i cant figure out whether i like the ending of the book or if i was just so excited to finish it anything would have been ok with me. Not to say that i didn't enjoy reading it, because i did. What i mean by being so excited to finish it is that i am now able to say i read Ulysses.
Molly is a little over sexed and superficial and vain. she is completely opposite of what i expected her to be. Although i realize that the chapter was an uncensored inner monologue, Joyce writes her as unappealing as the citizen and deazy and the press gang. I wonder why he would do that? or am i misinterpreting it? It seems to me that molly represents the sorta lady Macbeth, or the Eve, or the Madam Bovary. i mean, she is no good.

After Circe, i would have liked to see Steven and Bloom (united) realize there importeance to one another and get one with the problem solving. But Joyce avoids this cleche. Joyce doesnt give the reader the satisfaction of having a defined conflict or solution. The closest he comes to such a cleche is the writing. This chapter is writen in the most obvious tone, a neutral narrarator, cleche catch frazes (i.e. "none the least", "what so ever", "not to put to fine a point on it" and ect.) Joyce antisipates the want of the reader but stresses the use of language instead of the plot. Very keen of him. But also really awkward and annoying.

Plot wise, we see in this chapter how steven has made a realization quite like blooms. Where bloom, in circe, realizes he must become the father figure for steve, Steven realizes he must become the son figure for bloom. Steven gives bloom the responsiobility of taking care of him. The two trade glances in a instinctive way. and also Steven asks bloom to to take the knife off the table. Metiphorically speaking, steven asks bloom to take charge or to take up arms, and protect him.

In the Circe chapter Joyce has a good time. But what I found most interesting is how Joyce really confuses the Steven for Bloom and visa versa. We see Bloom “wearing the hamlet hat”, he is visited by the ghost of his father and also he says the famous “to be or not to be” line on page 499. Further, Bloom (though he does give birth) turns into a child himself. On the other hand, Steven act more like Bloom, he gets into a fight, he is drunk, and he is very witty. Steven’s character in this chapter reminds me of Bloom in the Cyclops chapter. Both key (no pun intended) characters in this play are mixed around. I would like to argue that Steven and Bloom are connected, as is evident in this chapter, on a higher level than just the figurative father and son. It seems that one completes the other.

The oxen of the son chapter dances around the literary concept of the “Eternal Woman”. As with other great works of literature (such as Faust!) Ulysses perceives the woman as embodying the creative force. As we discussed in class, the different uses of style and technique in this chapter as are parallel or in some analogous relationship to the stages of childbirth. This is a very interesting idea, especially if you think about Steven and Bloom. Both characters have forsaken their woman. In the case of Steven: his mother. In the case of Bloom: Molly. But also, it may be argued that their forsaking of their “Eternal Woman” is the cause of their literary impotence.

Look at the connections between Stevens mother and the reason Steven, as Buck Mulligan says, cannot or has not become a poet. Steven, as Buck Mulligan says, is incapable of fulfilling his literary destiny because he is to strung up on religion. In other words, Steven cannot deal with either the guilt of being an atheist or the contradictions of being a believer. For whatever reason, Steven would not pray for his mother at her death bed. He did not pray because he didn’t believe it would help, not because he hated his mother. But as in so many cases Buck Mulligan is correct and Steven has become detached from his creative force because of his religious problems. Essentially, Steven’s mother is the manifestation of Steven’s creative force, which he forsook by not praying for her at her death bed.

The Cyclops chapter was exciting. The collage effect of Joyce’s writing becomes more and more apparent in this chapter (especially because in juxtaposition with the Sirens chapter.) Joyce exercises a technique of writing, which stresses not only the moral perspective of a character, but also a mental perspective. The beginning of this chapter is written in a way that describes a myopic perspective of the world (the discussion between the narrator and Joe) and then concludes with an equally narrow minded perspective of the Cyclops (a.k.a the citizen). In other words, Joyce is keen on assigning a writing style and rhetoric to the perspective of the character. Here, more than just dislocating his fingerprints from the story, Joyce upholds the idea of perspective in the most modern way. As Conrad says in his heart of darkness (I use this quote to much but it is so usefull!!!) “we live as we dream, alone.” That is- the world of words is false. And to the same degree the world in our own eyes is false because it may not be true to another.

This idea is important to modernism, but is an echo of the poet Ovid, who dealt with issue very much in his Metamorphoses. In stories such as (I don’t know the exact title) Agamemnon and Odysseus argue over Achilles’ armor and Nestor’s omission of Hercules, the reader is confronted with the art of rhetoric and its inherent deception. For example, in the argument between Agamemnon and Odysseus, Odysseus has no use for the armor but he wins the argument because although he is not a warrior, he is a mightier rhetoratician. More on this point, in the Nestor story he completely omits Hercules’s role and when asked why he says its because he doesn’t like Hercules. Its funny, but its true. The part of the brain where language is formed is the same part of the brain where lies are formed.

The Sirens chapter reads the best out of anything we have read so far. I was really surprised by this. Thought it makes complete sense, I didn’t think Joyce would create such an obvious connection. Not just the arrangement of words, which sounds amazing next to each other, but also the imagery. In particular I like the lines on the bottom of page 263 “Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: love-lorn.” Joyce, as a narrator, writes very lyrically, almost sing songy. For example on page 269 “…He ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cod’s roes while Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward, ate steak and kidney, steak then kidney, bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate.”
Bloom is ignored completely in this chapter. He asks questions that are not answered. It is almost as if he doesn’t exist, or is not even there. Though the chapter is in his perspective, he is just a spectator; the only person that notices him is Pat, who is deaf anyway. The ear is upheld very strongly in this chapter, the sounds of the music and the other conversations are the main sensory intake.
A couple things I didn’t really understand, I know that it is four o’clock but why does that number keep coming up. Bloom says “four” then he says beware of nineteen four and then some other people say four. I wonder what this means?
Also, its only four O’clock and it is the third meal Bloom has had today. Further it is his second kidney. What’s with this guy and Kidney’s. I have a theory about the kidney and Prometheus, the one who brought fire and knowledge to man!!! The light of knowledge!!! Then Prometheus was condemned to have his Kidney eaten out for eternity because he was immortal and it would grow back. But the Hercules saves him.

This, being the middle of the book, made me both content and anxious. Though I am excited that I have gotten thus far in reading such an important piece of literature, I am terrified that I still have half the book to read. But god be praised. The bridging chapter was not a tuffy. As like some of the chapters we have seen in the past. This one was a walk in the park, or a walk in Dublin for that matter. I saw this chapter really as a breath of fresh air. Coincidently “The Wandering Rocks” is an episode in the Odyssey where Ulysses avoids an inescapable violence. So, at the end of the chapter I sort of felt like Ulysses having just dodged an esoteric bullet.

On another topic, the text. I found one passage in particular to be quite illuminating, where Haines and Mulligan are talking about Steven and how he will never become a poet. “They drove his wits astray, he said [Buck Mulligan], by visions of hell.” “Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly.” (p.249) Mulligan and Haines agree that it is Stevens religious upbringing that keeps him from his poetic destiny. I agree with this completely. Steven lacks emotional experience. Like Faust, who lived in the book, by the book, Steven needs to take a step into reality. He needs to feel love and heartbreak. Steven needs to walk in Blooms shoes.

If (as I rant about in the previous entry) Bloom mirrors the gluttonous and sexual (physical) half of Faust, the other, academic character of Faust reminds us of Steven.
“Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, and one is striving to forsake its brother. Unto the world in grossly loving zest, with clinging tendrils, one adheres; the other rises forcibly in quest of rarified ancestral spheres.” (Faust lines, 1110-1117)
The above quote from Faust outlines the duality of his character as well as the juxtaposition of Bloom and Steven. Faust, on the one hand, desires the physical world. But, on the other hand, pursues the world of knowledge. In the last chapter we discussed in class, Scylla and Charybdis, the latter half of Faust’s character (the academic) is shown through Steven.

The first part of the chapter is a discussion of Hamlet. One opens up the chapter by describing the “ineffectual dreamer”. “The ineffectual dreamer who come to grief against hard facts. One always feels that Goethe’s judgments are so true. True in their larger analysis” (p.184) Hamlet was, no doubt about it, an ineffectual dreamer. He had his head in the books (studied abroad and was constantly contemplating life and the meaning of death). Faust, as well, can be described as the ineffectual dreamer, (at least for a time). Before Faust meets the devil, he is lost in a world of books and knowledge, which leads him nowhere. As his apprentice says to him—“Ah, when one is confined to one’s own museum and sees the world on holidays alone, but from a distance, only on occasion, how can one guide it by persuasion? (Faust lines, 528-533)” Faust, like Steven, is well acquainted with the past and with antiquity, but as his apprentice articulates; when an individual has his face and attention in a book, he can hardly know what is right in front of him.

Our Bloom, the wandering Jew, makes up half of the character Faust, in Goethe’s great play, Faust. After Faust makes the deal with the devil, on the terms that he will employ the devil to help him find satisfaction, he wanders the earth in search of a time when he can say ‘I wish to keep this moment for the rest of eternity’.
“If ever I recline, calmed, on a bed of sloth, you may destroy me then and there. If ever flattering you should wile me that in myself I find delight, if with enjoyment you beguile me, then break on me, eternal night! This is the bet I offer.” (Faust, lines 1692-1700)
Just as Ulysses wanders the earth in search of Ithaca, a place where he may be at rest and at home, Faust searches for love, for happiness, contentment, and state of mind that cures his wandering as Ithaca would cure Ulysses’. Leopold Bloom adopts this struggle and so far in the book we have seen him conduct his day similarly to the fantastical adventures of both Ulysses and Faust.
Bloom is a creature of the distraction of earthly pleasures. We meet our ‘hero’ as he stuffs his face with breakfast and (as readers) accompany him on his long list of gluttonous daily chores. This is not to say that his life is purely pleasurable, he does his share of obligations. He attends the funeral, and he goes to work (for a brief time). Bloom’s constant attraction to distraction couples him with Faust. The pursuit of happiness is easily corrupted by glutton and lascivious desire, as seen in both Faust and Ulysses (the courting of Margaret and Calypso’s island).
Bloom’s wandering (for the most part) is reified in thought. His mind wanders from thought to thought. As he moves through the day, he thinks of women and food and other earthly pleasures. At the end of chapter eight he ventures into the museum, where he goes to view the naked female form. “His heart quipped softly. To the right. Museum. Godesses. He swerved to the right.” (p.183)

Aoelus cont..
Bloom is absent almost the entire chapter, making appearances here and there. I realized that this is because he is one of the only people (if not the only person) working! Everyone else is just socializing, making fun, and going to get drinks. Besides some minor characters, such as Monk and Red Murray, Steven is also the only person who has a mind to get things done.

Bloom is trying to get an ad in the paper, something about Keyes, a grocer or merchant. I wonder if it correlates with the key that Steven has to give up to Buck Mulligan. Bloom needs to two keys (he only has one) the only other key we have seen in the novel so far is Stevens. Coincidence?

There is more dialogue in this chapter than any we have seen so far. That’s why I find it funny that it correlates with the chapter in the Odyssey about the bad winds. Everyone in this chapter seems to be blowing a lot of wind. The fact that they are also at a press office further emphasizes this idea. Many argue that the press talks a lot of nonsense (like the Post with their obnoxious head lines, which happen to be echoed throughout the chapter). On a more self-conscious level, in the Evening Telegraph Office, (p.123) Ned Lambert reads allowed a speech, mocking its ostentatious tone. “The pensive bosom and the overarsing leafage.”

The motif of the flower riddles the chapter “Lotus Eaters”. In this chapter our Odysseus is supposed to have escaped calypso but still be hung up on some other island. We left off when Bloom was eating breakfast and reading the paper. This chapter starts off with him already out of the house and walking towards the funeral. Between his house and the funeral, an important but hazy event takes place when he stops by the post office and picks up a letter. The letter is addressed to a “Henry”. I assumed it was a letter sent by his wife that was sent back, or had the incorrect address on it or something. In the letter was a small yellow flour. He also pauses for some time in front of an oriental tea spot (an easy allusion to the lotus eaters). Eventually he gets to the funeral and then to a perfume store on his way to a bathhouse.

The escape of Calypso is reified by the reality of his wife’s adultery. In the previous chapter, as seen in his perspective of his daughter, Leopold didn’t want to make any moves on suspicion. Sort of like hamlet as well. Leopold thinks, in reference to his own daughters sexual promiscuousness: “O well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case till it does.” Assuming that Leopold uses this same logic on his wife, it is only now that he would be forced to take action. Just seeing her put a letter under her pillow (for all it is worth) didn’t give him probable cause. The Lotus Eater chapter, is the chapter where Leopold wakes up to smell the roses.

Though there is a little dialogue, most of the chapter is taken up by blooms wandering thoughts (no pun intended). He thinks about his wife and the disillusionment of her adultery. He thinks about death a little. But, in regard to the drown man I found it amusing that unlike Steven, who thinks of the bloated drown corpse, Leopold thinks of a man in the dead sea who, ironically, cannot drown because of the buoyancy of the water.
Also, in reference to the father son relationship, Bloom imagines Abraham’s recognition of his son Nathan. This biblical scene is much like the one when Odysseus meets Telemachus, who thinks he is dead.

Two references to Yeats: one in Maude Gonne and the other might be a stretch but, Holohan and Houlihan. When bloom has a quick word with M’Coy, M’coy tells him that he heard about the funeral through Holohan, which sounds sort of like Houlihan.

I imagined the painting bellow by Balthus while I was reading this chapter. The painting and the chapter use the same provocation, the same symbol of the “pussens” lapping the milk. Very erotic! Everything about the chapter was dirty. The passage when Leopold goes to buy the pork kidneys, and sees the girl buying sausages made me laugh out loud. “They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr. Policeman, I’m lost in the wood.”
The juxtaposition between Leopold and Steven is nice. Especially because of Steven is so not erotic. For example in the last chapter where he says to himself, “the froeken, bone a tout faire, she said. tous les messieurs. Not this monsieur, I said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing… Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.”

But besides the erotic, this chapter has all to do with glutton. He is eating constantly throughout the chapter, but not just eating. Eating not to stop hunger but to taste food. Bloom experiences, in this chapter nearly all the earthly pleasures.

The Proteus chapter has been the most experimental chapter we have read so far. By experimental I mean that it was incredibly elusive and hard to follow. As the title of the chapter calls itself Proteus, the shape-shifting ruler of the sea (second to Poseidon), I could have anticipated a radical departure from continuity and a radical interpretation of the changing of form.
Rather than the change of body, “Proteus” as a shape shifter, is better personified by Steven’s change of mind. As he first steps on the beach his mind dwells on what he sees, and looks at everything with equal scrutiny. “Signatures of things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snot green, bluesilver, rust; colored signs.” But then he decides to close his eyes and everything goes haywire. Stevens mind begins to go one hundred miles an hour, changing from this to that. Sometimes not even reaching a full sentence. Just a word, and then something else. He dives into his past, then back to the present, then into the further past, and then the future. All the while, the passages are written with the same amount of importance. At times, for example when he thinks about going to his aunt and uncles house, I couldn’t figure out if he was just thinking about it or actually going there. In conjunction with Homer, it is the reader who is Menelaus and Steven’s thought process personifies Proteus. It is a beautiful comparison; Proteus and the mind.
One part that I found very confusing is when Steven find the dogsbody. I am still not sure whether it is Steven who transforms into a dogsbody, or whether he just sees it. Remember, the dog goes over the smell the dogsbody.
“Ah, good old dogsbody. Here lies dogsbody’s body.
-Tatters! Get out of that, you mongrel.
The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn’t see me…”
I cant tell whether it is Steven or the dogsbody that the master calls his dog away from. Does the dogsbody refer to the way Steven sees himself? Or the way he assumes other people to see him?

I love Steven’s train of thought. Joyce has an incredible ability to express the candid unaffected sincerity of internal thought. Unlike Shakespeare (the king of the soliloquy), Joyce’s character Steven thinks to himself, for himself. In Hamlet, Hamlet obviously thinks to himself --for example the famous “To be or not to be, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer…” -- but Hamlets internal dialogue reads too much like a speech, as though Hamlet speaks to an audience and not himself. Shakespeare’s soliloquies are too well written, while Joyce allows Steven’s thought process to unwind distortedly and ungrammatically.
Steven’s thoughts balance perfectly between intellectual reasoning and unexplained instinctual self-consciousness. For example when Steven teaches his class and makes a comment, which he thinks Mr. Haines would have wanted for the collection of sayings.
“‘Kingstown pier, Steven said. Yes a disappointed bridge.’… For Haines chap book. No one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise.”
Joyce writes Steven’s thoughts as contradictory. Steven is human. He wants to prove himself to Haines, but at the same time he becomes aware of the subservience that accompanies this want. The quote is clever but not too clever. Phrases like “No one to here.” – are not a sentence but a thought and it rings out with the aura of feeling and instinct, not contrived practicality.

On another note, on the plot of the story, I found one important passage of the chapter to be about the ‘possibility of possibilities.’ Steven, while teaching, questions history.
“Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave weaver of the wind.”
The importance of this passage lies beneath the subtext of Homer’s Ulysses. Here, Steven not only questions history, but he questions, as Telemachus and Hamlet did, whether the ‘books are accurate’. He wonders whether Odysseus is coming home. Yes, Odysseus is thought to be dead, but there is a possibility that he is not. Yes, King Hamlet is dead, but what if he was killed. This passage shows Steven having a ‘new hope’, and further emphasizing his persona in connection with Telemachus and Hamlet.

Telemachus cont.
I forgot to mention. I find it keen how Joyce placed these two characters around Steven; Mulligan and Haines. Steven, I cannot help but assume is Joyce’s alter ego. Steven and Joyce concern themselves with Ireland, and the voice of Ireland, like Yeats. Why else would Steven play such a master of rhetoric, and have such an incredible sense of the Irish identity (needless to say the remark about the cracked looking glass). But back to Mulligan and Haines, I would like to imagine Mulligan and Haines as personifying to polarized citizens of Ireland. Mulligan being the cliché Irish “good ol’ boy”, social, funny, and whitty. Remarks like “O damn you and your Paris fads” and “…Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty” reassure the quintessential Irishness. On the other hand, Haines represents the other end, the invader, the religious, and the materialistic. He is a British man and wants to make a book of Stevens’s sayings, but also he wants to take away from Steven what he has. When Steven asks him about money, it is all too convenient that the conversation ends. Steven becomes aware later on, as Haines brings back up the collection of Stevens’s work, that Haines has an expensive and flashy cigarette case and lighter. “A smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone… from his waist coat a nickel tinder box.” In this chapter, these two characters give us a vision of what both Steven and Ireland are up against.

Telemachus:
We are introduced to Steven Dedalus, Buck (Malachi) Mulligan and Mr. Haines in the first chapter of the book, living together in a tower. As the title of the chapter has been given to “Telemachus” I couldn’t help but assigning such a persona to Steven. Joyce continually makes a connection between Steven and prince Hamlet. Most notably when Steven recalls seeing her ghost. She says to him in Latin “pray for me” (though this is my basic interpretation). In Hamlet the father says, “remember me”, a very similar expression. In addition, Steven remains in a subtle state of morning. He refuses to wear grey, though it doesn’t explicitly say that he only wears black. And he confronts Mulligan for being disrespectful to his dead mother. Also, It seems that Steven has just come back from Paris, where he must have been studying, as Hamlet was (studying abroad but not in Paris) when his father was killed.
Hamlet and Telemachus have very much in common. Besides the fact that they are both missing their fathers, they are both apart of a royal family being threatened by foreign (or not so foreign) infiltration. I wonder then, if Buck Mulligan and Mr. Haines could be interpreted as the suitors of Penelope? What we do know is that both Mulligan and Haines leach off of Steven. They are staying in the tower, where Steven pays rent and don’t hesitate to ask for favors, whether it be the key to the place or just some money for drink. Steven has problems with both Mulligan and Haines, but he doesn’t kick them out of the tower. In Mulligan’s case, Steven thinks he is rude and a bully. In Haines case, Steven is just annoyed by his obscure sleeping habits. In both cases the reasons are benign but present.

-Totemic, animism and the primitive- nature and man are as one.
The primitive artist was the original modernist, upholding his tool or his medium (i.e. animals and pants) as his spiritual guide. Yeats adopts this spirituality, and uses similar symbolism, such as the moon, the sun, the tree, or the bird, but also his own tools such as in his book “The Tower” where he writes about his table in “My Table”, describing his working area and his own ‘tools’. I make the connection between the primitive animism and Yeats’ rhetoric or symbolism neither to emphasize Yeats as modernist poet nor to illustrate primitive art as being modernist, the significance of the connection between Yeats and the primitive craftsman is the unification of man to nature. Like the primitive, Yeats doesn’t see the human race to be superior to nature. Man is a part of nature and his existence moves equally and as one with his surroundings. Yeats enunciates how man and nature are affected by the same cause and effect relationships. For example in the poem ‘Death’, Yeats understands that in the end, in death, flesh is flesh.
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone--
Man has created death.
This poem is called “Death”, but really it best describes human vanity. The line ‘Man has created death’ searches for the significance of ‘death’. Why does the individual struggle to comprehend the meaning of his own mortality while the death of an animal weighs nothing on his mind? Death, the word and the associations with the after life, hell, and the grim reaper, are human inventions, a product of our self-obsession and attempt to make our lives seems more meaningful than they really are.

Yeats’ work is bound to nature. In this working relationship, Yeats’ understands the mechanics of the world through nature, in a cause and effect relationship. As I stated before in an earlier entry, (Observational Science) according to Descartes, the world is like a clock and as one gear turns so does the next. As he describes in the poem “Happy Townland” the world’s great annoyance and distress is due to the anomaly of the rotation of night and day. In other words, the ‘world’s bane’ is the universal ‘machine’.
The little fox he murmered,
Oh what of the world’s bane?
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
The fox, is a totemic symbol, akin to the coyote, who represents cleverness, and slyness. The clever fox asks, ‘what about the trouble of the world’ and in response the sun says ‘I do what is natural for me to do… I rise when the night is over.’ in this part of the poem, Yeats describes a world that works under the principals of determinism. And determinism is the basis of all scientific inquiry.
- Cause and effect- modernism (causality) “When he thinks, he dreams, but when he acts, he thinks.”
(The Concept of Causality in the Physical and Social Sciences
Alexander Goldenweiser
American Sociological Review > Vol. 3, No. 5 (Oct., 1938), pp. 624-636)

-Creationism vs. determinism, a deterministic individual would be more inclined to appreciate the craft of something, and want to see it and show it. Where a creationist would be much more fascinated with the product of something, such as realism and perfection.

Ellmann really nails something here in the essay on Yeats’ “esotericness”. That is -- Yeats’ is the center of his own world. In other words Yeats creates an entire universe (much like Freud’s interpretation of dreams) where he and his wife reign as king and queen. In this world there is a faith, a totemic faith, and Yeats is the prophet. The Tower, where he and his wife lived, further emphasizes how Yeats was the king of his own castle. His world is almost impenetrable, and the only real window into it is his poetry. It is funny, like all religions Yeats couldn’t avoid imposing it on everyone around him, classifying his peers by the different cycles of the moon. The reason for the poet’s creation of this insulated universe is because of his inescapable contemplation of mortality. In Yeats’ desperation to freeze time and avoid death and aging, he designs a ridiculous spiritual connection between himself and the “order of the world”. Not to say that his fantasy is unfounded or uninsightful, it’s just comedic.
It would be too much to bear, Yeats’ self-imposed faith or doctrine, if the poet didn’t lighten this load by confessing self-consciousness.
What shall I do with this absurdity,
O heart, O troubled heart, - this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dogs tail?
In this stanza of The Tower, Yeats openly jests on his own monomania. And if it were not for this, this humanization, where he comes down to earth and walks among us laymen, Yeats esotericism would be unbearable. I like that at times he makes fun of himself and humbles himself.
On another note, I want to vent more on the idea of Yeats and his connection to a process of science. It is obvious that Yeats doesn’t follow an ordinary scientific process, albeit he, like all scientists, has an “object” and an “aim”. In other words he exercises his spirituality in a scientific way. For example, he attempts to understand his “object”--that is his own mortality, or himself-- by the means of an “aim”—that is his poetry and his freestyle writing. And by the observation of nature and all the things of life, he reflects what he sees upon his doctrine and attempts to solve ‘nature’. Yeats sees the world as an equation, and the variables are reified by symbols such as the moon and the tide and rocks and trees. His writing is, in conjunction with the equation of life, a type of experimentation.
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 enameling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Its clear here how Yeats is a self-proclaimed prophet. If it is Yeats who is speaking and I a will assume it is whether Yeats knows it or not. And if my calculations are correct, he is talking about how when he dies, his lifes work, such as that of a goldsmith, with bring people a beauty but also a meaning. And when he says ‘to sing… of what is past, passing, or to come’ he proclaims that he will solve the equation of time and answer mortality.

Observational Science

Yeats' scientific background in epistemology, geography and chemistry explains something interesting. The bio on Yeats begins with a characterization of his writing style, which is an 'arrangement of pictures' or images. Yeats is keen on using nature as a means of expression. And much like the Ovid, he reifies his feelings into tangible and natural objects, such as those which are easily imagined like animals and vegetation. Yeats' poetry is very much an illustration or a window into a world of seeing. And so is modern science. Descartes once said that our world is just a big machine, and thus if one part of the machine is present there must be another, behind it, which makes it work. Like the gears of the clock. In other words, through observation, we can understand everything about how the mechanics of the world work because all the parts are there. The hard part is figuring out where to look. Applying this principal of science to Yeats explains something about, not only his style, but about how he thinks. At heart, Yeats is a scientist, and his art, whatever spirituality it might be inspired by, is an observational science. Like Newton, who discovered gravity by witnessing the fall of an apple, the meaning of Yeats' poetry is derived from his world of pictures and images. Like in Red Hanran's Song About Ireland where he starts off with: "The Old brown thorn-trees break in two high over cummen strand,/ under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;/ our courage breaks like an old tree in black wind and dies..." Yeats, in describing an abstract concept such as courage or a lack there of, evokes the feeling of a striking fear or a sudden loss of courage with an observation of nature, not an observation of the human condition. In many of Yeats poems it is hard to distinguish between metaphor and plain imagery because of this.

On a brief history of Ireland and a misunderstanding of Yeats

The brief history of Ireland reassured my vague understanding of irish history. They had it good and they had it bad and it was mostly bad. What is most apparent is the suffering. In other words, the suffering is most interesting. Suffering is a chief inspiration. And though the irish people were robbed of their land, their language, their religion, their vote, their food, and their happiness, they never lost spirit or inspiration. They live with a 'sticks and stones' mentality. That is, the irish are empowered by the history of their suffering. Reading Yeats confesses something like this. His words, just by reading them, evoke a ritualism. his poems create an aura of sacrifice, and the sublime qualities of blood, coldness and stormy seas. Just reading them is a struggle. I feel physical and mental strain, as if i had gone days without food and had become numb to pain while still being aware of its presence. His work casts the shadow of suffering. There is nothing profane about it. And he upholds the history of the irish struggle in a most sacred light. There is no snobbery though there is pride. There is mostly spirituality and totemic appreciation. Though i am not familiar with what he references and though most of the time i cannot follow, i pick up on the sincerity of his expression. and that he has something to express.