26 August 2024 by Jian Zhi Qiu
Quote from Dear Su Yen pp. 96-98
Dear Su Yen
While I was reading your story of the unseen friend I remembered that you once said you had read a Chinese translation of an English poem by Yeats, When You are Old, and you would like to know more about it. Here is the original version. Again, we can call it a lyric poem because the poet is expressing his deep personal feelings.
Yeats knew he could not offer wealth or social position or conventional love to the woman whom he loved, Maude Gomme, and all he could give were what he called his "words'; that is, his poems. But these were not enough. Here he imagines that when she is an old lady dozing by the fireside she might look at his book and feel sorry that she sent his love away lonely, 'to pace [that is, to walk upon the mountains,' and, 'hide its face,' among the starry night.
He is really saying, 'Well, you'll be sorry when I'm gone!'; but he says it much more beautifully.
He says that other men loved her because of her outward beauty, but he loved her for herself, for 'her pilgrim soul'. Soul can be a difficult concept for Chinese because it seems to be confused with the idea of ghosts. Christians believe the soul is the intangible part of us which, when our physical body dies, goes to be with God, or perhaps with the Devil, depending on how we have lived our lives. Chinese may interpret 'soul' as a dead person's spirit which they see as a scary thing, but for us it is not scary these days. We used to think there were supernatural things such as evil spirits or ghosts in the world, but most modern people don't believe in them anymore. For people who do not believe in God the idea of a soul represents all the intangible qualities of a living person and it suggests deep, serious or sympathetic qualities.
A 'pilgrim' soul means that she will always be seeking for wisdom and enlightenment, as does a Buddhist pilgrim, but not in the same way. Yeats likes this quality.
Many people expect to find answers to life in art, poetry or music. However, another writer, Laurens van der Post, in his book, Yet Being Someone Other, seems to suggest that art does not provide answers; it only shows that we all have the same questions. It is this awareness of the sharing of the search for truth, or sympathy, which he says is the meaning of art. His book is about a Westerner in the 1930s discovering oriental culture, in this case Japanese.
When Maude Gomme became older and her beauty faded Yeats married someone else, when he was fifty-two years old, and seems to have been happy.
When You are Old, by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.
