Singing Amid Uncertainty: Yeats’s Closing Questions

Abstract

About modern poets, Yeats once wrote: “Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty” (Myth 331). Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in her study of how poems end, shows how this song amid uncertainty in modern verse “expresses the temper (or distemper) of our times” thematically and structurally. One key to this uncertain structure, she explains, is an ending that avoids “the expressive qualities of strong closure while securing, in various ways, the reader’s sense of the poem’s integrity.”¹ This is “anti-closure.” Smith notes how this anti-closure characterizes much of Yeats. It is established, for example, in the way he exploits traditional forms and their ending strategies, committing “poetic sabotage,” with his handling of, for instance, stanzaic refrains: she argues that a refrain repeated without change suggests continuation, while modifying it in the last stanza as is normally done signals closure but that, as an anti-closural device, Yeats often leaves a final refrain unaltered. The effect is intensified when the recurring line bears a puzzling relationship to the stanza and when it is “a question, a paradox, or some similarly unsettling utterance” (Smith, p. 246). Smith offers the final stanza of “The O’Rahilly” as one of many examples:

What remains to sing about

But of the death he met

Stretched out under a doorway Somewhere off Henry Street;

They that found him found upon The door above his head

‘Here died the O’Rahilly.

R.I.P.’ writ in blood.

How goes the weather? (VP 585)