Yeats The Stare’s Nest by My Window

Yeats’ poems lend themselves so accurately to an analysis that is grounded in speech acts theory. His
language is known for being vigorous and for relying so much on symbolism, presupposition and
implicature. The topics he handles, whether they are religious, political or philosophical, are hardly purely
subjective or merely impressionistic; they are more often than not highly intersubjective and value-laden.
Moreover, the language he uses to poeticize such topics always invites the reader to take part in the
speaker’s experience, to share his emotions and to take some kind of action. In this context of its own
relevance, a linguistic approach that is grounded in pragmatic principles will certainly do justice to Yeats’
poem The Stare’s Nest by My Window.
A linguistic analysis of this poem requires that we consider it as a speech act in the full sense of the
word, a speech act that relies for its global effect on a number of performative language items that are
meant to fulfill well-determined functions in a coherent poetic expression. This analysis also requires that
we examine the speaker’s attitude towards what he says and towards his addressee.
No one who reads Yeats’ poem may fail to observe the highly performative refrain which occurs at
the end of each stanza: [honey-bees] ‘Come build in the empty house of the stare’. The use of deontic
modality in this refrain plays a significant role in building the major effect intended to be achieved on the
reader. In other words, it plays a fundamental role in conferring on the poem the quality of a speech act
that is aimed at urging man to take action to put an end to the ‘comedy’ of war. The bees bear the
symbolism of hard work, production, fertility, construction and collective action, and it is precisely this
symbolic manipulation that constitutes the generic message the poet wants to deliver to his reader(s).
Taken as a whole and bearing in mind the political meanings it contains, namely the critique of war
and its obliteration of the human house, the poem contrasts the contingencies of war in the history of
mankind with the presupposed positive meanings associated with the natural symbolism of bees’ work.
The poem also involves different types of discourse that are expressed through different modalities and
linguistic maneuvers. There is a reflective discourse: the speaker reflects on himself and on the world he
is describing:

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

The use of three different cohesive devices ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘yet’ shows the degree of confusion the poet
experiences. Nothing is really definite: are the conditions of the war phenomenon added to one another?
Are they equal in effect? Are they opposed? There does not seem to be any conclusive answers to these
questions, for the war enterprise is as absurd and unjustified as any reason one might incredulously find
for it. We also notice the poet’s use of interactive discourse: the speaker merges personal deixis so as to
get the reader to share his feelings and attitudes. This can simply be seen through the progression from
‘My wall is loosening’ in line four to ‘We are closed’ on ‘Our uncertainties’ in lines six and seven. Added
to all these discursive varieties, there is the use of referential discourse in which case the poet brings
cultural and historical elements to the poetic expression. This type of discourse is informed by temporal
deixis like ‘some fourteen days of civil war’ and ‘last night’ as well as demonstratives like ‘that dead
young man’ added to definite descriptions like ‘the key’, ‘the fare’ and ‘the heart’.
Being aware of the impact of language on the addressee, the speaker adopts a progressive mode in
depicting the objective space he is trying to acquaint the reader with. He begins by describing the seminal
activity of the bees while they ‘build in the crevices of loosening masonry’ and ends up by describing
what is going on in the human mind. Although he does not specify the time of the bee’s activity, we
understand through the use of the simple present ‘build’ and the present continuous in line four that the
action is taking place now and it is still in progress. It is worth mentioning in this connection that the use
of the directive ‘Come build in the empty house of the stare’ is meant to counterbalance the loosening of
the human building and the void which is now overwhelming it. Gradually, as we hinted at earlier, the
description of the objective space is mixed with the subjective space of the speaker’s mind and heart. The
movement from outside to inside is articulated through the introduction of the possessive adjective ‘my’
in ‘my walls’ and through the use of the possessive ‘our’ in ‘our uncertainties’ which lends the experience
an intersubjective dimension.
But intersubjectivity as such is a highly presupposed stance. The speaker brings the other into his
own space assuming that he/she shares with him that uncertainty about what is taking place. Here, we
should not fail to note that the performativeness of the words is increased by their mutual reinforcement.
The indefinite ‘somewhere’ which creates a superb effect of perplexity, as it were, and ambiguity comes
to reinforce the already aporetic ‘uncertainties’ expressed.
As we reach the third stanza, we become more and more aware of the poet’s propensity towards using
presupposition and implicature. What is presupposed is the reader’s acquaintance with war conditions and
war makers. This is made clear through the poet’s reliance on definite description and through his
introduction of the third person plural deictic ‘they’ without having referred to its agent previously as he
presupposes that the reader knows the agent. What is implied, however, is that there is a war, that there is
killing, that the killing is brutal, that the reader knows about the dead man and that the poet is deeply
touched by that killing:

They trundled down the road

This utterance is so emphatic and ostensive indeed that it calls for sympathy on the part of the reader who,
by the end of the poem, is united completely with the poetic personae and is entirely riveted within the
first person plural deictic:

we are fed
our enmities
our love

In fact, the poet’s reflection on himself which is mostly conveyed through the words ‘uncertainties’ and
‘fantasies’ is inseparable from the interactive discourse he maintains throughout the whole poem; and
although the reader’s voice is hardly verbalized, his presence is rather strongly felt through the powerful
effect of presupposition. The reader is visibly involved: he is inculpated in the fantasies, implicated in the
uncertainties and caught up in the brutality of the heart ‘the fare’ has produced. The reader is supposed to
know everything about the fact that there is a war and about the absurdities of killing (also the
inexplicability of the phenomenon) and is ultimately supposed to share with the poet his appeal to the
bees to restore order to the house of man, to build what has been destroyed and to populate the ‘empty’
dwelling with meaning and significance.
Moreover, the use of constative statements ‘the bees build in the crevices’ and factives (through
narration) in ‘last night they trundled down the road’ is meant to have a perlocutionary effect on the
reader by force of contrast. To put it more simply, the reader’s mind is manipulated in such a way as to
compare and contrast the action of the bees to the action of man (destructive), so that he/she will take a
positive stance and join the poet’s voice in protesting against war and war makers.
Finally, the violation of felicity conditions (talking about the uncertainty and the indefiniteness of
events and at the same time using factives and mentioning the exact number of days ‘fourteen days of
civil war’ as well as referring to the killed soldier’) is a deliberate act of the poet. It should accordingly
be understood as a confirmation of the absurd and paradoxical nature of war and as a revelation of Yeats’
voice of protest, a voice that combines sense and emotion with reason and political determination. This is,
in short, a poetry of revolt in which the order of the actual becomes a reminder of the predicament of
man, an aide memoire testifying to the self-destructing drives inherent in the human psyche. This
expression of revolt, as stated earlier, is carried out through the combination of different language uses. It
is therefore necessary for the reader to treat the poem’s speech acts not as independent and self-sufficient
entities, but rather as integral parts of a global act of inquiry, assertion and protest.

The Capital by Auden

The Capital

Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting

Waiting expensively for miracles to happen
O little restaurant where the lovers eat each other
Café where exiles have established a malicious village

You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished

The strictness of winter and the spring’s compulsion
Far from your lights the outraged punitive father
The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent

Yet with orchestras and glances, o , you betray us

To belief in our infinite powers; and the innocent
Unobservant offender falls in a moment
Victim to the heart’s invisible furies

In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling;

Factories where lives are made for a temporary use
Like collars or chairs, rooms were the lonely are battered
Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes

But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far

Into the dark countryside the enormous the frozen
Were hinting at the forbidden like a wicked uncle
Night after night to the farmer’s children you beckon.1

December 1938
Commentary

Auden’s poetry is known for its powerful language and for the ability of its words to do things, that is, to
have a strong impact on the reader’s mind and emotions. Just as obviously, Auden believes in the
inseparability of language and the socio-historical reality it articulates. For him, and for a number of his
contemporaries like Yeats and E. Thomas, speech is tightly correlated with context and social as well as
ideological conditions. Besides, the expressive and aesthetic effects of a poem can only be fully achieved
when sufficient interaction obtains between the poet and the reader on the basis of shared knowledge of
the circumstances we mentioned above.
In the following commentary, we shall adopt a linguistic approach that is inspired from Roger
Fowler’s theory of the context of utterance. We shall focus on the relationship between the context of
culture and the context of reference as they orchestrate and inform the context of utterance. The context
of utterance, as Fowler explains in his book Linguistic Criticism (1986), focuses on the relationship
between the participants in a given linguistic interaction. 2 Assuming that a poem is a speech act in the first
place, our focus will be placed on the relationship between the speaker and the addressee, the attitude of
the speaker towards what he says, the speaker’s use of presupposition and implicature as he

1
. W. H. Auden, Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson, Vintage, 2007.
2
. See Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism. Oxford University Press: Oxford New York, 1986, pp. 110 – 129.
communicates messages to his addressee, as well as the interaction between the context of culture and the
context of reference.
‘The Capital’ is articulated through the first person plural deictic which is expressed through the
object pronoun ‘us’ and the possessive adjective ‘our’. The speaker identifies entirely with the victimized
subjects he depicts through the poem. He is addressing a tyrannical ‘you’ who is explicitly and implicitly
accused of being responsible for victimization. The poem can be considered as a speech act of
condemnation insofar as it uses a language of denunciation and blame addressed to an oppressive and
deceitful ‘you’. It is also a genuine speech act in the sense that it attempts to convince this censured ‘you’
(the class of capitalists) to recognize the evil nature of their coercive practices and ultimately put an end
to the deceptive ‘game’ they maliciously play on their victims (members of the lower class). This speech
act is orchestrated by definite descriptions, presuppositions and implicatures. By using definite
descriptions as in ‘the outraged punitive father’, the speaker presupposes that his addressee (the capitalist)
understands perfectly well what he insinuates. He addresses him as being a real hypocrite whose
appearance is enlightening and charming whereas his truth is harmful and destructive:

You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished

The strictness of winter and the spring’s compulsion;
Far from your lights the outraged punitive father,
The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent.

The contrast the poet is using here is strategic in at least two ways. It not only sets the general mood of
the poem which is the opposition between life and death as well as light and darkness, but also serves to
produce the effect of irony which is implicated throughout, irony being a logical outcome of the poet’s
flouting of the maxim of quality (saying the opposite of what he thinks). The poet uses the words ‘charm’,
‘lights’, ‘illuminate’ and ‘glow’ as he refers to the capitalist while he knows well that the latter lacks all
these qualities. What the poet actually means is that the capitalist ‘betrays’ his victims by his deceptively
charming appearance.
In fact, the contrast between appearance (what is shown) and reality (what is hidden) is also highly
suggestive and informative about the context of utterance (split context as referred to by Fowler). The
addressee, who is supposed to be the capitalist or the factory owner, deceives the dispossessed class by
the illusionary accessories with which he surrounds himself in city life, namely ‘the apparatus’, ‘the
lights’, ‘the glances’, ‘the orchestras’, ‘the illuminated sky’ and the ‘glow’. In the ‘unlighted streets’ of
the city, the capitalist ‘hides away the appalling factories’.
Perhaps the most suggestive vehicle by means of which implicature is conveyed is the device of
simile which becomes the dominant figure in stanzas four and five. The two similes in stanza four (lives
‘like collars and chairs’ and ‘like pebbles’) have their echoes in the last simile (beckoning at ‘the farmer’s
children’ ‘like a wicked uncle’ who is ‘hinting at the forbidden’). These similes are visibly highly
functional and performative. They achieve a certain cumulative effect that ultimately inculcates in the
reader’s imagination the image of the evil deceptiveness of the capitalist. Together with the assertive
force of the simple present ‘you betray us’, ‘you hide away’ and ‘you beckon’, these similes can only
reinforce the poet’s warning to the reader against the deceptive system of capitalism which is instituted on
deceit, exploitation, misuse and abuse of human lives.
The last remark brings us to talk about the context of culture and the context of reference which are
brought to bear on the context of utterance and on the discursive properties of the poem. In fact, the
socio-historical circumstances of Auden’s poem are fairly recognizable. Spatial deixis, for instance, seem
to inform the context of utterance in many ways. While they tell the reader about the position of the
speaker who situates himself outside the camp of capitalists, they indexically refer to the world of the
victimized, the underprivileged and the dispossessed with whom the speaker most emotively sympathizes.
The opposition between spatial indicators ‘quarters of pleasure’ and the ‘dark countryside’ corresponds to
the opposition between the bourgeois class and the working class. It also allows us to learn what is
inhuman and ugly about the abuse of human lives by capitalists. The force of this contrast is also
markedly in tune with the speech act of warning (stanzas four and five) we have commented upon earlier.
It is quite clear that the context of culture, which is highly presupposed in the poem, is a source of
information for a better understanding of the context of utterance. It also justifies, in a way, the poet’s
insistence on revealing to the reader things as they are, not as they are claimed to be. It is also essential to
remember, in this connection, that the context of reference is completely fused with the context of culture
by force of the realistic impulse that marks the poem as a whole. The reference to the ‘little restaurant’,
the ‘café where exiles have established a malicious village’, ‘the dullness of mere obedience’ and ‘the
farmer’s children’ in the victimized countryside is an authentic image of what is beyond the here-and-now
of the context of utterance. It is a replica of reality par excellence.
Finally, we can state with certainty that the reprimanding tone of the poem is largely intensified by the
poet’s use of the powerful simile of the ‘wicked uncle’ to close the lyric, a simile which presupposes,
implies and acts. What the simile presupposes is that the hearer is familiar with the image of the vicious
uncle gazing at his niece with lust and desire. What it implies is that capitalists are commonly driven by
an instinctive desire to abuse other people’s lives. What it does, as a speech act, is that it invites the
capitalist to look at his real image in the mirror and at the same time warns the victimized subjects against
the perils of being readily deceived by the outward appearance of the capitalist as it urges them to oppose
the ideology of exploitation that is eating their lives away.