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Monday, February 28, 2005
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IRISH LIT UD hasn’t seen Million Dollar Baby. She hasn’t read the F. X. Toole story on which it’s based. But she’s intrigued by what she hears of the use of Yeats in the film. Her Twentieth Century Irish Literature students know the “Lake Isle of Innisfree” poem the Eastwood character recites, having sat through their professor’s recitation and praise of it. But the Yeats poem they’ve read the most this semester is this one: WHO GOES WITH FERGUS? Who will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood's woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fear no more. And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen cars, And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all disheveled wandering stars. My students encounter this Yeats poem more than any other because Stephen Dedalus is haunted by its lines. They come back to him all day and all night as he wanders Dublin, disheveled. He sang them to his mother as she was dying. “Innisfree” and “Fergus” are similar. They imagine a realm, or a mental state, of escape from the sufferings of the world. The realm is ill-defined, but Dedalus will only be able to enter it through the act of imaginative creation - through the aesthetic clarification of himself and his history and his setting. This act of creation is also an act of love, the re-animation of the loved dead. From what UD hears of Million Dollar Baby, it seems that Yeats lends the film a lyric broodiness: “It seems fortuitous that Frankie is an admirer of William Butler Yeats,” A.O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review, “who in his later years developed a style of unadorned, disillusioned eloquence and produced some of his greatest poems: lyrics that are simple, forceful and not afraid of risking cliché. Late in the film, in his darkest hour, Frankie reads from ''The Lake Isle of Innisfree,'' the younger Yeats's pastoral dream of flight and transformation, a choice that makes sense in context. Mr. Eastwood himself, though, is closer to the sensibility of a late poem like ''The Circus Animals' Desertion,'' whose famous image of ''the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart'' might describe Frankie's gym. Or there is this stanza, from one of Yeats's ''Last Poems,'' called ''The Apparitions,'' which seems to me to capture the paradoxical spirit, at once generous and mournful, of this old master, Mr. Eastwood, and his new masterpiece: When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright.” But the film, despite what some critics of it say, does not sound to UD like a nihilistic or hopelessly depressive sort of thing. “The film,“ Scott writes, “rarely shifts its gaze from its three main characters, who glow with a fierce individuality and whose ways of speaking unlock the poetry that still lives in the plain American vernacular.” That is the aesthetic self-realization Dedalus is after: mournful, as Stephen is mournful throughout Ulysses, but achieving also, as Leopold Bloom does, the loving generosity of the realized self. |