348
FRANK KERMODE
order; justice is the human order we find or impose upon
it.
The
System
is
in fact all Justice; in combination with a sense of reality
which has nothing whatever to do with it, it became a constituent of
poems. The System is a plot, a purely human projection, though not
more human than its apparent antithesis, reality, which is a human
imagining of the inhuman. For a moment, in that expression, Yeats
saw himself as an emperor dispensing equity, transcending both the
fact and the pattern; it is what poets do. Only rarely did he forget
that whatever devotes itself to justice at the expense of reality, is finally
self-destructive. He might talk about the differences between the
symbolic meanings of poetry and those "emotional restless mimicries
of the surface of life" which were for him the characteristics of "popu–
lar realism," but he understood very well the need for that "moral
element in poetry" which
is
"the means whereby" it is "accepted into
the social order and becomes a part of life." He understands the ten–
sion between a paradigmatic order where the price of a formal eternity
is
inhumanity, and the world of the dying generations; that is the
subject of "Sailing to Byzantium." He was talking about this tension
again in one of his last poems, when he distinguished between "Players
and painted stage"-the justice of formal poems-and "the foul rag–
and-bone shop of the heart"-the human dirt and disorder that
underlies them. The whole history of Yeats's style, which from the
earliest times, before the turn of the century, he was trying to move
towards colloquial uncertainty, reflects this regard for the reality that
will not be reduced. In the end this modernism took on characteristic
colors of violence, a sexual toughness and slang to represent what
Yeats took to be a modern reality. In his
Oxford Book
he envied the
ease with which other poets were modern, and overvalued them in
consequence, perhaps not seeing that they dispensed too readily with
justice.
In short, one can say that this poet labored to speak in terms
of a modern reality, to save the phenomena, without forfeiting the
use of the paradigm. He did not always succeed; we are surely losing
the power to be charmed by the dry paradigmatic rant of such poems
as "Under Ben Bulben." What interests us is, very often, the effort
itself. Yeats was deeply committed to his idea of alienation, and his
conscious solution of the problems it set was a retreat to myth and to
