an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, September-October 2010,
ISSN 1552-5112
Yeats, U2 and Imaginative Experience
Introduction: The Romantic Quest
The Romantic poets of the late 18th century faced
a difficult quest. As exemplified by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in such sensitive
poems as his “Frost at Midnight,” they wished to unify the self with the
outside environment, and this could only be achieved by using their imagination
(and their pens) to transform the world of Nature into more easily
apprehensible symbols.[1] If Nature
could be so transcribed, intellectual man would reconcile with wild Nature, his
successful use of symbols having “fuse[d] head and heart”[2]—an act
that carried particular importance in a society where the threat of industrial
mechanization and scientific positivism made people feel removed from Nature.[3]
This problem of the Romantics was more than just the academic
solipsism of a few poets. The question of “how to—?” gathered force and
continued to plague art and literature across the centuries. Starting with the
poet Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th century, the Symbolist Movement pushed
writers to express their beliefs through intricate symbols and subtle
suggestions rather than direct or empirical statements. During the same period,
artists belonging to the Aesthetic
Movement, who were grounded in Kant’s theories, believed that the purpose
of Art was beauty alone which could not be measured by any utilitarian, moral,
or realistic standard. The Symbolist and Aesthetic movements are extreme
positions that are not interested in representing the human or the real but are
“content to specialize in either philosophical, sentimental, or sensory aspects
of experience in their poetry.”[4] Thus,
critic Vlasopolos argues, such poetry is not as powerful as that of their
Romantic fathers because it cannot show the union of emotion and intellect, or
how the imagination can make understandable an inhospitable, external world.
Coleridge’s theory of the imagination-as-unifying symbol was
reworked by Baudelaire, reworked again by 20th century Irish poet
William Butler Yeats in his study of Irish folklore and universal archetypes,
and finally, I would argue, reinvented with an ultra-modern twist by the Irish
rock band U2. As with Yeats, who is the favorite poet
of U2’s lead singer Bono, we hear in U2’s songs about feminine symbols who
represent the imagination, and how memory broods upon idealized images and thus
blocks out the sun or “lemon” of the real world. Yeats did not wish his
symbolism to depend entirely upon the written word, and thus incorporated his
heavy ideas into mythical images published alongside his poems, a tactic
duplicated in U2’s symbol-ridden music videos, concert performances, and
(especially in later years) album art. This essay will illustrate how the
themes and conflicts of a reworked Romantic Quest are richly explicated in
Yeats and U2, particularly in U2’s song “Lemon,” and how U2 borrows strongly
from the symbolism and theories of their great Irish poet predecessor.
The Last Romantics: Yeats and U2
Irish poet William Butler Years, writing in the early 20th century, was often called the “Last Romantic,” even though his writing experimented with the formal concerns of the Modernists. Yeats thought the imagination’s pursuit of ideal beauty can be dangerous since it may plunge you into an over-idealized, self-absorbed world that isolates you from humanity, [5] a mistake that he saw the Romantic Poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the rest of the “Tragic Generation” as making.
Instead, Yeats believed in a universal humanity: a perfect
world which could only be reached if poets accessed the same set of symbols
already stored in everyone’s unconscious collective memory. He spent much of
his life developing his own set of symbols to use consistently in his poems,
such as the
The
Not only does passion validate the poet, it also serves as
the emotional medium through which one’s imagination connects with the outside
world. This is because the unconscious universal memory finds roots in our
dreams, which in turn are based upon our repressed desires and passions. Yeats
seems to believe this when he says “the passions, when we know that they cannot
find fulfillment, become vision; and a vision, whether we wake or sleep,
prolongs its power by rhythm and pattern....”[8] In order
to avoid Romantic self-absorption and make sure that the passion in his poems
and ballads was communal, and thus more easily understood and felt by the Irish
people, Yeats began to study the heavily mythological folklore of his home
country. Like U2’s ability to preach about humanitarian issues without
(usually) sounding elitist or pedantic, Yeats’s passion, “allows him a subjectivity
without solipsism because [he can be] without self-consciousness” especially
since “passionate genres like folk art… validate the poet’s vision by giving it
the resonance of ancient myth and simplicity of language…. Yeats’s search for
Unity of Culture, because of its dependence upon a system outside the psyche to
sustain it, represents his greatest departure from the humanism of the
Romantics.”[9]
Eventually Yeats became so absorbed in the Irish culture that he began to see
himself as a messiah-like poet who would lead the Irish into a new beautiful
culture.[10] (Sound
like anybody else?) After the Easter 1916 Irish Revolution or “Sunday Bloody
Sunday” he theorized that the agitated middle class, because of their
chasteness and repressed sexuality, had cultivated hatred and forgotten their
inner creative power; all they could imagine was hate, and their repressed sexuality or sexual abstinence expressed
itself as violence.[11] This
instance must have reconfirmed his belief in passion as something which is
creative and not destructive, and thus the perfect way to unify your intellect
with your emotions, which often lead him to incorporate his political beliefs
about the deep strife and troubles in Ireland, though sometimes, as in his poem
“Leda and the Swan,” the aesthetic impulse took over and he dropped the more
overt political message (as U2 did in songs like “Red Hill Mining Town”).
I would argue that none of U2’s songs are ever taken over by
their political messages (an issue that Bono must have sought to remedy by
reminding his concert audiences of his songs’ political content during every
free moment) though, like Yeats, U2 also had a
difficult time uniting the angry, socially conscious world of the head with the
romantic, yearning world of the heart. Their first few albums exploded
with passionate songs that battled issues of social injustice in
The Passionate Reach of “The Tower”
I would like now to examine the beginning of Yeats’ poem
“The Tower.” You will hear how the first part of the poem is a lament of old
age.
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, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or with 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.[15]
The second line’s “O heart, O troubled heart” neatly shows
both the physical frailty of the heart, and the narrator’s desire to have more
heart, or more passion, but this is difficult in old age. But he tries, and in
the next stanza remembers his boyhood sports of fly-fishing and mountain-climbing,
the wisdom of his old age gives the narrator a more energetic imagination than
he possessed in boyhood.
Still, the relentlessness of time makes the narrator feel
the undeniable pull of reality, of “argument” and “abstract things,” and he feels
he must bid the Muse of imagination goodbye. Looking at this section in total
then, the question becomes “What wisdom can satisfy the passionate heart?” The
poem’s dive into youthful nostalgia yet embrace of wisdom set up the conflicts
of the Romantic Quest mentioned earlier, the desire for both an intellectual
understanding of the world and an emotional introspection. For now, however,
the narrator seems resigned to remain in the former, intellectual state, to
live in abstractions, removed from Nature.
Illustration for
the top of a tower.
II
I pace
upon the battlements and stare
On the
foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like
a sooty finger, starts from the 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.[16]
The narrator
paces as if in command and notes the ruin about him. He calls upon images
and memories from the ruined landscape for questioning, as if these ruins
are himself and he is trying to spark his imagination once more:
A peasant girl commended by a song,
Who’s lived somewhere upon that rocky
place,
And praised the colour 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
Cloone.
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.[17]
The farmers have a glorious song about a girl who used to
walk in the rocky ridge. The delightful music of this song maddens them, and
kills one. They have mistaken “the brightness of the moon/ For the prosaic
light of day.” “Prosaic” is the opposite of poetry, it is something lacking in
imagination, and so we can read this as the farmers are lacking in imagination,
or at least in control of imagination, since, as critic Sarah Youngblood says,
“The sun, as that which makes the real world evident, is a metaphor for
objective visible reality; it is opposed to the moon, which has its traditional
connotations as the softening, idealizing light.”[18] And of
course, throughout literature and history the moon has been the most common
symbol of the imagination and romantic yearning. So the farmers have mistaken
something imaginative for reality, and so a real death occurs. This scene
encapsulates Yeats’s fears of the Tragic Generation and their pursuit of the
ideal beauty, much like young Coleridge’s death from opium, which he used as a
creative outlet. The later line “The tragedy began” has a triple significance:
first, it means that the form of tragedy started with Homer, but it also seems
to mean the great tragedy of human suffering began then too. Why would human suffering
begin with the first great poet? Because poetry is also a tragedy in that it
inspires our imagination and deceives us from the true reality. So of course
this song maker has to be blind to be as important as Homer. Finally the
narrator concludes by saying that he wants the moon and the sunlight to be
inextricable so that he can make men mad, and succeed at his goal.
So he needs this sun/moon confusion, this mistaking of the
imaginary for the real, in order to make people mad. Perhaps he is not saying
that in order to triumph he must make people mad, but rather that if he does
triumph, one effect will be that people will go mad—this is not clear.
How to Make Your Reader Go Mad: Just Invent
an Insane Persona
How does the narrator triumph? By being a literary creator,
as we see in the following two lines. “And I myself created Hanrahan / And
drove him drunk or sober through the dawn…”[19] Hanrahan
was an old character that Yeats used in his poems. So Yeats as narrator is
saying that in order to triumph as a poet, he must make his readers mad, and
this must be a madness of passion because by making the link between moonlight
and sunlight inextricable you achieve the perfect unity, the Romantic tying of
intellect to emotions.
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 an
woman won or 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.[20]
The old
lecher here is Hanrahan, who has had many loves, and whom, being dead, Yeats
wants to reflect now on his various attractions to woman.[21] “Does the
imagination dwell the most/ Upon a woman won or woman lost?” If lost, it must
be since you (as Hanrahan) proudly turned aside out of some silly sexual
repression, or conscience. The very phrasing of the question involves abstract
reflection, and the narrator and Hanrahan, “move as symbols of the uncertainty,
confusion, and ultimate frustration of those who cannot be content with
argument or abstract things, but follow after the imaginary and are left with
the ‘horrible splendor of desire’.”[22] The loss
of the woman is also a sexual frustration and obstacle to one’s creativity,
leading to the need to chase after one’s imagination. No modernization of the
gender wars here; we are back to the tales of chivalric love, or even Tristanic
love where distance equals passion, and only absence of the beloved (her
“memory recur[red]”) can spur passion’s return. Youngblood comments on the
woman figure by explaining how the “loss of a desired woman is related to the
activity of the imagination and memory. There the image of the sun is again
introduced, for imagination and memory dwelling upon almost ideal image blot
out the “sun” of the real image and block out the “prosaic light” of the
present.”[23] Recall
how the narrator stated that he wants the moon and the sunlight to be inextricable
so that he can make men mad, and succeed at his goal. So he needs this sun/moon
confusion, this mistaking of the imaginary for the real. In other words,
despite his concern that poetry removes people from the real, he depends upon
people being mislead by poetry, he depends on people being moved, inspired,
charmed, even brainwashed by it, in order to connect with them, in order to feel his common humanity.
This playing with a poetic persona calls to mind Bono’s getup as Mephisto (or Mr. MacPhisto) in the ZooTV tour and related videos, where Bono is a devil who has taken the role of rock star in order to teach the world about truth and religion through rock and roll lyrics (or about intellectual matters through the emotions), and Bono-Mephisto’s tongue-in-cheek matter suggests the foolishness and artificiality of the entire enterprise. It is also by playing with personas that Bono can get his audience to leave their own personified selves and connect with the outside world’s ideas.
Bono in his costumed,
eye-linered get-up as Macphisto.
These last
few lines of the second part of “The Tower” bring us to the core of Yeats’s
theory of imagination. Yeats writes that if the memory recurs, the “day,” which
is synonymous to the “prosaic light of day” mentioned in an earlier stanza, is
blotted out and eclipsed. What eclipses a sun? The moon, of course. So the
prosaic sun is eclipsed by the imaginative light of the moon, which blots out
reality. Put another way, the over-active imagination, symbolized by the moon,
is taking up all of your thoughts and interfering with your perception of
reality. As Youngblood writes, the memory “retains the ideal image never
measured by reality, and it assumes in the proportion of the imagination a
brilliance which makes the known reality unimportant: the day is ‘blotted
out’.”[24] This is
what leads to the expression, sometimes given by one’s friends after asking
them how their romantic vacation was, that the “memory was better than the
event.”
Moon eclipsing the
sun (solar eclipse)
The elder Yeats.
Lemon: Sun and Moon
I would like to look now at the opening lyrics for U2’s song
“Lemon”:
Lemon
See
through in the sunlight
She wore
lemon
Never in
the daylight
She’s
gonna make you cry
She’s
gonna make you whisper and moan
But when
you’re dry
She draws
the water from a stone
I feel
like I’m slowly, slowly, slowly slipping under
I feel
like I’m holding onto nothing[25]
This woman
who is wearing the color lemon is going to hurt the “you” that the poem is
addressing, which seems to be a general you. But I believe this you is
specific; it is anyone who is reading the poem, and it is also the
singer/narrator, who is personalizing his own experience. The image of a
“lemon” is that of a bright yellow fruit, and it is presented as a metaphor for
the sun. As such, in the Yeatsian sense it would symbolize the prosaic light of
reality. The woman is going to hurt the reader and the writer because even when
you’re “dry,” or seemingly empty of imaginative power, comfortable with
reality, she will continue to suck imaginative power from you—both in a
beautiful, Muse-like way, and also in a vampiric way, which reiterates the need
for and yet the danger of the imagination; even when you’re “dry” you’ll feel
compelled to keep imagining. “Slipping
under” is a phrase used to describe someone drowning, and so the narrator says
he feels like he is drowning, and does not have a hold on anything. You drown
in water of course, and water here, because she draws it from the dry stone of
you, is symbolizing imagination and creative power. So the narrator is drowning
in his own sense of imagination that is not giving him enough of a hold on the
real—again, the classic problem of the Tragic Generation.
She wore
lemon
To color
in the cold grey night
She had
heaven
And she
held on so tight[26]
This stanza finally clues us in as to who this woman is. She
is not the prosaic light of day, because she is not actually the lemon; the
song says only that she wears lemon.
This short description has all the clues we need. Recall that she wore lemon
“Never in the daylight” and to “color in the cold grey night.” The only thing
that would make the night grey would be moonlight, so she is wearing it at
night, and coloring in the moonlight. This is a strange description, but if we
break it down we come to the question “What colors in the moonlight?” or “What
lights up the moon?” The sun, of course. So this woman, who is wearing the sun,
is carrying it into the moonlight to achieve a sort of unity—to make sun and
moonlight one “inextricable” beam. This woman, then, represents the power of
the poet—the woman is his poetic imagination, dancing about, wearing reality
like a loose dress so he can see the romantic “moonlight” better. Additionally,
the lines “She had heaven/ And she held on so tight,” characterize the woman,
our imagination, as desperately, selfishly holding onto the ideal, unwilling to
share it with us. But there’s nothing to share!
The Imagination Keeps Us From the Real
(Ideal)
Once we make the imaginative leap, we realize that there is
nothing real present, that we are
“holding onto nothing.” This interpretation is immediately reinforced by the
next stanza:
A man
takes a picture
A moving
picture
Through
light projected
He can see
himself up close
A man
captures color
A man
likes to stare
He turns
his money into light
To look
for her[27]
Here we have
a literal description of a film projector. “A man” or people in general, make
pictures, or ideals, the reason being that he can see himself in these ideals.
“Money” here has to represent desire, because money is the unit that allows
you to get things, and by turning it into light to look for “her,” he is looking
for his imagination, which has tied together both moonlight and sunlight and
can feed these inextricable beams into this mythical camera of ideals. The
male gaze upon this traditional symbol of woman is operating again, transforming
woman into whatever will give man inspiration (desire, money).
WOMAN ON TV (Here's lookin' at you viewer)
Midnight: Moon Highest
This should be getting easier. If he’s swimming out to her,
he’s swimming out to imagination, right? But the water he’s swimming in is imagination:
And I feel
like I’m drifting, drifting, drifting from the shore
And I feel
like I’m swimming out to her
Midnight
is where the day begins
Midnight
is where the day begins
Midnight
is where the day begins[28]
Perhaps it is her dress, the lemon, that he is swimming
towards; perhaps this is a sunset image, and he is swimming towards what he
sees as reality (the lemon dress) but in actuality is still only her, the
imagination. So here we have the same mistake of the farmers, the mistaking of
reality for imagination. She’s not the real, prosaic sun. And in the meantime
by swimming in his imagination, the narrator is drifting further and further
away from the real reality—the shore. The next lines are the only lines that
are immediately repeated in the whole poem, signifying their importance.
“Midnight is where the day begins.” What is midnight? It is the dividing line
where the next day begins. It is also the highest point of night, the middle of
the night. It is when the moon, representing the fantastic and at its highest,
that Bono feels the act of imagining can most perfectly begin. The actual day
is beginning, but the daylight is not, not yet—perhaps the poet can deceive
himself into thinking that he, through his imagination, is the one who is
creating the real landscape that the day will eventually reveal, but right now
is being hidden by the absence of daylight or reality. It is in this world of
weakest reality that the poet, dangerously, feels his power to be greatest.
Lemon
See
through in the sunlight
A man
builds a city
With banks
and cathedrals
A man
melts the sand so he can
See the
world outside (You’re
gonna’ meet her there)
A man
makes a car (She’s your destination)
And builds
a road to run them on (You gotta’ get to her)
A man dreams
of leaving (She’s imagination)
But he
always stays behind[29]
Here is
man in his reality, with his banks and cathedrals. But what is the driving
point behind all of this reality? These banks are merely to exchange his money
into light, to activate his desire and imagination so that he can get things. Cathedrals
are so that he has something to believe in. “A man melts the sand so he can/
See the world outside.” Now we are getting images of technology and
industrialization, including a literal image of a glass window being made; even
in his city, man wants windows. Why? So he can see the world outside, the
things he does not have—and to let the sun (reality) in! But the moonlight will
come in, too. Man desires objects from the external world, and he makes other
objects to move these desires--the car, the road to run it on.[30] The
simultaneous stanza here shows that the goal of all this is her, or the
imagination, which, as quest unifier, will unify your intellect with your
emotions (and make for one happy fellow).
This sounds remarkably like a stanza from the final part of
“The Tower.”
Poet’s
imaginings
And
memories of love,
Memories
of the words of women,
All those
things whereof
Man makes
a superhuman,
Mirror-resembling
dream.[31]
Youngblood
writes that “the mirror is double: it mirrors life because the ideal or “dream”
must take its images from reality; and it mirrors the self, as art is for the
creator a means of identity... but the dream of art is mirror-resembling and
superhuman, and this is an important qualification, as the moon and sunlight
can only seem an “inextricable beam” .”[32] Man
dreams, and man builds his cities and reality, because he wants objects
external to him, and to execute your desires, you have to imagine them.
Youngblood mentions that this art is a means of identity for the creator. U2
was very much aware of this. “I used to find it uncomfortable to be around a
lot of things,” says Bono. “Then I found these goggles. I put them on and found
that I could go anywhere.”[33] These
goggles or sunglasses were part of Bono’s costume as “the Fly” which was
another devilish persona he adapted for the concert tour of Zooropa, so that he could play with the
meaning of a perceived identity.
The Sound of a Lemon
Listening carefully to the instrumentation in “Lemon”
enhances the overall creation theme, since the song is surrounded by a bionic
synthesizer sound that becomes a leitmotif
for the imagination’s appearance.[34] The synthesizer’s
reverberation gives you a sense of moving, or of the actual creative act,
happening continuously. It is also interesting to note Bono’s use of his
falsetto. Whenever he talks about the woman wearing lemon, his voice is
falsetto and it casts a sort of self-mocking tone on what he is saying, as if
he is aware that the imagination has this grip on him, and that he is following
it “by the balls,” and it’s funny. But it’s also serious, and Bono’s voice
cries when he describes himself slipping and drifting, the “ah”s becoming
beautiful and sad laments of the agony the imagination has driven him to.
And the Packaging of One
Finally, the lyrics aren’t simply typed down plainly, but
are presented over an elaborate color picture of a lemon. The budding lemon
suggests the female breast, which further ties the lemon to the woman in the
song. Of course, the woman isn’t the lemon, she just wears lemon. But, if we
see woman as imagination, and she wears the prosaic sun of reality, the lemon,
there is one thing about woman which men stereotypically notice the most and
yet imaginatively blow out of proportion. Her breasts! (And in case any
listeners missed the connection, they could merely look at the adjoining page
in the album, a full page spread of a man looking at a woman’s breasts.)
Packaging images alongside their text is another shared technique U2 and Yeats
use in their art to convey their theory of the imagination.
Conclusion
So we have here man building his dream, represented by film,
pictures, cities or even the very isolated tower of wisdom that Yeats sets up.
The dream is that imagination can unify the intellect to the emotions, and the
outer world to the inner self. It is a
desire for unification with the world and its people. Additionally, passionate
relationships are characterized as sexual relationships. This is why
imagination is being represented by a woman, as a mysterious “she” in “Lemon”
and as the peasant girl and the women of Hanrahan in “The Tower”—the straight,
or at least mainstream male artist, in seeking relation to the world,
epitomizes this relation through women. The very name of the band U2 implies
this strive for connection; not only are they a spy plane, soaring high on the
wings of their own passionate music (observing the world and translating it,
like the Romantics, through their high-tech poetic paraphernalia), but in their
being, and their music, there is you, too.[35]
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, September-October 2010,
ISSN 1552-5112
Notes