Yeats' Early Period: The Limit of Contraction

“The mind or imagination or consciousness of man may be said to have two poles, the personal and impersonal, or, as Blake preferred to call them, the limit of contraction and the unlimited expansion. When we act from the personal we tend to bind our consciousness down as to a fiery center. When, on the other hand, we allow our imagination to expand away from this egoistic mood, we become vehicles for the universal thought and merge in the universal mood.”
-- W.B. Yeats and Edwin J. Ellis in The Works of William Blake

The duality Yeats expresses here can be noted in a comparison of his earlier period to his middle and later periods. When we read works from Yeats’ early period, we suspect traces of Yeats’ personal consciousness. The speaker of “The Ballad of Moll Magee,” which describes the lament of a woman sent away by her husband for laying on her child in the night, expresses a cry for sympathy which is an emotion that Yeats may have wished for his own mother, who struggled with severe depression.

“The Madness of King Goll,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “To an Isle in the Water,” and “Who goes with Fergus?” also address themes of escape which mirror the sentiments which Yeats experienced as a young boy and artist--
In Ellman’s essay on Yeats’ early life, he discusses Yeats’ overbearing father. He was a pre-Raphaelite painter who had married Yeats’ mother while studying to be a tradesman; she expressed her disapointment with his erratic change in vocation through a crippling depression that kept her bed-ridden throughout most of Yeats’ early childhood. In his opinions, we understand that Yeats’ father was perhaps more voluble than explicit1-- Ellman suggests that his opinions were seldom recognized to be such, and that Yeats’ use of classical mythology and philosophies in his early work were perhaps a form of rebellion against the more fashionable techniques of his father. (Ellman discusses the concept of a conservative rebellion, explaining the difficulty in rebelling experienced by the generation born to one that has rejected traditional modes of thought and discusses the way in which the new generation might renew conservative ideas to reject the ideas of its parents.)

We’re left to wonder at Yeats’ childhood impressions. What was it like to grow up in a house in which the caretakers were unchecked by eachother? The relationship of the Yeats parents was unbalanced. His father’s strong opinions were unopposed and unquestioned by his mother, whose complete retreat suggests her dominance by him. Would Yeats’ father behave disrespectfully toward his mother, causing her to withdraw?

The troubles and inadequacies of Yeats’ parents may not have been apparent to an outsider-- Because the superficial observer would not notice anything that could possibly trouble Yeats, there was probably a sense of suspicion or prejudice surrounding this child who was probably suffering, apparently without cause. His father was a popular figure, but there was probably a great contrast between his social demeanor and his personality at home.

This leads us to the theme of escape in Yeats’ early period, and the limit of conscious contraction which he addresses in his introduction to a volume of Blake. These difficult feelings which Yeats grew up with may have contributed to the self-invention that distinguishes this period, in which we see that Yeats uses these classical influences in his allusions to difficult and painful personal experiences through verse.