war, politics, and disappearing poetry ‘artificial’ tend to blur into each other in discussing this poem, and what seems a
commonplaceopposition threatens to become a nonsense.) Yet Yeatsian artifice is
not content to leave matters there. Thinking of the ‘little half-way house’ which is
the Chinamen’s imagined spring-time destination, the product purely of the poet’s
own fancy, Yeats in his imagination withdraws even further from—the oxymoron
is inescapable—the reality of the art object before him:
and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.Here artifice is piled upon artifice as, amidst music, imagined cracks in stone
or imagined wrinkles of age on human faces are finally transformed into laughter
lines. For one critic, Richard Ellmann, ‘Under thetremendous pressure of the poet’s
mood, the lapis lazuli is made to yield the message of affirmation which he must
have.’^50 An alternative—indeed, opposed—view is that this poem is as crazed or
as crazy or as crafty as the carved lapis lazuli which it first contemplates and then
artfully withdraws from, making even the reality of that art object disappear. On
such a view, the poem plays on the reader, and on the troubled Thirties world in
which its first readers must live, a sick and inhumane joke or trick or contrivance.
Henry James (writing of Flaubert) says what perhaps can best be said on either
side of the argument when he notes: ‘Style itself moreover...nevertotallybeguiles;
since even when we are so queerly constituted as to be ninety-nine parts literary we
are a hundredth part something else.’^51
William Empson, distinguished poet though he was, was considerably less than
‘ninety-nine parts literary’. On occasion, to the chagrin of readers and critics of
poetry, public events, the forces they exert, and the non-poetic demands they
make on writers can cause poets simply to stop writing—in the words of William
Empson’s poem, first published in 1949, a poem about stopping writing perhaps for
fear of, or in the face of, madness, to ‘Let it go’.^52 Empson’s tendency to write (or a
least to publish) very little poetry after the 1930s has been an enduring vexation and
puzzle to his admirers. To one of the greatest of these, Christopher Ricks, Empson
wrote in 1975:
I think you credited me with strong family feelings, and said I stopped writing because I
married. There was much else which was a positivecomfort to have said, but I had already
(^50) Richard Ellmann,TheIdentityofYeats(London: Faber, 1964), 187.
(^51) Henry James, ‘Gustave Flaubert’, inLiterary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers;
The Prefaces to the New York Editions 52 (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 340; italics original.
Empson,‘Letitgo’,inComplete Poems, 99.