johnlyon
Of poets that are always gay,
Foreverybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.^38The poet then immediately shifts to invoke the example of Shakespeare, perhaps
the most ill-judged argumentative move in the history of poetry. Invited into
‘Lapis Lazuli’ as an ally, Shakespeare does damage from which the poem can never
recover:
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
Andallthedropscenesdropatonce
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.They ‘Do not break up their lines to weep’: here one concedes that Yeats is con-
centrating on the endings of the plays and is expressing a preference for certain styles
of acting, a preference he expressed many times. He valued ‘the noble art of oratory’
over ‘the poor art of acting’; he valued highly stylized, ‘musical’ ‘half-chant’, rather
than actors speaking naturalistically ‘as if they were reading something out of the
newspapers’.^39 Butwho‘Do not break up their lines to weep’? The actors? Or the
characters? The uncertainty is not an inadvertence on Yeats’s part but a deliberately
cultivated conflation or confusion, ‘a blurred semantic space’ as Jahan Ramazani
characterizes it,^40 a manifestation of this poem’s high Yeatsian trickery. We do not
expect actors to burst into tears in performance. But characters often do, especially
in Shakespeare. Yeats’s assertion, then—‘[They] Do not break up their lines to
weep’—would seem to achieve the illogical distinction of being simultaneously
true and false.
(^38) Yeats, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, inPoems, 341.
(^39) Yeats, ‘The Theatre’, inEssays and Introductions(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1961), 168.
(^40) Jahan Ramazani,Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime(New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990), 88.