Coda: ‘All Things Fall and Are Built Again’

Abstract

Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ responds to a Chinese stone etched with a poem attributed to the Qianlong Emperor. Yeats describes the stone in Keatsian ekphrasis. He demonstrates the influence of Daoism, particularly Zhuangzi, as he interprets the stone philosophically. To Yeats the lapis offers consolation amidst upheaval. The object appears prophetic of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and Yeats finds its optimism pertinent as the Second World War approaches. The stone’s portrayal of sages on mountains prompts Yeats to invoke Daoism to correct the pessimism of Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna. The lapis expresses a universal wisdom that Yeats finds alike in Lucretius and in his Nietzschean reading of tragedy. As in his enthusiasm for ‘half-Asiatic Greece’—exemplified by the sculptor Callimachus—Yeats urges a fusion of classical and Asian values.