The Old High Way of Love, Blog #6: Adam’s Curse

This sort of thing takes much hard work, of course, infusing language with music, grief’s pang with its essential thought, and thought with the ego-purging influence of memory and time. In “Adam’s Curse” Yeats himself recognizes that “[i]t’s certain there is no fine thing/Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.” In the poem this is by way of referring both to his experience writing poetry and to a young woman’s counter-thought as to the labor involved in the maintenance of beauty. The young woman’s observation prompts Yeats, who is almost painfully smitten with her “young and mild and low voice,” to remark upon the hard work traditionally involved in the art of love as it was once pursued:

There have been lovers who thought love should be   

So much compounded of high courtesy   

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks   

Precedents out of beautiful old books . . .

He concludes this observation on a bitter note:

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.

This last thought, of course, is an old man’s grievance, and if the poem had ended here or morphed into a kind of Jeremiad against the barrenness of youth or of bourgeois culture, of the commercialization of love and the trivialization of language and art, it would be satisfying, perhaps, the way an Op-Ed in The Times might be if you agreed with it. But it would not rise to the sort of thing that a poem rises to: an affirmation of beauty and love through memory’s redress of the ravages all human hearts suffer at the hands of time. The piece would have ended up mere doggerel—and of the acrid sort nobody really wants to read.

There is a third party to the conversation, though, and since she is the one to whom the poem is addressed Yeats has already committed himself to doing the harder thing, to addressing their own love, a love with a history marked by his unceasing poetic labor and her never-diminishing beauty by virtue of it—as also, as per the poem’s logic, by virtue of her own similar expenditures of effort. Yeats’s aperçu regarding all this arises as the moon becomes apparent in the late afternoon sky, seeming to him like “a shell/Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell/About the stars and broke in days and years.” Yeats is old. The third-party addressee, presumably Maude Gonne, is old, too. The younger woman he’s been conversing with wouldn’t understand their weariness so his thought, like the poem itself, can only be addressed to the older woman he has loved thus faithfully and long:

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears;

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary hearted as that hollow moon.

The old high way of love, as Yeats calls it, is compounded of “high courtesy”—not the bourgeois notion of “politeness” but rather something involving “precedents out of beautiful old books.” Something, that is, that may also be thought of as the old high way of song, of poetry, a running and affirming memory of beauty—the beauty of the loved one, but also of love itself, which is attested to by memory, faithfulness, remaining “true.” This sort of love is “high” because it is existential: one lives one’s life according to it. It is chivalrous because it involves a continual, almost codified, reaffirmation of love’s permanent nature in the face of both time and time’s sidekick in thievery, experience. This permanent sort of love, like the poetry in which it is codified, has its music to realize the feeling of memory’s affirmations. In addition, there is a reciprocal grief, since memory, though an affirmation, is predicated on loss.

The hollow moon that prompts Yeats’s meditation is an image of weariness, but the weariness is the result of a lifetime of labor at the art, both linguistic and musical, of reaffirming that which is constantly lost: the moment in time in which love first conceives itself by way of conceiving the presence of beauty. Proust’s madeleine cake notwithstanding, memory is ultimately a construct born out of an act of will, an act of imagination, so its making requires a lifetime’s expenditure of spirit and strength.

The fact that Yeats cannot share this sense of weariness with the younger woman is key, I would argue, to understanding the predicament of poetry in an age that has swept aside the old high way of anything for the immediacy of the “marketplace” notion of the politically conceived assertion of self. In such an age individual narrative becomes an expression of class or category, and poetry’s truths are disregarded in favor of the promotion of political values—many of which, by the way, I myself, being still the choirboy after all, support and agree with and often give voice to. Poetry supports them too in the sense that it is expansive and inclusive. But I suspect the reason today’s poets embrace political value as the stuff of poetry in exactly the way Yeats lamented they did in his era has more to do with a kind of angst about poetry’s usefulness. In an era that does not experience grief so much in the depths of the human soul as in abstract political contexts—ie., as ideologically generated grievances—poetry in Yeats’s age-old sense or Frost’s turn-of-the-century American sense, has no “use.” Nowadays the best way for poets to convince radio hosts, commentators, and culture writers their work is worth paying attention to is to provide a politically recognizable voice and narrative, a life journey, so to speak. The less music the better, too, since music can only be taken as a distraction.

How often have we heard a prize-winning poet read a piece on an NPR cultural spot only to be asked afterwards not about the poem itself but about the circumstances in the poet’s life struggle that led him or her to write it? And how often do these poets concede to the premise that their putative autobiography, marked as it is by a politically identifiable struggle, is more important than any particular poem they’ve happened to produce? To make this particular concession is as much as to say that only a person with grievances can be a poet in the first place, which is itself as much as to say that poetry has nothing to do with “song and speed” as in Frost’s brook, that poetry is, well, no longer its own thing—you know, with its own life and its own justification.

Not the way, say, football is.

There is perhaps nothing less useful in American culture today than football, if we discount the uses it has been put to by money interests—owners, corporate entities, web-based ‘casinos,” their minions in advertising. Still, our enjoyment of the game, I’d propose as a fan myself, stems exactly from its being as useless as it is. It has its own internal laws, its formal symmetries, and its heroes, who mean nothing to anybody in any real day-to-day context, yet whom we love watching because they pursue their adopted discipline in ways that show what human beings are capable of when for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon they forget about themselves and enter into something larger than they are. Which, according to those companies who deliver the ratings, is what we all do on Sunday afternoon—watch, that is—and as we do we expand our sense of who we ourselves are, vicariously as fans, but also as “students” of the game. We enter into the affirmation of the human spirit that football embodies, feeling our own strength, our own grit and determination, our own love of structures and rules within which to allow our “true stuff” to play itself out.

For many people—okay, many men—watching football is the least useful thing they could be doing with their time on a Sunday afternoon, but it is also—to them at least—the most important thing. Many fans, in fact, organize their entire week around Sunday afternoon and spend much of every other day of the week thinking, talking, and arguing about either the game just completed or the one upcoming or both. Players are scrutinized, yelled at, cheered vociferously, interviewed, even invited on “Dancing With the Stars.” Ever since the great Rosie Greer recorded a rather heartfelt rendition of McCartney’s “Yesterday” in 1966, football players have taken pleasure in pursuing side-careers in singing, dancing, and acting, and I’ve even noted that not a few of the biggest and beefiest of them compose their own verse, going so far as to freestyle on TV. Not only don’t they have to apologize for the uselessness of their profession, they don’t have to apologize for being poets, either!

But poets do.

Some prose writers, even, have to watch out lest they be taken for poets, as was evident to me just last week as I listened to a very fine essayist being interviewed on the radio. The interviewer wanted to know if a passage from one of the essayist’s essays was intentional and serious or “just poetic.” The essayist, of course, was most eager to affirm that he’d never write anything that was “just poetic.” He had serious things he was trying to accomplish through his essays, and not one of those things but wasn’t politically shaded, mostly in the area of identity politics. More power to him, I’d say, but in the age-old sense of what poetry is identity broadens outward, as opposed to narrowing in politically, and it can get as big as the entire race if it follows its music.

The politicizing of poetry in the last several decades has coincided, causally in both directions, with its marginalization, consigning it to a Tinkerbell-ish existence over to the side of what is generally held to be the more substantive and existential work of political struggle as more aptly forwarded by prose—or by something we call poetry that is, however, as close to prose as poetry can get. When poetry veers this close to agitprop, a kind of fence is put around it in the same way that, on the right, the various fundamentalist churches, funded by corporate money, have put a fence around their heavily politicized versions of Christianity. In each case, something that has always belonged to everybody has been coopted by societal subsets defined by shared grievances. And, for both, the concession to the “marketplace” of politics is ultimately, I worry, an empty one. In the case of televangelism it robs “Jubilate Deo”—or perhaps more aptly “Rock of Ages”—of substantive worth as an affirmation of much other than a political agenda. In poetry’s case, it might win some pats on the back for poets themselves, but it wins nothing for poetry—for the human heart, that is. In fact, it gives itself over to the active suppression of poetry that is, one could argue, a great sickness of our age.

Then again, the suppression of poetry, one might also argue, is a great sickness more or less of any age and of the race in general. Yeats’s bitterness over “idle trade” is, as we’ve noted, a bit old-man-ish and, too, elitist in a kind of bitterly old-man-ish and elitist way. His notion of “high courtesy” is, as the word suggests, courtly—of the court and those who frequented it, who were never peasants and only rarely what we have come to call the bourgeoisie. Yeats’s nostalgia for lyrical Ireland was a nostalgia for what he conceived of as a stratum of souls who stood apart from the general run, embracing higher things. Most people, though, in any society and in any age, muck about the market stalls or plough someone else’s field or trudge off to a very political war to get themselves very politically killed. They’re generally younger sorts, especially the lattermost, for whom memory is not yet a primary mode of self-definition, although music is, along with feeling. What thought there is focuses not on the past so much as on a better future, no matter what camp they’re in. If memory is how we bring the past forward into the present, politics is how we strive to bring the present forward into an imagined future. So politics embodies the mental and physical world of youth. It will always prevail over poetry as youth prevails over age. In the last analysis it makes no sense to grumble about it, just as it makes no sense to grumble over the incoherence of a particular set of pop lyrics.

In addition, politics is a way of escaping isolation, so if the twentieth century for Europe and America was an era of culturally sanctioned, radical isolation, perhaps it is a good and natural thing that recent generations have bent the will of literary culture to the exigencies of political struggle. Politics after all is about classes and cohorts and movements, not just about individuals. Grievances are collectivized, coalitions formed, and self-interest yields to principles like “justice” or “democracy,” all of which describe a future worth living for over the narrow interests of self. The various world religions, along with music, art, and, yes, poetry, not only generate these principles by way of establishing what we mean by “civilization,” but encourage everyone, including the young, to unify around them,  to live for a high concept of what being inalienably human means. So there is in politics a reaching for a common humanity. It’s just that it’s described, this humanity, in abstract terms, and is assumed to be something to be realized, instead of something that is already within us.

When I was embarking on my own life's journey through this world, listening to John Lennon singing “Give Peace a Chance” and “All You Need Is Love,” the question of what society should be and do in the name of something called “humanity” was a defining question in almost all the major decisions I made about my future, and I regret neither the decisions nor the role social questions played in making them. I was a young man and the only thing worth thinking about and working for was the future. Having lived out the effects of those decisions I see them in a very different light now, just as I do my break with “Jubilate Deo” for the patens and thuribles of the sanctuary. I’m aware of what I missed or even lost out on as a result of those decisions, but I don’t at all regret making them.

One might say it’s of the nature of poetry to be overlooked and under-appreciated in the same way that it is of the nature of the self to remain unrealized except through the crucible of experience. Experience could be said to be the testing out of illusions and that is mostly a painful process. Despite the availability of really great pop songs and football and “Dancing With The Stars,” life itself can be a bit grueling, a fact which we often only come to appreciate after we’ve lived a while, pursuing our passions and life-goals and, well, political agendas, until we finally realize that we still feel un-whole—in a real sense, unrealized. When that happens, if we’re lucky, there might be a book of poetry nearby and we might be moved to open it. Something by Frost, maybe, or Yeats or Keats, or Emily Dickinson, or Langston Hughes, all of whom at their best cleaved to the “old high way of love,” knowing there was no reward in it for them thus to cleave, but only for the experienced human heart in the form of something we might call “healing.”

Loss being a reciprocal of growth, the loss of an imagined future, politically conceived or otherwise, might well be as painful as the loss of every present moment we live through in our passage through time. As such, it is as much an element of our common fate as anything else, to be “suffered” the way any fate is, even a happy one—a victory, say, in some little war between competing interests or avenging grievances.

Yeats claimed that in the twentieth century “Fate” would be determined not by the gods, nor (as in the nineteenth century) by psychological dynamics, but by politics. Yeats’s concept of fate was a tragic one, defined by the death of illusions, or more accurately delusions. His notion of history was cyclical, involving nothing even remotely resonant of our notion of “progress,” which underwrites as it were our prioritizing of politics over what might be called “culture.” Yeats’s conception of our “political” fate, therefore, was very much a conception of the delusional nature of Enlightenment social principles. That the healing effects of the poetic enterprise were considered useless by his or any age was for him a correlative of just how necessary and just how healing poetry was when left alone to be itself.

I, for one, tend to align with Yeats’s old-school notion of history. Despite our fetishization of our own age as an embodiment of something we call “progress,” there is, I’d venture, no such thing, really, as progress. There are as in any age only the “high courtesy” of love and the anxiety of the “marketplace.” When Frost called a poem “a momentary stay against confusion” he was getting at this fact. The buy and sell of the marketplace being a confusion of gain and loss, poems in both their memory and their music are figuratively and functionally a kind of stay. The past, after all, is the only thing we can really come to know—or to feel we know.

Every epoch, I suspect, has had among its younger ranks individuals who understand this and who look back on their past lives at least as much as they hope or dread forward into the future. Frost himself believed that poetry was a young person's pursuit, not an older one's, going so far as to say that if a poet hasn't struck his voice by the age of 21, he probably never will. This is perhaps too rigid a pronouncement, but it does allude necessarily to the fact that poets start out young and are distinguishable from the rest of their generation by the fact that they already have a sense of past experience and the need to bring it forward into the present in order to realize something we might call selfhood. The past may be done with but for the poets it isn't. It's where their earliest, and most potent experiences reside. All our yesterdays may have "lighted fools the way," but with Sir Paul we can still feel we believe, and with all our hearts, in yesterday itself.