The Cold HeavenW.B. Yeats

Written 1912.Published in ‘Responsibilities’ (1914)

AO4 – BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT- Yeats was travelling on a train from Manchester in November

1911 when he noticed the strange sky patterns outside of the window; he drafted a poem which would later become ‘The Cold Heaven’

- He was touring with the Abbey Players at the time and was on his way to see a performance of his play, ‘Countess Cathleen’, by another theatre company. This play was written for Maud Gonne (the Irish heroine of myth and legend was a vivid and self-sacrificing figure) twenty years earlier and critics suggest this might have prompted this poem.

A04- LITERARY CONTEXT

- The poem explores a moment of crisis: Yeats’ remorse over failure at love and his fears that it would continue after death.

- Biblical allusions: Revelation 21:1 “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away and there was no sea.”

- Transcends reason; focuses on emotion (Romantic in this sense?)

- Moves away from ‘the ‘embroidered cloths of heaven’; a new brutal reality?

Timeline….Yeats and Maud Gonne• Between 1891 and 1901, four

proposals were turned down• Maud Gonne married John

Macbride in 1903, although they became estranged in 1905

due to his domestic abuse, drinking and possible advances towards Iseult (who was 11 at

the time)• Yeats was in close contact with

her throughout, advising on her separation (in a few years, he

would propose to her daughter, Iseult!)

The Cold Heaven (1912)

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season 5With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago; And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason, Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro, Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken, Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent 10Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

Key techniques – AO2• Alexandrine – poetic metre consisting of 12 syllables. • It is known as iambic hexameter—a line of six feet or measures

("iambs"), each of which has two syllables with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. It is also usual for there to be a caesura between the sixth and seventh syllables.

• Alexander Pope famously characterized the alexandrine's potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine:

A needless alexandrine ends the song That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Affirmative capability? (a theory developed by Richard Ellmann in ‘The Identity of Yeats’ in 1954)

- A variation on Keats’ negative capability (the ability to remain in a state of doubt without searching for a premature resolution)

- Yeats prefers affirmation: he wanted to kill the ‘scepticism in myself’, although he accepts that scepticism is needed in order to progress.

- On scepticism: ‘It is the wind resistance that makes flight possible.’ (Ellmann, p54)

- Keats (as a Romantic) wanted sensation/emotion, not thought/intellect but Yeats felt it was the poet’s duty to involve the intellect too; remaining in doubt could never be satisfying.

- Arguably this existential crisis plays itself out in ‘The Cold Heaven’; its language and form is full of chaos.

- Does it anticipate later poems when Yeats is caught between meaningless beliefs of the mob and the struggle for autonomy/ individuality?

‘The Cold Heaven’ is the most significant poem in [Responsibilities] and points the way to [Yeats’s] later development. The heaven he now sees is no longer ‘embroidered cloths of light and half-light’ but a cruel and remorseless one of burning ice and ‘more ice…’ He beholds himself shorn of all his accomplishments and defences, no memory left except that all important one of love crossed long ago for which he feels inexplicable compelled to take all the blame. The poem ends in terror.’Richard Ellmann ‘Yeats: The Man and the Mask’ (1985)

Critics – ‘The Cold Heaven’

‘The mystic ecstasy is not this or that.’Jan Ruysbroek (1293-1381)

‘We sing amid our uncertainty.’WB Yeats ‘Anima Hominis’ (1918)

‘Natural and spiritual ideas arecombined in dramatic metaphor.’(Greening 2005)

Q. How does each of these quotes relate (or don’t relate) to your understanding of the poem ‘The Cold Heaven.’

‘The poem moves from an emotional response to the material, natural world to a metaphysical, occult experience.’ (Greening 2005)

‘He that is to govern a whole nation must read in himself,

not this or that particular man, but mankind…’

Thomas Hobbes ‘Leviathan’ (1651)