Much has been written about Yeats's practice of revising his early
poetry. Whether we consider this revision a pernicious practice or only the
province of the mature poet-craftsman, the fact remains that many of
Yeats's early poems have been revised. All this has been faithfully recorded
in the valuable Allt-Alspach Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.
B.
Yeats. Much also has been written about A Vision:
some
deny that this esoteric system has any value, while others find it the key to
all Yeats's later work.
A study of the early poems, before The Wild Swans at
Coole, to discover what influence, if any, the Vision
system had on the revision of these poems[1] reveals that only "The Two Trees"
(Var., p. 134 or C. P., p. 47), first
published in 1892, contains a revision clearly influenced by
A
Vision. Before 1929 the poem read
There, through bewildered branches, go
Winged Loves borne on in gentle strife,
Tossing and tossing to and fro
The flaming circle of our life. (ll. 13-16)
In 1929 this passage was changed to
There the Loves — a circle — go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
(dashes in l. 13 omitted in 1933)
It is not surprising that Yeats wished to change the original lifeless lines to
a more startling, precise image in a poem which was Maud Gonne's
favorite and which he especially valued on that account. Lines 13 and 14
of the earlier version seem cluttered with adjectives — bewildered,
winged, gentle — besides containing a defective image, perhaps even
a
pathetic fallacy. The later version is clean and concise; "great ignorant leafy
ways" seems a more exacting and more highly connotative phrase than
"bewildered branches." The former "flaming circle of our life" (with the
change of the last word to "days" for purposes of rhyme) becomes
identified, in the revised passage, with the
Vision's "Great
Wheel" and with the system's principal symbol of the double vortex or
intersecting gyres. Thus "gyring, spiring" is substituted for the much less
effective "tossing and tossing." Even the change in the order of the lines
seems to be an improvement. The revision in this instance
is a happy one; the sense has not been materially changed, but greater
power is achieved in the later version.
[2]
Peter Allt, in his thorough study of the revision of the earlier
poetry,[3] does not comment on this
particular poem, nor does he seem to provide for this kind of revision in his
useful categorizing of the revisions. Russell K. Alspach in an important
article, "Some Textual Problems in Yeats," does discuss the revision of
"The Two Trees" (ll. 13-20), designating the later version "a clearer
statement of the desirability-of-innocence theme so superbly expressed ten
years earlier in 'A Prayer for My Daughter.'"[4] Alspach does not, however, relate
the
revised lines to A Vision.
"The Two Trees," then, is an unusual, even unique, example in the
early poetry of a poem revised with A Vision in mind. In
addition, the revision helps to reinforce the point that the system is not
merely important for interpretation; A Vision provided
metaphors or images for Yeats's poetry. His "spirits" had told him they had
come to give him "metaphors for poetry," and Yeats himself in a letter to
Olivia Shakespeare in 1929 wrote ". . . I believe I shall have a poetical
rebirth for as I write about my cones and gyres all kinds of images come
before me."[5] In the case of "The
Two Trees" the system supplied a revision providing a new and superior
image for a favorite poem, an image that most of us would prefer to the
original.
