W. B. Yeats’s obsession with old age remained one of
his main concerns throughout his literary career. The association of old age
with death and physical decay is central in early poems like “When You Are Old”
(1891) and “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in Water” (1903). The theme of old
age grew in importance in his late poetry as the poet began actually living the
experience. This paper makes an attempt to read Yeats’ late poetry concerning
issues like old age, ageing, death and regeneration in the light of Edward
Said’s idea on “late style.” In the collection of essays On Late Style,
Said explores the idea that late works of great
artists, musicians, writers and poets such as Beethoven, Strauss,
Mozart, Jean
Genet, Cavafy, Ibsen, Lampedusa, and Adorno are not always serene and
transcendent but, on the contrary, sometimes unresolved and
contradictory. Said
discerns in all a stubborn refusal to unite things which ultimately
could not
be reconciled. In the last or late period of life, the decay of the body
and the onset of ill health instilled in their works a new idiom --
what Said calls a “late style”.
Said finds these works representative of late style: an artist believes
that the tradition had been exhausted, it's weight cannot be overcome,
so it is struggled against, without hope of resolution. In exploring
late style, Said isn’t really
interested in lateness that brings wisdom, harmony and serenity. Here,
lateness
is not a reflection of hard-earned knowledge; lateness in these artistic
figures is opposition, lateness is “intransigence, difficulty and
unresolved
contradiction.”
I
read a number of Yeats’ later poems such as “Among
School Children” (1927), “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), “A Prayer for
Old Age”
(1935), “The Black Tower” (1939), “The Tower” (1925) “At Algeciras, A
Meditation
on Death” (1928), “Mad as the Mist and Snow” (1929), “The Apparitions”
(1938), “Why
Should Not Old Men Be Mad” (1936), “Under Ben Bulben” (1938) and others
in the
light of Said’s idea to see how Yeats deals with the problem of old age,
of
death and of regeneration. At certain moments of despair, Yeats refuses
the
wisdom that comes with old age and its intellectual gain and defends
passion,
but more often he hopes to keep his soul and intellect strong and
uncompromising against the tides of time and impending death. As a poet
he
continued to re-invent himself, never being content, always resltess,
refusing to bow down to age and tradition, Like Sophocles, Goethe and
Milton, Yeats is a poet who, even in age, shows no impoverishment of
spirit of weakening of intention. I argue that as
exemplifying the characteristics of “late style” these later poems of
Yeats on
old age, ageing, death, decay, memories and mourning give expression to
tragic
anxiety, intransigence, contradiction, scrupulous self-reflection, and
daring
revisiting and revising of artistic idioms and personal and intellectual
selves.
Arindam Sarma,
Department of English,
Chaiduar College,
India.