Quaint, Exquisite by Lavery Grace E.;

Author:Lavery, Grace E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

“Imitated,” according to editorial notes, from “a Japanese haiku poem in praise of spring,” and yet the praise of spring, sardonically hemmed in by two parentheses and a mordant period, is hardly the poem’s matter.95 Yeats appears here not so much tired by his old age, as tired of his having already recounted it to greater effect elsewhere. In “Among School Children,” (1927) eleven years earlier, he frailly self-presented “a sixty year old smiling public man”; in the prefatory poem to Responsibilities (1914), he was already desperate to plead with his ancestors their “pardon that for a barren passion’s sake, / Although I have come close on forty-nine / I have no child.”96 Here the line “Seventy years have I lived” appears three times, not to recontextualize itself but to prolong its self-evident fatigue: the poem makes nothing happen, and it doesn’t even happen until the last line. Like “Pardon Old Fathers” before it, and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” after, “Imitated from the Japanese” is both thematically and formally embarrassing: it describes one embarrassment (of being old and never having danced for joy) and performs another (as vagueness, vacuity, and repetition). Of that sequence, “Imitated from the Japanese” is the only explicitly Orientalist composition. The air of Japaneseness that looms over the poem, albeit above the line of a mimetic “imitation” that marks Yeats’s composition as structurally an effect rather than a cause, desublimates form into theme, as though the whole poem could be excused on the grounds of its Oriental oddity. Not merely quaint, then, but strategically eccentric.

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