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.