NATURE POETRY OF W.B. YEATS AND STEPHEN GILL

 

Dr. G.L. Gautam

 

Wordsworth holds that  “a poet is endued with more lovely sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness.”8 In other words,  a poet experiences emotions more deeply than other human beings do. This is true also with any  poet who has love for nature. This love goes beyond  time and space. The golden light emanating from the rising and setting sun has since time immemorial stirred poet’s imagination. Even the Neoclassical poets during the eighteenth century, who held nature in contempt,  admitted  the beauty that lay in simple and contented life, though these poets produced a small corpus of poetry dealing with nature. With the innate bent that a poet has towards nature, even today he enjoys the sparrows fluttering their wings in summer. This is despite the facts that under the conditions of urban living, a poet  has to live amidst the jungle of high rise buildings which hide horizon from his view.  The poet thus enjoys nature as an aesthete which does not imply he ever neglected the human sufferings.

 

As early as first century before Christ, Horace in his odes draws immensely on nature and on life of ploughman. He uses nature variously by imparting human metaphor to winds and fields, representing super natural power of nature gods, and also representing nature as a great leveler between the rich and the poor. Like Horace, Tagore makes us aware of the fact how the Vedic poets saw in nature both divine and human spirits.“ The rivers and clouds, dawn, fire and storm were not scientific facts to them but the manifestation of the divine law.”9

 

So nature and human life are not two words apart without converging anywhere. Man can cultivate his love for both. It is possible  if he is not cut off from the world of flora and fauna and lives in less materially conscious society. In a materially conscious society, since the love of money takes away all other loves, man gets alienated from man and nature. Alienated from man, he seeks refuge in religion and  approaches the landscape of nature as a stranger, but both W.B. Yeats and Stephen Gill are not strangers to nature.

 

W.B. Yeats emerges as a significant modern poet after the publication of The Tower (1933) and The Winding Stair And Other Poems (1933). Due to striking simplicity of diction,   his poetry won a wide readership.  This simplicity is striking also in the nature poetry of W.B. Yeats.  But in the content, the dichotomy it presents between nature and world is wide.   In contrast with human world, his poetry of nature is enchanting, uncanny and mysterious. Taking an overall view of themes, among which nature is a significant area in Yeats poetry, Augustine Martin comments:

 

Behind all the masks and beneath several voices there is same probing passionate intelligence, the same importunate self being endlessly remade. This is equally true of Yeats other themes art nature the soul, polities, history landscape, myth, philosophy and god (Preface To Yeats)

 

The question is why Yeats, a poet of awareness and intelligence, plays down the ills of industrialism as did Alfred Tennyson. The reason why the twentieth century criticism  disapproves the great poets such as Tennyson and Yeats may be answered in the words of Humbert Wolfe:

 

Steadily thereafter in the beginning of twentieth century the revolt against Tennyson’s dictatorship asserted itself. Tennyson had represented the industrial age in its years of self-complacency and self-satisfaction mitigated by doubts and occasioned by satiety. The new writers were beginning to be aware of the cruel wounds that the age had inflicted on the spirit of man. They were no mere long-haired aesthetes, trilling rondeawx and offering absinthe to thirsty world. They were man aware of something fast and fateful sweeping on to some disastrous consummation. The great poet of the period, Honsman, de la More and Yeats all played to low and troubled note.5

 

Another poet who is not a stranger to nature is Stephen Gill, an internationally known poet of Indian diaspora who lives in Canada. He has six collections of poems to his credit. He has also a collection of short story and three novels.  It is however in poetry that he earns a worldwide recognition. It is mainly because of his epical poem The Flame that deals with the menace of terrorism. In India and abroad, doctoral  theses are being done on Gill’s poetry and book length studies have come out on his prose and poetry. John E Robbins discovers Gill’s forte for poetry when he says that “…it is in his poetry I think that real Stephen Gill finds expression."6

 

The majority of critics, who have written about Gill’s poetry, have seen him as a poet of peace and harmony. His nature poetry that constitutes a significant area of his whole poetic corpus has been largely neglected. Ravichandran is right when he says:

Yet the excess of criticism that focuses on these overt aspects fail to highlight other subtly significant features of Gill’s poems, particularly a much ignored feature that is very much embedded in these aspects in the poet’s concern for nature, environment and ecological balance.7

 

In literary landscape, the modern poets appear on the horizon with the sole objective of showing the angst the modern man faces in his existential predicament. For example T.S. Eliot shows his  preoccupation with the predicaments of love and sex and comes up with solution that man should live with fears of death. So nature in mainstream modern poetry receives scant attention. Some poets who have been imbued with democratic socialist vision went to the streets in search of theme and idiom. A poet thus earns  what Walter Benjamin called the appellation if he takes his hero from commoners. The postmodern times have witnessed the unprecedented technological advancement that results in jeoparying the land, sky, lakes and ocean. So the creative writers have devoted to nature enough space making good the setback it suffered in mainstream modern poetry. Moreover, the concern for protection of environment and movements for maintaining ecological balance have of late staged centre stage. Stephen Gill is one of them. In Year After Year, he says:

 

Heavy taxes

less service

higher unemployment

financial obligation

more elderly persons

soaring prices

increase in terrorism

shortage of physicians

violence on the streets

no security

abuse of the earth

ecosystem

legacy of garbage piles.

In A New Canadian in Toronto, Gill graphically describes how life in a metropolis is unproductive and uninspiring, and human warmth has been causality. What is true of Toronto is true of London, New York and New Delhi. The poet categorically exposes the murder of souls everywhere:

 

My mind and body remain engaged all the time

grabbing some bones.

The lips of the city

smell like plastic flowers

and eyes display the festivals of the orphans

souls carry hidden wounds.

(Shrine, 102)

 

By 1890s when W.B. Yeats was settling in London, he presented more or less the same panorama of a big city as shown by Stephen Gill in the above lines. When T.S. Eliot portrayed the life in modern waste land he had in mind the sterility characterizing human relationships. It not only lacked compassion for fellow human beings, but the din and clatter which distracted the new entrants to it was beyond tolerance. Even during the eighteenth century, coffee houses and fashion saloons dotted the city. It was a destination where to persons from all parts of rural England rushed, where persons pursuing cultural, pursuits went to realize their ambition.5 So London was busier than any other city any where. In order to accommodate the swelling populace the city swallowed its green suburbs. The farther the city expanded, the remoter became nature. Having thus distanced from nature, a poet intensely longs for peace.

We can thus understand the longing Yeats expresses in Lake Isle of Insfree . The distracting London life more acutely taxed the nerves of W.B. Yeats, since he inherited the love of nature through his upbringing. Yeats’s mother came from  a family of ship owning merchant of Sligo on the West Coast. It was here where W.B. Yeats spent his early childhood holidays. No where does Yeats refer to smoke and fumes of London, however, but the very fact he resolves to go down to Sligo coast testifies. What a nostalgic import the place held for him.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,                                                                                                                                                                                                 Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings                                                                                                                                                                                                             There midnight’s all a glimmer and noon a purple glow                                                                                                                                                                                                                              And evening full of the linnet wings

  (The Rose, 1893, 35)                                                                                                                                 

Since the urbanization swallowed the land where nature abounded the nature with linnet became wings distant, remote and therefore alien. As a result, the life turns into monotonous drudgery. Added to it is the fact how the egotistical calculation, with ulterior motives working behind human relationship,5 irreparably upset an individual’s psyche, resulting in loss of trust. Left alone to fend himself, an individual feels less secure than in community. So the peace turns out to be a sought after thing as other usable things are. In the poem Peace of Mind, Stephen Gill focuses on the fact that peace of mind is difficult to be had, since an individual gets hurt after hurt.  In the case of the poet a hurt is more deeply felt that is obvious in these lines:

Whenever I think of you

lightning thunders

in the lone sameness of my retreat  

(Shrine, 119)

Whereas nostalgic note is obviously striking in Lake Isle of  Innsfree, the mystical note is deeper in Yeats other early lyrics. Here it is deeper than the Keatsean odes. For example in Ode to a Nightingale, Keats finds it unbearable to bear the fever and fret of life and therefore escape into the green leaves where the nightingale is singing. The poem also relates the song of the nightingale to magic and mystery:

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

 

The fresh joy that the nightingale’s song contains has ever been fresh through history and even before history had begun.  Like Keats, Yeats shows the contrast between the timelessness of the world of fairies and fluxing or temporal character of the human world. In Fairy Song, Yeats, to a large extent, humanizes the fairies who wish to give silence, love and quiet of night to children.

 

We who are old, old and go

O so old

Thousands of years, thousands of years

Of all were told 

Give to these children, new from the world

Silence and love,

And the long dew dropping hours of the night and stars above

(The Rose, 34)

In the example of fairies, Yeats seems to express his wish to bring up children in an affectionate environment. He probably would have seen children with tense looks in schools of London. So he proposes:

 

Gives to these Children, new form the world

Rest far from men,

Is anything better? any thing better Tell us then (35)

The song is striking both for its lyrical simplicity and touch of humanism. Contrary to it, the poem, Stolen Child, demonstrates Yeats predilection for fantasizing nature and he correspondingly presents human life in sordid light, devaluing human existence and its concerns. The existential concerns, Yeats suggests, are incomprehensible, more of a riddle, therefore unworthy of serious notice. The following alliteration shows how Yeats dismisses the world’s weeping as something incomprehensible: 

Come away, O human Child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand

For the world is more full of weeping than

Than you can understand..

 (From Cross ways 1889, 16)

Nature mystical poetry predicates on certain fundamental premises. First it essentially deals with super reality or dream world, focusing on magic and fairies. Secondly, the world so subjectively constructed is supposed to be hallowed with antiquity and so supposed to be superior to the existential reality and latter due to its fluxing character is regarded as inferior. Thirdly, nature is treated something remote, having an isolated existence described with super natural attributes such as wonder world etc. What follows from the latter aspect or what results from an obsession with, poet’s transcendental love of nature is viewing a spirit in nature. For example, Wordsworth views a spirit in these lines And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with joy (Tentern Abbey, Lyrical Ballads, 116)

 

The following lines of Stolen Child are typically mystical and escapist wherein the ontological troubles have been shown in poor light and nature shown as an ideal refuse:

 

And chase the frothy bubbles, / While the world is full of troubles

and is anxious in its sleep.  (17)

 

As Yeats advanced in years, his idiom and style moved towards modernity. His attitude also changed, thereby humanizing nature. Nevertheless, when it came to giving expression to nature and struggles on the streets, the latter were treated contemptuously. So much so, that even the cause of Irish Independence, a subject so dear to his heart, seemed to him unworthy.  The legendary Seven Woods and its magical environment make him forget the bitterness born of political struggles. The poet expresses the idea: 

 

I have heard the pigeons of the seven woods

Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees

Hum in the lime tree - flowers’ and put away

The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness

That empty the heart.

 

These lines call up to mind Stephen Gill’s poem Invisible Hand in which he underlines the quietitude of nature as Yeats does.

It is a lyric

that use compassion

to wash ingrained marks

from the walls of savage beliefs.

Even if ears are blocked

and the mouths locked

silence communicates

(Shrine, 118)

The Wild Swans at Coole is the last significant nature poem of W.B. Yeats. It was the title poem of the volume published in 1919. It seems to be modeled on Wordworth's Tintern Abbey, which he wrote during his second visit to the banks of Wyee River in 1798 after a gap of five years. Yeats visited the Coole country side after what he calls the nine tenth autumn. The swans are wheeling in broken rings upon their noisy wings. Much has changed since he first visited the beautiful countryside with his own heart grown bitter. But the light flight of swans captivates his heart:

 

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures

And now my heart is sore

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight

The first time on this shore

The bell beat of their wings above my head, trod with a lighter tread.

(From Wild Swan At Coole (1919) 129)

 

Like Yeats, Stephen Gill seems overjoyed and overawed by the solitude and beauty, which are essential characteristics of nature. Nature’s solitude, however vast pervasive, may be its reign, can not be enjoyed with a hungry belly. As a matter of fact, it sounds illogical and inhuman to idealize nature when the hunger is eating into ones vitals. Gill, as does Yeats, is overwhelmed by the reign of peace nature provides and uses derogatory terms for hunger.  He eulogizes nature in the poem Domain of Peace.

 

I am often allured 

by the power of heavens

in the elegant brilliance

of the sunshine

that streams from the mystic land

of serenity

beyond greed’s range

where the specter of hunger does not storm the abode of peace

to shake its occupants with terror

(Songs before shrine, 112)

 

Except a few of his poems wherein Gill seems to give a mystifying view of nature, in majority of them, he draws on nature human metaphors. Needless to add, it would imply how the power of nature could motivate human beings to realize such ever cherished ideals as nobility, courage, freedom. Unlike Eliot who shows a marked abomination to nature by linking it to romantics, Gill generously treats beauty of spring sunshine, freedom of wind and loftiness of clouds. At the same time he shows his concern at degradation of environment and depletion of natural resources. Thus he joins the movement to save the planet earth from environmental hazards. To the chagrin of environment activists, apocalyptic bourgeois motives have caused damage to ecology. As a result, jungles, zameen, Jal, Vayu (Forest, Land, Water, and Air) all have been poisoned to the utmost limit. Once the blue watered sky where the birds flew freely is not their exclusive domain, but the commercial flight operators have bought it-- without paying anything-- they treat it as their own zone to operate many flights in competition with other private operators. No less cause of concern is the fact how the quantum of dangerous fumes emitted into sky from the land traffic and power generating units and factories is going up. The jungles and zameen (the forest owned by tribal community and agricultural land) are being intruded into and acquired to meet capitalistic ambition of globally operative industrial houses. The river are dying everywhere on the globe. The sea and lakes have witnessed considerable decrease in number of fish. Considering the facts that the crisis is of global proportion, the creative minds of all political persuasions have come up against it. Stephen Gill, though innocently, also asks some questions concerning nature and ecology in his poem Who Shall Buy:

 

No one can buy

nor sell

the blessings of the skies

the warmth of valleys.

 

No one can buy

nor sell

the freedom of the winds

the grace of the lakes

the dignity of palm tree

the mystery of the ocean

the sobriety of jungles

and the songs of the seasons  (Shrine, 41)

 

Like Yeats, Gill seems to be enchanted by the beauty of nature manifested in its various objects. He however, should have seen that nothing remains sacrosanct when bourgeois profit motives alone operate in undertaking development projects. Everything under the sky turns into a salable item.

 

But differing from Yeats and Eliot, since the former was overawed by Nature, and latter under rated it, Gill believes in its humanistic side. Instead of eulogizing the spring sunshine for its own sake, he underscores and demonstrates how it fulfils a human need and enhances joy when it falls on river and lake. So he seems concerned with the fact in Sun in Spring:

 

Which lake or river

house or field

a bride’s gown

leaf or tree

a traveler’s head

or infant’s feet

will ever receive

in the beginning of spring

the rising sun’s

renovating beams                              

(Songs Before shrine, 110)

 

In the poem a “Breeze That is Free”, Gill categorically speaks for growing trees as the environmentalists do. He discourages intellectualism that, too, he believes, has polluted the planet by producing too much of thought. He shows concern at how the intellectual’s love for scholarship has turned them indifferent to nature and environment. He would want them to look for the treasure that a field of trees possesses. The idea is effectively conveyed in the following lines.

 

If I were a breeze

I should lull the learned

to bar the door of his thinking

from breeding substance

that pollutes our planet

and fill him with a treasure

that is possessed by the fields   

filled with trees                        

(Songs Before Shrine, 107)

 

Further more, through his acute sensuous power the poet has fed his eyes on the wings of butterfly. He has appreciated smiling flowers, and also enjoyed the smell of fresh water of lakes. This, however, does not imply he has turned away from the sufferings of man. In poem I Have Seen,  Gill is conscious of the predicament of man in  the street.

 

Famished walking skeletons

bodies resting enshrouded

forlorn infants and old

sad sights of the sisters

mute messages of the eyes

dealing with dears

atrocities never told

flood in emotions crushed

souls of the wounded

the surge of the wishes                           

(Songs Before Shrine, 103)

 

To conclude, both poets have been overawed by the reign of peace that nature affords. Gill, however, looks at nature from wide perspective, using nature for attainment of great human concerns.

Works Cited

1)                  Auden, W.H. quoted by peter Faulkner, Yeats, Philadelphia; Open University Press, 1987.

2)                  Bloom, Harold quoted by Martin, Augustine, Preface to The Collected Poem of W.B. Yeats, London: Macmillan and Co LTD, 1955.

3)                  Drett, R.L. and Jones. A.R. eds. Preface to Lyrical    Ballads : Wordsworth . London: Me Then and Co. ltd.1963.

Tagore, Rabindra Nath. “Poet Yeats”. Poetry in Theory: an anthology, 1900-2000. Ed. Cook, John. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing ltd. 2004.

4)                  Gill, Stephen, Shrine: poems about peace and social concerns. Allahabad: Cyber wit. Net, 2008, first edition printed in April of 1999 by World university Press. Subsequent quotations from this collection will be referred to in parenthesis by the name of this collection along with page number.

5)                  Gill, Stephan, Songs before shrine, New Delhi: Authors Press, 2007. The subsequent quotations have been given in parenthesis by page number.

6)                  Keats John, ode to a Nightingale, Master Poems of English Language. Ed. Williams, Oscar. New York Trident Press, 1966.

7)                  Moore, Marianne, Spenser’s Ireland, also included in the above book.

8)                  Ravichandran, T. “Green Dove in the shrine; Eco concern in Stephen Gill’s Shrine”. Discovering Stephan Gill. Ed. Agrawal, Nilanshu Kumar.  New Delhi; Authors Press, 2008.

9.Wolf, Humbert. “Alfered Tennyson.” Fifteen Poets. London: Oxford university Press, 1965.

9)                  Yeats, W.B., The Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats. All quotations of Yeats are taken from the same edition quoted earlier and have been referred to in parenthesis by page number and name of the collection along with year of publication. 

10) Hines, George. Stephen Gill and His Works. Authors Press, India, 2008

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Dr. G.L. Gautam has contributed papers on Stephen Gill even before. He teaches English Literture at Lajpat Rai College in Sahibabad, Ghaziabad, UP.