Porphyry’s Cup: Yeats, Forgetfulness and the Narrative Order

Abstract

Halfway through “The Tower”, Yeats’s masterful voice appears to stumble, tripping over some half-buried thought that prevents him from completing his sentence. He has been remembering Hanrahan, “created” and “thought out” by himself twenty years ago — specifically, that moment in the story “Red Hanrahan” when the ancient ruffian in the barn bewitches the playing cards into a pack of hounds and a hare, which Hanrahan rises as in a trance to follow:

Hanrahan rose in frenzy there

And followed up those baying creatures towards —

O towards I have forgotten what — enough!

I must recall a man … (VP 411–12)

And then Yeats too is off, compelled, like Hanrahan, to follow some new trace, forgetting where he started, wandering as if off the subject onto the new subject that becomes his theme for the rest of the stanza.

I have taken the “honey of generation” from Porphyry’s essay on “The Cave of the Nymphs,” but find no warrant in Porphyry for considering it the “drug” that destroys the “recollection” of prenatal freedom. He blamed a cup of oblivion given in the zodiacal sign of Cancer.

(Note to “Among School Children”, VP 828)