The Tower by W.B.Yeats: An Analytical & Critical View

The Tower

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

 I

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail? 
Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fanatical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible—

No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back

And had the livelong summer day to spend.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

  II

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once

When every silver candlestick or sconce

Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,

A serving-man, that could divine

That most respected lady’s every wish,

Ran and with the garden shears

Clipped an insolent farmer’s ears

And brought them in a little covered dish.

Some few remembered still when I was young

A peasant girl commended by a song,

Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,

And praised the color of her face, 

And had the greater joy in praising her,

Remembering that, if walked she there,

Farmers jostled at the fair

So great a glory did the song confer.

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,

Or else by toasting her a score of times,

Rose from the table and declared it right

To test their fancy by their sight;

But they mistook the brightness of the moon

For the prosaic light of day—

Music had driven their wits astray—

And one was drowned in the great bog of Clone.

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;

Yet, now I have considered it, I find

That nothing strange; the tragedy began

With Homer that was a blind man,

And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.

O may the moon and sunlight seem

One inextricable beam,

For if I triumph I must make men mad.

And I myself created Hanrahan

And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn

From somewhere in the neighboring cottages.

Caught by an old man’s juggleries

He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro

And had but broken knees for hire

And horrible splendor of desire;

I thought it all out twenty years ago:

Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was on

He so bewitched the cards under his thumb

That all but the one card became

A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,

And that he changed into a hare.

Hanrahan rose in frenzy there

And followed up those baying creatures towards—

O towards I have forgotten what—enough!

I must recall a man that neither love

Nor music nor an enemy’s clipped ear

Could, he was so harried, cheer;

A figure that has grown so fabulous

There’s not a neighbour left to say

When he finished his dog’s day:

An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

Before that ruin came, for centuries, 

Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees

Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs, 

And certain men-at-arms there were

Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,

Come with loud cry and panting breast

To break upon a sleeper’s rest

While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

As I would question all, come all who can;

Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;

And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;

The red man the juggler sent

Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,

Gifted with so fine an ear;

The man drowned in a bog’s mire,

When mocking Muses chose the country wench.

Did all old men and women, rich and poor,

Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

Whether in public or in secret rage

As I do now against old age?

But I have found an answer in those eyes

That are impatient to be gone;

Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,

For I need all his mighty memories.

Old lecher with a love on every wind,

Bring up out of that deep considering mind

All that you have discovered in the grave,

For it is certain that you have 

Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing

Plunge, lured by a softening eye,

Or by a touch or a sigh,

Into the labyrinth of another’s being;

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

  III

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were 

Bound neither to Cause nor to State, 

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse—

Pride, like that of the morn, 

When the headlong light is loose,

Or that of the fabulous horn,

Or that of the sudden shower

When all streams are dry,

Or that of the hour

When the swan must fix his eye

Upon a fading gleam,

Float out upon a long

Last reach of glittering stream 

And there sing his last song.

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus’ thought

And cry in Plato’s teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul, 

Aye, sun and moon and star, all, 

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise, 

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

And the proud stones of Greece,

Poet’s imaginings

And memories of love,

Memories of the words of women,

All those things whereof

Man makes a superhuman

Mirror-resembling dream.

As at the loophole there

The daws chatter and scream,

And drop twigs layer upon layer.

When they have mounted up, 

The mother bird will rest

On their hollow top,

And so warm her wild nest.

I leave both faith and pride

To young upstanding men

Climbing the mountain-side,

That under bursting dawn

They may drop a fly;

Being of that metal made

Till it was broken by

This sedentary trade.

Now shall I make my soul, 

Compelling it to study 

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body, 

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky 

When the horizon fades, 

Or a bird’s sleepy cry 

Among the deepening shades.

Analytical View:
“The Tower” is one of the longest poems written by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It was written in 1926 and was the title poem of the collection that he published in 1928.

The tower in question is that of Thoor Ballylee in County Galway. It is a typical Irish square castle tower (built around 1500) that Yeats bought in 1916 and restored over several years. It was his summer home until 1929. It was also the first property that he had ever owned outright.

Yeats had turned 60 when he wrote “The Tower”. He was aware that he is getting older and that his health was beginning to fail. He was therefore moved to take stock of his life. The tower, with its long history and associations with past legends, symbolized the passing of time and gave rise to thoughts about how people in the past had dealt with the approach of old age.

The first section of the poem’s three sections comprises 17 lines. In them, Yeats considers the “absurdity” that is “decrepit age”. He feels that his mind is as active as ever (“Never had I more/Excited, passionate, fantastical/Imagination, nor an ear and eye/That more expected the impossible”), but his body is not as nimble as when he was a boy climbing the local mountain with “the livelong summer day to spend”. The reference to his “troubled heart” can be taken, for once, as a literal rather than a poetic one. The alternative, he feels, is that poetry must be abandoned (“I must bid the Muse go pack”) in favor of the consolations of philosophy (as represented by Plato and Plotinus). Imagination, ear and eye will have to be “content with argument”.

The second section is much longer, comprising thirteen eight-line stanzas with an AABBCDDC rhyme scheme (although a number of the rhymes are half-rhymes). As he walks on the battlements at the top of his tower, Yeats chooses to use imagination as a tool to seek out the past and “call/Images and memories/From ruin or from ancient trees”, because he wants to pose a question to some of the people who once lived in the neighborhood and whose spirits still seem to haunt the place. He takes time to tell a few of their stories before asking his question.

First there is Mrs French, who sent her serving-man to cut off the ears of a farmer who had been insolent to her. The ears were presented to her in “a little covered dish”. Then there is the story of the men who, after a night of drinking and singing, resolved to “test their fancy” for a local peasant girl by going to find her but they fell into the local bog, where one of them was drowned.

This second story had come from a song written by Anthony Raftery (1784-1834) who, as a blind poet, was, to Yeats’s mind, Ireland’s equivalent of Homer, “that was a blind man”. Yeats is thus prompted to compare the peasant girl with Helen of Troy in her ability to drive men mad with desire and lead them to their doom. Although he does not make the link directly in the poem, Yeats is clearly thinking about the unrequited love of his own life, namely that for Maud Gonne, whom he had pursued for many years without success and who he had often compared with Helen of Troy (as in his earlier poem “No Second Troy”).

Yeats next recalls a character that he had invented himself in a series of short stories entitled “The Secret Rose” (1897). This is “Red Hanrahan”, a country poet, who was able to perform feats of magic. Yeats repeats one of his stories for two stanzas of “The Tower”, but then breaks off to bring in “A figure that has grown so fabulous …”, namely a former owner of Thoor Ballylee who went bankrupt. This then prompts Yeats to mention all the previous men-at-arms who had garrisoned the tower in past centuries.

After a stanza (the tenth of the second section) that summarizes all these characters, Yeats ask the question at which he had hinted earlier, which is whether they did: “… in public or in secret rage/As I do now against old age?” However, he then dismisses all the “real” characters and only asks that Hanrahan stays behind, he being the poet that only existed in Yeats’s own imagination.

Yeats has another question for Hanrahan, which is: “Does the imagination dwell the most/Upon a woman won or woman lost?” Clearly Yeats has Maud Gonne in mind as his “woman lost” and, by invoking the spirit of his own invented character, it is his own memories and imagination that he is calling upon to answer the question. His conclusion, at the end of this section of the poem, is that such a memory can only result in: “the sun/Under eclipse and the day blotted out”.

The third section has a very different character to the preceding section, in that it comprises four stanzas of different lengths (respectively 45, 7, 8 and 15 lines), the lines being short and half-rhymes being much more common than full ones. The pace therefore picks up as Yeats makes up his mind and declares his intentions unequivocally and boldly. This section is possibly one of the finest passages that Yeats wrote in his later poems. The words tumble out as Yeats makes it crystal clear that he will always place poetry above philosophy. He begins by stating that: “It is time that I wrote my will”, and the first thing he wishes to bequeath is his pride, which he had inherited from people who were bound: “Neither to slaves that were spat on, Nor to the tyrants who spat”. His inheritance is from people who were not afraid to speak their mind in the cause of freedom, and he mentions two Irish politicians from a previous age (Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan) whom he admires for that reason.

Yeats declares that his inheritors will be: “…upstanding men/That climb the streams until/The fountain leap …”. In other words, they will be another generation of people just like he was when young, as these lines echo those at the start of the poem about his explorations as a young boy on the mountain of Ben Bulben. Having previously wondered about devoting his last years to the study of Plato and Plotinus, Yeats now declares his faith: “I mock Plotinus’ thought/And cry in Plato’s teeth”. It is through constructing systems of thought that man has: “Made lock, stock and barrel/Out of his bitter soul”. Far better, says Yeats, for “Poet’s imaginings/And memories of love” to be the building blocks for “… a superhuman/Mirror-resembling dream”. He likens all the memories that the poet accumulates through life to the sticks laid by jackdaws as they build their nests outside the tower. Each is insignificant by itself, but together they form the cradle in which new life can be created.

However, Yeats is also clear that he is passing on this inheritance of faith and pride to a new generation. His own future may be limited to “study/In a learned school” due to “the wreck of body”. There is no need for rage, as hinted at earlier, because the “young upstanding men” will carry on where he is forced to leave off. He is content, as the poem’s last lines say, to let the process of aging take its course until he is no more than: “a bird’s sleepy cry/Among the deepening shades.”

As stated earlier, this is a long poem that has many facets to it. There is much to be gleaned from it over several readings and it has many memorable and well-crafted lines. It is a poem that entertains as well as posing questions and suggesting answers.

Critical View:

In this extract from "The Tower":

  II

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

It is not easy to classify Yeats in poetry because he is a modern poet but not modernist, symbolist or imagist. The subject matter upon which all poets work is the same, and it is not different from our subject matter. We are living in the same world and dealing with the same materials. The difference between one poet and the other is the same difference that exists between all poets and ourselves. The difference is that one poet looks at subject matter as representation of a unified universe and others (Yeats) as being separated. In Yeats the existence is a dual existence. In his book "The Tower," which included such famous lyrics as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," the most representative emblem of fire is hell. 

Line 3: "Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth:" According to Yeats, art is a not a deliberate creation but it is a creation. It is not spontaneous, it is an art and not feelings. Art is not equal to feelings, it is creation. A poet can not say that he is going to write a poem, but he has to evoke feelings and this has to be created and worked for. It is not the automatic outcome of feelings though it is not deliberate. When he says not deliberate, he does not mean spontaneous. It is not the feeling but the creative model from which these feelings are made. So, poetry is a creation but not deliberate nor spontaneous as William Wordsworth believes (spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings). It is the creation of intense feelings, the target of poetry has to be emotional. Yeats says in a letter to a friend: "I have no speech, I have symbols". Speech is common but creative ability is not, it is characteristic of artists. A poet should have the ability to create intense feelings in his poem, so the emphasis or criterion is the model and not the feeling. Hence, when Yeats says "Sooty fingers," the implication is black. However, "Starts, call, and sends," are forceful verbs which are being used in a row. Sooty implies that the finger is coming from hell. "Sooty finger, starts from the earth:" he is creating a complete movement. Dual conception of the universe (hell & earth) and (day & declining beam). When he mentioned tree twice, he dropped the definite or indefinite articles (he didn't say a tree or the tree) as if the tree has become a noun, he adds a personal quality to the tree, he is giving it life.  

Line 4: "And send imagination forth:" This line is an elaboration of the previous one. He is saying that there is no subject which is poetical. Poets bring over subjects which they think are poetical and use them whenever they write poetry. William Wordsworth has touched on the issue when he spoke of poetic language. Poets borrowed the terms which were functional, but the time has changed; what was functional is no more functional nowadays. So, Yeats couldn't believe in inherently poetical things or else poetry would cease to be a creation. There is no inherently poetical things, a poet has to modify and create. 

The lines of  this poem have sound unity but the rhythm and sense overruns this unity. 

         Or where ------>  and call 

         Tree like ------>  Images and memories

The most distinctive feature of the poem in so far as the superficial surface structure of the poem is that we have couplet form. The couplet form here is modified because here we have a sound unity but not a sense unity. The form is inherited but modified. Here the regular Iambic pattern is not found. The form is the way a poet feels and thinks. Yeats is using the couplet form, but he thinks and feels in a different way than Dryden and Pope because the target of poetry changed from what it was before. 

A Vision by William Butler Yeats: Critical View

In her book the Unicorn Virginia Moore says: "To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, being or persons which die each other's life, live each other's death, that is true of life and death themselves." She also says: "The acts and nature of spirit during anyone life are a section or abstraction of reality and are unhappy because incomplete. They are gyres or part of a gyre where as reality is a sphere." Another critical view on classifying poetry, in the book 'First Principle' written in 1904, states: "Art, in its highest moments, is not a deliberate creation, but the creation of intense feeling." In addition, Arthur Symons says: "The error of late periods like this is to believe that some things are inherently poetical, and pull them on to scene at every moment. It is just these seeming inherent poetical things that wear out."

There is no one track view in poetry. Regardless of the fact that critics classify poetry, there are only two classifications: good and bad. Yeats represents a case standing on its own. He wrote in the 20th century. He is modern but not a modernist; he is not a symbolist or imagist. Yeats is coming from a wide extensive background of poetry, and he represents a track for which there was no taste. He did not create the taste upon which he could be followed or judged. Yeats is appreciated and to understand his poetry, one has to exert an effort. So, he has his own philosophy and every poet is a philosopher and thinker, but he has to leave his philosophy outside his poetry. When you start writing, you are a poet. Therefore, Yeats is a very particular poet, a particular character as a poet indeed.

The requirements of poetry are very different, could Yeats fulfill these requirements being a particular poet?

If we speak of rhythm in good poetry, it is not enough to observe rhythm because anyone could write poetry with rhythm and not be a good poet. The criterion in good poetry is that the reader should be patterned by the music of the words. If the poet achieves this, then he would be a good poet. In reading a good poem you would be oriented, however being sustained by a bad poet you cannot be patterned by his rhythm. Pattern is a product of the movement of a verse. Music is an achievement in language. Yeats is complicated and in order to clear this complication you have to look into his philosophy and his particular thought. He invents words and concepts which are his own, so we have to have a particular knowledge in order to study him (Ex: Perne in gyre).  

Yeats says in a letter to a friend: I have no speech, I have symbols. Most of his symbolism is subjective symbolism because elsewhere symbolism to a great extent has to do with the objectivity. A symbol in Yeats' poetry is subjective. In his book "A Vision" there is terminology which we do not know, he invents words that stand for conceptions. He presents new terminology and conception. For example, a gyre would be a chain of circles, like a spiral spring. If we look down at them from above, we would see one circle. The circle represents the moon. In this book there is two moons and has  twenty eight phases standing for the inexorable cyclic movement of history that determines all that happens. Each phase represents a period in history, and it is dominated by a certain civilization and its own myths. Therefore, each phase stands for one complete civilization (rise and fall of it). To these phases there is a beginning and an end. The end is a new beginning and not an end. There is the new moon represents the beginning of phases and the full moon represents the end of phases. For example, according to Yeats, the present cycle of history has started with birth of Jesus Christ and it will last till the year 2000. This explain his conception of duality. His world is build on a dual conception (something and its opposite) this is the world of Yeats on which he built his poetry. Unless one has passed through the two phases he would not have lived his complete life. Death is another life it is not an enemy. The cycle is made of 2000 years. Death is not the end. By necessity, one's life is unhappy because it is incomplete. His philosophy is not standardized. The polarities of his poetry are subjectivity and objectivity. His attitude towards poetry should affect the structural level of his poetry. Yeats was for a pattern in world and in poetry, he was against the free verse medium where there is neither a pattern nor structural rhythm.

Therefore, Yeats had fulfilled one condition which is he is a philosopher, there is philosophy in his poetry and this is an obstacle to the reader. He created poetry, but he didn't create the taste. What comes with this philosophical movement, leads to another philosophical notion: The repeating notion of life and death moving in a parallel line with the cyclic movement. History moves in phases and cycles following the full moon and the moon. The axis of his poetry is set on this conception of duality and coexistence: existence of life, there is death; existence of body, there is spirit. Others have found a still point. However, the basic structure of his poetry is build on a dual structure of two opposites "death" and "life". 

William Butler Yeats Poetry

Yeats, who started his artistic era as a Pre-Raphaelite, gained an ultimate reputation when he succeeded. Thanks to Pound in developing rather than unleashing his poetic gifts and approximating the threshold of modernism. Yeats, who was viewed as a survivor of the romantic age, made his poems harsher and more outspoke, adopting an extraordinary directness and a subtle clarity, and striving hardly to represent a new kind of poetry that has the virtues of good prose. Thus, the vagueness as well as the eccentric mysteries of the past were dismissed to be replaced by the favorable concreteness of the new age.

It's worth noting that Yeats's poetry has the advantages as well as the features of symbolism simply because it sought to capture reality itself rather than an interpretation of it. In his poetry the sensuous emphasis fell more upon the ear than the eye, a music which casts the feeling inward declaring an instantaneous verbal rather semi-musical event. In other words, Yeats's poems delivered succession of deeply interwoven sounds that has the ultimate ability to provoke the readers imagination, and therefore allowing at the same time an overflowing of passionate feelings. Yeats's symbolist poems reflect too much glamour and too much beauty for beauty's sake where aesthetic features arises in its ultimate intensity declaring the presence of transcendental poetic gifts. Thus, symbols in Yeats's poetry existed to suggest, to evoke, to stimulate imagination and to arouse emotion, but not at all to stand as symbols in allegory that only denote something particular of abstract nature.

Evidently, "The new Yeats", as Pound preferred to call him, revolted to certain extent against the enormous hindering restraints that prevented the poet from projecting his poetic experiences without being deformed or mutilated by superficial rather artificial devices. He strived hardly to get rid of the old-fashioned rhetorical techniques which are the fertile soil of bombastic style and unnecessary euphemism. Yeats also dismissed the theory of poetic diction trying hard to strip away everything that was artificial, to get a style like daily speech, as simple as the simplest prose. In fact, Yeats whole endeavor was to prove in a way or another that the ordinary speech is the best medium that suits poetic purpose. Therefore, his poetry was no more sophisticated or complex than any simple conversation.

A very large past of Yeats's problem in making the change to his later rather modern style, was that he set himself almost impossible tests simply because they were conflicting and contradicting. He planned at the same time to rid his poetry of every poetic artificiality of syntax and diction, making the normal words and the word-order of accustomed spoken English the controlling measure of his style which it should always return. On the other hand, Yeats was not by any means ready for the usage of the open form, for he did not want an apparently low style of the kind found in many of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads. He was bound to the restrictions of meter and rhyme scheme patterns depriving himself from the open and free form, which was developing by Pound who had a wide range of musical and metrical possibilities, that would always appeal to his instinct. 

As a matter of fact, Yeats's poems were mostly viewed as the works of a master-craftsman, a thing of beauty. He was always obsessed by a necessary quality that functions as a distinction from the practice of prose. Therefore, the rhyme scheme pattern is, always, regular and the metric rhythm rarely strays from the iambic pentameter. Yeats was considered 'the greatest minor poet who ever lived', for he was able to evolve his own poetical gifts as well as style. His endless subjectivity and  all his attempts to be poetic in some manner or other defeat their own end. Yeats could be only considered as a mere practitioner in the field of modernism. His enslavement to fixed forms and moods make him imprisoned in an earlier time. Hence, he could not 'make it new', but most important of all he could not produce what the present age called for.

The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Ezra pound

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me.  I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

   As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

This letter was published in 1915 in Pound's third edition of poetry. According to Pound, any great poet should be a philosopher, there is no great poet ever without being a thinkable provider while writing poetry. The poetry should leave philosophy out of this process. However, according to T.S. Eliot: "Any poet should know at least his national heritage add to it world heritage from Homer down to his own age, without having an attitude towards life how could a poet rewrite that life."

This poem seems to have a superficial structure. This is one advantage that can be given to Ezra Pound. When we read the poem, we sense the conversational rhythm found in that poem. The poem superficially in structure is an address from a wife to her husband. By nature, the grounds on which the language should be built should be conformed by a conversational language based on common speech rhythm. The poem has a very complex complicated structure.

The major ingredients of this structure would be:

1) The 'I' is of the speaker of the poem whom is the wife writing the letter, and the 'you' is of the husband of the wife.

2) It is made up of 5 parts: they aren't divided according to symmetrical pattern.
    Part 1 is made up of 6 lines    
    Parts 2-3-4 is made up of 4 lines
    Part 5 is made up of 11 lines

The sum would be 29 lines.

3) This is functional and not a random pattern in the poem; it enhances the complexity of the poem.    Each line starts with a capital letter, grammatically speaking syntactically. The capital letter after line 3 'You' complies with the grammar after the full stop. Grammar doesn't justify this but poetry does. Therefore, the line is not a sentence structure, but it has a poetical structure.

Chokan-Ku To Yen-Kiang

Those are terms made in the 8th century by philolosa; the presence of those Japanese (Haiku) is relevant in the poem. The function is poetical and historical at the same time. I believe that the presence of them shows that Pound is writing through what I call in poetry the historical masks. He is writing in history. If he didn't use those Japanese words, he would lose the traditional conception and the fact that there is a chronological break through the notion in the poem. He is placing the entire tradition of 20th century taking him back. The tradition is alive. The response to the world is one and this is what links the human race.

There is inside the stanzas different length of lines, the poem has to be written in the free verse because of the complication. The complexity can't sustain in a couplet form medium the Iambic pentameter, then the poem is a complex complicated structure. Though the title of the poem is written between 2 poles 'I' and 'You', the 'I' coincides with the 'I' of the poem. However, the 'You' is the you of the husband, and it can be the you of a reader, the circle is completed, the readers are included in the poem. There is a centered image i.e the 6 lines rotate around one period in the life of the 'I' of the poem. The image of the little girl who is addressing the 'You' in the poem and the reader. The entire period between the original poem written by philolosa, is a point of radiation in the poem. Chokan use in the 8th century and Pound use in the 20th century indicates that the human response of whatever feeling is one. There is love, emotion and separation centered in one image. The girl is sending a message to the 'You' and this is definite emotion which is expressed in the lines. This is the direct treatment and direct presentation used by Pound in the poem. Chokan is the chronological break through the very bridging of the gap between time of philolosa and Pound. The human race is one, this should be expressed in poetry which is the emotion of all race, language is no more a tool but a medium because through them the poet, reader and 'you' work. What the poet thinks? What the reader gets from the poem has to be different from the poet? What the reader thinks is more valid than what the poet thinks?

Part 1: The language is very close from conversational language and the rhythm is of a common speech. An image is generating another without linking devices. This is why he used the capital letter because if he uses linking devices there is no capital, and it would be related to the object; thus, there is a succession of imagery and this is through association. When he wrote part 1, he used addition in the 5th line "And we went on living in the village of Chokan, so marriage is done. He is using clarity in his language without using much words at the expense of the central image in part 1.

Part 2: A simple image resulting in a complex complicated emotion. Each line is functioning on the same square image because there is a definite emotion created. He created a very definite rage, he has to release all energy through one simple image. The total effect of this part as being a part of the entire emotion of the poem is a very close link tightening created between the 'I' of the wife and the 'You' of the husband. This kind of relation couldn't afford any separation. He is focusing and releasing through a simple image that is the link is very solid. In part 2 the separation would be very difficult to them because of the link between them. In addition, there is a distribution in spaces of time. She is a narrow sighted person in the positive sense. She didn't know anything else. The tight was very close and solid in the letter addressed by the 'You' in the poem. The "Wall" could indicate punishment and limitation to whatever she would know. I never looked back without any repentance, one direction without a return, he is releasing the maximum energy through this part.

Part 3: It starts with the age of 15. In part 1 he invoked Chokan that the gap of time is bridged. "I desired my dust to be mingled with yours," he is invoking oriental civilization; they used to burn dead people in India. What is complex is that he is invoking oriental civilization (India) then the sentiments are one, emotion of love-separation. Technically speaking, he didn't want orient or Indian, the complex of this incarnation is being achieved. It invokes civil relying on device by which he relies on common speech. He didn't resort to diction; he is still dealing with common language. It is complex because it is built on the music of common speech. Once more he is bridging the gap not through exotic name but by the language of common men in common life. He relied on the rhythm of common life. He relied on the rhythm of common speech not resort to the language of dictionary, grammar and thematic diction. The 2 lines have nothing to do with each other. An emotion is released through the centering of succession; imagery relies on the rhythm of common speech.

In part 2-3-4 there is same linking devices. "At" those are key lines of consequence of part 1.

Part 4: The effort is exerted on the emotion of love that existed between 'I' and 'You' of the poem, so departure would result in great suffer: at 14-15 solid love and the departure. The function of center image part is revealed by Ezra Pound. Far to Chokan, a chronological break to the past. There is a wavering movement from the present to the past. History is crystalized, dead, while tradition is not; it is always alive. As in "Ku To Yen" when there is a past what is important in the past is its presentness. Then the past and the present should have in poetry a simultaneous existence and order, and they must have the same level of existence. Pound wanted to say that Europe civilization is not the only valid civilization, there are other civilizations which are as valid as Europe.

Present and past:

1) There is the present conscience of the past.

2) They exist in poetry on same levels.

3) They have the same order.

Part 5: The first three lines of this final 11-line stanza are centered on the image of the river-merchant's absence. Line 19 indicates that he was as averse to this separation as she was. In line 20 the phrase "by the gate" (perhaps the same gate they played about as children), indicates that she has returned to this gate and in her memory sees him reluctantly leaving again. For her it is the scene of the beginning of his absence. And evidently she knows this scene well: not only is there moss growing there, but she is aware that there are different kinds of mosses, which she has not cleared away since his departure. They are now too deep to clear away. In line 22 the sadness of the river-merchant's wife is again reflected back to her by the natural world, by the falling leaves and wind of autumn. This image becomes more defined with her observation of the butterflies in the garden, for they are "paired" as she is not, and they are becoming "yellow" changing with the season, growing older together. The butterflies "hurt" her because they emphasize the pain of her realization that she is growing older, but alone, not with her husband. Lines 26-29, in these closing lines of the poem and the "letter" the river-merchant's wife reaches out from her lonely world of sorrow to her husband in a direct request: Please let me know when and by what route you are returning, so that I may come to meet you. This, however, conveys more than it would at first appear. Her village is a suburb of Nanking and she is willing to walk to a beach several hundred miles upstream from there to meet her husband, so deeply does she yearn to close the distance between them.

"One major theory in poetry says that poetry cannot be translated because if words in poetry have no referential meaning how could those words be transposed from one medium to the other without blasting their basic ingredients. For example, if words in poetry were referential, their reference could be translated from one language to the other, but if a word initiate another meaning, not in it, how could its combination convey into another meaning."

This is not the attitude of Pound, he believes that for him a symbol can be translated into another language because in translation the symbol can gain the heritage found in difference of time. When the symbol is written, and it is translated, words are not referential. In translation, this symbol could gain from the difference in time and culture (8th till 20th century chronological break down-Japanese to English). From this transposition and in culture the symbol does gain its importance. He believes in the present awareness of the past. The past does surpass the English heritage. A validity is not found in the European language he is using, but it is found outside this heritage.

There is an introspection into the presentness of the past because he thinks that the human race is one emotion and not personal. He doesn't believe in the personality of the poet but poets have medium for their persons. Each part has image centered, 5 parts, 5 stages. The rhythmic movement of sounds are very important in the poem.

Part I: represents one emotional state between wife and husband.

Part II: the structure represents another stage.

Part III: Spencer in 'Prothalamian' said in the 16th century "The nymphs have departed." Pound brings in the poem the entire Renaissance period because 'Prothalamian' was written in the Renaissance. The nymphs are usually innocent creatures, so he implies that the days of innocence have departed. Collision of parties departed, recall nymphs and innocence. Therefore, he translated same language, same civilization evoking same atmosphere found in Spencer "Prothalamian" through implications and annunciation as if the golden age has departed (Nymphs departed) in order to create the ambiguous tension of the poem. He is using the same structure of Spencer not only words, so by this departure many things have departed. He is transforming an atmosphere in his poem.

Part IV: I believe poetry is a source of inspired mathematics. The difference between both are scientific and objective. The only difference is that mathematics results in abstract equation where as poetry results in objective correlation standing in the human equation.

Part V: Moss ...... place is deserted, rust: he used all annunciation in one image. Good poetry should be able to say much more than prose. Instead of causing pleasure, the butterflies hurt him. A sequence of imagery, once more it is image centered moss, decay, rotten. The "I grow older" (climax) is an emotional statement. Five months-too deep-older, with a rhythm that is built on common speech this justifies the difference-length of the lives, each life calls the rhythm of the speaking voice. No systematic rhythmic but a wavering rhythm following the speaking lives who represent the human emotion, feelings of love and separation. This sequence of imagery leads to this intensified emotion. The gap of time-distance-geography is narrowed down immediately after the intensified emotional statement. 

Ronald Bush Says:
About the poem that Pound called "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter," Fenollosa's Professor Mori remarked that it beautifully presents the wife's unspoken feeling "not logical or straight but trailing here and there." Few of us, I think, would disagree. Which only makes more interesting the fact that Pound, maintaining the beautiful indirection of the poem, transformed its subject. As a Sinologist has recently pointed out, the river merchant of the poem would have been understood by Li Po's contemporary readers as the poet himself, and the poem read as "a love-poem to his wife but written as if from her to him, which was a common Chinese practice at the time." The implied emotional drama of the poem, therefore, is one of love maturing before our eyes. The wife remembers herself as a little girl, recalls a time when she entered into an arranged marriage without much feeling, and then, spurred by the pain her husband's departure has provoked, slowly realizes how much she cares for him. Li Po's poem swells to maximum feeing twice. At its center, moved by the river merchant's prolonged absence, the wife recalls her fifteenth year, when she realized what love was and first desired her "dust to be mingled with" his, "forever and forever and forever." Then at the end of the poem she dreams of his returning and achieves a poignant reunion by traveling a considerable distance in her imagination to meet him halfway.

In Pound's hands, this poem becomes a dark reflection of its Chinese self and a recognizable cousin to the poems of blocked expression in the suite around it. Recalling Mori's remark that the wife belatedly discovers her own 'ignorance' after her husband leaves home, Pound tuned his ear to a line near the beginning of the poem in which the wife recognizes that she and her lord were once "Two small people, without dislike or suspicion"—a line that unmistakably announces those feelings have arrived. The emotional curve Pound conveys is accordingly more complicated and more problematic than Li Po's. In Pound's poem, to affirm her love for her husband (that is, to deliver her letter), the wife must overcome not only the miles between them but also her own fugitive feelings of betrayal. Consequently, near the beginning of her monologue we detect nostalgia not only for the time when she first met her husband, but for an innocence before and beyond that, for a time when she was a child and her hair was "still cut straight across [her] forehead." The word "still" here is Pound's invention and not Li Po's. In Fenollosa's notes, as in his Chinese original, the line reads: when her hair was "first" cut across her forehead, and speaks of a cheerful memory of the beginning of youth. In Pound's version it implies a world of disappointment in what has followed.

In "The River-Merchant's Wife," moreover, this is only the first hint of suppressed ambivalence. Another involves the wife's worries about the route her husband must take on this journey home. In Fenollosa, the wife thinks of him passing through a notoriously dangerous group of river narrows. In "The River-Merchant's Wife," the same narrows become more figure than fact. Beyond worrying about her husband's return, Pound's wife reveals reservations about whether her domestic happiness will ever be restored, and she telescopes the river narrows with the dark passages of her heart. In her unfolding vision, the merchant passes through a "river of swirling eddies" of her own conflicted feelings to a region where monkeys echo her own sorrow, only to then negotiate his return through the "narrows" of her suspicion. At that point, though, the completed fellow feeling figured by his return seems as unlikely as the possibility in "South-Folk in Cold Country" that China might acknowledge a fallen hero. Li Po's poem had ended with the wife crying out that she does not care about the great distance, she will travel to meet him to far Cho-fu-sa. But Pound deliberately alters what he found in Fenollosa and allows his syntax to overpower a geography none of his readers would be likely to guess. Fenollosa had translated the poem's last lines "For I will go out to meet [you], not caring that the way be far. / And will directly come to Chofusa." Pound, shifting the feeling, has his wife aver that if her husband lets her know beforehand, she will come out to meet him "as far as Cho-Fu-Sa," with the implication (it is the culmination of her ambivalence) that she will come so far and no farther.