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WILLIAM H.
PRITCHARD
department always reserved particular scorn for this early poem and
insisted on saying "dre-ams" in a mournful tone and as a spondee. In
other words, many readers could well prefer the "sentiment"
and
the
"expression" of Middle to Early Yeats; it may be only Harold Bloom
who finds '''the rich lacquer [of
The Wind Among the Reeds]
protected
against time's decay," or indeed likes Early Yeats so much that he
often prefers the
really
early, unrevised versions of those poems.
The polemical habit is exhilarating and not always conducive to
keeping one's head. When combined with Bloom's particular historical
perspectivism it can add up to some bizarre effects, as when in his
commitment to some particular poem or style he casts about furiously
dealing death to others. He wants to praise "Adam's Curse" as a great
poem, an overstatement I would let pass, but in doing this he must go
on to insist parenthetically that "surely Yeats never wrote better,
though this was 1902." (Why incidentally is it not then a triumphant
vindication of Middle Yeats?) The point of the insistence is that
because Eliot had admired '''Adam's Curse" as the start of a new and
better Yeats, Bloom must reject that line of description by the Cowley
of our age. Which he does by staggering us with judgments that are
really forms of critical one-upmanship:
"The Madness of King Gall
is
a better poem than
The Gyres,
and
The Wanderings of Oisin
shows a
power of sustained invention that Yeats never demonstrated again."
Sent to the bottom of the class for having never properly appreciated
King Goll and Oisin we nevertheless wait for demonstration of the
fineness of "Adam's Curse." And now the polemicist retires and allows
the historical-perspectivist to take over: we are told that it is fine
because "Epipsychidion" is behind it, because it is in the conversational
style Shelley was so marvelous at, because it has much
spr.ezzatura
(a
word overused by academic critics these days), because finally, in the
culmination of Bloom's paraphrase,
Shelley's waning moon, assimilated to his sea-shell of Promethean
prophecy, comes to an end together with that prophecy, washed in
the breaking days and years of the unfathomable sea of Shelley's
brief lyric,
Time.
Nothing in Shelleyan quest allowed for the
pos–
sibility of unrequited love, never one of the poet's many sorrows.
What happened to Yeats's great poem "Adam's Curse"? The same
thing that happens to "The Cold Heaven" (another poem Bloom rightly
much admires) in the following paragraph:
Both
The Cold Heaven
and
The Magi
begin with a glance at the
sky, the cold heaven of winter and the "pervading and indifferent
blue" of an early autumn, respectively.... The sky is a Romantic
image of division and fall, of a covering that must be rolled away
)
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