The post below comprises some notes on a poem by Yeats. It is part of something I am writing on the poet. These notes will interest perhaps only one or two readers. For the majority of you, who can’t be bothered reading the whole thing, any thoughts on chanting (historical / theoretical) and the differences between chanting and singing would be welcome.
To the Rose Upon the Rood of time
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
Come near, come near, come near - Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
Lest I no more bear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field-mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days
So firstly, what is the relation between the ‘chaunt’ of the second stanza and ‘sing’ of the first? The poet invokes the Rose as muse in order to ‘sing’, to articulate in song, a certain tradition. But the Rose’s ‘overproximity’, at once conjured and feared, would draw him towards the obscure language of the Dead and to the chant rather than the song. We need, then, to interpret this counterpoint of song and chant – or ‘chaunt’, for the archaism needs also to be read.
If we consider the etymology of chant, it is frequently used, or was, as a description of the non-human voice: birds and even hounds ‘chaunt’[1]. Yeats may have wanted this suggestion of some inhuman or chthonic noise, an accent from some language before language. And the archaic spelling may return this older sense. (‘Sing’, certainly, is something birds do, but not other animals, and in any case it perhaps connotes pastoral harmonies that the poet wants to exclude.)
‘Song,’ of course, is associated also with expression; to sing is to utter or vocalise – a conscious articulation. Chaunt is something altogether more incantatory, mantric, rote-like. There is something properly mindless about chanting, hence its use in religion, ritual and magic – one cedes the initiative to a word or formula not yours. The momentum of the chant seems to overtake and then take in the individuals who began it. So too does the chant reverse the relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ implied in ‘expression’. That is, whereas ‘expression’ is conceived as the inner made outer, something like a chant begins by emptying out the ‘wilfulness’ of expression in deference to some older word or doctrine. Yeats’s phrase here might be apposite: “a monotony in external things for the sake of in interior variety”. In liturgical practice, chanting allows the Word to speak rather than the congregation. In Yeats’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’, the ‘resonant chanting voice,’ that of an ancient wisdom, speaks through the mouth of the old man (himself elsewhere in dreamland). In bardic poetry, tradition itself speaks, and it is this association that Yeats seems to associate with chanting:
“Tales of the kind that are told generation after generation in the same words and in the same chanting voice.”[2]
“night after night in winter, Gaelic storytellers would chant old poems to them over the poteen”[3].
Chanting is clearly linked to enchantment. In another early Yeats story, (‘The Binding of the Hair’), Yeats refers to the ‘chaunt’ of “bard Aodh” and the “enchantment of his dream-heavy voice” – poetry is here tied to song and is a matter of incantations and spells as opposed to ‘expression’. As such the chant is from the prehistory of art - it is bound up with tradition. Indeed, if tradition is that wherein the Dead continue to live, then Yeats’s phrase ‘bright hearts of those long dead’ seems to encapsulate this. It is through the ‘medium’ of tradition that the Dead are animate.
But the ‘unknown tongue’ adds a further emphasis. If, in chanting, the “I” is speechless, the image of chanting an unknown or foreign tongue is of words learned as mere rhythm and sound prior to sense, of the self subdued or bound by the spell of some uncanny incantation. Again, at the close of ‘Adoration of the Magi’ the narrator ‘repeats’ rather than utters a Gaelic prayer – a ‘foreign tongue’ - as a chant to hold the daemonic at bay.
Worth noting here is that the other ‘unknown tongue’ in the early poetry belongs to a demon in WOO:
“.. beyond the door a plain,/ Dusky and herbless, where a bubbling strain/ Rose from a little runnel on whose edge/ A dusk demon, dry as withered sedge,/ Swayed ,crooning to himself in an unknown tongue.”[4]
This daemonic figure rises ‘barking’ from an earth of which he seems the very likeness or echo (dusk/ dusky), a chthonic inhuman creature of the island, the ‘mournful’ emanation of an equally mournful landscape, engaged in who knows not what obscure jouissance.[5] Again, the ‘unknown tongue’ is here an sign of some language older than language, or ‘canticle of the earth’.
But the phrase ‘unknown tongue’ has biblical precedent too. In a phrase very close to what Yeats says, we find __ “He who speaks in an unknown tongue speaks not to the congregation but to god”. Note that ‘unknown’ here means unknown to the person actually speaking the words. We are dealing, that is, with glossolalia.
Secondly, in speaking in an unknown tongue, the ‘spirit still prays’ even where the understanding doesn’t follow What this suggests is that the words, like the Tibetan prayer wheel, have an autonomous force over and beyond the individual. The words do the praying for you.
The poem’s contrast, then, is between a subject summoning, or beckoning a muse so as to be able to sing, and the prospect of some subjectless chant of tradition, some inscrutable ancestral idiom which might cancel the space necessary for the poet to draw breath. The poet needs to be able to summon or cite tradition and the ancestral, without thereby being taken at his word.
But the ‘chanting’ of the Gaelic prayer at the end of Adoration of the Magi reminds us also of the peculiar nature of the language issue in Ireland, and the way in which the ‘singing’ of tradition would at some point have to translate back into the ‘unknown’ Gaelic register from which it draws validity, the 'lost' language of tradition, native but foreign to that middle-class ‘congregation’ to whom Yeats must speak. And there is, again, a rather literal sense in which the past is padlocked inside a ‘tongue men do not know’, a temporal safe-deposit box which he lacks the power to open and which, therefore, can only leave him sick with longing.
[1] The relevant definitions from the OED are as follows:
intr. To sing, warble.arch. or poet. b. of birds. c. transf. of other animals; spec. of hounds
trans. To sing, utter musically. (Often with notion of ‘prolonged or drawling intonation,’ due to influence of sense 4.) Chiefly poetical.
To sing of, celebrate in song. poet.
music. To recite musically, intone; to sing a chant ,as the Psalms, etc., in public worship
fig. To talk or repeat a statement monotonously; to harp upon (obs.)
chant (n):
2. music. A short melody or phrase to which the Psalms, Canticles, etc., are sung in public worship. The essential characteristic of a chant is the long ‘reciting-note’ to which an indefinite number of syllables are sung, followed by a rhythmical cadence.
[2] Welsch, 173
[3] ‘Adoration of the Magi’ [first ed.] p. 37.
[4] The Wanderings Of Oisin and Other Poems, W.B. Yeats (London: Kegan Paul, 1889), p. 28.
[5] One critic apparently thought this demon ‘orgasm incarnate’ (Brown, Yeats, p. 44)g
copyright M.B.
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