THE ROSE SYMBOL IN W.B. YEATS' POETRY

Yeats: an introduction

Art in general and poetry in particular carry within themselves those eternal symbols which contribute to define the power of archetypes. The artistic production of W.B. Yeats, Irish poet born in 1865 and dead in 1939, took place during positivism; in a period dominated by the rational approach, this author proposed an approach to literature based on symbols: from the inexhaustible richness of symbols that we can find in his poetry, I have decided to analyze the ‘rose’, since we are perfectly aware of how this symbol goes over a strictly poetic dimension to be present as universal symbol in a great number of cultures. Just a few flashes concerning the imaginary: we find the rose in tradition, initially attributed to Venus, the goddess of pagan love. This flower will later be bound to be filtered by Christianity in order to be re-directioned inside the values recognized by the Catholic Church . Thanks to this operation it will become, with St Bernard of Clairvaux, the principal symbol of Virgin Mary, the Queen of Paradise. It is anyway evident that the apex of the concept of Love, both considered in its earthly and spiritual aspect, is synthetized in the rose found in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, where we can verify the Middle Ages in the spirit of courtly love and in the theological interpretation of divine love. The last cantos of the Paradise are dominated by the huge mystic rose, on the white petals of which sit the saints; the sun, symbol of the trinity, illuminates the scene: the sun that gives life to the rose and the rose which manifests the glory and the power of the sun are inseparable and interdependent symbols: the fact that it blossoms thanks to the divine sun is the expression of the eternal realization of all that is temporal; that is why Dante’s love for Beatrice, in the same way as man’s love for a woman, from a personal experience should assume a transcendent meaning. This assumption (also underlined by C. Baudelaire in his theory of ‘correspondences’), which states that any entity in the natural world corresponds to a supernatural counterpart, is at the basis of the symbolist movement, developed at the end of the XIXth century, to which Yeats belonged. According to Yeats art must be symbolic, since only a symbol can express an invisible essence and thus escape from the poverty of an excessively ordered conscience; this poet believes that the encounter with Wisdom (Sophia) can only take place far from conscience. Yeats took his symbolic iconography from many sources:
1. Ethnic tradition
2. The cult of Irish heroes
3. The fight for the Home Rule (Irish political freedom)
4. The disappointment which followed the poet’s unhappy love for the actress Maud Gonne
5. A new interpretation of the world, connected to Jung’s psychology and archetypes. With regard to this conception, it is interesting to notice that Yeats, as early as 1901, had already elaborated, in his essay ‘Magic’, the theory of ‘the Great Memory’ which stated the existence of a collective memory, seat of all myths and universal archetypes that can only be evoked through symbols. This means that, according to Yeats, THE SYMBOL IS THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT COMMON TO THE HISTORICAL MIND AND TO THE UNIVERSAL MIND. On the other hand, if we believe in the eternity of the mind, the poet’s job will be close to the one of a Socratic scholar: THE LIBERATION OF ETERNAL MAN FROM HIS TEMPORAL CHAINS.
6. As far as symbols are concerned, we cannot forget that Yeats owes much of the richness of his symbols and images to his approach first to M.me Blavatski’s Theosophical Society and later (in 1890) to the Rosicrucian movement of The Golden Dawn, founded by Mac Gregor Mathers.


Yeats and the rose

lso to Yeats, the rose is the symbol of a final accomplishment. It is the personification of eternal spirit in human flesh, of infinite love in finite man. After going through a huge number of titles, lines and sentences underlining the essential importance that this flower bears in Yeats’ poetry, I have decided to examine a poem, ‘The Travail of Passion’ and a tale ‘Rosa Alchemica’, which in my opinion evidence how the poet has found in the rose both its symbolical meaning and the highly archetypical one.
‘The Travail of Passion’
When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Commentary:
The poem represents the union between the highest and the lowest elements of reality: this signifies that love is nothing but a painful experience, which should prepare us for a nobler love, incompatible with our earthly existence.
FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS:
It is here expressed the moment when immortal beings enter mortal life, through the process of incarnation.
1. The origin of human passion, according to this poem, is to be found in eternity and man is allowed to love profoundly only with the consent and participation of what he is not, which means only when ‘an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay’. In this construction Christ is the imagination which enters ‘mortal clay’ for the purpose of purifying it, rendering it symbolic.
2. The experience of love is an agony, like the crucifixion, the end of which is the death and consequent purification of the lover.
3. ‘Passion’: key-word denoting both Christ’s final suffering (with an allusion to the wounds and blood) and a deep sexual sentiment.
4. The element ‘dew’ is here present.
5. The last line of the poem describes the mortal lovers who have initiated their cosmic drama: ‘the lily of death pale hope’ represents the male element, while ‘the rose of passionate dream’ is referred to the feminine: here they form an image of absolute unity, the archetype of the integration of the opposites.
6. This means that the force symbolising emotions is cosmic (and not personal) and that it implies the usurpation, by the mortal lover, of the same energy by which God created the world. The sexual (infra-red) question is transformed into the (ultra-violet) longing for the progenitor figure of Wisdom, symbolised by the Virgin.

“Rosa alchemica” (published in 1896)

The anonymous Catholic narrator of the story, decides of engaging himself in an initiation practice, which will enable him to get in touch with the gods surrounding him. For this reason he decides to move to a village by the sea (at the border between conscience and unconscious), where there is a small building, seat of the Temple of the ‘Rosa Alchemica’; there he will become one of the adepts that have attained the fusion with the immortal spirits. A dance will take place, during which, in the middle of incense clouds, the union with archetypal figures will lead to the complete emptying and subsequent death of the ego, making man become an incarnation, a mask of the archetype. In the end the narrator will escape, deciding to cling to orthodoxy and holding tightly his rosary to his breast.

Commentary:
1. The narrator must come to terms with his shadow, which pushes him towards a compromise between Christianity and paganism; Yeats seems to have partially understood the power of archetypal gods and the risk the narrator runs is the one of becoming the puppet of the gods we see dancing with the adepts, the risk of not succeeding in reconciling his ego with the archetype. As a consequence he might start his descent to hell or, to say it alchemistically, he might fail to accomplish the ‘solve et coagula’ process and be unable to proceed further, since he has got bogged down in the moment of dissolution/destruction. It is evident that the Ego cannot be invaded and submerged by the Es: we should always try to actuate a balance between conscience and unconscious, a dialectical relationship considering the risks that one might prevaricate over the other.
2. The description of the huge ball room where the dance takes place, shows a rose on the ceiling and a cross on the floor which, more than referring to the Rosicrucian movement, symbolise the union of soul and body, life and death, spirit and matter.
3. The fact that, in the end, the narrator should escape from the temple and decide to dedicate himself to traditional religion, pressing a rosary to his heart, makes us remember that C. G. Jung, in his autobiography ‘Remembrances, dreams, reflections’, stated how important it is that we should lean on our solid habits and principles in order to be able to adhere to reality and avoid falling into insanity.

The rose and a psychosomatic vision

After this introduction, in which the poet examines the imaginary aspects, above all with relation to the rose theme, we can analyze the fictitious representation provided by Yeats who, in the attempt of clinging to the idea that ‘a man is a great man just insofar as ha can make his mind reflect everything with indifferent precision, like a mirror’ finds himself involved in a typhoon and hears a voice over his head cry:
‘The mirror is broken in two pieces’ and another voice answer ‘the mirror is broken in four pieces,’ and a more exultant cry ‘the mirror is broken into numberless pieces;’ and then a multitude of pale hands were reaching towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were forgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will, everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise through numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, in some way more certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternal moment…and then I passed into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and become a drop of melted gold falling with immense rapidity, through a night embroidered with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant wailing'
From these words it sounds evident that symbolical aspects can both refer to our imaginary and to elating situations of our body, at the centre of which we find the rose theme. Dealing with the imaginary, we all know that the rose, the flower blossoming in may, has been often associated by alchemists to dew. Alchemists used to work on matter and on the body through innumerable analogical operations, with the purpose of reaching the ecstatic component, the identification with the divine, the integration with the ONE.
So, if we consider ‘dew’ from the analogical point of view, we are bound to notice that it is the distilled product of the night and, consequently, it cannot but represent a secretion deriving from the nocturnal unconscious, hardly localizable in a precise part of the body, but evidently ascribable to the production of dreams, rêveries or sudden intuitions. Concerning the biological field or, more precisely the psychosomatic aspect, if we look at the rose in its archetypical value, we cannot forget the studies led in the light of echobiopsychology which, in a unitary ‘continuum’, freely connect matter with the subtlest aspects of man’s imaginary. It is in this context that our ‘rose/dew’ can refer to the liquid element present in our body, in all its aspects of emanations, smells, sweat, tears which derive from more or less specialized cells, originating from blood.
It is thus evident that, the liquid state, that has unravelled through the phylogenesis, starting from the primordial coacervates to reach invertebrates and, following evolution, even mammals’ blood, is closely connected to the infinite images present in legends, mythology and traditional cultures on the rose theme. The rose, of course, cannot prescind from the most intimate female aspects, but if we concentrate on what it may symbolise in the infra-red, we must think about the hematic aspect present in man (and in women, too), that represents the human tie to the maternal being who gave him life. It must be anyway underlined that, while in man blood (the symbol of the maternal being) is kept inside the circulatory tree, in women it is monthly offered outward through the menstrual cycle. This is the reason why the access to the motherly dimension is easier to women than to men, who will always have to face the inevitable question of relating themselves with their original blood, through a symbolic wound representing the impact with their feminine part. Concerning W.B. Yeats, the ecstatic experience just quoted refers to a sea of flames, to remembrances, to thoughts and hopes that are liquefied in order to enter Death, which is Beauty itself: through these words, we are shown how the poet has transcended a strictly human dimension managing to impact the opposite pole, the feminine, with the aim of completing the individuation process. It is at this point that it should be doubted whether the ‘vapores’ quoted by alchemists with regards to the rose might represent a feminine component which, once exalted, is given the occasion of distilling its potentialities.

Conclusion
We have just dealt with blood, and it is therefore evident that, speaking about a rose we cannot forget thorns: it must be anyway underlined that, in the XIIIth century, St. Albert the Great explained that speaking about thorns is not correct: while thorns are the transformations of a member of superior plants into a hardened and sharp organ (as in the case of the hawthorn), the emergences we find in roses and that are characterised by a woody consistence, ending with straight or curbed points, are actually to be defined as prickles. Since they are cells derived from the epidermis of the underlying tissue, prickles can be considered as the pendant of the transformation of the epithelial cells present in our body. Moreover, since they recall, on one side, the blood/wound theme and on the other the colour red, we are again dealing with the aspect of the hematic dimension, emblem of a feminine potentiality, of a soul which, by tearing us, helps us to establish our own truth. It is not by chance that are men, not women, who generally offer red roses to women. Last but not least, it is to be evidenced that it was once more St. Albert the Great who noticed the different form of the 5 sepals of the rose (the sepals are the green petals at the basis of the calyx, enclosing the bud before it blossoms). He wrote a riddle, which describes them as follows:
QUINQUE SUNT FRATRES They are five brothers
DUO SUNT BARBUTI Two of them have a beard
DUO SINE BARBA NATI Two of them have no beard at all
UNUS E QUINQUE One of the five
NON HABET BARBA UTRINQUE Has a beard just on one side
How not to think about the representation of the male, the female and the androgyne? How not to think, once more, about the symbol of the union between the opposites? It is thus evident that this symbol has been essential to Yeats, in order to let him unravel his psychological context of the imaginary, with the aim to recuperate and complete his identity, making him pursue an alchemic path of integration between the opposites.

ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andronico Tosonotti, Pina ‘I ROSACROCE’ 2000, ed. Xenia, Milano
Blavatski, H.P. ‘ISIDE SVELATA’ 1996, Armenia ed., Milano
Cattabiani, A. ‘FLORARIO’ 1998, Mondadori, Milano
Chevalier-Gheerbrant ‘DIZIONARIO DEI SIMBOLI’ 1999, BUR, Milano
Eco, U. ‘IL NOME DELLA ROSA’ 2000, Bompiani, Milano
Grossman, A. R. ‘POETIC KNOWLEDGE IN THE EARLY YEARS: A STUDY OF “THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS” 1969, University Press of Virginia- Charlottesville
Guénon, R. ‘SIMBOLI DELLA SCIENZA SACRA’ 2000, Adelphi, Milano
Guillaume de Lorris ‘IL ROMANZO DELLA ROSA’ 1983, Archè, Milano
Heinz-Mohr, Volker Sommer ‘LA ROSA’ 1989, Rusconi, Milano
Mac Liammòir M. – Boland E. ‘W.B. YEATS’ 1971, Thames & Hudson, London
Malins E. – Purkis J. ‘A PREFACE TO YEATS’ 1994, Longman, London
Oliva, Renato ‘HODOS CHAMELIONTOS’ 1989, ed. Le Lettere, Torino
Seward, B. ‘THE SYMBOLIC ROSE’ 1990, Pennsylvania Un. Press
Yeats, W. B. ‘SELECTED POEMS’ 2000 Penguin Books
Yeats, W. B. ‘ROSA ALCHEMICA’ 1998, ed. Se, Milano
Yeats, W. B. ‘SELECTED POEMS’ 2000, York Press, London
Zolla, Elémire ‘L’ANDROGINO’ 1989, ed RED, Milano

Written by Daniela Capsoni