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The Symbolism of Yeats’s At Hawk’s Well
Joaquim Geerlach

The purpose of this short article is an attempt to show Yeats’s symbolism on one of his well-known plays At Hawk’s Well. In order to do it, we first have to see what Yeats understands by symbolism and in which way Yeats’s symbolism is close to the Noh Drama which certainly influenced him. Finally, we will try to find out the meaning of the symbols  used by Yeats on this play.
 

Yeats and the Symbols

It is well-known Yeats was interested in occultism since young age. Not only because it was a possibility to him to find his theological and metaphysical approaches away from a conventional and established church with its dogmatic answers, but also because occultism was a rich source of symbols where Yeats could find inspiration to drive away his imagination from the natural world. As Richard Ellmann states: “ He read mystical writers because they saw symbols in everything, and, with the same general purpose, he sought out those who said they could manipulate external nature by magic as poet manipulated it by symbols. He would justify himself and his method. He rightly perceived that the question of symbolism went beyond poetry and esthetic theory, and knew that to use the magic wand he must master all the charms”[1]. That is why Yeats says: “I had made a new religion, almost, an infallible church of poetic tradition”[2].
 
One of Yeats’s influence was the gnostic poet William Blake - and through him, Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme – which he has been introduced by Edwin Ellis. Yeats says on his Autobiographies: “He (Ellis) had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios, and early in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins  - “The fields from Islington to Marybone,/ To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,/ Were builded (sic) over with pillars of gold,/ And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood. – The four quarters of London represented Blake’s four great mythological personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake that requires an exact knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the connection between his system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I recognized (sic) certain attributions, from what is sometimes called  the Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation was more than fantasy he and I began our four years’ work upon the “Prophetic Books” of William Blake”[3].
 
Although Yeats’s early poetry and dramas have got clearer influence from the occultism than his later works, mysticism was always an important subject on his thought and art throughout his life. Yeats himself says - replying John O’Leary’s worries to see him veering, as he thought, so far from life -: “If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. It holds to my work the same relation that the philosophy of Godwin holds to the work of Shelley and I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaesance [sic] – the revolt of the soul against the intellect – now beggining in the world”[4].
 
As Daniel Albright says: “Yeats hoped to subvert a language created for the description of the everyday world, in order to embody visions of the extraterrestrial. The mirror of his art must not merely reflect, but kindle, start to burn with images hitherto unseen.
 
Yeats’s poetry ( we can also include his dramas) shows a lifelong search for such images, images that were not reflections but illuminations. He sought them in translations of old Irish myths. He sought them in visionary poetry, especially that of Blake and Shelley. He sought them in the fairy-tales told by Irish peasants – he heard many as a boy, when his family spent summers in Sligo, in the far west of Ireland, and later he made a systematic investigation of folk-beliefs. He sought them in séances, alchemical research, spiritualistic societies, telepathic experimentation, hashish-dreams, meditation on symbols. When old, he sought them in philosophy, from Plato to Berkeley to the Indian Upanishads. Wherever anyone purposed to find revelation – even the most disreputable places – Yeats was willing to look.
 
As he contemplated these multifarious sources of transcendental images, he came to the conclusion that there was in fact one source, a universal warehouse of images that he called Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World. Each human soul could attune itself to revelation, to miracle, because each partook in the world’s general soul. Most of us had blinded our spiritual eyes, in order to maintain our little privacies, in order not to be disturbed by truths that violated logic and the evidence of the five senses” [5].
 
Yeats accepts - in the same sense of  the Gnosticism - irrationalism and magic. He says himself: “  I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the dephts of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early time, and been the foundations of nearly all magical  practices. These doctrines are:
(1)   That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2)   That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
(3)   That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols”[6] .
 
Like Emerson’s Over-Soul this theory is close to the Gnostic tradition as Gino Scatasta asserts: “Quel che c’è di comune nell’animo di ogni uomo, sia esso la scintilla che gli gnostici chiamavano il vero sé o l’inconscio collettivo junghiano o ancora l ’ “anima mundi” teorizzata da Yeats, fa sì  che il prodotto della creazione individuale finisca per avere effetti profondamente sociali; tali effetti si ripercuotono sai sull’autore, che attraverso l’estasi provata dal suo pubblico può sperare di raggiungere l’unità dell’essere, sia sul pubblico, che attraverso la dissoluzione delle singole personalità  che lo compongono può raggiungere uno stato estatico e divenire il simbolo di una nazione”[7].
 
[English Translation: “That what is common on everybody’s Soul, being what the gnostics called Aeons or Jung’s Unconciouness  
We can say Yeats is a symbolist author, though we cannot say his symbolism is as the French Mallarmé, Verlaine or Rimbaud. Yeats is also worried about nationalism while the others are not. Occultism is present on all these writers, mainly on Mallarmé poetry, however Yeats was already a symbolist before the overspread of the French symbolism. As William York Tindall remarks: “ Like Rimbaud, Yeats had discovered a way to evade the interference of his intelect and to explore his unconscious in search of symbols. Rimbaud had done this by a systematic derangement of the senses through drugs, fatigue, and depravity. Yeats, who was far too prudent for such excesses, found in the occult a way of doing the same thing”[8].
 
And Tindall carries on: “Yeats was a symbolist. That much is clear. But it is also clear that his knowledge of French  was so slight that he was unable to read the difficult poems to which he is supposed to be indebted...Yeats, who was a symbolist poet long before had heard of the French. He based his symbolism upon the poetry of Blake, Shelley, and Rosseti and, above all these, upon the occult”[9].
 

Yeats and the Noh Drama

It is not the purpose of this article to show the relationship between Yeats and the Noh drama, but on writing about At the Hawk’s Well one should at least mention its influence on Yeats’s mind. Fernanda M. Sepa reminds: “Seu contato com o  Nô se deu por intermédio do poeta Ezra Pound, que, em 1913, recebeu de Mary Fenollosa o encargo de coligir e editar para publicação os manuscritos de seu marido sobre literatura japonesa”[10].[...] “Por meio do estudo da tradição Nô, Yeats também reinterou suas idéias anteriores sobre o drama simbólico e constatou como o símbolo poderia ser aproveitado em todo o seu potencial”[11].
 
The Noh drama, being a ritualistic drama, was close to what Yeats was looking for. Gino Scotasta states: “L’arte teatrale, per Yeats, aveva delle caratteristiche in comune con la cerimonia religiosa”[12].
 
The Frech scholar Jacqueline Genet argues: “Comme le nô, la partition musicale, ici conçue par Edmund Dulac, accompagnait la danse. Le jeu des acteurs étáit minutieusement réglé[...]Le nô offrait donc la représentation métaphorique du conflit situé dans les profondeurs de l’être. [...] Le lieu sacré où conduit le voyage symbolise l’intersection de l’humain et du divin. Le nô prescrit des lois précises sur l’événement miraculeux qui doit permettre d’introduire dans le monde du temps dieu, déesse ou fantôme tout en contribuant à tension dramatique de la pièce [...] Le rituel du théâtre japonais devenait une métaphore du rituel d’initiation. ”[13].
 
However, some scholars support that we should not give more importance to the Noh drama’s influence on Yeats than it really has. Knowland remarks: “It would be idle to speculate on the sort of drama that Yeats might have produced had he not read the Pound-Fenollosa plays, but it would be stupid to assert that he would have produced what he did without reading them. He took from Noh drama what suited him[14].  Richard Allen Cave reinforce the idea when saying: “Copying the Japanese prototype was never his (Yeats) intention: Noh was to provide a springboard to facilitate his leap into a new level of personal experiment and invention”[15]. Yasuko Stucki goes further when he asserts : “Ao passo que o Nô apresenta uma experiência, que é possível colorir com a filosofia budista de seu criador, as peças-dança de Yeats oferecem símbolos que apontam para conceitos ocultos. Poder-se-ia dizer que a experiência Nô se irradia para fora em círculos concêntricos crescentes, enquanto a versão yeatsiana do Nô está voltada para dentro, para si mesma, conduzindo de símbolos de superfície a significados, se não demasiadamente claros”[16].
 
Anyway, it is certain that Yeats was thinking on a spiritual drama where he could explore his occult ideas. Richard Ellmann says that: “Yeats can never find escape in his dreams, for they all lead more or less circuitously back to action. He tries to infuse them into Ireland as a kind of religion, first through the Irish theatre, which was originally intended to give plays based on occult ritual”[17]. As a secret society these ideas are only for few, just to the wise aristocracy . Yeats says on a later essay: “ I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society where admission is by favour and never to many”[18].
 
As well Christine Greiner remarks : “... (Yeats) estava buscando um teatro que pudesse ser representado em um simples quarto, sem qualquer ostentação. Um teatro cuja simplicidade não fosse uma questão de mera economia, mas uma síntese harmoniosa de idéias, sentimentos e imagens que pudessem ser transmitidas através da arte”[19].
 

The Symbolism of AT THE HAWK’S WELL

Like the Sweden gnostic  Swedenborg, Yeats considers: “Every symbol is an invocation which produces its equivalent expression in all worlds”[20]. This doctrine, exposed by Baudelaire on the poem Correspondances, is very important to understand the symbols effect. It means the symbols have a hidden meaning which changes the supernatural world when well used by the magi of the words, the poet.
 
Knowland asserts: “...a drama of psychic essences acted out in what Yeats called the deeps of the mind”[21]. The play has spiritualistic aim as the musicians sing when the play starts: “I call to the eye of the mind...”[22]. This spiritualistic objective is the search for immortality. Both the old and the young man are looking for the water from the well to become immortal. The first title Yeats gave to this play was The Well of Immortality.
 
It is worth to remark the immortality has a mystical meaning. As we have seen, Yeats was deeply interested on gnostic mysticism. On gnosticism, immortality means the discovery of the divinity inside of the Being. This discovery is only possible for the wise man, who can find it out, when reaching the ancient wisdom of the Adamic tradition. This wisdom is not a common one, but that one which the serpent offered to Eve and Adam, it means, the knowledge of the Well and the Evil: “Scit enim Deus quod in quocumque die comederitis ex eo, aperientur oculi vestri et eritis sicut dii, scientes bonum et malum”[23]. 
 
The play uses a lot of  symbols related to the gnostic tradition. As the play tells us both old and young man are looking for the well to drink its water to obtain immortality. However, the guardian of the well is a woman who changes herself into a hawk and deceives the men not to drink the well’s water. Having the occultist doctrines in mind and the possible meaning of these symbols we can see how the play can be clearer interpreted.
 
Jean Chevalier says the well, for instance, means: “...síntese de três ordens cósmicas: céu, terra, inferno; de três elementos: a água, a terra e o ar; ele é uma via vital de comunicação. É também, ele próprio, um microcosmo, ou síntese cósmica. Em numerosos contos esotéricos, retoma-se a imagem do poço do conhecimento ou da verdade [...] simbolizando o conhecimento, o poço representa também o homem que atingiu o conhecimento. Citando Victor Hugo: “coisa singular, é dentro de si que se deve ver o exterior. O profundo espelho sombrio está no interior do homem. Lá está o claro-escuro terrível...Debruçando-nos sobre esse poço, aí percebemos, a uma distância de abismo, dentro de um círculo estreito, o mundo imenso”....O poeta se aproxima aqui da tradição que faz do poço um microcosmo, mas o poço é o próprio homem”[24].
 
Thus, we can say the well is the cosmos  and the men want to drink its water to find the wisdom of  the divine inside themselves, so they can reach immortality.
Jacqueline Genet in agreement with us says: “Ce symbole de perfection que le puits suggère déjà de par sa forme circulaire – le cercle étant traditionnellement l’union des contraires – évoque aussi le Grall qui, selon Jung, représente l’harmonie intérieure que chaque individu s’efforce de réaliser”[25]. 
 
It is important to notice that there are hazelnuts and leaves all over the well. The young man says:
 “Lead me to what I seek, a well wherein
Three hazels drop their nuts and withered leaves,
And where a solitary girl keeps watch
Among grey boulders. He who drinks, they say,
Of that miraculous water lives for ever”[26].
The hazel means wisdom. It is the science’s fruit of the Well and the Evil. It covers the well because to reach the divinity one needs to know the hidden wisdom the hazel symbolises. It is well-known the hazel is a symbol much used by Yeats, like on the poem The Song of Wandering Aengus from the book The Wind among the Reeds:
 
“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread...” [27].
 
As Jean Chevalier asserts about the hazel:  “...a avelã é encarada, em muitos contextos, como um fruto da ciência. Símbolo da paciência e de constância no desenvolvimento da experiência mística, cujos frutos requerem longa espera”[28] .
 
The hazel, being a symbol of the mystical experience’s development, make us understand why the old man has been waiting for such a long time to drink the water of immortality. It is not an easy task to find the mystical revelation. It requires time and the old man symbolises it so. 
 
The “miraculous water” they are waiting for, to have at least a sip, has a lot of different meanings, though they do not differ much one from another. As Chevalier states: “As significações simbólicas da água podem reduzir-se a três temas dominantes: fonte de vida, meio de purificação, centro de regenerescência. Esses três temas se encontram na mais antigas tradições e formam as mais variadas combinações imaginárias – e as mais coerentes também [...] a água se torna o símbolo da vida espiritual e do Espírito, oferecidos por Deus e muitas vezes recusados pelos homens [...] Enfim, a água simboliza a vida; a água da vida, que se descobre nas trevas, e que regenera”[29].
Jacqueline Genet states: “Cette au eau miraculeuse évoque aussi l’élixir de vie des alchimistes qui aspiraient à retrouver l’unité du corps et de l’âme et inventèrent de nombreaux symboles pour représenter cette totalité”[30]. This totality which Genet argues could be related to the “Unity of  Being”, as Yeats liked to call it.
 
Hence the “miraculous water” would provide the soul’s re-birth in order to achieve eternal life. This water is only found in the well of immortality under the darkness as :
 
“Nights falls;
The mountain-side grows dark”[31] .      
To reinforce these ideas, there is the symbol of the wind as well. The musicians say, on beautiful lines :
 
“Why should I sleep? The heart cries,
For the wind, the salt wind, the sea wind,
Is beating a cloud through the skies;
I would wander always like the wind”[32].
Jean Chevalier explains the wind: “ ...é sinônimo do sopro, e por conseguinte, do espírito do influxo espiritual de origem celeste”[33]. The wind is also part of the process of spiritual development and reinforce the idea given by the other symbols discussed above. Furthermore, the fact that the wind is a “salt wind” reminds us the alchemical tradition, since the salt is one of the elements used by the alchemist on his work.   
 
Besides, the wind was used as symbol by Shelley as well. Yeats probably knew Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, where the wind is presented as a spiritual element to man’s re-birth and also the presence of “withered leaves” which Yeats uses many times on At The Hawk’s Well . Shelley’s poem says:
 
“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
 
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
 
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
 
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among manking!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
 
The trumpet of a profecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”[34].   
 
It is curious to notice the Old man saying to the Young man: “You said: ‘The well is  full of hazel leaves’ You said: ‘The wind is from the west’ ”[35]. The wind is from the west as on Shelley’s  poem.
 
Finally, we must try to understand the symbolism of the hawk. The Guardian of the Well  transforms herself into a hawk “the Woman of the Sidhe” which is immortal. As the Old man says “ she is possessed” that he: “...cannot bear her eyes, they are not of this world, nor moist, nor faltering, they are not girl’s eyes”[36].    
 
She is not from this world, she is possessed, she is a hawk because as Chevalier states:  “O falcão simboliza o princípio celeste[...] é um símbolo ascensional em todos os planos: físico, intelectual e moral”[37].
 
Thus, we can conclude the hawk is the mystical symbol of divinity, it is immortal because it is divine. It protects the divine wisdom - the well – which is covered by the fruit of knowledge - the hazel – being everything surrounded by the spiritual flux – the west wind - and touched by the supernatural achievement of the immortal source – the water.
 
However, neither the Old man nor the Young man succeeded in achieving the immortality by drinking the water because they could not drink it. At the end the musicians sing:
 
“He has lost what may not be found
Till men heap his burial-mound
And all the history ends.
He might have lived at his ease,
An old dog’s head on his knees,
Among his children and friends”[38].
 
Like on the alchemy the search for the Lapis Philosophorum is not achieved on the world of the nature even if one has knowledge of its symbols and  process. The immortality is not an endless life in the world of reality, but a mystical and private process of self-knowledge and self-revelation provided by the supernatural enchantment of the divinity which reveals itself on the history – as Hegel thought. It does not  happen “till men heap his burial-mound and all the history ends”.
 
Yeats searched for his “spiritual immortality” -  Lapis Philosophorum - and it seems he has been satisfied on finding his own theology instead, exposed on A Vision. As Norman Jeffares says: “...when the poet became a student of theosophy and the Christian Kabbala he was in effect searching for a system of truth, a religion [..] he did not want to escape from orthodoxy but to find a substitute for it”[39]. However, this is not the subject of this article.
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHEVALIER, Jean & GHEERBRANT, Alain. Dicionário de Símbolos, J. Olympio, Rio de Janeiro, 1996.
ELLMANN, Richard. Yeats: The Mand and the Masks. Penguin, London, 1987.
FLANNERY, M.C. Yeats and Magic. Colin Smythe, London, 1977.
GENET, Jacqueline. Le Théâtre de W.B.Yeats. P. Universitaires Septentrion, Paris, 1995.
GREINER, Christine. O Teatro Nô e o Ocidente. Annablume – FAPESP, S.Paulo, 2000
JEFFARES, A Norman. W.B.Yeats: Man and Poet. St.Martin’s Press, New York, 1996
KNOWLAND, A S. W.B.Yeats Dramatist of Vision. Colin Smythe, Bucks., 1983
LONGENBACH, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. Oxford U.P, Oxford, 1988.
ROSENTHAL, M.L. Running to Paradise ( Yeats’s Poetic Art). Oxford U.P., Oxford, 1994
SCATASTA, Gino. Il Teatro di Yeats e il Nazionalismo Irlandese (1890-1910). Patron Editore, Bologna, 1996.
SEPA, Fernanda M. O Teatro de W.B.Yeats: Teoria e Prática. Olavobrás/ABEI, S.Paulo, 1999
SHELLEY, P.B. Poems and Prose. Everyman, London, 1995.
UNTERECKER, John (Edited by). Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays. Yale University, Yale, 1963.
YEATS, W.B. The Poems. Edited and introduced by Daniel Albright. Everyman, London, 1990.
___________. Selected Criticism. (Ed. by A.N. Jeffares). Macmillan, London, 1964.
___________ . Selected Plays. Penguin, London, 1997
___________ . Autobiographies (The Collected Works, vol. III). Scribner, New York, 1999. 
___________ . Prefaces and Introductions (The Collected Works, vol. VI). Scribner, New York, 1999.
__________ . Mythologies. Collier Books, New York, 1959.

[1] Richard ELLMANN. Yeats: The Man and The Masks, p. 57.
[2] W.B.YEATS. The Trembling of the Veil, section II. In:.Autobiographies, p.115
[3] W.B.YEATS. The Trembling of the Veil, section XV. In:.Autobiographies, p.144-145.
[4] Quoted from: Richard ELLMANN. Yeats: The Man and the Masks, p 97 -98. 
[5] Daniel ALBRIGHT. Introduction to Yeats: The Poems, p.22.
[6] W.B.YEATS. Magic. In: Selected Critiscism, p.80.
[7] Gino SCATASTA. Il Teatro di Yeats e il Nazionalismo Irlandese (1890 – 1910), p. 68.               
[8] William York TINDALL. The Symbolism of W.B.Yeats. IN: Yeats – a collection of Critical Essays edited by John Unterecker, p.50.
[9] William York TINDALL. The Symbolism of W.B.Yeats. IN: Yeats – a collection of Critical Essays edited by John Unterecker, p.43-45.
[10] Fernanda M. SEPA. O Teatro de W.B.Yeats: Teoria e Prática, p.63.
[11] Fernanda M. SEPA. O Teatro de W.B.Yeats: Teoria e Prática, p.69.
[12] Gino SCATASTA. Il Teatro di Yeats e il Nazionalismo Irlandese (1890 – 1910), p. 70.
[13] Jacqueline GENET. Le Théâtre de William Butler Yeats, p.191-201.
[14] A S. KNOWLAND. W.B.Yeats Dramatist of Vision, p.109.
[15] Richard A CAVE. Commentaries and Notes. In: W.B.YEATS – Selected Plays, p.313.
[16] Cit. In: Christine GREINER. O Teatro Nô e o Ocidente, p.55.
[17] Richard ELLMANN. Yeats: The Man and The Masks, p. 292.
[18] Quoted from: Richard ELLMANN. Yeats: The Man and The Masks, p. 217.
[19] Christine GREINER. O Teatro Nô e o Ocidente, p.54.
[20] W.B.YEATS. Estrangement. In: Autobiographies, p.356.
[21] A S. KNOWLAND. W.B.Yeats Dramatist of Vision, p.109.
[22] W.B.YEATS. At the Hawk’s Well, p.113 (All quotations from this play are from Selected Plays, as mention at the Bibliography).
[23] BIBLIA VULGATA. Genesis, 3;5
[24] Jean CHEVALIER & Alain GHEERBRANTE. Dicionário de Símbolos, Poço, p.726-727.
[25] Jacqueline GENET. Le Théâtre de William Butler Yeats, p. 193.
[26] W.B.YEATS. AT THE HAWK’S WELL, p. 117
[27] W.B.YEATS. Poems, p.76.
[28] Jean CHEVALIER & Alain GHEERBRANTE. Dicionário de Símbolos, Aveleira, p.102-103.
[29] Jean CHEVALIER & Alain GHEERBRANTE. Dicionário de Símbolos, Água, p.15-22.
[30] Jacqueline GENET. Le Théâtre de William Butler Yeats, p. 193.
[31] W.B.YEATS. AT THE HAWK’S WELL, p. 114.
[32] W.B.YEATS. AT THE HAWK’S WELL, p. 115.
[33] Jean CHEVALIER & Alain GHEERBRANTE. Dicionário de Símbolos, Vento, p.935-936.
[34] Percy B.SHELLEY. Ode to the West Wind. In: Poems and Prose, p.164.
[35] W.B.YEATS. AT THE HAWK’S WELL, p. 116.
[36] W.B.YEATS. AT THE HAWK’S WELL, p. 119-120.
[37] Jean CHEVALIER & Alain GHEERBRANTE. Dicionário de Símbolos, Falcão p.417.
[38] W.B.YEATS. AT THE HAWK’S WELL, p. 121.
[39] A N. JEFFARES. W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet, p.45
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