2 - Early Yeats: The Rose of Ireland

Summary

THE UNITY OF THE ROSE

Yeats devised a scheme for the earliest lyrics he wished to preserve whereby, among other things, he would embody the effect of unity achieved out of difference by means of some of his favoured symbols, particularly that of the rose. In Poems (1895), he grouped together some early lyrics under the heading Crossways, and some other lyrics from The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) under the heading The Rose. In Hiberno-English, the word ‘crossways’ can be a synonym for ‘crosswise’, i.e. ‘in the shape of a cross’. It can also refer to small roads or pathways crossing a larger thoroughfare. The reference to the cross is strengthened by the deliberate juxtaposition with another series called ‘The Rose’, for we know that Rose and Cross are the chief symbols of Rosicrucianism. The Rosicrucians believed that the cross of Christ should be equated with the Tree of Life, the chief symbol of the Jewish mystical writings in the Kabbalah, which, in accordance with an established Renaissance trend, they subjected to a Christian interpretation. The Tree of Life stretched into the very abode of God, and the adepts of the Golden Dawn believed that it was possible to ascend it, through various states of being, by means of magical invocations and visualizations. In doing so, they would travel along ‘pathways’. An important theme introduced in Crossways is that of the wandering spirit of life, with which one should be in sympathy. As it says at the end of ‘Ephemera’ (P 13), ‘our souls | Are love and a continual farewell’. In ‘The Madness of King Goll’ (P 14– 16), the ancient Irish king who is the speaker seems to have been driven mad by an oversensitivity to the variety and force of experience, and wanders around registering this condition:

And I must wander wood and hill

Through summer's heat and winter's cold,

They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.

The poems in Crossways are quite various in style and subject matter, as befits the idea of various states of being.