Pamela Colman Smith, The Green Sheaf, and "Dream of the World's End"

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was the creator, editor, and publisher of The Green Sheaf. A magazine of poetry and art, it came out for a year between 1903 and 1904. There were to be thirteen issues in a year, and each issue cost 13 pence, while a subscription cost 13 shillings, and the thirteenth number declared that it was the last. It included contributions from Cecil French, John Todhunter, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, A.E., John Masefield, W. T. Horton, J. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats, and herself. It was printed on hand-made paper, with hand-coloured illustrations, and has something in common with the hand-printed books of the Susan Mary and Elizabeth Yeats's Cuala Press (they are better known to readers of Yeats as Lily and Lolly).

Cecil French, "The Fountain of Faithful Lovers", The Green Sheaf, no. 4

 

Dreams featured heavily in all numbers of the magazine, but never more so than in the second issue, with "A Prayer to the Lords of Dream" by French, an untitled dream by Colman Smith, "Dream of the World's End" by Yeats,  "A Dream on Inishmaan" by Synge, and "Jan A Dreams" by Masefield.

For some reason, Yeats's "Dream of the World's End" is not collected in any of the volumes of "Uncollected" prose, so tends to be little known. Fortunately the availability of the whole series of The Green Sheaf at archive.org means that it is now readily accessible, though you have to know to go and look.

W. B. Yeats, "Dream of the World's End", The Green Sheaf, no. 2.

DREAM OF THE WORLD’S END

I have a way of giving myself long meaning dreams, by meditating on a symbol when I go to sleep. Sometimes I use traditional symbols, and sometimes I meditate upon some image which is only a symbol to myself. A while ago I came to think of apple-blossom as an image of the East and breaking day, and one night it brought me, not as I expected a charming dream full of the mythology of sun-rise, but this grotesque dream about the breaking of an eternal day.
     I was going through a great city, it had some likeness to Paris about Auteuil. It was night, but I saw a wild windy light in the sky, and knew that dawn was coming in the middle of the night, and that it was the Last Day. People were passing in a hurry, and going away from the light. I was in a brake with other people, and presently the horses ran away. They ran towards the light. We passed a workman who was making a wall in his best clothes, and I knew that he was doing this because he thought the Judge would look at him with more favourable eyes if he were found busy. Then we saw two or three workmen with white faces watching the sky by their unfinished work. Everybody now was a workman, for it seemed to be a workman’s quarter, and there were not many people running past us. Then I saw young workmen eating their breakfast at a long table in a yard. They were eating raw bacon. I understood somehow that they had thought “we may as well eat our breakfast even though this is the Last Day”; but, that when they began to cook it, they had thought, “it is not worth while to trouble about cooking it.” All they needed was food, that they might live through the Last Day calmly.
     After that, and now we seemed to have left the brake, though I did not remember our leaving it, we came to a bridge over a wide river, and the sky was very wild and bright, though I could not see any sun. All in a moment I saw a number of parachutes descending, and a man in a seedy black frock-coat came out of one of them, and began distributing circulars. At the head of them was the name of a seller of patent medicines, and we all understood the moment we saw the name, that he was one of the most wicked of men, for he had put up great posters that had spoiled many beautiful views. Each circular had printed upon it a curse against this man, and a statement that a curse given at the end of the world must of necessity weigh heavily with the Eternal Judge. These curses called for the damnation of the patent medicine seller, and you were asked to sign them at the bottom, undertaking at the same time to pay the sum of one pound to the medicine seller if the end of the world had not really come. I remember that the circular spoke of this “solemn occasion,” but I do not recollect any other of the exact words. I awoke, and was for some time in great terror, for it seemed to me that an armed thief was hidden somewhere in the darkness of my room. Was this some echo of what the Bible has said about “one who shall come as a thief in the night?”

W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats, "The Lake at Coole", The Green Sheaf, no. 4.

This is evidently based on a real dream, and Yeats notes his use of plants to evoke dreams in Per Amica Silentia Lunae:

I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all moments of my life the happiest and the wisest. (CW5 17–18; Myth 345)

His plant symbolism was probably related to elements of the Celtic Mysteries that he was working on at this time—in 1898 Maud Gonne had a vision "to get the trees of the cardinal points", of which the only one Yeats remembered certainly was "an apple bough in the East" ("Visions of Old Irish mythology" [NLI 36,261/1], see Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult 121 and 160n29). Other trees mentioned are oak, hazel, quicken (rowan), and hawthorn, foreshadowing Robert Graves's use of the tree alphabet in The White Goddess. Yeats, however, also associated apple-blossom and its scent with Maud Gonne, so it is perhaps understandable that the symbol had unpredictable results and evoked a city where Yeats had visited her often.

A.E. (George Russell), "A Million Years Hence", The Green Sheaf, no. 2.

A.E. (George Russell) had an engraving in the same issue that was enigmatic and apocalyptic in a rather different way, perhaps more reminiscent of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (or even Planet of the Apes). Human(oid?) figures surround a huge skull, with one perched on top of it, entitled "A Million Years Hence". Is the skull human and the figures minuscule? or are the figures the descendants of humans with a giant's skull?

Pamela Colman Smith, "Once, in a dream...", The Green Sheaf, no. 2.

Jaff Seijas: Images for the Emblems of the 28 Phases

The artist Jaff Seijas recently contacted me, drawing my attention to a group of paintings he has created for the 28 phase emblems that the Yeatses drew up from the automatic script. There is plenty more to be said about these, and I hope to get round to it, but want to share the paintings on their own first. I've added some of the pictures to the webpage where I touch on the emblems—Phase Symbols—and am posting a different selection here, with Jaff Seijas's kind permission. Go to his website at jaffseijas.com to see the full set of images. I know from writing about the phases and preparing web materials that going through all twenty-eight of them can sometimes become a little tiring, and realize that some of the images are probably less inspiring than others, so I can only add thanks that he has taken pains to illustrate the full set. Most of the emblems have relatively brief summaries, but a few have fuller descriptions, either  in the card index (S66), or in a workbook that sadly does not seem to be published (a short section on Phase 1 is quoted in George Mills Harper's The Making of Yeats's "A Vision" and passages are supplied to fill in gaps in other manuscripts).

Phase 3: "Eagle over sea with one foot caught on back of sea lion one foot caught by Dolphin. Eagle drags both"

Phase 13: "Man hanging over pond head down just touching water. Reflection on surface of pool at which he looks but another image going down. Surface image primary that in depth anti. Stagnant water & weeds. A third image from back of head which is the subconscious"

Phase 17: "Crystal arrow going through golden crescent. arrow cut so as to reflect all colours. Colours in crystal show how much energy has passed into anti"

Phase 27: "more or less [? easter] figure. in left hand holds a mans soul in a simulacrum of man temptation to put it in. He stands on globe."

Phase 15: "Beautiful Man in pool holds stone of wrath & arrow of wisdom. arrow reaches crescent."

Phase 1: "naked man at North with outstretched hands tied to branch of tree swinging. Could not get rid of it--'an obsessing figure' not luminous like the tree images. Snake coiled once round feet & tail touching ground. Head looking to place of Initiate. a good deal to left at N a figure weeping into a cup & opposite on opposite side of figure a boar drinking from cup. feet on cup pulling it towards him. on other side towards E a figure whirling a leather thong with stone at end, in a fury. He stands on back of eagle. someway past boar. think on right hand side east but not sure."

For Phase 1 itself, this last image would probably be rather simpler, since, as Harper notes, "this confusing exposition combines imagery from several Phases". The paragraph is quoted without context in The Making of Yeats's "A Vision" and is not included in Yeats's "Vision" Papers, so it is difficult to be sure exactly what Yeats was doing, but it appears to be an attempt to evoke a vision of Phase 1 within the context of the Wheel.
• The figure of Phase 1 is that of the man hanging from the tree, probably with the snake included. Yeats notes that the evocation is not luminous as true visions tend to be, and not easy to move  or develop from but obsessive.
• Phase 1 is located at cardinal North, and the man looks towards "the Initiate": this term came into the script very early and is ambiguous, as it may refer to the last phases, (especially Saint and Fool), or go beyond cycles to the centre of the Wheel (linked to avatars and Christ).
• It is difficult to see how the "figure weeping into a cup" can be both at N and a good deal to left of a figure at North. It could well be a misreading of the rather N-like glyph for Capricorn (♑), which would make sense, since this is the marker for "Loins" placed in the fourth quarter, usually shown between Phases 25 and 26. (This ties in with the description of Phase 18 on card S66, where it is noted that the "Legs go to ♈" i.e. Aries, the zodiac sign marked on the Wheel between Phases 18 and 19.)
• The elements of the weeping woman with the cup and the boar with cup both seem to come from Phase 24, even though they are referred to as being opposite one another.
• Whether these are left or right seems moot, and it is probably best not to place too much emphasis on this aspect.
• East is identified in the normal arrangement with Phase 22 and the other figure with the whirling leather thong appears to be the emblem associated with Phase 22.

•The "back of an eagle" does not tie in exactly with any symbol, though eagles figure in the emblems for Phases 3 and 9, and a "bird of prey" in Phase 8. The figure of Phase 22 may therefore be standing on an "opposite" figure.

Without more context, it is difficult to tease out exactly what the vision communicates. As it stands, it seems like a rather cluttered hybrid of Odin sacrificing himself on the World-tree and Alice in Wonderland. Yet the imagery is clearly part of Yeats's phantasmagoria, with descriptions of these images recurring in the description of Speculum Angelorum et Hominum and the woman with the cup figuring in Yeats's own bookplate.

Illustrating A Vision 

When we were thinking about a cover image for the book of essays Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts, the editors were casting around for a suitable picture that would not incur too much copyright payment. Though the obvious image would be Dulac's illustration of the Great Wheel, it has been used quite a few times already and probably appeals more to the symbolically minded—one of the editors found that type of image off-putting, though I recognize that I myself am a sucker for a mandala! However, there is separate problem here, that Dulac's estate, handled through a publishing company, has been slow to process requests for other writers, and of course we had left the matter slightly late... There is also the Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) plate of hawk, unicorn, fountain and moon that was used for the pastedown on the inside boards of Macmillan editions during the 1920s.

In part this appeals to my sense of the importance to Yeats of the unicorn for the symbolism of A Vision—as I noted in an earlier post, he had originally placed a unicorn at the centre of the Great Wheel.

Publishers regard the most commercial option as a portrait of W. B. Yeats himself, as a more instant form of "branding" and this has plenty of virtues, though we would have wanted a picture of both George and W. B. at the very least. In the end, there were not so many of these that appealed, and we started looking at the work of other artists who had worked with Yeats.

One was W. T. Horton (1864-1919), whose work is out of copyright, in particular his Book of Images, for which Yeats wrote the introduction, and The Way of the Soul, which echoes the fictional title of Kusta ben Luka's work, The Way of the Soul between the Sun and the Moon. A few seemed quite possible, though a little stretched perhaps.

The moon presiding over a split landscape—primary and antithetical?—seemed possible, as did the rocky path to the moon, both from The Way of the Soul, but I also have a certain reluctance to emphasize the moon's place in the system more than it already is. It is such a potent symbol that it slightly overwhelms the concepts it represents, as much for Yeats as for us readers.

Images with sun-moon imagery are visually very appealing, but they also tend to run the risk of feminizing the moon—something that Yeats certainly does in his poetry, but actually goes against to some degree in the system. (Though the Graeco-Roman imagery that dominates Western understanding makes sun masculine and moon feminine, and tends to be viewed as "natural," Germanic, Middle-Eastern, Japanese and other mythologies have a male moon and female sun, and in A Vision the antithetical lunar Tincture, is the one associated more with the masculine.)

John Trinick's designs for A. E. Waite's meditation Tarot, at the British Museum

(I realize that I am taking advantage of a kind of apophasis—including all these images by saying that I couldn't include them...). We considered other artists who had collaborated with Yeats or been associated with him such as Althea Gyles (1868-1949) whose work features in the excellent section on Crafting the Book in the National Library of Ireland's online exhibition on Yeats (and there is also a Japanese gallery featuring her work). Here, there did not seem to be an eminently suitable image, and the situation with her estate was unclear.

To get to this section of the National Library of Ireland's online exhibition,
you need to get to the appropriate part of the exhibition "floor":
probably the simplest way is by Searching on "Crafting the Book,"
then going to "view": this display is on the left-hand side.

This led to Thomas Sturge Moore (1870-1944) who created book covers, book plates and other designs for the Yeatses. His work is in copyright, but with clear family holders, and we hoped that it would not be too expensive. In this case, we ended up favouring the plate created for George Yeats, which is directly inspired by elements associated with A Vision as well as a range of other Golden Dawn associations. In many ways the slightly mandala-ish rose on the cover of Per Amica Silentia Lunae might have been the most appropriate, but it has been used by the Yeats Annual, so might have led to some confusion.

Both of the Yeatses' book plates are rather gnomic, and the big question is whether either of them would attract a browsing reader, or please a reader who had a copy of the book. Yeats's book plate is particularly cryptic, including heraldic elements (the goat's head and the gates=Yeats) as well as personal emblems such as the candle in the waves.

George's is more striking and memorable. Though it is not immediately connected with A Vision, it is relevant to anyone who is interested: I've already commented to some extent on the unicorn and I shall go into the symbolism more in the next post.

Sturge Moore's estate, two grand-daughters, was very generous in giving us permission to use the images for a small sum, and we are all very pleased with the outcome. That said, someone involved in publishing criticized it to me as confusing, for including the name of George Yeats on the cover, and as unlikely to attract any readers. I, for one, am delighted to have George's name on the cover, albeit in an odd way, and do not really think that this is the type of book someone is going to stumble upon--if you come upon it, you are probably looking for it or at least have an interest in A Vision and the Yeatses. But I may be wrong, or at least thinking rather uncommercially: I'd love to hear any comments one way or the other, for future reference, and of course I'd be delighted to hear any further suggestions that anyone might have, either for a later edition of this book, or more likely for the next one on A Vision.

Dulac and the Great Wheel

 

The Great Wheel of A Vision A, printed on brown paper,
tipped into the book on [p. xiv].

The Great Wheel that appears opposite p. xv in A Vision A is one of the enduring images that most readers retain of A Vision, an archaic woodcut that hints at symbolic meanings, some of which are never quite explored in the book itself. Yeats gave Edmund Dulac both guidance and latitude in his instructions for the design, trusting him as a personal friend, who shared many of his own esoteric interests, particularly astrology. He had already asked Dulac to make a picture of Giraldus, his putative author of Speculum Angelorum et Hominum in Cracow,  and in thanking Dulac for the portrait he outlined his requirements for a diagram, supposedly from this Speculum, in October 1923:

My dear Dulac, 

      The portrait of Gyraldus is admirable. I enclose the sketch for the diagram. The pencilled words will have to be in Latin & I will get the Latin I hope tomorrow. The man I count on for it was out yesterday. You can use any symbolism you like for the elements—nymphs, salamanders, air spirits, or Roman gods or more natural objects.…

      The round objects in the enclosed diagram are of course the lunar phases 1. 8. 15. 22 making new moon, half moon, full moon & half moon respectively. They will be nasty things to draw but your Kracow artist would not have drawn them very carefully. I can give the Speculum what date you please.…

(October 14, [1923];  cf. Letters 699–700)

I do not think that the sketch is extant, but its general outline is probably fairly close to the final picture, except in a few details. There are five elements to the final design: (1) the elemental attributions in the corners, (2) the circle of the moon's phases, (3) the zodiacal symbols, (4) the words designating the key phases, and (5) the central motifs.

 - (1) Yeats's sketch must have indicated the placing of the elements, whether by word or symbol and, though he may have hoped for something a little more exuberant and elaborate, Dulac uses just the simple symbols for the four elements, placed on furled banners.

 The kind of picture Yeats was originally thinking of?

Note the elemental corners, which have the same arrangement as that of A Vision. These surround a ring depicting sun and moon formed by two intersecting circles, one dark and one light.
Frontispiece of Musaeum Hermeticum (Frankfurt, 1625).

- (2) The "round objects" might not have been entirely self-explanatory, except that Dulac had no doubt been told about the 28 phases of the moon—everybody else seems to have been—so Yeats could therefore comment that they were "of course the lunar phases 1. 8. 15. 22" (I am using John Kelly's transcription, rather than Wade's; the other letters are drawn from Diana Hobby's unpublished thesis, "William Butler Yeats and Edmund Dulac, a Correspondence: 1916–1938" [Rice University, 1981]).

- (3) The zodiac signs are not mentioned but were almost certainly in the diagram as they were in most iterations of the schema in the notes and drafts, though Yeats was still unclear about their significance and later had doubts about their placing.

 The kind of picture Yeats was originally thinking of?
Classical figures symbolize the elements on either side of the title (clockwise from upper left: Jupiter - Air; Prometheus – Fire; River god [?Nile] – Water; [?]Autumnus – Earth). 
Above, Phoenix and Minerva, on the left, and Pelican and Mercury, on the right,  flank Apollo with the Nine Muses. Below, the sun, with a lion (Leo), and the moon, with a crayfish (Cancer), flank an emblem of Nature, holding the light of perfection, followed by short-sighted researchers with lanterns.
Engraved title page of Musaeum Hermeticum revised (Frankfurt, 1678), by Matthäus Merian.

- (4) The "pencilled words" must have been the English—Beauty (15), Wisdom (1), Temptation (8) and, probably, Power (22)—and a little over a week later Yeats sent on the Latin that he had been given by Louis C. Purser, a distinguished classicist at Trinity College, Dublin: "put Pulchritudo at 15, Sapientia at 1, Tentatio at 8 and Dominatio (or Potestas) at 22. I enclose Purser's letter as his spelling may correct mine" (October 23, [1923]). There are two points of variance from the words Yeats gives, the minor one of "Temptatio" and the major one of "Violentia" rather than "Dominatio". The first may reflect Purser's spelling or Dulac's preference to avoid a spelling that looked more like his native French. "Violentia" is stranger and less readily explicable, but there was plenty of time for Yeats to modify his ideas, since it was over a year and a half before Dulac sent the design to him (see below).

The kind of picture Yeats was originally thinking of?
The four elements are symbolized by animals and the four humours by goddesses: (clockwise from top left) Diana/Artemis – Phlegm, corresponding to Water – Dolphin; Venus/Aphrodite – Blood corresponding to Air – Chameleon; Minerva/Athene – Yellow Bile corresponding to Fire – Salamander; [?]Ceres/Demeter – Black Bile corresponding to Earth – Mole. Septem Planetae, engraved title page by Gerard de Jode (after Maarten de Vos), 1581.

- (5) The emblems at the centre of the diagram seem to have been Dulac's own idea. Yeats had sent him a draft of the introductory material when he requested the portrait of Giraldus—"I send you my preface, in the rough, or rather Owen Aherne's. It will give you all the facts as I see them" (July 26, [1923]). This typescript spoke of a design where "the zodiacal signs were arranged in a circle with a unicorn in the center, while in the corners of the diagram <cancelled words> Biblical symbols", which Dulac seems to have realized only rather late in the day:

Herewith the Diagram. When it was done I remembered in that your description of it you mention that the square in the center is occupied by a design of a unicorn. Thence the accompanying design of the Animal in question. If it is not absolutely necessary that the Diagram should incorporate it leave it as it is, but if its presence in the Diagram is of vital importance, the engraver can make the two blocks and fit that of the Unicorn in its proper place for the purposes of printing. Otherwise it may be used as a tail piece somewhere else in the book. (April 30, 1925; LTWBY2 462)

The animal in question did indeed appear as a tail piece to the poem, "The Phases of the Moon", pasted in at the end.

If the designs were, however, Dulac's idea, Yeats was happy to incorporate them—"The designs are exactly right. 'The Wheel' could take in the whole British Museum" (May 5, [1925]). He changed the introduction so that the "lunar phases and zodiacal signs were mixed with various unintelligible symbols—an apple, an acorn, a cup" (AVA xviii), and later noted that "The East, in my symbolism … is always human power" adding as explanation that "In the decorative diagram from the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum … the East is marked by a sceptre" (AVB 257–58).  

As this indicates, the emblems do logically express the words Yeats had given, at least to some extent: Beauty – a flower, plausibly; Wisdom – a fruit, possibly; Temptation – a cup, possibly too; Power – a sceptre, certainly. But they also show kinship with traditional playing card suits. Though the English-speaking world tends to use the suits of French origin—spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs—the rest of Europe draws on similar but different symbols.

Swiss suits; three variants of German suits; three variants of North Italian suits
from "Andy's Playing Cards", with thanks to Andrea Pollett.

Dulac's flower has definite similarities with the Swiss one, while the fruit seems to have the idea of the acorn mixed with the shape of the bell from Swiss and German iconography and may explain why Yeats refers to an acorn AND and an apple. The cup and sceptre are more clearly linked with the traditional Italian suits—denari, coppe, spade, bastoni—emblems which are also retained in the Tarot cards. Certainly this was in keeping with Yeats's own thought and the early drafts of the Arabian fictions outlined in A Vision A, indicate that "the four suits of the Tarot, the King, the Queen, the Knight & the Knaves should really be King, Queen, Prince & Princes, & were derived through the Saracens from the dance, & … these cards have in turn given birth to our common court cards" (YVP4 153).

In the end, however, what kind of picture was Yeats originally thinking of? He was willing to shift the date from the late sixteenth century to earlier, but he does seem to have conceived of a later, slightly more refined style than he was finally given by Dulac, although the style was clear and agreed on once he had the portrait of Giraldus. Of the illustrations above, one is before the date of 1594 that he gave and the other is other is after it, but both are rather more elaborate than the style that Dulac created. At that date, the woodblock style is more generally used for illustrations inserted into the text, while the finer lines and greater detail of engraving are used for full-page illustrations. It seems possible that Yeats had originally conceived of a more clearly sixteenth-century look, and also that the design would centre on a unicorn—symbol of the Daimon, or of the soul. Might he have been thinking of something more like this?