

In the first stanza, the b rhyme "smooth"/ "youth" is approximate while the d rhyme "crowd"/ "cloud" is exact. In the second stanza, however, there is no d rhyme at all, for line 13 is a repetition of line 12, "Let her finish her dance". The only rhyme in the second stanza is the exact rhyme "say"/ "astray". The fourteen-line poem has six rhymed lines, four fines containing epiphora, and four lines with no terminal sound repetition. Of the three rhymes, only two are exact. When "Sweet Dancer" is heard rather than read, the listener hardly notices that the poem does, in fact, have a rhyme scheme. The "traditional stanza" upon which Yeats insisted is thus radically "altered".

2. THE CLASSIFICATION A N D DISTRIBUTION OF YEATS'S APPROXIMATE RHYMES

Not only does the percentage of approximate rhyme per volume increase steadily from the Early to the Mature Period, but the approximations themselves become more complex; they become "echoes and half-echoes of broad and slight vowels, and of consonants, differentiated into classes . . . " (Sigerson, p. 3). In order to describe the phonetic evolution of Yeats's approximate rhymes, it is necessary to classify the kinds of approximate rhyme used by Yeats as accurately as possible. 19 The word RHYME as used throughout this study is best defined as "the correspondence in terminal sounds of two or more lines of verse", 20 more specifically, the correspondence of the last accented vowel (v) and all succeeding consonants (c), when they occur. When the v-c correspondence is complete and when both rhyming units have primary stress,21 19 My analysis of the phonetic character of Yeats's rhymes is based on Yeats's own reading of his poems as recorded by Spoken Arts, No. 753. This recording also contains readings of Yeats's poems by Siobhan McKenna and Michael MacLlammoir, both of whom generally share Yeats's speech habits. It should be noted that Yeats's pronunciation is not nearly so different from Standard American English (SAE) as might be expected: the word "mask", for example, is pronounced [maesk] as in SAE, not [mask] as in British "Received Pronunciation". Yeats differs most notably from SAE in his trilled r's, his dropping of the final consonant sound of the suffix -ing, and in his placing of primary stress on certain syllables which would receive only weak or tertiary stress in SAE, e.g., "composite", "maybe". 20 Webster's Third New International Dictionary. 21 All linguistic terminology used in this book is based on that of George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, An Outline of English Structure, Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers No. 3 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1951). For a more recent version of Trager and Smith one may consult H. A. Gleason, An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, rev. ed. (New York, 1961). Gleason uses Trager and Smith's terminology throughout. Another good recent treatment is that of John P. Hughes, The Science of Language (New York, 1962).

30

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

as in "black"/ "tack", the rhyme is called exact rhyme; when the correspondence is incomplete, as in "bleak"/"tack", or when the two rhyming units have different degrees of stress, as in "me"/ "memory", the rhyme is called APPROXIMATE RHYME. Approximate rhymes fall into three broad categories. The first category involves two rhyming units that have primary stress and PHONEMIC VARIATION, that is, imperfect v-c correspondence. Yeats uses the following types of approximate rhyme involving phonemic variation: 1. CONSONANCE-RHYME occurs when the final consonant sounds of the stressed rhyming units agree but the vowel sounds differ.22 For example, Yeats uses consonance-rhyme in "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" (151):

That cast their shadows upon road and bridge The tower set on the stream's edge ....

(lines 51/52)

2. EYE-RHYME occurs when the rhyming units are spelled alike but are pronounced differently; phonetically, eye-rhyme is generally equivalent to consonance-rhyme. For example, Yeats uses eye-rhyme in "Easter 1916" (200): The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live ....

(lines 53/55)

3. CONTRAST-RHYME occurs when there is assonance of the vowels in the stressed rhyming units, but the final consonants have a voiced/ voiceless contrast. I have had to coin the term contrast-rhyme for a fairly large class of approximate rhymes in Yeats's poetry for which no name exists. In the following example from "Never Give All the Heart" (84), the vowel sounds are identical [8], and the consonant sounds almost identical, the only difference being that [v] is a voiced, [f] an unvoiced labiodental spirant:

And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love ?

(lines 11/12)

an infrequent type of approximate rhyme, occurs when the rhyming units have different vowel sounds 4 . CONSONANCE-AND-CONTRAST RHYME,

22 My definitions of consonance-rhyme, eye-rhyme, and vowel-rhyme are based on Babette Deutsch's definitions in her article on "Rhyme" in Poetry Handbook (New York, 1957), pp. 116-27.

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

31

and the final consonants have a voiced/ voiceless contrast, as in the following example from " A Woman Homer Sung" (98): 'He shadowed in a glass What thing her body was.'

(lines 13/14)

5. VOWEL-RHYME occurs when the rhyming units contain no final consonant (c), and the vowel sounds differ, as in the following example from " I Am of Ireland" (295): And the trombone,' cried he, The trumpet and trombone,' And cocked a malicious eye ....

(lines 23/25)

6. MOSAIC-RHYME is disyllabic or trisyllabic rhyme in which one of the rhyming units consists of one word, the other of more than one word, as in the following example from A Coat (148) : 2 3 Song, let them take it For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

(lines 7/8)

Since, as was stated on p. 27 above, rhyme proper occurs when the v-c correspondence is complete and when both rhyming units have primary stress, a second group of approximate rhymes may be isolated in which the rhyming units have no phonemic variation but do have stress variation. My terminology for these rhymes which have never, to my knowledge, been classified, is based on the treatment of stress in Trager and Smith's Outline of English Structure (pp. 35-37). Trager and Smith's distinction between the four degrees of stress in English — primary (J), secondary (/\), tertiary (\), and weak ( u ) — is generally accepted today by linguists. In terms of the four degrees of stress, the following types of approximate rhyme occur: 1. SECONDARY-STRESS RHYME, which is very close to EXACT RHYME, occurs when one rhyming unit has primary stress while the other has secondary stress. Secondary-stress rhyme is relatively rare in Yeats's poetry simply because secondary stress is much less frequent in the English 23

Mosaic-Rhyme is often defined as it is by T. W. Herbert in his article on "Rhyme" in Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph Shipley (New York, 1953), pp. 346-47, as a rhyme in which "one or both of the rhyming partners are made up of more than one word." My definition, which is based on Webster's Third, is, I believe, a more useful one than Herbert's for, according to his definition, one would have to label such common feminine rhymes as "let us"/"get us" mosaic-rhymes. The word "mosaic" more appropriately fits a rhyme in which a single word is rhymed with more than one word, as in "take it"/"naked".

32

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

language than are the other three degrees of stress. It occurs chiefly when a compound noun rhymes with a simple noun, as in the following example from "The Rose of Peace" (22): If Michael, leader of God's host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven's He would his deeds forget.

door-post (lines 1/3)

2 . TERTIARY-STRESS RHYME occurs when one rhyming unit has primary stress while the other has tertiary stress. It occurs most commonly when a derivational or inflectional suffix rhymes with a root, as in lines 2/4 of "The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner" (36):

Although I shelter from the rain Under a broken tree My chair was nearest to the fire In every c6mpanj> ....

occurs when one rhyming unit has primary stress while the other has weak stress.24 Weak-rhyme occurs most commonly when a root rhymes with a derivational or inflectional suffix that is typically unstressed. The vowel sound of such a suffix is likely to be SCHWA, tertiary stress often falling on one of the other syllables of the word, as in the following example from "Ancestral Houses" ( 2 1 3 ) : 3 . WEAK-RHYME

The pacing to and fro on polished floors Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined With famous portraits of our dncSstori . . . .

(lines 35/37)

4. UNACCENTED-RHYME occurs when neither rhyming unit has primary stress; it involves two units with weak or tertiary stress, as in lines 2/3 of "A Coat" (148): I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies ....

A third group of approximate rhymes involves both phonemic variation and stress variation; these may be called COMBINATIONS. The following Combinations occur in Yeats's poetry: 24

This type of stress variation is discussed, with reference to Renaissance poetry, by Percy Simpson in "The Rhyming of Stressed with Unstressed Syllables in Elizabethan Verse", Modern Language Review, XXXVIII (1943), 127-29. C. S. Lewis in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 478, calls this phenomenon "Simpsonian Rhyme".

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

1. TERTIARY-STRESS-AND-CONSONANCE "My Descendants" (216):

RHYME,

33

as in lines 19/21 of

And I, that count myself most prôsperoùy Seeing that love and friendship are enough, For an old neighbor's friendship chose the hàuse .... 2. TERTIARY-STRESS-AND-EYE RHYME,

Before Dawn"

as in lines

75/77

of "The Hour

(132):

My sleep were now nine cénturiès But for these mornings when I find The lapwing at their foolish criés .... 3. TERTIARY-STRESS-AND-VOWEL RHYME,

and the Witch"

as in lines

17/19

of "Solomon

(197):

He that crowed out etérni/j) Thought to have crowed it in again. For though love has a spider's éye. 4. WEAK-AND-CONSONANCE RHYME, as in lines 1/3 of "The Stare's

Nest by my Window"

(218):

The bees build in the crévices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

Certain other Combinations are used very occasionally: "6nce"/ "companions" ("At Galway Races" [114], lines 5/7) is Weak-andContrast Rhyme-, "irregular"/ "war" ("The Road at my Door" (217), lines 1/3 is Weak-and-Eye Rhyme: "éverywhère"/ "inhéritor" ("Coole Park and Ballylee, 1 9 3 1 " (262), lines 3 0 / 3 2 ) is UNACCENTED-ANDCONSONANCE RHYME.

The above classification of approximate rhymes must, of course, be used with a certain amount of caution. Sometimes it is extremely difficult to classify an approximate rhyme: whether a syllable has weak or tertiary stress, for example, often depends on the individual performance of a poem. I have aimed, above all, at consistency: the suffixes -es, as in "images", "presences", "crevices", always receive weak stress, both in Yeats's speech as recorded by Spoken Arts (see note 19), and in

34

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

my own; the suffix -y in three-syllable words such as "memory", "tragedy", "misery", on the other hand, always receives tertiary stress. The classification is not meant to be absolute; it is, rather, a useful tool to be used in the description of Yeats's rhyming technique. The chronological distribution of the kinds of approximate rhyme just defined is found in Table B, Appendix. Table III on p. 35 f. summarizes the findings of Table B under three headings: (1) Kinds of Phonemic Variation, (2) Kinds of Stress Variation, and (3) Combinations of Phonemic Variation and Stress Variation. The following conclusions may be drawn from Table III. In the early poetry, Yeats's rhymes are nearly always exact rhymes, the two exceptions being tertiary-stress rhyme and eye rhyme. Both these types are, of course, very close to exact rhyme; both are conventionally used in English poetry and occur fairly frequently in the poems of the Pre-Raphaelite and Rhymers' Club poets who exerted such influence upon the early Yeats. William Morris, for example, rhymes "brow" with "blow" in "The Defense of Guinevere" (lines 2/4), and Lionel Johnson frequently uses tertiary-stress rhyme: for example, "Fates"/ "dominates" in "A Dream of Youth" (lines 93/94). In the case of phonemic variation, In the Seven Woods seems to be the crucial volume; in 1904 not only consonance-rhyme but also contrastrhyme, vowel-rhyme, and consonance-and-contrast rhyme make their first appearance. From 1904 on, Yeats uses consonance-rhyme, his favorite form of approximate rhyme, with ever increasing frequency: in The Green Helmet (1910), 23 % of the approximate rhymes are consonance-rhymes; the percentage rises to 39% in The Tower (1928), 53% in The Winding Stair (1933), and 64% in Last Poems (1939). In all, 47 % of Yeats's approximate rhymes are consonance-rhymes. Contrastrhyme, on the other hand, which constitutes 20% of the approximate rhyme in Seven Woods, declines in the later volumes; only 4% of the approximate rhymes in Last Poems are contrast-rhymes. Vowel-rhyme, mosaic-rhyme, and consonance-and-contrast rhyme continue to be used sporadically from 1904 on. Secondary-stress rhyme generally occurs when a compound noun rhymes with a simple, monosyllabic noun (see p. 32). Since compounds are more frequent in Yeats's early Pre-Raphaelite poetry than in his later work, secondary-stress rhyme occurs more frequently in the early volumes than anywhere else. In the Early Period, 19% of the approximate rhymes are secondary-stress rhymes, as compared to 1 % in the Mature Period and 2% in the Late Period. Tertiary-stress rhyme and weak-

35

THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF RHYME IN YEATS'S POETRY

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118

RHYME AND MEANING IN THE POETRY OF YEATS

Table IV makes clear that rhymes involving semantic disparity are no more likely to be approximate rhymes than are rhymes involving semantic congruity: the total percentages are very close — 37 % of the rhymes involving semantic congruity are approximate as compared to 40% of the rhymes involving semantic disparity. Nor does approximate rhyme seem to be a peculiarity of any one meaning class: metonymy-rhyme and antithesis-rhymes are opposites yet the incidence of approximate rhyme in the two classes is almost identical — 35 % and 36 % respectively. Symbolic association-rhyme and pun-rhyme have a higher percentage of approximate rhyme than the other classes (52% and 60% respectively) but, as Table C and Table D make clear, these two classes are heavily concentrated in the volumes of the Mature Period in which the incidence of approximate rhyme is relatively very high; naturally, then, symbolic association-rhymes and pun-rhymes have a higher total percentage of approximate rhyme than, say, metonymy-rhymes, 31 % of which are concentrated in the Early and Middle Periods. Causal-rhyme has the lowest percentage of approximate rhyme (28 %); in this case, it is possible that there is some correlation between the type of semantic relationship and the incidence of approximate rhyme. Causal-rhyme usually has large intervals and its function is to organize the meanings of a stanza (see pp. 63-67 above); if the rhyme is approximate, the causal or temporal relationship between the two rhyme words is much less evident than if the rhyme is exact. In "Memory", for example, the causal-rhyme ' 'in vain''/' 'lain" resolves the meaning of the poem; it is appropriately the only exact rhyme in the poem (see p. 18 above). With the exception of causal-rhyme, however, there is no consistent correlation between approximate rhyme and specific classes of R-M's. This does not preclude the possibility, however, that in individual instances, the approximation of a rhyme may have a direct bearing on the semantic relationship involved. In Sections 3 and 4 of this chapter, I have pointed out such cases: in "To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing", for example, the approximation of the rhyme "exult"/ "difficult" suggests the difficulty of exulting (see p. 69). In " N o Second Troy" the contrast-rhyme " i s " / "this" underlines the discrepancy between "age like this" and "being what she i s " (see p. 86), and in " A Woman Homer Sung" the consonance-and-contrast rhyme "glass"/ " w a s " emphasizes the tension between art ("glass") and life ("was") which characterizes this irony-rhyme (see p. 95). The opening stanza of' 'The Wild Swans at Coole " (150) contains an in teresting example of a relationship between approximate rhyme and meaning:

RHYME AND MEANING IN THE POETRY OF YEATS

119

The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans. This stanza begins in what looks like standard ballad meter, a^bzabz, and, accordingly the reader expects lines 5 and 6 to continue the pattern (dibz) to make a six-line ballad stanza; the rhyming couplet therefore comes as a surprise and the rhyme "stones"/ "swans" is made particularly prominent. "Stones"/ "swans" is a symbolic antithesis-rhyme, epitomizing the central antithesis of the whole poem, the tension in the speaker's mind between the claims of earth and heaven, of body ("stones") and soul ("swans)". The rhyme words are not only antithetical; they also have an ironic relationship, for the speaker implies that it is paradoxically "among the stones" that "swans" are to be found; his intimations of immortality, in other words, come only through the medium of the physical "stone" world. The fact that "stones"/ "swans" is consonance-rhyme is significant in this connection; the minimal approximation ([stownz] / [swaHnz]), emphasizes the tension between the mortal and the immortal which the speaker cannot quite resolve. This tension is also suggested by the uneven line lengths: line 5 has eleven syllables and five stresses; line 6 has six syllables and three stresses. It is doubtful that an exact rhyme could convey the precise nuance of meaning contained in "stones"/ "swans". For a second example of a relationship between approximate rhyme and meaning, let us consider "The Second Coming" (207). In its first draft, this poem begins with the following six lines: intellectual gyre is ( ) The gype&-gF«w-w4deF-and-FBeFe wide falcon cannot hear The bawk -can ae- more-heap the falconer The germans are ( ) now to Russia come Though every day some innocent has died The gyres sweep wider day by day The tyrant has the anarch in his pay

(Reproduced from Stallworthy, p. 17) The rhymes "wide"/ " d i e d " and " d a y " / " p a y " indicate that "The Second Coming" was originally to have been in rhyme. In the final version, however, rhyme has been abandoned in favor of blank verse, except that the poem opens with two rhymed couplets, each of which has an approximate rhyme:

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world....

The two approximate rhymes "gyre"/ "falconer" (weak-and-consonance rhyme) and "hold"/ "world" (consonance-rhyme) both involve semantic relationships. The first rhyme is antithesis-rhyme: the ' 'widening gyre", symbolic in Yeats's system of the chaos and violence that mark the cataclysmic point where the countermovement or opposite cycle will begin, is opposed to the "falconer", who symbolizes God, or, more broadly, the image of ideal perfection that man (the "falcon") has lost in the modern world.53 The rhyme thus contains a tension between chaos and order, emphasized by the minimal approximation of the rhyme: the heavily stressed rhyming unit [ayr] of "gyre" is barely echoed by the weakly stressed rhyming unit [8r] of "falconer". The second rhyme is irony-rhyme: as "Things fall apart", it is not only the "centre" but the "world" itself that cannot "hold". Again, the phonetic discrepancy between "hold" and "world" emphasizes the ironic implications of the rhyme. The effect of the first four lines would certainly be quite different if the rhymes were exact as they are in the first draft. What happens in line 5 of the final version is particularly interesting. As "Things fall apart" in the nightmare vision of the speaker, so does the rhyme scheme of the poem: rhymed couplets give way to blank verse. Jon Stallworthy believes that Yeats abandons rhyme here because "it ... might distract and limit the reader's attention" (Between the Lines, p. 21), but it seems more likely that Yeats felt that rhyme would 63

On the meaning of the phrase "widening gyre", see Yeats's own note to Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Variorum, p. 825), "... the end of an age ... is represented by the coining of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the othei to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment, the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its chaiacter from the contrary movement of the interior gyre." A. N. Jeffares in W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (New Haven, 1949), p. 203, writes, "... the falconer is Christ, who began the era of history which has now almost reached its conclusion.... The falcon represents man, losing touch with Christianity". Ellmann (Identity, p. 259) disagrees with Jeffares; he argues that "Yeats would not have cluttered the poem by referring to Christ both as falconer and as rocking crade further on. Essentially the falcon's loss of contact implies man's separation froms every ideal of himself that has enabled him to control his life, whether this co mel from religion or philosophy or poetry". Whether we adopt Jeffares' or Ellmann's reading, the "falconer" is clearly antithetical to the "gyre"'

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be unsuitable for a poem of such unmitigated violence and bitterness as "The Second Coming"; it is one of Yeats's only poems in which the speaker seems to feel that there is no compensation for the horror and indignity of life. In beginning his poem with two approximate rhymes, both involving semantic disparity, and then switching to blank verse, Yeats subtly dramatizes the fact that "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". In what is surely one of his most successful blank verse poems,54 Yeats brilliantly uses approximate rhyme in the opening lines in order to imply that all coordination, all Unity of Being is breaking down. As in the case of "stones"/ "swans", exact rhymes would not have the appropriateness, the precise relevance to meaning found in "gyre"/ "falconer" and in "hold"/ "world". In studying Yeats's rhymes, one concludes, the possible correlation between the use of approximate rhyme and a particular semantic relationship between rhyme words should be considered, but it should be neither assumed nor exaggerated. Yeats's major poems, such as "A Dialogue of Self and Soul", have both a high percentage of approximate rhyme and a high percentage of rhymes that involve semantic relationships, but these two variables occur side by side, not necessarily together, to create an overall rhyme structure which is both artful and intricate.

54

Marilyn Denton (Form of Yeats's Lyric Poetry, p. 155) write» " 'The Second Coming' is one of the few poems in which Yeats was able to express intense emotion in a coherent metrical pattern without the aid of rhyme".

in THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

Our words must seem to be inevitable. — Yeats

The two Byzantium poems — "Sailing to Byzantium" (1926) and "Byzantium" (1930) — represent perhaps the most perfect expression of Yeats's mature rhyming technique. The poems are, of course, thematically related, but there is a basic contrast in meaning which is, interestingly, reflected in the rhymes themselves. A careful consideration of the rhyme structures of these two major poems will give us a clearer picture -of the overall relationship between rhyme and meaning in Yeats's poetry which has been studied thus far. 1. "Sailing to Byzantium" I That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees — Those dying generations — at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. II An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence-, And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

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III O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a gold bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. The four ottava rima stanzas of "Sailing to Byzantium" contain twentyeight rhymes which may be classified as follows: EXACT RHYMES

APPROXIMATE RHYMES

song/ long

1. Phonemic Variation

trees/ seas

A.

Consonance-Rhyme

thing/ sing unless/ dress fire/ gyre gyre/ desire take/ make

young/song young/long trees/ dies seas/ dies wall/ soul

take/ awake

2. Stress Variation

make/ awake thing/ sing

A. Tertiary-stress

Rhyme

neglect/ intellect thing/ studying sing/ studying come/ Byzantium me/ eternity thing/ enamelling enamelling/ sing Byzantium/ come

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THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

3. Combinations A. Tertiäry-stress-andContrast unless/ magnificence dress/ magnificence B. Weak-and-Consonance wall/ animal soul/ animal Seventeen of the twenty-eight rhymes (60%) are approximate, and the approximations are marked by great variety: there are five rhymes that have phonemic variation, eight rhymes that have stress variation, and four that have Combinations. The distribution of approximate rhymes is particularly interesting. One may note, first of all, that the closing couplet of each stanza has tertiary-stress rhyme ("neglect"/ "intellect", "come"/ "Byzantium", "gather me"/ "eternity" and "Byzantium"/ "come"); the last couplet differs slightly from the other three in that the rhyming unit that has tertiary stress precedes the one that has primary stress; the variation that is thus produced is, as will be explained below, relevant to the meaning of the poem. In Stanza I, the first two a rhymes are consonance-rhymes ("young"/ "song", "young"/ "long"), while the third is an exact rhyme ("song"/ "long"); the b rhymes have precisely the same pattern but in reverse order — the first b rhyme is an exact rhyme ("trees"/ "seas"), while the second two b rhymes are consonance-rhymes ("trees"/ "dies", "seas"/ "dies"). In Stanza II, the first a rhyme is exact ("thing"/ "sing"); the second and third a rhymes are tertiary-stress rhymes ("thing"/ "studying", "sing"/ "studying"). The first b rhyme is similarly exact ("unless"/ "magnificence", "dress"/ "magnificence"). In Stanza III Yeats introduces a new variation. All three a rhymes are now exact ("fire"/ "gyre"/ "desire"), while all three b rhymes are approximate: "wall"/ "soul" is consonance-rhyme; "wall"/ "animal" and "soul"/ "animal" are weak-and-consonance rhymes. Finally, in Stanza IV the three a rhymes are exact ("take"/ "make"/ "awake"), while only the second b rhyme is exact ("thing"/ "sing"), the other two being tertiary-stress rhymes ("thing"/ "enamelling", "sing"/ "enamelling"). Yeats thus combines exact rhyme and approximate rhyme in a great variety of ways; no two stanzas have the same distribution of approximate rhyme, and in no stanza are all the rhymes exact or all approximate.

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125

The balance thus achieved is very delicate: on the one hand, Yeats avoids the monotony that ababab might have if all the rhymes were exact; on the other, he avoids the chaos that would result from an exclusive use of approximate rhyme — there is just enough exact rhyme to fix the ottava rima rhyme scheme firmly in the mind. The meaning of "Sailing to Byzantium" must now be considered. While controversies continue to rage over specific details of this poem, 1 it is generally agreed that the speaker of "Sailing to Byzantium" feels he must turn away from one complex of values (life, sex, the body, the natural — the world of becoming) and commit himself to another (art, intellect, the soul, the supernatural — the world of pure being). Yeats described his purpose in a manuscript book: Now I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts upon that subject I have put into a poem called "Sailing to Byzantium." When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells and making the jewelled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the center of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city. 2

The early drafts of "Sailing to Byzantium" shed light on the relationship of rhyme to meaning in the poem. In the discussion that follows all references are to Curtis Bradford's arrangement of the notebook drafts. 3 Yeats was evidently dissatisfied with his early version of the beginning of "Sailing"; in the first draft, designated as A by Bradford, the opening Stanza (see A1 and A2) has no resemblance whatsoever to the opening stanza of the finished poem, beyond the fact that it is written in ottava rima (the rhyme words are "Byzantium", "mariners", "come", "stairs", " f o a m " , "oars", "lies", "Paradise"). The germ of the first stanza as we know it is found in the third draft. CI is reproduced below, except that, in the interest of conciseness, lines that were completely cancelled are omitted. Bradford explains that "internal cancellations are lined out; then, following a slanting rule, the revised version is given" (p. 112). 1

For a detailed bibliography, see Prolegomena, pp. 122-23. The best general account of the Byzantium poems is that of T. R. Henn in The Lonely Tower, Chapter 12.

2

Cited by Curtis Bradford in ' 'Yeats's Byzantium Poems: A Study of Their Development", PMLA, LXXV (1960), p. 111. 3 I refer to Bradford's version of the drafts rather than to Stallworthy's (Between the Lines, pp. 87-136), which is slightly different, because the Bradford essay is readily available, having been reprinted in Yeats. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Unterecker.

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Thia/ Hero/ That is no country for old men—the young •Pass-by-me/ That travel singing of their loves, the trees Break/ Clad in such foliage that it seems a song The shadow of the birds upon the seas The leaping fish, the fields all summer long The leaping fiGh/ The crowding fish commend all summer long Deceiving [?] abundance/ Plenty, but no monument Commends the never aging intellect The salmon rivers, the-fish/ mackerel crowded seas Flesh/-Ati/ Fish flesh and fowl, all spring all summer long What/ Commemorate what is begot and dies. In the final version of Stanza I, Yeats alters every word in lines 2, 3 and 4, except for the rhyme word; he seems, in other words, to begin with the rhyme words "trees", "song", and "seas", and then goes back to fill in the rest of each line. Thus line 8 reshapes line 4, bringing it closer to its final version. At the end of CI, the rhyme words of the first six lines are all intact; only the couplet rhymes are missing. 4 The first draft of the second stanza is found in C3 and C4: C3 The/ An aged man is but a paltry thing Uit U1U) nniACe iAl lD«l»«ii UU1J Uimiwan« UUJ111VJJ tlF VC UlllCsS -My/ Soul clap -hands/ its hands and sing, and then sing more/louder sing dress oar For every tatter in its mortal dress C4 An aged man is but a paltry thing Nature has cast him like a shoe unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress And there's no singing school like studying The monuments of ita old/ our magnificence And therefore have I sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium 4 In the C draft, the closing couplet of Stanza I is And man has made no monument to extoll The unborn, undying, unbegotten soul The closing couplet of Stanza I in the final version first appears in the first printed version of "Sailing to Byzantium" in October Blast (Dublin : Cuala Press, 1927).

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127

In C3, Yeats seems to be searching for the right rhyme words: in line 2 he crosses out every word except the rhyme word "unless", which he retains in the final version of the stanza. The words "dress" and " o a r " are jotted down in the margin as possible rhyme words; Yeats retains the former but not the latter. In C3, the first four rhyme words are in place; in C4, all the rhyme words are in place, although the lines themselves still receive a great deal of revision (e.g., line 2, "Nature has cast him like a shoe unless ..." becomes "A tattered coat upon a stick unless ..."). The first version of Stanza III appears in the A draft: A6 Procession on procession, tier on tier Saints and apostles in the gold of a wall As in God's love will refuse my prayer When prostrate on the marble step I fall And cry aloud—"I sicken with desire Though/ And fastened to a dying animal Cannot endure my life—O gather me Into the artifice of eternity." This draft is only the germ of the final version, yet five of the eight rhyme words are in place: "wall", "desire", "animal", "me", "eternity". It is interesting that the a rhyme words are revised in the direction of exact rhyme rather than vice-versa: they become "fire", "gyre", "desire". The substitution of "soul" for "fall" in line 4 creates two interesting relationships between rhyme and meaning which will be discussed below. A7 is the first draft of Stanza IV: And if it be the dolphin's back Of hammered gold and gold enamelling That the Greek goldsmiths make And set in golden leaves to sing Of present past and future to come For the instruction of Byzantium

take spring sake

Only five of the projected eight lines of the fourth stanza appear here,, and these five lines are almost totally changed in the final version; nevertheless, six of the eight final rhyme words are in place: "take", "enamelling", "make", "sing", "come", "Byzantium". One con-

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THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

eludes that in this stanza, as in the other three, Yeats generally works from right to left; he gets his rhyme words in place first and then works out the details of each line: the "golden leaves" of line 30, for example, are transmuted into the "golden bough", an image with more specific mythological reference. The rhyme structure of the finished poem follows: 1

IRONY ..IRONY

II . paltry thing unless sing mortal dress . . . . studying magnificence come .. Byzantium

ANTITHESIS SYNONYM ANTITHESIS

III God's holy fire gold mosaic of a wall gyre soul desire dying animal gather me eternity

ANTITHESIS ANTITHESIS

THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

129

IV take natural thing make .. enamelling awake .. sing Byzantium come

ANTITHESIS

SYMBOL

This diagram indicates that seventeen of the twenty-eight rhymes involve semantic relationships. In the first stanza, the a rhymes and b rhymes exhibit similar semantic patterns: in both cases, the first two rhyme words are metonymically associated, while the third rhyme word ironically qualifies the meaning of the first two. Those who are "young" are traditionally associated with the joy and gaiety of "song", but here both "young" and "song" are ironically modified by the phrase "all summer long''. ' 'All summer'' may seem like a ' 'long" time to the young lovers, but obviously the summer cannot last, the implication being that the "song" of the "young" is merely transient, unlike the "song" of the golden bird in Stanza IV. Similarly, the words "trees" and "seas", both images of natural life, of fruition, of vitality, are qualified by the third b rhyme word "dies". All living things, the speaker reminds himself, must "die"; he therefore turns his back on "those dying generations" and sails to the "holy city of Byzantium". In Stanza I, the rhyme words revolve about the life-death antinomy; in Stanza II, the rhyme words involve the related antinomy between body and soul. In terms of his material existence, an "aged man" is "but a paltry thing", but in the immortal world of Byzantium, the soul can "sing". The song of the soul is an intellectual activity; it is the process of "studying" the "monuments" of a permanently valuable civilization such as Byzantium. "Sing"/ "studying" is, then, synonymrhyme. The rhyme "mortal dress"/ "magnificence" again contains the central tension between body and soul, life and art. The tattered "mortal dress" is the very opposite of the "magnificence" of the Byzantine artifacts. In Stanza III, the rhymes constitute a distinct improvement, not only over the first version (see p. 127 above), but also over the B draft, in which lines 19 and 20 are:

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Consume this heart and make it what you were Unwavering, indifferent, fanatical... The word "were" has no particular semantic relationship to "fire" or to "desire"; the new rhyme word "gyre", on the other hand, is a Yeatsian symbol for flux or conflict; as he writes in A Vision, the gyres or cones "mirror reality but are in themselves pursuit and illusion" (p. 73). The "gyre" thus aptly symbolizes the painful "desire" for rebirth of the speaker, who prays to the sages to "gather" him "into the artifice of eternity".5 Both "gyre" and "desire" are, furthermore, antithetical to the phrase "God's holy fire" in line 17; the supernatural is opposed to the natural, the immortal to the mortal. The internal rhyme "holy fire"/ "gyre" in line 19 intensifies this crucial antithesis.6 The revision of line 20 has an equally effective rhyme change. The word "fanatical" has no specific relationship to the "gold mosaic of a wall" or to the "dying animal" while "soul" relates to both. In its stylized splendor, the "gold mosaic of a wall" symbolizes the perfection of the "soul" in the afterlife; the symbol-rhyme "gold mosaic of a wall"/ "soul" is further antithetical to the "dying animal" or body of line 22. In Stanza IV, the rhyme "natural thing"/ "gold enamelling" is a variation on the antithesis-rhyme "gold mosaic of a wall"/ "dying animal". Again Yeats opposes the natural to the artificial, the mutable to the permanent. Nothing has been said so far about the four closing couplets. Taken together, they exhibit a very interesting pattern. In the first three couplets, the rhymes all involve the syntactic relationship: VERB/ COMPLEMENTARY NOUN; each one can be read as an independent imperative sentence: 5

Cleanth Brooks ("Yeats's Great-Rooted Blossomer", The Well-Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), pp. 188-90) and Ellmann (Man and Masks, p. 256) believe that Stanza III contains the speaker's ambivalent attitude toward Byzantium; he wants to be taken "out of nature", but even while he longs to be an artificial golden bird, he is "sick with desire" for the "sensual music" of the natural world. Ellmann writes, "... the eternity into which the poet longs to be gathered is described with deliberate ambivalence as an artifice". But, as T. R. Henn notes (Lonely Tower, p. 214, note 3), "artifice of eternity" is used in the time-honored sense of Sir Thomas Browne, who wrote, "In brief all things are artificial, for nature is the art of God". As for "sick with desire", the grammar of lines 21-22 suggests that it is the soul that is "sick with desire" for eternity. Even if we adopt the Brooks-Ellmann reading, however, "gyre"/"desire" is a symbol-rhyme and "fire"/"desire" an antithesisrhyme. 6 Stallworthy suggests that "the close internal rhyme of 'fire' and 'gyre' brilliantly suggests a narrowing spiral and the approaching climax" (p. 111).

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I II III

neglect/ intellect come/ to Byzantium gather me/ into the artifice of eternity

The fourth and final couplet does not have this structure, for noun and verb are reversed in position: "Byzantium"/ "come". Rather, this rhyme is symbol-rhyme: "Byzantium" has become the symbol of the eternal, of that which is "past, or passing, or to come". The four couplet rhymes are related to the narrative movement of the whole poem. The first three define the state of becoming, as the speaker moves toward Byzantium. In the fourth stanza, however, the speaker has arrived at his destination; Byzantium is now revealed as the symbol of timelessness, encompassing past, present and future. Interestingly, the phonetic nature of the four rhymes supports this shift in narrative movement; as was pointed out on p. 124 above, all four are tertiary-stress rhymes, but whereas in the first three rhymes the rhyming unit with primary stress precedes the one with tertiary-stress, the process is reversed in the fourth rhyme: "Byzantium"/ "come". In summary, the following seventeen relationships between rhyme and meaning (R-M's) are found in "Sailing to Byzantium": Semantic Congruity

Semantic Disparity

Symbol Synonym Metonymy

Antithesis Irony

Total

7 4

11 Grand Total: 17

Commenting on the symbolic value of the golden bird of Stanza IV, Yeats wrote, "I use it as a symbol of the intellectual joy of eternity, as contrasted with the instinctive joy of human life" (cited by Bradford, p. 111). These two poles — "the intellectual joy of eternity" and "the instinctive joy of human life" — remain in sharp opposition or contrast throughout the poem. It is therefore appropriate that antithesis-rhyme is the predominant R-M; the antithesis-rhymes convey the central tension between body and soul, change and permanence, life and art. Surely it is no coincidence that "dying animal" rhymes with "soul", "natural thing" with "gold enamelling", or "gyre" with "God's holy fire".

THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

2. "Byzantium" The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walker's song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. Miracle, bird or golden handiwork More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire and blood. At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood, Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood. The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles on the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

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133

"Byzantium" has five stanzas with the following rhyme scheme: aabbcddc. In the second and third stanzas, epiphora is substituted for the a rhyme so that the poem has a total of eighteen rather than twenty rhymes. These rhymes may be classified as follows: EXACT RHYMES

APPROXIMATE RHYMES

song/ gong disdains/ veins breath/ death metal/ petal flit/ lit leave/ sleeve dance/ trance blood/ flood yet/ beget

1. Phonemic Variation A. Consonance-Rhyme recede/ abed cloth/ path summon/ -human aloud/ blood flame/ come B. Vowel-Rhyme bough/ crow 2. Stress Variation A. Tertiary-stress Rhyme complexity/ sea B. Weak-rhyme Emperor/ floor 3. Combinations A. Tertiary-stress-andConsonance is/ complexities

Nine of the eighteen rhymes (50%) are approximate: there are six rhymes involving phonemic variation, two rhymes involving stress variation, and one rhyme involving a Combination. The percentage of approximate rhyme is 10% lower than that of "Sailing to Byzantium"; the exact rhymes are, moreover, more prominent in "Byzantium" than in "Sailing" because five of them occur in couplets: "song"/ "gong", "metal"/ "petal", "flit"/ "lit", "dance"/ "trance", and "yet"/ "beget". As in "Sailing to Byzantium", each stanza of "Byzantium" has a different distribution of approximate rhyme. In Stanza I, the first couplet has consonance-rhyme ("recede"/ "abed") and the second, exact rhyme ("song"/ "gong"). The c rhyme, with its three-line interval, is exact ("disdains"/ "veins"), but the enclosed d rhyme is a

134

THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

minimal approximation, the tertiary-stress-and-consonance rhyme "is"/ "complexities". In the second stanza, the a rhyme is replaced by the epiphora of "shade" and the b rhyme is consonance-rhyme ("cloth"/ "path"). Again, the c rhyme is exact ("breath"/ "death"), while the d rhyme is approximate: "summon"/ "-human" is a feminine consonancerhyme. In Stanza III, the a rhyme is again replaced by epiphora ("handiwork"/ "handiwork"); the b rhyme is a vowel-rhyme ("bough"/ "crow"). This time the c rhyme is a consonance-rhyme ("aloud"/ "blood") while the enclosed d rhyme is exact ("metal"/ "petal"). Four of the five rhymes in the fourth stanza are exact; the only approximate rhyme is the b rhyme "flame''/' 'come'', which is consonance-rhyme. The fifth stanza begins with an exact rhyme ("blood"/ "flood"); the b rhyme is weak-rhyme ("Emperor"/ "floor"), the c rhyme is tertiary-stress rhyme ("complexity"/ "sea"), and the enclosed d rhyme is exact rhyme ("yet"/ "beget"). No two stanzas, then, have the same distribution of exact and approximate rhymes; the overall pattern is further complicated by the use of epiphora in lines 9/10 and 17/18. Again, Yeats makes us aware of his basic rhyme scheme while using enough approximate rhyme to avoid a sing-song effect. The antinomies of "Sailing to Byzantium" reappear in "Byzantium", but in a different context. John Unterecker observes: ... both setting and point of view have shifted radically. "Sailing to Byzantium" represents the voyage and is written from the point of view of the uninitiated outsider who leaves the material world for the immaterial. "Byzantium", on the other hand, is written from the point of view of the initiate who watches the uninitiated, unpurged spirits arriving from beyond the "gong-tormented sea" which separates Byzantium's reality from thefleshand blood reality of the twentieth-century world. (Reader's Guide, p. 217) Yeats established his rhyme scheme aabbcddc on the very first page of the manuscript book which contains the successive drafts of "Byzantium" (Bradford, p. 119). The stanza used is that of such famous poems as "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" and "A Prayer for my Daughter", except that in "Byzantium" Yeats reduces the number of stresses in lines 6 and 7 from four to three. The writing of "Byzantium" involved less revision than that of "Sailing to Byzantium"; after the first two drafts, the poem is essentially finished; the third and fourth drafts contain only minor changes. As in the case of "Sailing to Byzantium", most of the rhyme words are already in place in the first draft. On Page 1 of the MS (Bradford, p. 119), Yeats gets four of the rhyme words of

THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

135

Stanza I in place: "recede", "beds", "song", and "gong". On Page 2, he begins the second stanza by jotting down possible rhyme words in the right margin: "cloth", "path", and "breath"; all three appear in the final version of this stanza. At the end of this page, he has every rhyme word but "summon" (line 14) in place; he also decides immediately upon the epiphora of the word "shade" in lines 9/10. The epiphora of "handiwork" in Stanza III appears in its first draft on Page 3 of the Ms (Bradford, p. 120). On this page, Yeats gets every rhyme word for Stanza III in place, except that line 20 is originally "What the birds of Hades know...." Page 4 has all the rhyme words for Stanza IV in place, except that "flit"/ "lit" (lines 25/26) is "flits"/ "lights" in the first draft. Page 5 has all the rhyme words of the fifth stanza in place, except that "complexity" (line 37) is "intricacy" in the first draft. Twenty-seven of the thirty-six rhyme words are thus in place in the first draft of "Byzantium"; at the end of the second draft, they are all in place, except that lines 25/26 still have the rhyme "flit"/ "lights". It is remarkable that the rhyme words are chosen so quickly, for the individual lines of the poem receive a great deal of revision between the first draft and the final version, even though the revision is not as wholesale as it was in the case of "Sailing to Byzantium". Consider the following examples of line revision:

First Draft Variorum

line 1 line 1

All the tumultuous floods of day recede The unpurged images of day recede

First Draft Variorum

line 11 line 11

What if the limbs are wound in mummy-cloth For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

First Draft Variorum

line 13 line 13

What if the body's dry the mouths lack breath A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

First Draft Variorum

line 21 line 21

Or by the star or moonlight wakened mocks aloud Or by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

First Draft Variorum First Draft Variorum

line 29 line 29 line 34 line 34

And all their blood begotten passion leave And all complexities of fury leave The crowds approach ; the marble breaks the flood Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood

136

THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

These examples suggest that, as in the case of "Sailing to Byzantium", Yeats generally begins each stanza by selecting his rhyme words and then works out the internal pattern of his lines. Sometimes, unsatisfied with his first choice of a rhyme word, Yeats drops it and selects another, but his final choice is again in place before the details of the line in question are fixed upon. Consider the evolution of line 37: Page 5 Page 7

Page 7 Page 8

Breaks the bleak glittering intricacy XBreaks the bleak glittering-, intricacies/ aimless flood of imagery Breaks that bitter bleak complexity/ bright flood, that bleak complexity Break -bleak/ bitter, bleak aimless complexities XBreak bitter, bleak,-aimless/ stupid aimless furies

Page 8 Page 8 Variorum

XBreak the bleak fury or blind complexity Break Weak blind/ bitter furies of complexity Break bitter furies of complexity

Page 7

of

complexity

[An " X " in front of a line means that the whole line has been cancelled.

Yeats hits upon the rhyme word "complexity" in his third attempt at writing line 37; but there are four more revisions before the whole line is in place. He chooses "complexity" because (1) it is a key word in the poem, having already appeared in each of the previous stanzas except the second, and (2) "complexity" and "sea" (line 40) are semantically related, the rhyme being symbol-rhyme. The rhyme word "complexity" is thus chosen with an eye toward the meaning structure of the stanza; from the phonetic point of view, any other word ending in -y would do just as well as a rhyming partner for "sea". The rhyme structure of "Byzantium" may be diagrammed as follows: recede« abed" .night-walker's song, . . . . cathedral gong • disdains man is • complexities < veins

-METONYMY -SYMBOLIC ASSOCIATION

-IRONY

THE RHYME STRUCTURE OF THE BYZANTIUM POEMS

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