"A man who does not exist": Yeats invents the reader he wants
Yeats's 1919 poem builds a fisherman out of grey cloth, a stream and one turning wrist, then admits the man is a dream — which is where its lesson about whom you write for begins.
Yeats placed this poem at pages 44–45 of The Wild Swans at Coole, the collection Macmillan published in March 1919 1. Most of that book was already two years old. In his preface Yeats calls it "in part, a reprint of The Wild Swans at Coole, printed a year ago on my sister's hand-press at Dundrum, Co. Dublin" 2. The Fisherman was in the hand-printed book too, and the trade edition changed a few of its words.
A man appears in the first line: freckled, in grey Connemara clothes, out at dawn casting flies on a stream. For twenty-four lines he reads like a portrait of somebody the poet has stood and watched. Then the poem says what he actually is — "A man who does not exist, / A man who is but a dream" — and the portrait turns inside out. The fisherman is a reader Yeats invented, in scorn of the audience he did have, and the poem's last words are a promise to go on writing for him anyway.
The poem is forty lines long and plain in its grammar, and that plainness is what makes it worth a slow read. It shows, step by step, how a poem can put an audience on the page: first one kind, then another.
Passage
Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies, It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I'd looked in the face What I had hoped 'twould be To write for my own race And the reality; The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved, And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down.Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream: A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, 'Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.'— The Fisherman, in W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole (New York: Macmillan, 1919), pp. 44–45 3
Gloss
- Connemara: the Atlantic coast of western County Galway, a district of mountains, coves and small lakes, and the largest Irish-speaking region in the country 4. The poem never names the landscape. It names the cloth — "grey Connemara clothes" — so the reader sees a place through what a man wears to work in it.
- Cast his flies: angling vocabulary. An artificial fly is a lure tied from fur, feather and thread onto a hook, built to imitate something the fish are feeding on; "cast" is the angler's verb for throwing the line 5. The dawn in this poem is a working morning, not a scenic one.
- "All day I'd looked in the face / What I had hoped 'twould be / To write for my own race / And the reality": four lines of compressed syntax. To look a thing in the face is to confront it, and the two objects of that looking arrive only at the end — what the poet hoped his writing for his own people would be, and what it actually was. The semicolon that follows hands the rest of the stanza one job: to show the reality, name by name.
Close read
The device is a catalogue that arrives without a verb, and it does the poem's hardest work.
After that semicolon, twelve lines of people follow, none of them doing anything: "The living men that I hate, / The dead man that I loved, / The craven man in his seat, / The insolent unreproved". The list is grammatically an extension of "the reality", so the audience is not something that acts on the poet; it is what he has been given to work with. Each name is specific enough to be somebody met in a street or a theatre lobby, and none of them is a reader worth writing for. Then the sentence's engine starts again at line 25 — "Maybe a twelvemonth since / Suddenly I began" — and the poem performs the opposite operation.
It builds a man out of a place and a hand: "And his sun-freckled face, / And grey Connemara cloth, / Climbing up to a place / Where stone is dark under froth, / And the down turn of his wrist / When the flies drop in the stream". The one detail that certifies him is not his face but his wrist, the small rotation that puts the fly where he wants it. Freckles appear twice, first as an attribute of a man "who goes to a grey place" and then as "sun-freckled" — so the only face the poem describes in any detail belongs to someone who is not there.
Then the admission, flat and unadorned: "A man who does not exist, / A man who is but a dream". It does not cancel the portrait; it reclassifies it. And the vow that follows lands as the end of the sentence begun twelve lines earlier — "I began ... And cried" — so the poem's closing statement is something the poet shouted at himself a year ago: "Before I am old / I shall have written him one / Poem maybe as cold / And passionate as the dawn." The final line is an oxymoron, and it takes back nothing. The landscape has been grey three times over; the dawn is when the light arrives and the water is coldest. The poem Yeats wants to write is to be both at once — as impersonal as the stream, as hot as first light — and he hedges it with "maybe", which is honest.
Two of those words are worth watching because they changed between the hand-press book of 1917 and the Macmillan printing of 1919. The earlier text has "Where stone is dark with froth"; the later one has "dark under froth", which puts the stone beneath the moving white water instead of mixed into it, and makes the fisherman's feet the thing the reader has to imagine 6. The same printing swap turns "May be a twelvemonth since" into "Maybe" and restores the Irish spelling "grey" in all three places.
Why it still matters
The poem's honesty is worth more than its beauty. Yeats does not pretend the ideal reader exists; he says outright that he made the man up, and he makes the promise after the admission rather than instead of it. That order is the lesson. Most of us imagine an audience that already agrees with us and then feel robbed when it does not turn up.
The poem also separates two things that get muddled whenever anyone makes something for other people. Who you write for is a choice, and it is allowed to be a person who is not available — a better reader than the ones in the room. Whether that reader ever arrives is not part of the choice and never was. The poem keeps the vow and drops the illusion, in that order, in four lines.
There is one more thing to carry out of it. When Yeats invents his fisherman, he does not describe his taste or his opinions. He describes what the man is doing at dawn: where he stands, what he wears, how his wrist turns. An invented reader gets to be real in the poem only because the poet has thought hard about his working morning.
Reflection
Who is the reader you imagine when you make something — and what changes if you admit, as this poem does, that the person is a dream?
References
- 1
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- 4Wikipedia: Connemara
en.wikipedia.org
- 5Wikipedia: Artificial fly
en.wikipedia.org
- 6
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