Poet William Butler Yeats had interests and a life that spanned times and poetic styles. His earliest poems whole-heartedly exhibit 19^th century romanticism and prosody, but like the English Pre-Raphaelites he sought to vividly revive elements of the deeper past while doing so. His interests beyond poetry ranged as well. Last time I performed Yeats, I mentioned he had deep interests in esoteric magic, and yet the same man had a firm grounding in civic poetry while supporting an Irish cultural revival and independence from England. A poet with an already established style, he crossed paths with the American and British Modernists early in their revolution, and his later poetry shows that rather than getting his back up about their changes, he adapted some of their make-it-new approaches. Yeats employed influential American Modernist critic Ezra Pound during Modernism’s rise, and while he dipped his toes into fascist movements,* unlike Pound he seems to have drawn back from that.

Today’s piece, “Meru,”  is a late poem in Yeats’ career. I find it balancing the worldly and spiritual, and on no more authority than my own necessary to come to grips to perform it, I see it as commenting on the rise of rapacious authoritarians contemporary with its composition in the 1930s.**   Here’s a link to the poem as Yeats published it.

“Meru”  is a sonnet, a rather regular one structurally. Though the word we use for this lyric poetry form literally means “little song,” many sonnets are hard for me to perform with music. Their length is good, and lyric poetry in this context means that they focus on a compressed scope of time and experience — but the form rarely uses refrains, a powerful, almost indispensable, tactic for song attractiveness. Seeking a good musical structure, I divided Yeats one-stanza poem into four verses, with refrains after verses two and four.

The song form I reformed Yeats’ sonnet into. Note the chords shown are what I fretted on guitar, but I used a capo on fret 3, so the piano, bass, and the song song sound in Eb.

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What do I think, as I chose to perform this, the poem conveys?

I like Yeats opening here, with its circular word-choice of “hooped,” for describing civilization’s shared beliefs. I’m unaware that this is any kind of established British Isles idiom, and the choice of this scene-setting word seems to invoke something like a key-ring or perhaps a wooden barrel or cask — and in the last image, that’s a construction that can fall apart. The opening statement continues to say civilization’s order is only an illusion, but the first three lines end by reminding us that such creations of the human mind are none-the-less great movers of reality and life. I’ll come back to that at the end today.

The second, four-line, group is remarkable in its ferocity, and I think it’s a description of mankind’s often perverse desire to gather more power, more wealth, and perhaps something they vaingloriously ascribe as rough justice while doing so. The ending line of this section serves as my first refrain: “The desolation of reality” that results from this.

Third segment, as I read it, brings in a distinct element of Yeats’ occult beliefs, starting by reminding us that the “desolation of reality” is a repeating motif of history and the fall of empires. But what’s with the two mountains introduced? Everest is Earth’s highest mountain, but it’s remoteness and location in Tibet links it with a late 19^th century form of occultism: Theosophy. Theosophy is too large a subject to go into here,*** but its founder posited that certain Ascended Masters located in Tibet held onto ancient secret wisdom becoming super-human in the process. Mount Meru is more obscure to most readers I suspect: it’s a symbolic mountain, and like other symbols such as Mount Ararat, the Garden of Eden, or the entrance to the underworld, it is not an actual fixed map point, but is often referred to as being in some part of the Himalayan region. Some read the poem’s plural hermits as two hermits, one-per-mountain, and Theosophy holds to two current Ascended Masters.

I suspect these Theosophical details were in Yeats’ mind as he wrote his poem, but I don’t know if he ever wrote about the genesis of this sonnet. And luckily for most readers (and listeners today) you don’t need to know any of that. After a description of desolation of nations, I think the image of two or more hermits, ascetics living naked in snow and ice shelters in famously remote places stands as an image of the other-worldly mystic surviving with nothing but belief and the knowledge that the world’s disasters are part of some reoccurring process driven by human greed for power and wealth. Is this removed survival our fall-back in today’s world of raging authoritarians, blinded in their ravening?

And once more, I suspect the aged Yeats was thinking of his own age, of the rising of fascist authoritarians then, not just specifics of Theosophy — as a poet, one uses the images in one’s cupboard. This aged singer certainly thinks of those men and the desolation they cause as I sing Yeats poem this month. The poem ends — and I refrain on this — with a twist on the old saw: “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” Chillingly, naked in the snow, Yeats has as his dawn consolations that all tyrants (and alas, all mankind’s) glory and monuments are gone.****

Is this fate? Is this prophecy? Is this inevitable? I’m no Ascended Master — if you are, you tell me. I’m just a composer drafted by words and asked to sing them. But I promised I’d come back to the “manifold illusion” of peace, of some sustainable rule without unleashed tyranny. “Man’s life is thought” the poem said. A diverted American poet turned President once spoke of a conception, a particular manifold illusion, imagined on: “Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” If enough believe, the mage’s trick works. I’d rather it be a kind trick.

You can hear my musical performance of Yeats’ “Meru”  with the audio player gadget below. Has the audio player become subject to the desolation of reality? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress it. This highlighted link will conjure up a new tab with it’s own audio player so you can hear it.

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*I’m not a Yeats scholar, and there are surely many who know more about the man and these political matters. While disappointing, I was not surprised to see he found some connections in fascistic groups, as trappings of cultural nationalism and nostalgia for some mythic past were widespread then, just as they remain in the fascistic nationalists now crowding under the aged wings of my country’s self-fancied mad king.

**Because of the later date of publication, this poem may not be in the Public Domain in the US, and this entirely non-commercial project almost always uses work in that class out of respect for author’s rights. I’m making an exception here out of a renewed commitment to civic poetry in the current world.

***Here’s more info on Theosophy if you want to wade in deeper. Having had some interest in esoteric beliefs as a young person, I carried some knowledge of it as I encountered this poem. As the Wiki article points out, Theosophy continues to influence various “New Age” ideas, but I’m not a believer.

****Some readers of the poem hold the “His” in the last line to be a godhead. I’m not sure why that would be. Could it be the then traditional capitol letter at the beginning of the poetic line leads to that reading? Or is it some element of Theosophical mythology? There’s another, non-cap, “his” in the poem, and I read that pronoun, along with its partner, to refer to elements of mankind.