The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision: The Original 1925 Version

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W.B. YATES

George Bornstein, George Mills Harper, and Richard J. Finneran, General Editors

VOLUME I THE POEMS

ed. Richard J. Finneran

VOLUME II THE PLAYS

ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark

VOLUME III AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald

VOLUME IV EARLY ESSAYS

ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein

VOLUME V LATER ESSAYS

ed. William H. O’Donnell with Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux

VOLUME VI PREFACES AND INTRODUCTIONS

ed. William H. O’Donnell

VOLUME VII LETTERS TO THE NEW ISLAND

ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer

VOLUME VIII THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT

ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran

VOLUME IX EARLY ARTICLES AND REVIEWS

ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre

VOLUME X LATER ARTICLES AND REVIEWS

ed. Colton Johnson

VOLUME XI MYTHOLOGIES

ed. Jonathan Allison

VOLUME XII JOHN SHERMAN AND DHOYA

ed. Richard J. Finneran

VOLUME XIII A VISION (1925)

ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper

VOLUME XIV A VISION (1937)

ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul

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CONTENTS

Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Illustrations

Editors’ Introduction

A Vision

Dedication

Introduction

Book I—What the Caliph Partly Learned

Chapter 1: The Wheel and the Phases of the Moon

Chapter 2: The Dance of the Four Royal Persons

Chapter 3: The Great Wheel

Chapter 4: The Twenty-Eight Embodiments

Book II—What the Caliph Refused to Learn

Chapter 1: Desert Geometry or the Gift of Harun Al-Raschid

Chapter 2: The Geometrical Foundation of the Wheel

Book III—Dove or Swan

The Historical Cones.

Chapter 1: Leda.

Chapter 2: The Great Wheel and History.

Book IV—The Gates of Pluto

Chapter 1: The Fool by the Roadside

Chapter 2: The Great Wheel and from Death to Birth

Chapter 3: All Souls’ Night

Textual Matters and Notes

About Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper

Notes

Corrections to the Yeatses’ Copies of A Vision (1925)

Emendations to the Copy-Text

End-of-Line Word Division in the Copy-Text

Index

In memory of

George Mills Harper

and

Richard J. Finneran

EDITORS’ PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This edition, like all scholarly work on W. B. and George Yeats, would not be possible without the generosity of the Yeats family, especially the late Senator Michael B. Yeats and the late Anne Yeats. For many years, they have given of their family’s resources as well as their own time and energy to provide unparalleled assistance to scholars. In particular, their gift of W. B. and George Yeats’s library and occult papers to the National Library of Ireland has made possible new levels of scholarly investigation of A Vision. We are grateful to Michael B. and Gráinne Yeats for their great and ongoing kindness.

The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Walter Kelly Hood and Connie Hood, former designated editors of AVA and AVB in this series, who shared with us the results of many years of labor as they passed the project on to us. We are grateful to Jonathan Allison, Alan Baragona, George Bornstein, Terence Brown, Wayne K. Chapman, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Michael de Nie, Stephen B. Dobranski, the late Richard J. Finneran, R. F. Foster, Christine Gallant, Warwick Gould, Eloise Grathwohl, Mary Jane Harper, James Hirsh, Nancy Kojima, Scott Lightsey, George Maalouf, Elizabeth Muller, Claire Nally, William H. O’Donnell, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, James Shimkus, Malinda Snow, Maria Thanassa, Deirdre Toomey, Michael Vickers, and the Yeats Society of Sligo. Thanks are due to Rebecca Drummond at the Georgia State University Library; Dr. Stephen Ennis at Woodruff Special Collections, Emory University; Peter Kenny, Tom Desmond, Ciara McDonnell, and Nicola Ralston at the National Library of Ireland; Charles McNamara at the Walter Royal Davis Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Kristen Nyitray and F. Jason Torres at the William Butler Yeats Microfilmed Manuscripts Collection, Special Collections Department, Frank Melville, Jr., Memorial Library at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; and staff at the British Library and the Robert Muldrow Cooper Library at Clemson University. Emily Benthall Weathers, Charis Chapman, and Stefanie Peters, research assistants to Professor Paul, gave invaluable assistance. Richard W. Stoops provided unparalleled technical support. We thank the Department of English and College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities at Clemson University and the Department of English at Georgia State University for support of this project. Samantha Martin, our editor at Scribner, has been of immense help, and we are more than grateful for her management and expertise.

We wish especially to acknowledge the work of George Mills Harper. In addition to invaluable published work and personal assistance, he left extensive files that have helped us immeasurably in understanding WBY’s methods of composition and the ordering of many manuscripts and typescripts, not to mention drawing our attention to significant aspects of the genesis of AVA and helping with transcriptions of WBY’s nearly illegible handwriting. We have also drawn on notes he made to himself in his copy of CVA after its publication, as he continued his work on the Yeatses’ occultiana. This edition is deeply indebted to Harper’s immense knowledge and scholarly precision.

ABBREVIATIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. [Frontispiece of A Vision]

2. [Title page of A Vision]

3. [Copyright page of A Vision]

4. The Great Wheel

5. [Unicorn]

6. [Lunar Phases]

7. [Gyres as Lines]

8. [Gyres as Cones]

9. [Gyres of Destiny and Will, Fate, and Mind]

10. [Approaching and Separating Gyres]

11. [Contracting and Expanding Gyres]

12. [Gyres placed one within the other]

13. [Gyres of the Four Faculties]

14. [Solar and Lunar Circles]

15. [Solar and Lunar Months]

16. [Solar and Lunar Year]

17. [Solar and Lunar Gyres]

18. [Gyres of Principles and Faculties]

19. [simplest form of History Cone]

20. [Cones of entire Era]

21. The Historical Cones

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

I

A Vision appeared in the dead of winter. On 15 January 1926, the London publisher T. Werner Laurie distributed to subscribers six hundred signed copies of W. B. Yeats’s occult mythography. ¹ As recently as the previous July, WBY had indulged in high-flown hope for it, telling Laurie, I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books. ² However, Laurie and WBY had long known that, as WBY mentioned understatedly in March 1923, the book is entirely unlike any other work of mine and will not appeal to the same public. ³ They estimated correctly that a limited print run would be best. A Vision was a handsome volume, with light blue paper boards, parchment half-binding, woodcuts by Edmund Dulac printed on brown paper, and untrimmed pages, with one striking diagram of historical cones in both red and black ink. It was appropriately expensive, selling for £3.6s. ⁴ It was reviewed by WBY’s old friend and fellow mystic Æ and seemed to disappear soon afterward.

By spring, WBY wrote to Olivia Shakespear that the book’s reception reminds me of the stones I used to drop as a child into a certain very deep well. The splash is very far off and very faint (L, 712). The lack of response does not seem to have disturbed him, however: WBY ends the letter to Shakespear fantasizing whimsically about founding an Irish heresy with his few readers on his side of the Irish Sea. Interestingly, a tone approaching levity pervades much of his correspondence about the book, both before and after publication. To some degree, such a tone is attributable to simple relief: WBY had been compiling and composing the book for years, struggling to get the philosophy right, the structure intelligible, the prose understandable, the details consistent. It had taken nearly ten years to receive, sort through, and present the system outlined in the book. That system had brought with it extraordinary changes in his life and work, and it had been no easy task to come to terms with it all. By 1925, upward of ten thousand manuscript and typed pages of queries, replies, notes, outlines, charts, diagrams, drafts, revisions, and corrected proofs—including nearly four thousand pages of automatic script (AS), four hundred pages in journals, six hundred alphabetized index cards, and over two thousand sheets of handwritten as well as scribally typed drafts—stand testament to the difficulty of arriving at 256 published pages. ⁵ As WBY put it to Laurie, getting a book of this sort into print is a reverse of the Christian miracle for one has to turn twelve basketfuls of fragments into—is it not?—two loaves and two little fishes—a greater miracle than the other. ⁶ Neither WBY nor others was sure if A Vision contained profound truths and creative genius or if it had been a ridiculous exercise in obsession. As it was being delivered to booksellers, WBY wrote to Laurie that he was waiting for the book with some excitement as I don’t know whether I am a goose that has hatched a swan or a swan that has hatched a goose. ⁷

It might be answered that WBY was neither a goose nor a swan but a heron—Aherne or A Herne, as WBY sometimes spelled it in the drafts, one of the figures of the phantasmagoria of characters, authors, redactors, and players in the drama that swirls around the philosophical matter of the book. Owen Aherne and his associate, Michael Robartes, fictional characters revived from the trio of occult stories, Rosa Alchemica, The Tables of the Law, and The Adoration of the Magi, written over two decades earlier for inclusion in The Secret Rose (1897), were at one stage meant to speak the philosophy, in a dialogue that WBY worked on for several years before finally abandoning it in favor of the discursive form of the published book. ⁸ This form retained the dynamism of the system, which depended upon its dialogic arrival. In fact, the story of A Vision is riddled with dialogues and doubles, beginning with the collaboration between WBY and GY, which took place in spiritualistic sessions of automatic writing (and other methods, which will be explained below) during which he asked questions and she wrote the answers that came to her from regions beyond the grave and outside material existence. The spiritualist nature of the automatic script also presumes a second kind of dialogue, between the human partners and a host of instructors and communicators of various supernatural kinds who wrote or spoke through GY’s hand or voice as she acted as a medium for their revelations. Writing the book was another exercise in dialogism, as WBY strained to find adequate ways to explain material of which he was frequently in less than perfect command. He found, as readers of A Vision also find, that the relationship between writer and text that is authorship itself is more than usually unstable in this book. The author is not a unified entity: there is both explanation and instruction, argument and agreement, a sense of monologue or even diatribe, as well as a sense of conversation or even just several voices speaking all at once. Finally, the book called A Vision is two books: the 1925 book here presented was followed, after over a decade of revision, by a second book of the same title. Published by Macmillan in 1937, it is so different from the earlier text that it may effectively be regarded as a separate work. Some sections were kept intact, but others were added, dropped, or radically changed, and a new and large body of introductory material changes the feel of the book as a whole. The general editors of the Collected Works of W. B. Yeats have wisely decided to present A Vision (1937), here abbreviated as AVB, in a separate volume from this one, here abbreviated as AVA.

The later Vision is less deceptive than this earlier one. It is more philosophical and smoother in presentation. AVA is more personal and eccentric, again like the phantasmagoria of such characters as Robartes and Aherne who play major roles in the hoax that surrounds the explication of the system. A session of automatic script from January 1918, soon after the experiments began and at roughly the time that WBY began to write the first drafts of the dialogue between these two characters, explained why the poet was warned against studying philosophy as he started to compose: I warn you against the philosophy that is bred in stagnation—it is a bitter philosophy a philosophy which destroys—I give you one which leads—I give you one which is from outside—a light which you follow not one which will burn you. ⁹ The Robartes-Aherne dialogues had another purpose: to deflect the outside reader from intuiting the most sensitive of the dialogues at work. They allowed GY to remain in the background, with her role in the project a secret, as she and the instructors insisted (on 4 March 1918, for example, the injunction came that they "do not wish the spirit source revealed and that WBY when writing should only speak of those actual machineries of the philosophy that may be in the book" [YVP 1:369]).

Although dramatized speakers were finally unworkable, a number of distancing devices remain, in layers of personae, stories, and thinly veiled hoaxes, from frontispiece to final poem. Edmund Dulac created the frontispiece of Giraldus, the supposed author of a book outlining the system, entitled, in bad (and misspelled) Latin, Speculum Angelorum et Homenorum. ¹⁰ Dulac’s woodcut of a sly-looking visage in a turban, which bears a strong resemblance to WBY as well as a slight one to GY, faces the title page of A Vision, where textual convention places a portrait of the author. WBY was very pleased with the image, writing to Dulac that he even doubted if Laurie would have taken the book but for the amusing deceit that your designs make possible (L, 700). Others enjoyed the deceit as well: Frank Pearce Sturm, one of very few serious readers of AVA, wrote admiringly to WBY that Every book I pick up seems to speak with the voice of W. B. Giraldus, of cones & gyres (FPS, 92).

A tongue-in-cheek tone punctuates the book, ironically revealing in his most occult work an aspect of WBY that is most often hidden: an inclination toward humor, even in the spiritual system that is at the same time a dreadfully serious matter. In All Souls’ Night, the poem appended as a coda to the book, the poet declares,

I have mummy truths to tell

Whereat the living mock;

Though not for sober ear

For maybe all that hear

Should weep and laugh an hour upon the clock.

A Vision has certainly caused some readers to laugh and others (or maybe the same ones) to weep. It is comedy and tragedy: a grave and playful, poetic and geometric, concrete and abstract, earnest and slippery work, aiming to be all at once a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of WBY. George Mills Harper, one of the early scholarly proponents of WBY’s occult interests and general editor of the four-volume edition of the automatic script and related materials, declared the unwieldy work "the most maligned and misunderstood tour de force in the history of modern literature" (MYV 1:xiv). Richard Ellmann, one of the few critics whom GY allowed to examine the Vision materials after her husband’s death, called it The strangest work written by a great poet in English since Blake’s Prophetic Books. ¹¹ R. F. Foster remarks in his authoritative biography that A Vision not only provides necessary illumination for a key section of [WBY’s] oeuvre but that the book’s real value is to students of WBY’s mind, and of his aspirations (Foster 2:285).