Works of art function, on a cultural level, as both message-carriers and symbolic talismans. To the extent that the intentions of the artist are taken seriously, the artist him or herself becomes a message-carrier and a symbolic talisman. This is the art-function that forms the basis for the study of artists and works of art as semiology. Yet, in framing a work of art, criticism always presents a de Man-ian crisis situation, which brings to light an issue, which, unsatisfyingly, lacks objectivity, but is compellingly magnetic enough to be irresistible (to some) nonetheless. This is the issue of perfection. There cannot be, objectively, a perfect work of art, but the critical brain nonetheless may be compelled at any moment to have recourse to a perceived perfection inhering in a work of art. That criticism and crisis can be objective, a reaction to an existing situation or context, or subjectivist, a personal stream of consciousness following or developing from close, patient study of cultural products, is taken for granted. When I begin to contemplate the years I have spent studying Ephemera, an early poem by early Mod or Edwardian poet William Butler Yeats, I understand that the crisis latent in the poem for me was slow to materialize. But materialize it did, and now, in 2025, in the mode of crisis, the issue forces its hand. Could it be that Ephemera is the most perfect poem in the English language? If this is acknowledged as at least a possibility, could we extrapolate from said possibility that Yeats takes a vaunted place above the major Romantics and Milton, superior to them in allegiance to textual intensity, dramatic sweep, and symbolic weight?
The poem itself must take the floor and speak for itself. Worth noting that Ephemera is not seen to be in the first tier of Yeats’ oeuvre. How this is possible is simple: it lacks the representationally bardic stance which is seen, critically, to lend Yeats his largesse. The modesty in the poem, however, inhering on a surface bereft of seeming socio-historical import (often the stock-in-trade of Yeats’ first tier) in favor of a small incident or situation, is balanced by a surfeit of semantic, and imagistic, gorgeousness. An apogee, as it were, of the pure and purely aesthetic. Apogee, also, suggesting the perfection bardic postures often miss:
“Your eyes, that once were never weary of mine,
are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
because our love is waning.”
And then she:
“Although our love is waning, let us stand
by the lone border of the lake once more,
together in that hour of gentleness
when the poor, tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
how far away the stars seem, and how far
is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!”
Pensive, they paced along the faded leaves,
while, slowly, he whose hand held hers replied:
“Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.”
The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
a rabbit, old and lame, limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
on the lone border of the lake once more:
turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves,
gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
in bosom and hair.
“Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
“that we are tired, for other loves await us;
hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
are love, and a continual farewell.”
The formal component of Ephemera which most distinguishes itself is that it is free verse. As was the case when Ephemera was written (1889), perfection in English-language poetry without end-rhyme (or at least the sturdiness, strictures of blank verse) was unthinkable. Yet never, in said English language, have assonance and alliteration so accomplished the yeoman’s task of making the piece shudder, oscillate, scintillate, resonate as they do here. The third stanza (“Pensive…hearts”) is a foray into a mysticism of the English language which mirrors all the signified mysticisms in the mise en scene, built into the exquisitely represented landscape. Close reading, however, in the manner of the New Critics, can only take us so far here. It is enough to know that the line-by-line reality of the piece subsists on a level of extremely tautened dynamic tension. The two lovers stand, and walk, but never sit; that establishes the physiology of the poem tautened, taken care of. They also seem to inquire of the woods and the lake whether their shared assumption, of also shared obsolescence, is correct. A felt, affirmative answer closes the circular paths they walk. The dialogue could be taken as mannered. If I do not take it that way, it is because the physiological tension built into the piece renders the dialogue more potent, more raw. Physiological tension, also, missing, it might be said, in the effete languidness of Adam’s Curse. Which, of course, is higher placed in Yeats’ oeuvre, and bears some similarity to Ephemera.
The next inquiry closes our own circle back to the idea, quixotic or not, of perfection. The mirroring physiology of the reader most closely attuned to Ephemera— why is there something perfect here, in 2025? Yeats’ brief sojourn into free-verse crushes the life out of what has been written in the English language since 1889— yet the form of the piece seems beamed to him, in mystical Yeats-ian fashion, from a race whose prescience as regards 2025 was razor sharp. Yeats speaks to us now, today. Ephemera becomes a backwards, forwards moving warp from 1889, and the sense of a time and matter consuming warp is what reaches us, on a wavelength immaculately attired.
© Adam Fieled 2025
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The Modernity of Ephemera distinguishes it, too. Critical and scholarly confusion tends to place Yeats in a mélange of different, uncomfortable positions as regards literary Modernity. Yeats is either (hesitantly, tentatively) the first true literary Modernist, or an Edwardian-cum-late Romantic. The elements of Ephemera which make it extraordinary, and a hinge to perfection— a tautened sense of physiological tension (dynamism), and a sense, also, of a new, streamlined approach to sonority in the English language, wherein free-verse can resonant or shudder as convincingly as end-rhymed material— subsist. Yet there is also, built into Ephemera, and adumbrating the entire twentieth century which followed from it, a sense which scholars might tend to miss, of the cinematic. The fractures and abrasions built into Ephemera mirror the fractures and abrasions built into cinematic expression, shot (or succession of shots) by shot (or succession of shots). This, complete with dialogue without end-rhyme consigning it to the dust-bin of the Mannered, the effete. Ephemera reads (or views) as, among other things, a short film:
The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
a rabbit, old and lame, limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
on the lone border of the lake once more:
turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves,
gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
in bosom and hair.
Real, live action, in real time, followed camera-style. That sense of prescience in Ephemera, which broadens the significations out of its Modernity past usual Modern parameters (parts rather than wholes, formal fractures rather than seamlessness, collage-like impulses), takes and electrifies its sense of constructed-ness with a sense of change, dynamism, vitality. In other words, this reading of Yeats says that he, at his most perfect, is triumphantly Modern. Picture-ism in the Prelude, especially the more memorable encounters, happens yet (blank verse not having to be a deterrent) with one-ended dynamism. In other words, Wordsworth has a dynamic reaction to something static. The Prelude suffers massively from the absence of the precise, perfected dynamic tension which electrifies, makes cinematic (anticipatory) Ephemera. Moreover, dialogue cannot be electrically charged in the Prelude, because there is none. Yeats configured as a late Romantic does a disservice to the idea that fracturing, in Modernity, can in fact take the form of internal electrification (incandescence) of elements. The jaggedness of the text is then an embedded sense that it cannot stay still within itself. The text moves.
Electrification creates confusion. Those who might want to dismiss Ephemera on account of its brevity, in defense of a twentieth century talisman like The Waste Land, are missing the point. The nature of Ephemera’s twenty-six lines renders The Waste Land, like Prelude, at least a semi-moot point, owing to Eliot’s caddishness, boorishness, and lack of dynamic integrity. By dynamic integrity, I mean that there are no sequences in The Waste Land tautened around physiological dynamism, to compare with Ephemera. The Waste Land describes itself perfectly— it does not move. With Wordsworth on one side and Eliot on the other, Yeats is the wavelength frequency most attuned to what happened in art in the twentieth century which was worth noting. The sense that Modernity was one big move— from the wholesome to the unholy, the sanctified to the irreligious, belief to irony— is anticipated by Ephemera having game live action, real time, camera-style. Eliot described himself as, in the context of The Waste Land, rhythmically grumbling; Yeats does more than that. Cinema follows from Modernism as an ancillary channel, not respecting wholes, showing what they care to show, nothing less, nothing more. Why cinema is often credited with more vitality than literature in the twentieth century is that the basic principles, magnetism and fascination, are not attended to by Modernist literature to right way. If Yeats emerges, without a sense of the hesitant or the tentative, as the most advanced (whole, entire) Modernist voice, it is because his willingness to include action in poetry, leading to a perceptive response (magnetized, fascinated, led in productive circles), is more convincing in the twenty-first century than what has already been posited. The stasis of Eliot, as the most likely alternative, is signifying.
© Adam Fieled 2025
