Yeats, THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE, and the Wisdom of Beans.

On: 12 March 2015, At: 16:36 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The Explicator Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20 Yeats, THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE, and the Wisdom of Beans Shawn Normandin a a Sungkyunkwan University Published online: 12 Mar 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Shawn Normandin (2015) Yeats, THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE, and the Wisdom of Beans, The Explicator, 73:1, 25-28, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2014.1000250 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2014.1000250 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Copyright  ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2014.1000250 SHAWN NORMANDIN Downloaded by [Sung Kyun Kwan University] at 16:36 12 March 2015 Sungkyunkwan University Yeats, THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE, and the Wisdom of Beans Keywords: William Butler Yeats, Henry David Thoreau, occult, Neoplatonism One way of registering the complexity of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is to focus on the beans imagined by the speaker: “Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade” (Yeats, “The Lake” 3–4). Why plant beans? The answer relates to Henry David Thoreau. The earliest version of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” appears in a letter dated December 21, 1888 (Yeats, Collected). Years afterward, Yeats described what was on his mind when he wrote the poem: “Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity . . . I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill” (Autobiography 94). Thoreau grew beans during his stay at Walden Pond, and in a chapter titled “The Bean-Field” he claims, “I was determined to know beans” (206). This is a joke, because “to know beans” is “to know ‘a small or the least amount”’ (Skwire 287n19). To say that a person “doesn’t know beans” is to say that he or she is ignorant. C. Stuart Hunter concludes that “to know beans is to be wise. Hence one can see that it is possible for Yeats to have equated, tropologically, Thoreau’s cultivation of beans with his pursuit of wisdom” (73). Hunter finds Yeats cross-fertilizing Thoreau’s Yankee litotes with the wisdom of Celtic mythology. Yeats’s poem, however, also reflects his occult studies in London. He “was a member of the Theosophical Society” from “May 1887 to August 1890” (Monteith 216). Madame Blavatsky, the leader of this movement, influenced the young poet. She drew much of

her wisdom from ancient philosophers, and references to Pythagoras saturate her writings; there is no way that Yeats, reading Isis Unveiled (1877) or The Secret Doctrine (1888), could have overlooked the importance of Pythagoras. The most well-known reference to beans in Western philosophy is the Pythagorean warning to abstain from beans. In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky mentions that “Pythagoras actually persuaded an ox to renounce eating beans, by merely whispering in the animal’s ear!” (1:283)—a story she repeats (2:78). Thoreau also alludes to this famous avoidance of beans. He explains that he did not grow them to eat them: “for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day” (207). The parable-maker turns out to be Yeats; indeed, as critics often note, the poem’s “I will arise and go” (lines 1, 9) echoes the Prodigal Son. But just as Christ’s parables—on a close reading—often turn ambiguous, so does Yeats’s poem. Thoreau jokingly calls himself a Pythagorean, but the Pythagoreans would not be amused. The Neo-Platonist Iamblichus reports that they were not even supposed to touch beans. He tells the story of a band of Pythagoreans who, if they had crossed a bean field, would have escaped from enemy troops; unwilling “to violate the dogma which ordered them not to touch beans,” they stood their ground and died (100–101). By Pythagorean standards, Thoreau’s casual attitude toward beans is naive at best—unbecoming in an ox, let alone a philosopher. Iamblichus reports that the Pythagoreans’ “dinner consisted of bread and honey or the honey-comb” (52). Thomas Taylor, who translated Iamblichus, also translated Porphyry’s “On the Cave of the Nymphs,” a text later used in “Among School Children.” Porphyry claims that bees “do not sit on beans, which were regarded by the ancients as a symbol of generation” (185). Taylor explains: “when Pythagoras exhorted his disciples to abstain from beans, he intended to signify, that they should beware of a continued and perpetual descent into the realms of generation” (Porphyry 185 nm; Iamblichus 211–12). We know that Yeats had read Porphyry by 1893 (Wilson 27), but his occult studies may have brought him in contact with Taylor’s translations years earlier. In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky quotes Taylor and praises him highly (1:283–84). According to R. F. Foster, “Thomas Taylor’s translations of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists,” lent to “young aspirants” by John O’Leary, formed part of Yeats’s “agenda for esoteric study” (50).

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE To go to Innisfree and plant “bean-rows” may, from a Thoreauvian perspective, reap austere wisdom, or it may, from a Pythagorean perspective, amount to a betrayal of wisdom, a “descent into the realms of generation.” The simple word bean condenses the struggle of a poet caught between London and Sligo, and suffering from homesickness (Yeats, Autobiography 94), sexual frustration (93–94), and intellectual exhaustion. The letter containing the poem reports that Yeats had been suffering from “collapses”: “I find a single vigerous [sic] conversation, especially if any philosophical matter comes up, leaves me next day dry as a sucked orange” (Collected 118). The dream of the lake isle may promise wisdom, but it also offers a wishy-washy alternative to the poet’s desiccating quest for knowledge. Henry Merritt has cogently argued that the poem’s longing for Sligo involves a flight from London’s “sexual entanglement” (103). The poem, however, superimposes London on Sligo. The Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, which Yeats entered a few weeks before he wrote the poem, “required abstention from meat, alcohol, and sex” (Ross 566). Innisfree, with its life of bean-growing solitude, parallels the ascetic conditions of the poet’s London activities. Moreover, Yeats, studding the poem with phrases from the Authorized Version, doesn’t even meet Gaelic halfway but wallows in the King’s English (Purdy 51). Imagining escape, the poem hunkers down in London. Sean Pryor notes that “lingering over the ‘I’ in ‘arise’ and the repeated ‘go’, the poet goes nowhere” (99). Doubt stalls him: Is going to Innisfree a way to obtain cleansing knowledge or contaminating folly? The doubt clings to the surprisingly rich word bean. Works Cited Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled. 2 vols. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical, 1972. Print. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Hunter, C. Stuart. “Return to la bonne vaux: the Symbolic Significance of Innisfree.” Modern Language Studies 14.3 (1984): 70–81. Print. Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life. Trans. Thomas Taylor. London: J. M. Watkins, 1818. PDF file. Merritt, Henry. “Rising and Going: The ‘Nature’ of Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’” English 47 (1998): 103–109. Print. Monteith, Ken. Yeats and Theosophy. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Porphyry. Select Works of Porphyry. Trans. Thomas Taylor. London: Thomas Rodd, 1823. Google Books. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Pryor, Sean. “Iconicity and the Divine in the Fin de Siècle Poetry of W. B. Yeats.” Insistent Images. Ed. Elzbieta Tabakowska, Christina Ljungberg, and Olga Fischer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. 91–102. Print.

Purdy, Dwight H. Biblical Echo and Allusion in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats: Poetics and the Art of God. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1994. Print. Ross, David A. Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats: A Literary Reference to his Life and Work. New York: Infobase, 2009. Print. Skwire, David. “A Check List of Wordplays in Walden.” American Literature 31.3 (1959): 282–89. Print. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Penguin, 1983. Print. Wilson, F. A. C. W. B. Yeats and Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1958. Print. Yeats, William Butler. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Print. ———. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 1. Ed. John Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Print. ———. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt and Russel K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1957. 117. Print.