Monday, November 30, 2015

#334



Thrums up from nowhere a distinguisht wail,
the griefs of all his grievous friends, and his,
startling Ballsbridge,
our sedate suburb, the capital of What Is,
a late September fly          goes by, learned & frail,
and Cemetery Ridge

glares down the years of losses to this end
that the note from my bank this morning was stampt with
    Sir Roger Casement,
no ‘Sir,’ just the portrait & years:
about whom Yeats was so wrong
This distinguished & sensitive man lived in the grip
of a homosexual obsession, even the ‘tools’ of native policemen
excited him.

Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols
& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge
would not have been scared, like you & me,
he would have been, before           the bullet that was his,
studying the movements of the birds,
said disappointed & amazed Henry.

Sir Roger Casement was a well-known human rights activist turned Irish revolutionary who was hanged by the British in 1916 for his involvement in the Easter Rising. The presence of Casement’s so-called “Black Diaries” sealed his fate: They were written in secret by Casement and detailed his activities as a very active but closeted homosexual. When the Brits got hold of them, they made the contents known to a number of public figures and activists, which caused them to back away from defending Casement and pressing for some measure of clemency toward him. It was a nasty and underhanded thing for the Brits to do, but this was a nasty and underhanded situation in the first place, which included a threat of bloody revolution and more than a few hangings in response, so it all figures. There was widespread suspicion that the Black Diaries were forgeries, foisted by the British on the Irish to condemn Casement in the public’s eye on grounds that had nothing to do with revolution but that effectively condemned him to hang. So went the power of homophobia in Anglo-Irish society in the early twentieth century. Yeats wrote a poem entitled “Roger Casement”  accusing the British of smearing Casement’s reputation with a conspiracy in order to eliminate him.

In the end, though, this is a poem about Yeats and B.’s evolving attitude toward the great poet that for so long has engaged with his image of what a poet is and can be. But it’s set up with two allusions to the violence of modern political events: Cemetery Ridge, the terrible scene of the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg, and Casement, who was hanged for his homosexuality as much as for his revolutionary activity. Not happy stuff. The wail Henry hears in the poem’s opening, to which he adds his own figurative wail, are apt and appropriate responses to the state of humanity. It’s hard to read the line about a fly going by and not think of Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” the fly in that poem actually arising unexpectedly as a harbinger of death itself by the end of the poem. So there are two or probably three allusions to death right off the bat here. It all still is used to situate the mention of Yeats: Yeats didn’t get what happened to Casement. In defending the man’s “honor” against accusations of homosexuality, Yeats let an orthodox bigotry blind him to the real life of the gay man he meant to defend. He didn’t get it. B. often lets bigotry have the last word in The Dream Songs—the minstrel business is very dicey, he betrays the misogyny that lurks beneath a broadcast and indulged sexual appetite, and the couple times he tries to identify with Jews’ victimization in the Holocaust rings as a bit insulting. But here, I actually think his attitude toward homosexuality is more than just tolerant, it’s accepting. Casement was who he was, and he was a great man. Why do we have to defend him against his sexuality?

I have to take exception to one thing: Wordsworth was more than egotism incarnate, thank you very much.  I love Wordsworth’s work. It’s high Romantic, but it’s also earthy. If the Wordsworthian self often arises in the work as the central perceiving presence, much like with Walt Whitman, who on Earth is John Berryman to criticize that? But he does it, pretty brazenly. Either he’s being a flat-out hypocrite—my initial reaction—or something else is happening. In a sense I begin to suspect something is continuing that I first got a glimpse of in DS 331: Something is changing. Something is growing. Here it takes the form of something like an empathy that hadn’t been there before, and now that it’s coming on, he calls out Yeats on not demonstrating something that he hasn’t demonstrated much of until just this second either. B. was capable of a political repugnance against inhuman political systems, but it was from a fairly broad perspective. And, he’s hardly a stone cold sociopath on an interpersonal level. There are lots of moments of human contact and warmth, all over the place actually. But in the end, the writer of The Dream Songs up to this point is a bit of a narcissist, which only means that he was more interested in his own self-directed interests and his own self-involved and often self-inflicted suffering than he was in the life of personal individual suffering all around him, except, as I say, in a rather abstracted political sense—coolly if miserably repulsed by the bureaucratic stupidity behind so many of the world’s ills. There are exceptions. For sure, though, he was disgusted at the broadest levels at the entrenched societal racism shot through American life. At Gettysburg, we can certainly surmise that B. would have been afraid, of course, but also furious at the fucking monstrous insanity of the proceedings, more than a hundred thousand beautiful young men shooting and stabbing and blowing each other to pieces in atavistic fury over whether or not it is morally permissible to own slaves of African descent. Why would he have felt this way? Broadly, politically, he would of course find it repugnant. But I also think he’s tuning in to the personal tragedy of it, multiplied by 100,000. Each soldier had his story, his mother, and his farm or town, his hopes for the future. The accusation is that Yeats wouldn’t have noticed any of that, simply because his wasn’t a sensibility attuned to such things. He was too wrapped up in effete abstractions about life, and his defense of Casement was another statement arising from a sensibility of effete abstractions. It was about defending Casement’s abstract honor against accusations of a debased sexuality. I think Henry’s suffering has had an effect on him, and it is causing him to question one of his guiding lights. I do not accept that Wordsworth was a mere egotist, but that pronouncement leads to another that’s more important: That Yeats was an egotist as well. There is often something ethereal, weird and abstracted about Yeats, so I won’t argue, but the only thing at issue for now is what B. thought. I don’t think he’s being hypocritical. I think he’s starting to get it. I think the reason is that he’s beginning to question his own substantial egotism.

1 comment:

  1. I see what you mean about B's change. With you as our guide, the DSs are getting exciting!

    ReplyDelete