W.B.Yeats, surely one of the greatest poets of all time who wrote in the English language, offers me so much artistic, literary, and dare I say it, spiritual sustenance, that my volumes of his poems are always well thumbed. Therefore, let me offer the reader another of my favourites from his pen, here. It is called, aptly enough, "The Long-Legged Fly." There is something at once beautiful and somewhat gauche about the title as "long-legged" applied to any species suggests a certain ungainliness and a definite awkwardness in the first place. And yet the poem suggests a certain transcendent grace that builds its myth upon lowly nature; a certain extraordinary beauty that transcends the ordinary quotidian experience of life.
Long-Legged Fly
That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand upon his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts child,
That nobody looks:
Her feet practise a tinker shuffle,
Picked up upon a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on the scaffolding resides
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
Commentary
Something as beautiful as this poem simple defies commentary, and in so doing I am, in a sense being somewhat sacrilegious in attempting, as it were, to nail down the "sacred" experience of these well-crafted lines in more mundane words. Despite that caveat, I shall try to express here, at least what this poem means to me, one solitary reader. I love the scientific, very unpoetical term, a word, naturally enough, avoided by Yeats, namely "dolichopodidae" that describes that most cosmopolitan of fly families, namely that of the "two-legged flies." Apparently there are about 7,000 species of these flies at a conservative count.
When I read a poem I don't necessarily go in search for an exact meaning, for such an intention, to my mind, is sacrilegious. In other words, I search for connotations more than denotations. I have learnt to let a poem suggest meanings, obviously not outlandish and impossible ones, but rather more possible ones and as many of them as is reasonable. In a sense, obviously, we will never know exactly what was in the poet's mind when he wrote the poem, but we can make an educated guess anyway.
The refrain which marks the ending of each stanza is an amazingly powerful chorus that suggests the power of human reflection, awareness, concentration, meditation or contemplation from whose seeds all of civilization emerged. It suggests that through this self-reflective power civilization emerges and is greater than the individual parts that go to make it up. Civilization and all its cultures transcend the individual.
Western monasticism and Eastern practices of Buddhism have always rated silence highly because silence is, as it were, the seedbed of creativity and wisdom. Silence is also the seedbed of genius. In the first stanza we meet the great Julius Caesar sitting in his tent looking into the distance, obviously pondering, with his eyes "fixed upon nothing." In silence, he is obviously contemplating what he and his troops have as a goal. The Romans were great conquerors, great men of action and one of the great builders of Western civilization. Caesar needs to enter the realm of silence to garner inspiration for his conquests, to tap into his vision of future possibilities:
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
In the second stanza we encounter the great Helen of Troy. Obviously, her beauty is directly conjured up in our minds by the lines:
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
These lines remind us of the lines from Christopher Marlowe's play, Doctor Faustus, especially these lines put in Faustus's mouth by the playwright:
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium -
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Helen is the very essence of beauty, a beauty so natural and so rhythmic that she captures its quintessence in the gorgeous peasant girl that dances so lithely in the streets. Through her, Yeats seems to be arguing that all beauty is made possible as she is its symbol or emblem in Greek civilization. The Greeks, obviously, with the Romans were the two great builders of Western civilization. In this sense, we may say that the first stanza is essentially about politics/military affairs, which lie at the physical foundations of civilization, while the second stanza is about aesthetics and the innocence of pure alluring beauty which is also another source of the creative spark that set civilization alight. One could also maintain that this second stanza highlights or underscores the power of creativity in the realm of mythology.
In the last stanza, Yeats contemplates the spark of genius that inspired one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance period, one Michel Angelo, whom he calls Michael Angelo here in this poem. It is, as it were, the "Arts" stanza as it describes the painting of the Sistine Chapel. To put it rather bluntly the poet's wish "That girls at puberty may find the first Adam in their thoughts" suggests that the power of Michel Angelo's depiction of the naked male form may entice them to have children.
Once again, genius thrives in silence and peace:
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Each of the three characters, one in each stanza, viz., Julius Caesar, Helen of Troy and Michel Angelo achieve transcendence, or an elevation to a higher plane, or a going beyond this physical world just as the long-legged fly defies gravity as it walks across the water. Let us note here that the imagery in the last two lines, which function like a chorus from a song, is simply beautiful and so gently put because the long-legged fly can move across the surface of the water effortlessly, without disturbing it in the same way, as it were, that the genius of Caesar, Helen or Michel Angelo can move creatively from one idea to the next.
Michel Angelo, like Helen and Caesar, is inspired by a vision beyond him, some transcendent pull, as it were. Aristotle called such a pull, a "telos."*
*A telos (from the Greek τέλος for "end", "purpose", or "goal") is an end or purpose, in a fairly constrained sense used by philosophers such as Aristotle. It is the root of the term "teleology," roughly the study of purposiveness, or the study of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. See WIKI here.
