Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Negative Capability / Delineation of Abstraction

The success of many of Yeats poems in the selection In the Seven Woods can be attributed to their ambiguous dissonance of ideas also known as negative capability. This struggle of the binary gives his poems rich depth and complexity; never resolved, there meaning wavers in flux for an eternity.
Yeats is also interested in delineating the abstract but then abstracting that which has form. This passage in Withering of the Boughs is my favorite example of this:
I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:
‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,
I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,
For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.’
The moon yearns for the bird’s words, which the readers automatically hear as song, giving an abstract quality to the words he longs for; words and song that house his emotion give place to the river of his mind, delineating this depth of nebulous emotion. I see this moon as stating one of Yeats’ poetic goals: to give place to his mind, reminiscent of that hammer he talked about.
He does this in the poem In Seven Woods:
I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods
Make there faint thunder, and the garden bees
Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
Such a vivid and tangible image delineates the abstraction of sorrow. This is beautiful. But even more then this he adds another level of depth to the dichotomy and in this poem, by exulting the unconscious side of this dichotomy. I can only think of describing it as favoring buddhistic awareness, an awareness and wisdom that it not tainted by consciousness and manifested by delineating the depth of the abstract into words. I pick up where I left off:
and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile
Tara uprooted, and new commonness
Upon the throne and crying about the streets
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post.
The depth that the outcries and old bitterness was given in the first few lines is taken away in the proceeding line. Could this be because they were given place and now we only have paper flowers to commemorate our sorrows?
This preference of buddhistic wisdom can also be found in The Withering of the Boughs. This is how I interpret No Boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams. Giving dreams form destroys them.
A king and queen are wandering there, and the sound
Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so
blind
With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;
This is this buddhistic wisdom that I am taking about, a wisdom that defies time and consciousness.

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