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Candidate no.

Module Title:

Reimagining the Present, Rewriting the Past in Irish Literature

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(e.g. 5AABC123 )

7AAEM728

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Yeats and the Uncanny

A defining characteristic of so much Irish poetry, not least the poetry of W. B.

Yeats, is the way in which it straddles the borders between opposing states: past
and present, spiritual and physical, remembered and forgotten, alive and dead.
The poet invites the reader into a world in which these states coexist: a world
that is both unreal and hyper-real, where invisible forces are rendered concrete
symbols, where memory is a tangible thing to be recovered and restored, where
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the dead are given flesh and blood and live again. This strange world of blurred
boundaries is the subject of Sigmund Freuds essay, The Uncanny 1, in which
he attempts to analyse how and why some of these images and concepts can
have such a powerful, unsettling effect. It is my belief that a great deal of what is
characteristic of Yeats poetry ancient spirituality, mysticism, otherworldliness
and ghosts derives some of its power from the phenomenon Freud terms the
uncanny. It is not always an explicit connection or firm conclusion sometimes
Freud offers nothing more than a different set of linguistic or analytical tools
but so many of his concepts appear to be paralleled in Yeats that it bears
investigation. The aim of this essay therefore is to test the thesis that Freuds
analysis can increase our understanding of Yeats poetry and the effect it has its
reader by approaching it from a more psychological perspective.
*
The phenomenon which Freud terms the uncanny is no easily graspable, clearcut thing; therefore, it is first necessary to consider what, exactly, is signified by
the term at the foundation of his argument. Initially, he suggests that uncanny
can be applied to, all that is terrible to all that arouses dread and creeping
horror.2 The word fear is significantly absent; the dread and horror that stand
in its place suggest a more intellectually-based emotion dread meaning the
realisation that something bad is going to happen, horror meaning the
realisation that something bad has happened rather than the less rational,
more nebulous fear. The key element in this basic formulation of uncanniness is
realisation: rather than fear itself, it is the realisation that a fear will, or has,
come true. It is, in short, a very real emotion, distinct from the irrational or
disproportionate phobias that make up so much of Freuds other work; it is fear
supported by evidence. As will be explored below, Yeats the poet does not deal
in fear but in evidence.
Freud offers a vast array of definitions, citations and quotations, across a range
of languages, in order to establish the point that the term uncanny is at heart
paradoxical. If it is considered in relation to its apparent antonym, we have:

1 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), Standard Edition, 17 (1955), 217-52;

all subsequent references to this edition
2 Freud, p. 217
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familiar

strange

canny

uncanny
hidden exposed

However, by switching the places of the two meanings:

hidden

= strange

canny

uncanny
familiar = exposed

The two words reveal themselves to be almost synonymous. Thus, we arrive at a

much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon
described by the term uncanny. Something uncanny is inherently liminal it is
not in a state of one absolute or another, but rather in a state of becoming one
from the other. It is when an image or an idea is somehow both strange and
familiar which is to say when the strange is becoming familiar; or one that is
both hidden and exposed, something secret which is in the process of becoming
known. The essential effect on the observer of this ambiguous liminality is what
Freud terms intellectual uncertainty. In the hands of master poet like Yeats, this
intellectual uncertainty can be employed to disturb, unnerve, remind, and
reawaken the reader in essential preparation for the journey towards truth and
enlightenment. The Second Coming for which we often yearn may be a more
terrifying experience than anticipated, and the agent of that experience may be
by necessity destructive before constructive.
*
The most enduring example of uncanniness offered in Freuds essay is the image
of the automaton. He groups with this dolls, waxworks and anything that appears
human but is not. What is unnerving is not the object itself, but rather the doubts
and intellectual uncertainty arising in the mind over whether the animate object
is really alive. The most obvious use of this phenomenon to support Yeats poetic
purposes is The Black Tower3. There in the tomb, the dead stand upright, he
writes in the first line of the first instance of the semi-repetitive chorus. On
3 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Wordsworth Editions,
2008) p. 300 (the chorus portions of the poem are italicised in this edition); all
subsequent reference to this edition
4

surface reading, the image is simply one of statues or effigies lined up in a crypt.
However, by using the verb stand in the active tense, he brings them to life; yet
again, however, though the verb is active, the sense is static: the dead stand,
but they do not move. That tension between stasis and motion creates a more
unsettling tension between alive and dead: they stand but do not move. It is
sinister and uncomfortable - one wonders what they are waiting for, whether
they will come fully to life, or fall down to a final death. The recurring image of
the chorus has a similar effect: They shake when the winds roar, / Old bones
upon the mountain shake. As the couplet is repeated three times in the poem,
the image becomes ever more portentous and unsettling. Like the standing
dead, the old bones are looming, upon the mountain, poised perhaps to come
down. Again, the verb is active crucially, the bones are not necessarily shaken
by the wind, all we know is that they shake in the wind. They become animated,
but it is not clear by what - are they merely relics blowing in the wind, or are they
limbs animated by an ancient soul with some mysterious unfulfilled obligation.
They are both, of course: as poetic licence allows for metaphor to become truth
and the uncanny effect to take hold.

Freud also ascribes this quality, in an inverted sense, to epileptics, the insane
and trauma victims: those who give the appearance of being alive and yet seem
to act mechanically or impulsively, without volition. I believe it is a form of this
dynamic that gives Yeats An Irish Airman Foresees His Death 4 its haunting,
otherworldly quality. The airman in question is characterised by negatives Those that I fight, I do not hate / Those that I guard I do not love. This has an
unnerving effect on the reader: some kind of emotional response to flying and
fighting would be expected, yet there is none. The effect is heightened as he
appears so chillingly undisturbed by the prospect of his own death: The years to
come seemed a waste of breath. There is an interesting instance of past tense
here, with seemed used to describe the future to create a strange mingling of
times. It is as though he has already experienced his future, that it is already
written, that his own thoughts, feelings or actions are so hopelessly
inconsequential as to be nothing. Again, he appears more mechanical than
human. Ultimately, his foreseen transition from life to death appears to be so
minor as to be no change at all. The impact on the reader is a kind of
4 Yeats, p. 111
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uncanniness: he seems already a ghost, yet he is not up there among the

clouds, he is already half-way to heaven. We realise that he is not what we
expect him to be and with that realisation we are forced to question even
whether he is human, whether he was ever human, and who or what made him
inhuman. There is a somewhat more light-hearted instance of this in Sailing to
Byzantium5, in which Yeats writes, An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A
tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hand and sing, and louder sing.
The image is of a man made inhuman fleshless, bloodless and soulless merely
a coat on a stick. However, here Yeats offers the reader some precise answers:
age is the cause of this, music and singing presumably suggesting any kind of
emotional expression are the remedy.
There is a more general distinction to be made here: that which is uncanny in
Yeats poetry is not uncanny to Yeats. The poet offers the realisation of
intellectual uncertainty, challenges the readers conventions of belief, but in
order to do so he must be at ease with that intellectual uncertainty; he must be
the uncanny man with the capacity to achieve [his] aim in virtue of certain
special powers.6 Freud suggests that each individuals perception of the uncanny
is highly subjective, that there is a great variance in sensitivity to the problem 7;
the extreme delicacy of perception that Freud identifies in those who most feel
or experience the uncanny could just as well be used to describe what we
understand as the poetic disposition. Similarly, poetry itself is inherently
uncanny. Song, dance and poetry are in many ways a relic of and a throw-back to
that initial animistic phase; the transformation of blank prose to poetry is a
special power that blurs the boundary between real and metaphorical. Poetic
devices of rhythm, repetition, alliteration and rhyme are all, in a way, Freudian
coincidences, means by which the poet conjures a certain uncanniness. Theres a
neat little illustration of this in On Woman8; Yeats writes:
And all because some one,
Perverse creature of chance,
And live like Solomon
That Sheba led a dance.

5
6
7
8

Yeats, p. 162
Freud, p. 231
Freud, p. 217
Yeats, p. 122
6

The rhyme of dance and chance is obvious, but so central to the meaning of
the poem that one wonders whether it is merely coincidence that these two
concepts are signified by rhyming words or if they are somehow linked
conceptually as well as linguistically. It is almost too perfect to be coincidental.
Similarly, the wonderful half-rhyme of some one and Solomon some one
just happens to turn into Solomon; it could be anyone, but it is not. The overall
structure is tightly measured in six-syllable lines, which gives the simultaneously
contrasting impression of intellectual order imposed on the dance of chance
and intrinsic, hidden order within that dance.
*
The idea of reawakening from the dullness and lazy ignorance that can
accompany the passing of time, of becoming human again, is thematically
central to much of Yeats poetry. Sometimes, as in An Irish Airman, it is a
personal revival; more often, however, it is a collective renaissance, as in The
Tower, The Gyres, or Hound Voice. The notion of recovery or rediscovery of
knowledge that has been discarded, discredited, repressed or forgotten is
similarly at the heart of Freuds uncanniness. In the essay, he alludes to the
theory of the evolution of human belief outlined in his earlier work, Totem and
Taboo. Essentially, he suggests that humanity as a whole has passed through
three distinct phases of belief: first, and most primitive, was the belief in magic,
animism and the omnipotence of thought; second came spirituality and religion;
and finally came science and objective rationality. 9 Each stage represents the
discrediting, abandonment and obsolescence of the previous, and erects an
intellectual barrier against it. Much of what strikes us as uncanny, Freud argues,
is the result of a breech in this barrier: it is the doubt and intellectual uncertainty
that occurs when one is confronted with evidence that perhaps the old beliefs
were true, and therefore by implication that our current beliefs are not as
definitive and inviolable as we had assumed. It is not the old gods that we fear, it
is the sense that we may have misplaced our faith in the new ones.
Yeats revels in trampling this barrier: he loves old gods; he draws from and
delights in animism, magic, spirits, and ghosts. In The Double Vision of Michael
Robartes10 - the uncanny spirit who has his own uncanny experience he
9 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1960)
10 Yeats, p. 114
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sketches a scene of a Sphinx and a Buddha sat side-by-side. Unmoving and

omniscient, the Sphinx, Gazed upon all things known, and unknown, / In triumph
of intellect / With motionless head erect representing the timelessness of
wisdom; while the Buddha, whose eyeballs never moved, / Being fixed on all
things loved, all things unloved, represents the eternal truth of love. Between
them dances a girl another automaton, being both dead and alive animated
by primal transcendent abandon. All three of whom having, time overthrown /
Were dead yet flesh and bone. The core element in this is a desire to embrace,
to reclaim, and to revive a more ancient conception of life based on the
universality of truth and love. Lines Written in Dejection 11 expresses a similar
sentiment but with the emphasis shifted on to the inadequacies and limitations
of a modern world severed from the animistic tradition. It is not an uncanny
poem, though it plays with the uncanny dynamic; it is more about the absence of
uncanniness. In it he laments the loss of the heroic mother moon, the holy
centaurs of the hills, and the noble wild witches whose angry tears, are gone.
In their place is left nothing but the timid sun. There is no balance between light
and dark, no spaces in which the mythical beings can hide and sustain
themselves, no scope for ambiguity and imagination in the unchanging, pedantic
glare of the sun. Something is lost in its unblinking objective rationality. Timid is
that sun, however, which illuminates perhaps only because it is fearful of what
may happen if it should cease for a moment. Similarly, Yeats thumbs his nose at
this new world in The Collar Bone of a Hare 12 as he stares, At the old bitter
world where they marry in churches / [] Through the white thin bone of a hare.
There is no magical power in this tiny bone, but is does offer a new or actually
a very old perspective. The impression on the reader is of a man that is a little
weird, eccentric perhaps, or even crazy.

Ultimately, in both Yeats poetry and Freuds analysis, the fundamental element
of the uncanny phenomenon which occurs when the discarded beliefs of the past
reappear to challenge and encroach upon those of the present, is that in doing so
they implicitly or explicitly also threaten the intellectual barrier that mankind has
erected between itself and awareness of its own mortality. Yeats, like Tom
ORoughley And if my dearest friend were dead / Id dance a measure on his
11 Yeats, p. 121
12 Yeats, p. 112
8

grave13 does not avoid death nor half-view it with reverent dread. He removes
its sting, disarms it, by making the living appear dead, as in An Irish Airman,
and by making the dead seem alive, as he does so often with his frequent
deployment of ghosts. In In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,

14

he does not

only welcome memories of the dead to flood back to him, he also, with the
almost contrary refrain of: All, all are in my thoughts tonight, being dead,
suggests their presence is somehow closer and more real precisely because they
are dead. Aside from the unfortunate Sidney, death figures in most of Yeats
poetry as a means of rejuvenation and rebirth. Illustrations of this idea abound,
from his recurring use of the symbolic phoenix, to Broken Dreams 15, where he
writes: Vague memories, nothing but memories, / But in the grave all, all, shall
be renewed.; or Solomon and Sheba, in which he offers a kind of animistic
prayer:
Now I am growing old
But when, if the tale is true
The Pestle of the moon
That pounds up all anew
Brings me to birth again
To find what I once had
And know what once I have known
Again, there is longed-for destruction before reconstruction, with the ultimate
aim that knowledge and understanding, eternal truths ever extant but hidden,
will be revealed and recovered. Yeats conception of mortality seems essentially
a tacit rejection of the linear temporality of the modern world in favour of the
cyclical, regenerative power of the natural world. It seems strange to us, archaic,
possibly a little unsettling, but not to Yeats.

Under Ben Bulben is perhaps Yeats most uncanny poem and neatly combines
several of the uncanny characteristics. Poised between life and death, the living
immortal voice provides the epitaph for its own dead body. It begins with an
invocation of the chants of sages around the Mareotic Lake (which almost
suggests amniotic, a primordial starting point) that brings spirits back to life.
The uncanny effect emerges as the phantom pale long-visaged company rides
the wintery dawn: unsettling because dawn is traditionally the province of the
13 Yeats, p. 116
14 Yeats, p. 108
15 Yeats, p. 128
9

living, one expects spirits at night. Again, Yeats concept of death as rebirth
appears: Many times man lives and dies / Between his two eternities; but here it
is stated more directly, less couched in the mystical or spiritual. Similarly, this is
an old truth that ancient Ireland knew, but has now been forgotten by
unremembering hearts and heads / Base-born products of base beds. The thrust
of the poem, the purpose of the ghostly procession, becomes a journey forward
into the past. From ancient Egypt through the renaissance to Ireland, art has
advanced towards transcendence in order to bring about a return to the spiritual
understanding of the ancients, the profane perfection of mankind. It is in a way
the ultimate gyre as we bore on with progress into the future, we find it
returning us to our past.
The uncanny dynamic outlined by Freud is employed by Yeats, but it is used
subversively - in order to nullify and destroy it. He shows us evidence of our fears
so that we will no longer be afraid. To cast a cold eye / On life, on death, is to be
liberated, to embrace liminality, to be enlightened. In doing so, the doubts, fears
and worries that lie behind Freuds uncanniness simply vanish into thin air.

Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny (1919), Standard Edition, 17 (1955), 217-52
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1960)
Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Wordsworth Editions,
2008)

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