johnlyon
We have conceded that actors, unlike dramatic characters, do not ‘break up
theirlines to weep’. But even here, Shakespeare, enlisted for the counsel for the
Yeatsian defence, in fact provides strong evidence for the prosecution: at Hamlet’s
request, declaiming the account of the slaughter of Priam, the First Player provokes
Polonius to interrupt that declamation in wonder: ‘Look whe’er he has not turned
his colour and has tears in’s eyes.’^47 A few moment later Hamlet himself describes
the actor—‘his visage wann’d,|Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,|A broken
voice’^48 : here, then, is an actor who does ‘break up his lines to weep’.
The final line of the Shakespearean section of ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is self-sparingly
vague: ‘It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.’ What exactly does ‘It’ designate
here? Hindsight has cruelly ‘modified’ Yeats’s vague little word ‘in the guts of the
living’...and in the guts of the dead. For if ‘It’ has come to refer to the Second
World War, ‘It’ has come to refer to a war unprecedented in the vastscaleof
its suffering and destruction; moreover, talk of not growing ‘by an inch or an
ounce’ proves hard to countenance or even to contemplate in the context of the
destructions and deprivations of that war’s concentration and death camps.^49
But Yeats’s poem has at least one further trick up its sleeve. Turning to the piece
of carved lapis lazuli which was given to Yeats by Harry Clifton and which, in turn,
gives Yeats’s poem its title, the poet writes,
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards...Time has evidently not served this art object well, leaving it variously damaged.
Yeats’s poetic imagination transforms this damage into ‘natural’ phenomena or
‘natural’ disasters: cracks and dents become watercourses and avalanches; and
the blurring of the carving is transformed into snow. (The words ‘natural’ and
(^47) Shakespeare,Hamlet, ii. ii. 520–1. (^48) Ibid. ii. ii. 554–6; my italics.
(^49) Placing this line in the context of our nuclear age, inaugurated by the nuclear bombing of Japan
at the end of the Second World War, Jahan Ramazani makes a related but more extreme point: ‘We
may grant Nietzsche’s and Yeats’s tragic spectatorsthat death is a part of the ‘‘eternal condition of
things’’, but it is harder to grant that each waris as well; the possibility of nuclear annihilation—all
the drop scenes dropping at once, never to rise again—has made it even harder’ (Ramazani,Yeats and
the Poetry of Death, 90).