Ladders
The title to this series of articles comes from a poem by W.B. Yeats “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:
……………………..Now that my ladders gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart
It was published at the end of his life and it’s about a crisis and how to respond to it. The nature of the crisis is the failure of old ideas that had been relied upon (the circus animals which have deserted). It’s a recognition that ideas he had about himself and the world around him were not realistic, they were an illusion, he made them up. And now he has to start again.
What comes across very strongly in this poem (and much of Yeats’ writing) is the importance of pursuing the idea of how to live, constructing something (ladders), gaining a sense of competence.[i] And what’s significant here is the necessity of having to do that by first being somewhere you don’t want to be, looking at things you don’t want to see, confronting the idea of your own foulness.[ii]
And this, from Vacillation, is a description of a very different state of mind that Yeats experienced:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Two things to pick out here. One is that the mind shifts; nothing holds completely or for long (and Yeats loved dialectic, switching between unreconciled contrasts or opposites). The other is that the state of rapture he describes is to do with other people, the self and other people. It’s about him finding within himself a source of openness, generosity and affection (over suspicion, complaint, grievance and resentment). It’s about him being able to meet what’s outside his head (rather more than) halfway.[iii]
∞
Yeats found good ladders: he transformed himself from fey Celtic romantic to modernist master, Nobel laureate and Irish Senator, acquiring wealth and immense prestige along the way. And he found competence in his personal life, but he had to wait. There’s a reason all this is in the late poetry: Yeats had to work hard on his ladders. He had a fantastic capacity for silliness:[iv] this is a man who once proposed to a woman and then her daughter within the space of 12 months.
In his 50s he married for the first time and the marriage was very successful. Shortly after marrying, he bought a house and owned a home for the first time. And this is from the verse he inscribed in a slab on that home (a Norman tower in Galway):
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old millboards and sea-green slates
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower
For my wife George
Again, it’s about generosity and gratitude.[v] For the first time in his life he’s found enough of a sense of competence and peace of mind to be able to manage durable affection in intimacy. The situation holds enough, enough for a home, a successful marriage to become more possible.
And here’s the key, again (again, because it’s the foul rag and bone shop again). This time from Vacillation (the poem of rapture):
I cannot look thereon
Responsibility so weighs me down.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
In Vacillation, again, Yeats is describing building something, a system, working out what good is, making a ladder to climb up and out of a mess of anxiety, aggression and self-hate. And, for him, the key is remorse[vi] - confronting what you don’t want to look ‘thereon’, being able to be ‘appalled’ by what you find. And that’s because (whether Yeats had explicitly worked out the connection or not) from that there flow naturally the feelings of gratitude and generosity and affection he felt in a London shop and expressed in the lines to his wife that he put on the wall of their home.[vii]
He's not spelling it out in bullet points or a schematic, because it’s not a self-help book, but what Yeats is describing is a process of:
coming to terms with his own capacity for causing harm by being prepared to look hard enough at the idea of his own shittiness
to find some system of reconciliation (what he has done wrong and what he hasn’t) that works for him and can hold enough
so that he is able to engage with a sense of remorse that it’s possible to tolerate because it’s based on a realistic, proportionate stable enough sense of what he’s got wrong
and emerge, with a desire to put things right, to make good, into a more generous, reparative, grateful rapport with the world around him.
For Yeats there had always been the idea of ladders, the idea of doing better. What The Circus Animals’ Desertion is about is running out of road, reaching a point where the old ideas don’t work anymore – and nothing works for ever. He’s saying when you’re in trouble, when things aren’t working, when you’re hurting most, you have to be ready to go to the well again, to re-engage with the source. You have to be able to see enough of what you’re really dealing with, in yourself. You have to be able to come to terms with your own capacity for shittiness, again, in order to work out where you’re going wrong, so you can see what doing better would look like. You’ve got to be prepared to ‘lie down’ in it. Until then, not much can really happen.
Elitist, snobby, insecure and arrogant, needy, self-centred, vain, showy and self-deluded: Yeats was a bit of a tit. But that’s the point: he had to work at it.[viii] And he knew it: he never stopped taking seriously the idea of how to live well, how to do better. He’s an inspiring example in terms of his tenacity and determination and clarity of purpose and his intellectual discipline – his willingness to look. And in the end, he got there: he built a system of thought, a set of ideas about himself and the world around him that worked, for him, that held enough to allow him to move forward, to sustain relationships in a way he’d never managed before and find a stability, contentment and happiness that had always eluded him. And his facility with words was such that, along the way, he couldn’t help telling profound psychological truths exquisitely.
[i] Yeats’ temperament led him towards vocabulary like ‘mastering’ (e.g., a few lines earlier in The Circus Animals’ Desertion: ‘those masterful images because complete/grew in pure mind but out of what began?’ or ’So mastered by the brute blood of the air’ in Leda and the Swan) rather than ‘competence’ but, in terms of what it’s reacting to, it’s the same idea: the idea of incompetence, not being good enough: see https://jonathancoppin.substack.com/p/the-great-secret-shame-game
[iv] ‘You were silly like us; your gift survived it all’. In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden
[v] Never mind that actually most of the restoration funds initially came out of her money, the verse is expressing an impulse of appreciation and affection, a desire to do something for the other, to embrace what’s outside his head
[vi] In fact, this section of the poem was subtitled ‘Remorse’ when originally published.
[vii] An unthought, automatic process, no effort required: see 2 and 4 above