Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

NATURE VERSUS HISTORY IN W. B. YEATS 109

and anecdote (a “house burned,” a soldier “trundled down the road”) blending
with broad confessional truths (“We are closed in.. .,” “We had fed the heart
on fantasies.. .”), and finally that stark cry: “O honey-bees, / Come build
in the empty house of the stare”—only a poet ’s lifelong quarrel with himself
could bring it off.
As long as Yeats struggled to unite private, public, and visionary experience
within a poem, he had to be questioning art itself. “Sailing to Byzantium” tests
the saving grace of art against a touchstone of natural process not yet spoiled
by human action:

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Art, art takes a lasting shape that flesh can’t deliver:

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling.

Somewhere he ’d read of artisans setting a golden bird “upon a golden bough,”
nature transformed into art. Yet once there they sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Great art, yes, but still it sings of mortal nature, the changing stream of what ’s
begotten, born, and dies—those spawning “salmon-falls,” like the moorhens
calling moorcocks in “Easter 1916.”
Yeats’s sense of mortality led to ever-stronger writing. In July 1936, with war
looming, he wrote “Lapis Lazuli,” prompted by the eighteenth-century Chinese
stone a young poet had given him. (plates 7 and 8) First Yeats looks to tragic
Hamlet and Lear for blazing joy. Then he turns to this deep-blue gemstone, a
mountain scene with three men climbing, carved into lapis lazuli so that

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.

It ’s no small feat, turning accident into art and nature both. It takes guessing,
imagining into the stone: “doubtless plum or cherry-branch.. .” Then Yeats