Ephemera: beginning the work (1)

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