APOCALYPSE
347
of the decadence of the times and the myths of
ma'Uvaise foi.
All, in
different ways, venerated tradition and had programs which were at
once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly
made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood
was eschatological, but skepticism and a refined traditionalism held in
check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was
elsewhere that the myths ran riot.
Let us look once more at Yeats. At bottom, he was skeptical
about the nonsense with which he satisfied what we can call his lust
for commitment. Now and again he believed some of it, but in so
far as his true commitment was to poetry he recognized his fictions as
heuristic and dispensable, "consciously false." "They give me meta–
phors for poetry," he noted. The dolls and the amulets, the swords
and the systems, were the tools of an operationalist. Yeats was always
concerned that what made sense to him in terms of the system should
make sense to others who shared with him not that arbitrary cipher–
system but the traditional language of poetry. In this way he managed,
sometimes at any rate, to have his cake and to eat it. The rough beast
of the apocalyptic "Second Coming," and the spiraling falcon of the
same poem, mean something in the system, but for the uninstructed
reader they continue to mean something in terms of a broader system
of cultural and linguistic conventions-the shared information codes
upon which literature, like any other method of communication,
depends. So too in the later plays, which analytic criticism tells us
are very systematic, but which Yeats himself declared must conceal
their esoteric substance and sound like old songs. So too with the
Byzantium poems, and the Supernatural Songs; even a poem like "The
Statues," which contains notions that are bound to seem inexplicably
strange to one who knows nothing of Yeats's historical and art-his–
torical opinions, takes its place in our minds not as a text which codes
information more explicitly provided in
On the Boiler
but as one
which in some measure our reading of the other poems, and the
persona of the wild old man, can justify.
Yeats, in a famous phrase which has occasionally floated free of
its context, said that the System enabled him to hold together reality
and justice in a single thought. Reality is, in this expression, the sense
we have of a world irreducible to human plot and human desire for
