"Words Obey my Call:" Yeats and Adorno

I’ve always been intrigued by a phrase from Yeats’s poem ‘Words’, from The Green Helmet (1910): “words obey my call”.

“Words obey my call” may seem like a statement of what all writers wish for. But not quite. The relation of words to the writer is arguably not one of “obedience”; this implies discipline, power, and, crucially, the externality of words. Ideally, words “express” or disclose the call of the writer. Words are, indissolubly, the call of the writer. But “words obey my call” places a sliver of foreignness, of resistance, between writer and word.

“Words obey my call” is one of a constellation of examples in the middle and late Yeats in which he draws attention to his own agency in handling words, in making poetry. “Here’s an old story I’ve remade;” “I declare this tower is my symbol” and a host of other instances. In many instances, there is the sense of discipline in handling some recalcitrant material. 

Absent from the early Yeats, by contrast, is this awareness of the process of making, of poetic labour, and something like its opposite. Rather than the sense of words and poetic images as things ‘commanded’ by the poet, as the products of his own poesis, we have a poet for whom words and images have a kind of magical autonomy. They float weightlessly above a void, hallucinatory, disembodied. The poet then contemplates these things almost as a dreamer contemplates the contents of his dream, or as what Theodor Adorno calls a phantasmagoria:

The phantasmagoria tends toward dream.. it mirrors subjectivity by confronting it with the product of its own labour, but in such a way that the labour that has gone into it is no longer identifiable. The dreamer encounters his own image impotently, as if it were a miracle.. The object he has forgotten he has made is dangled magically before his eyes.

The poem which might be the text-book illustration of Adorno’s point is “Song of the Wandering Aengus”: 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk along the long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Like other early Yeats poems, there is an initial appearance of nature being near and ready to hand - “I went out to the hazel wood”. But it is at once clear that this is a pastoral - generic - environment, a stage-set for a fantasy of labour (catching the fish) as effortless and spontaneous. It then becomes clear that this is also an image for poetic creation and of the “catching” of the poetic image. The moment of this poetic catching is, familiarly enough in early Yeats, that of twilight or dream, a liminal time when things lose their determinate outlines. Stars lose their distance and solemnity to dance like moths in some depthless foreground.

The “glimmering” of the girl is the indeterminate flickering of absence and presence which marks her off as Other from the well-defined shapes of the quotidian and every day. She has been fantastically transfigured and set glowing with a magic which renders her doubly unreal. But the unreality which shines through her will also cause her to vanish without trace, having failed to realize some solid artistic form. 

What we have here is a phantasmagorical image of the poetic act: The image comes into being indeterminately - “something”, “someone” - opaque to the poet himself, the formation of a preternatural object which cannot be controlled but only consumed. This consumable image then appears to interpellate him personally (it calls him by his name). He becomes the passive addressee of his own creation. The poem pictures emblematically the productive energies of the poet alienated from himself, dancing before his eyes estranged.

There is a sense, the early Yeats, that “It [is] the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not my conscious intention that produced the effect.” And it is this sense of the autonomy of symbols, their independence, which then mean they have to be controlled, subject to discipline: "Words obey my call".