Words for Music Perhaps: W. B. Yeats, Music, and Meaninglessness

Recovering from fever in February 1928, William Butler Yeats determined to spend his remaining winters where he had sailed the seas and come: Rapallo, a small town on the Ligurian shoreline of Italy, along the coast from Genoa. Writing to Olivia Shakespear about poems eventually entitled Words for Music Perhaps, Yeats had confided, and critics gratefully repeat, that “for music is only a name-no one will sing them.” The poems of Words for Music Perhaps take their place among Yeats’s many expressly musical projects, from his experiments in “Speaking to the Psaltery” to his Noh plays and radio broadcasts. If, in Pater’s conception, “La Giaconda” is beautifully indifferent to the music of history, in Yeats’s poem musical sound moves Cathleen to what is both a religious ecstasy and empathy. In line with Yeats’s bitter comments about print’s “dead words on dead paper,” the poem evokes a pre-literate age in youth and historical time.