As has been previously observed, Auden verbally resembles Yeats on more than one occasion, and Yeats sometimes resembles Auden. But, as far as Daalder is aware, several genuine or possible parallels are yet to be discussed. Daalder's examples are meant to suggest that Auden imitates Yeats, alludes to him, or shows kinship with him; in this article, Daalder is not, however, concerned with Auden's impact on Yeats

Daalder, Joost

Notes and Queries

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YEATS AND AUDEN: SOME VERBAL PARALLELS S has been observed by e.g. Monroe K. Spears (The Poetry of W. H. Auden, Oxford University Press, 1963), Richard Ellmann (Eminent Domain, Oxford University Press, 1967), and John Fuller  (A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden,  Faber, 1970), Auden verbally resembles Yeats on more than one occasion, and Ellmann points out that Yeats sometimes resembles Auden. But, as far as I am aware, several genuine or possible parallels are as yet to be discussed. My examples are meant to suggest that Auden imitates Yeats, alludes to him, or shows kinship with him, rather than that I am here concerned with Auden's impact on Yeats. I need perhaps hardly add that I am not trying to be exhaustive. Auden very definitely echoes Yeats in the poem called " 1929 ", which of course takes its title from Yeats's " Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen".1  Yeats's poem influences Auden in section IV, 1. 11, where he writes :  "This is the dragon's day, the devourer's…", in imitation of Yeats's " Now days are dragon-ridden…" (" Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen ", I, st. 4, 1. 1). It is possible that Auden is alluding to Yeats's poem, to suggest that in 1929 things are as bad as they were in 1919, but we are not given a very clear pointer to this purpose, and I am rather more inclined to think that Auden here simply borrows from Yeats, possibly not even consciously. In the same poem, Auden looks back to Yeats's "All Souls' Night", where we read how Florence Emery had found out much about "the soul's journey" (st. 6, 1. 4) from  "some learned Indian" (1. 3) : How it is whirled about, Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,       Until it plunge into the sun ; And there, free and yet fast, Being both chance and Choice, Forget its broken toys And sink into its own delight at last. (11. 4-10) 1  I quote from the 1967 repr. of Macmillan's The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, and from W. H. Auden's Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (Faber, 1966). Auden, rather, speaks of the soul's pro- gress through life in section III of "1929". He is not mystical, like Yeats, but explains how the soul must do without the security of home or (later) "love": Moving along the track which is himself, He loves what he hopes will last, which gone, Begins the difficult work of mourning, And as foreign settlers to strange country come, By mispronunciation of native words And intermarriage create a new race, A new language, so may the soul Be weaned at last to independent delight. (III, 4) Auden here adapts Yeats's language to a very different purpose. If he is alluding to it, he must almost be ironic. But his tone seems to me serious, and there is just enough linguistic difference with Yeats, even in the last two lines, to make it more probable that Auden is quoting from his unconscious memory, or at least is trying to achieve a degree of verbal independence. Auden's "Lullaby", too, seems to reflect Yeats. One particularly thinks of Yeats's  "A Prayer for my Daughter", though also of his "A Prayer for my Son". In "A Prayer for my Daughter", one of Yeats's wishes is that she may be beautiful (st. 3), but not to such an extent that she will  "Consider beauty a sufficient end" (1. 5). Auden hopes, however, that his "love" will "Find our mortal world enough" (st. 4, 1. 6), and to him, despite the passing of things, the lover is "The entirely beautiful" (st. 1, last line). This line clearly echoes Yeats, who prays that his daughter will be courteous, for ". . . hearts are earned /By those that are not entirely beautiful " (st. 5, 11. 2-3). I was not surprised to find in S. M. Parrish and J. A. Painter's A Con- cordance to the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Cornell U.P., 1963) that Yeats uses "en- tirely beautiful "only once in his poems : indeed, this is the only occurence of     "entirely". It appears almost as though Auden is setting himself off against Yeats in insisting that to him the loved one is entirely beautiful, and that this is quite good enough. If he is not publicly allud-ing to Yeats's poem, we can at least see an argument with Yeats behind the lines. In the last two lines of "Lullaby", Auden says: "Nights of insult let you pass/ Watched by every human love." This seems to have been influenced by the last stanza of Yeats's "A Prayer for my Son" : A334 NOTES  AND  QUERIES  September, 1973 7 night] Night (S2) (52) adds exclamation  JOHN FULLER. Magdalen College, Oxford. This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in 'Notes and Queries' following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/9/334Daalder, Joost 1973. Yeats and Auden: Some Verbal Parallels. 'Notes and Queries', vol.20, no.9, 334-336.Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.auAnd when through all the town there ran The servants of Your enemy, A woman and a man, Unless the Holy Writings lie, Hurried through the smooth and rough And through the fertile and waste, Protecting, till the danger past, With human love. We can note some common factors. Each poet is praying for a person he loves; that person is asleep; protection from "human love" is expected at the end of each poem (though of course Auden's lacks Yeats's religious dimension). These common factors make it likely enough that Auden is borrowing the phrase "human love" from Yeats, who according to the Con-cordance uses it only twice in his verse (despite the relative frequency of "human" and "love" separately), and only here in final position. I do not think that Auden wants us to attach special significance to this echo; his poem seems neither suffi-ciently similar nor sufficiently different for that. But I think there can he little doubt of Yeats's conscious or unconscious in-fluence. Possibly, but not necessarily, "Lullaby" was also influenced by Yeats's "The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers". This not only contains the phrase "living creature" (1. 1), which Auden has in st. 1, 1. 8 of "Lullaby", but also such lines as these: Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace .. . st.2, 11. 1-3) One wonders whether this might have a bearing on Auden's : "Noons of dryness find you fed/By the involuntary powers …" (st. 4, 11. 7-8). Reading "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", I had often wondered why in section III, st. 1, 1. 2, Auden's "William Yeats" sounds at once so peculiar (why not "Yeats" or     "W. B. Yeats"?) and yet so familiar. Per-haps Auden uses "William Yeats" because it fits the metre, but re-reading Yeats I found the phrase of course in Yeats's very short but meaningful "To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee". It seems quite possible that Auden is alluding to this poem : "William Yeats is laid to rest" in words both Auden's and Yeats's, and the implication may be that, in Yeats's words, the "characters" will "... remain /When all is ruin once again." There are several words in this section of Auden's poem which may (but need not) allude to Yeats's use of them. In st. 2, 1. 1, Auden speaks of "the nightmare of the dark" in relation to the contemporary situation, and Yeats uses the word "night-mare" similarly towards the end of "The Second Coming", in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" (st. 4, 1. 1; the line, in fact, which Auden echoes in his "1929", see above), and in "The Gyres" (st. 2, 1. 1). It is conceivable, perhaps, that the sequence       "hate ... Intellectual" (sts. 2-3) owes some-thing to Yeats's "An intellectual hatred is the worst" (st. 8, 1. 1 of "A Prayer for my Daughter", from which Auden certainly borrows in his "Lullaby", see above). Auden's request to Yeats : "With your un-constraining voice/Still persuade us to rejoice" (st. 4, 11. 3-4) calls to mind Yeats's :   "What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,/And all it knows is that one word ` Rejoice! '", which concludes st. 2 of "The Gyres". In fact, it can hardly be acciden-tal that Auden, like Yeats, has the rhyme "voice"—"rejoice". Formally, too, this section is very Yeat-sian. I used to think that Auden had based his form on Blake's "Tiger", but I now believe he took it, more directly, from Yeats himself, probably specifically from "Under Ben Bulben". If he did not, the two poems show a remarkable poetic kinship. Section V of Yeats's poem, for instance, is not only formally very similar to Auden's section III (note the heptasyllabic couplets and the marked trochaic-iambic metre in both sections), but there is even a resemblance in syntax and vocabulary. Cf. Yeats : "Irish poets, learn your trade,/Sing whatever is well made . ." (V, 11. 1-2), and Auden :   "Follow, poet, follow right ..." (st. 4, 1. 1) —"Sing of human unsuccess . ." (st. 5, 1. 3). This last line rather looks like an ironic allusion on Auden's part. Cf. also Yeats, section VI, 11. 1-2: "Under bare Ben Bulben's head/In Drumcliffe churchyard Yeats is laid", and Auden, section III, ll. 1-2 : "Earth, receive an honoured guest: / William Yeats is laid to rest." I do not want to exaggerate the extent to which Auden resembles Yeats. But it seems not unremarkable that a number of in-dividuals, probably all of them relying on memory alone, have found, together, a not inconsiderable group of Yeatsian echoes in September, 1973  NOTES AND QUERIES  3 3 5  This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in 'Notes and Queries' following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/9/334Daalder, Joost 1973. Yeats and Auden: Some Verbal Parallels. 'Notes and Queries', vol.20, no.9, 334-336.Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.auAuden, and we may very well still not have found everything that there is to find. JOOST DAALDER. University of Otago. E. M. FORSTER'S MANUSCRIPT OF " MARIANNE THORNTON " HE manuscript of Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography by E. M. Forster belongs to the bulk of research material' handed over to King's College Library, Cambridge, by the trustees of the Forster Estate on 31 December 1971, i.e. a year and a half after the writer's death. Part of the Thornton family papers, letters, diaries, legal documents, and draw-ings that were used as a basis for this biography were given by Forster himself to the Cambridge University Library in May 1966 (C.U.L. Catalogue Add/7674/1 A to Z, consisting of three notebooks, three bound volumes of family letters, and 734 other items, mainly letters dating from 1772 to 1855). Some substantial additions to this matter were deposited in the University Library by Forster's executor, Professor W. J. H. Sprott, in September and October 1970 (C.U.L. Catalogue Add/7674/2 A to C, dealing with such material as Dorothy Pym's Battersea Rise, or S. Meacham's Henry Thornton of Clapham, and Add/ 7674/3 A to N, containing mainly family letters from 1815 to 1885). The whole col-lection covers the lifetime of the writer's great-aunt Marianne, and though essentially a family chronicle, it brings into light some aspects of the social life of the time and of the Clapham Sect. Section Add/7674/3A may be the richest for our concern; it gathers together Marianne's letters to her sister Laura—the writer's grandmother, Miss Louisa Inglis, Miss Patty Smith, and Hannah More. They are mostly undated, ranging from 1816 to 1884, and many are just fragmentary. These letters particu-larly were used by E. M. Forster, as well as the papers in Add 7674/1 and Add 7674/3 in general, while working on this biography, so many of them are briefly annotated in his handwriting and/or provisionally dated. Now in chronological order, as far as K. C. L. Catal ogue E. M. Forster, i n which  Section I, devoted to E. M. F.'s writings, consists of twenty-three bound volumes and five boxes of fragmentary material.possible, they were in a completely chaotic state when deposited in the University Library: though the possibility of checking this point has disappeared, there is reason to assume that originally Forster had filed separately those letters he had sorted out as relevant copy-material for his work. Together with this bulk of documents, which occupies one full shelf of the Cambridge University Library archives, is the final product of Forster's family researches, i.e. his own annotated and corrected copy of the published version' which will be con-sidered later. But the intermediate stages between both extremes are to be found at King's and in already published material. The manuscript that was given to King's College Library is an early draft of the biography, as the edited text differs from it in various ways. It consists of 451 leaves or fragments mounted in 400 folio sheets' and bound in three volumes (K.C.L. Cata-logue E. M. Forster I. 1 to 3). It is a mixture of autograph manuscripts, type-scripts, and a few printed pages (followed by Marianne Thornton's " Recollections " as a typed appendix). The first volume consists of 97 fragments, which corresponds to the first 76 pages of the book—roughly the first part. The second volume, 154 frag-ments, deals with parts II and III of the biography; the third one, 149 fragments, can be divided into two groups: the major part devoted to the final section, and the last ten folios to the typescript of Marianne's " Recollections " (1857). Throughout the volumes the paper is a common large-sized (20 cm. x 30) lined one, but some pages are cut and only small fragments of them remain, for the reason stated in footnote.' The variety of inks used while writing may be of some relevance to the student of Forster's creative process, as well as the frequency of alterations, crossed words or ballooned insertions. The composition, 2 C.U.L. Adv-o-106-2. This copy was deposited on 4 November 1970 as a present intended by E. M. Forster himself: the first page shows in the writer's handwriting: "E. M. Forster. Marked copy. Do not touch. To go to the University Library with the Thorntons [sic] papers ". ' As the introduction points out, " the author attached pieces of MS and TS to each other with sellotape, which had to be removed before the MS could be mounted, so slight damage was inevitable in the process, and where the original TS carbon was damaged, but had no amendments by Forster on it, it was replaced by photocopies when these were available ". T336 NOTES  AND  QUERIES  September, 1973 This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in 'Notes and Queries' following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/9/334Daalder, Joost 1973. Yeats and Auden: Some Verbal Parallels. 'Notes and Queries', vol.20, no.9, 334-336.Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au

Yeats and Auden: Some Verbal Parallels

JOOST DAALDER

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YEATS AND AUDEN: SOME VERBAL PARALLELS

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Yeats and Auden: Some Verbal Parallels

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