To the woman who has me looped.
Brown Penny
I whispered, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
W. B. Yeats
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.”
Immanuel Kant
I’ve loved this poem for a long time. But it was only a few years ago that I think I got it, when I noticed that the first line of the second stanza is probably a reference to a famous line by Immanuel Kant.
The point of Kant’s remark is to bemoan the corrupt state of human beings. Kant gave a new and radical twist to the Ancient and / or Christian notion that we are that we are divided creatures with a rational side and a sensual or passionate side who often find that  latter often overcomes the former. Kant followed Luther, Calvin, Hobbes and Locke in holding that the break between reason and desire was far greater than Plato and Aristotle had ever thought. For Plato and Aristotle reason itself was a kind of desire, and our lower desires could be educated by a good community and ultimately by reason. For Kant, reason must command and control our essentially unruly passions. That was an impossible task and so we were destined to fail, again and again, to live up to the demands of reason. Hobbes, Locke and, most radically, Kant, present a secular version of the Augustinian story of our fallen nature, one that went even farther than Augustine in seeing our desires as always opposed to reason.
Yeats, identifies the source of the crookedness as love and yet at the same time he embraces it. Far from fearing love, he understands that it is a kind of intoxication that leaves us looped, and embraces that as well. He stands with Plato in seeing love, the crooked thing, as central to our nature and as a product of our intermediate state between the natural world and the gods. Plato, read righty, held that eros is, if not crooked, at least problematic not just in that it can lead us down the wrong road but, more fundamentally, because the deep yearning for wholeness, for the good and ultimately for immortality which are love is a yearning for something that no matter how hard we try, will always remain just beyond our grasp.
Love in this broad respect is crooked and always unsatisfied, But love for a woman can and must be pursued, especially if she is “young and fair.” We have no reason to fear such a love, or indeed love as a whole. And because love is so central to our nature, we “cannot begin it to soon.” Nor, I would add, can we ever end it.
But no matter how soon we begin it, or how long we continue it, we will never wholly understand or fathom the depths of love, either the particular love for a woman or the general love and pursuit of wholeness that is our nature. Nor will we attain the wisdom to which love also directs us, no matter whether the wisdom we seek is in the good in soul of the person we love or the more impersonal good in the world around us. When we turn from thinking about the stars to thinking about love we are lead in pursuit of a wisdom we will never quite attain. Kant hoped that, at least pure reason, the reason that stands above our sensual perception of the world, could attain a kind of completion. In the last few lines of the poem Yeats perhaps refers to or echoes Socrates’ turn from studying nature to studying the human soul as well as his identification, in the Symposium, of Eros as the never satisfied source of all human desire, including the desire for wisdom.
Kant pursued knowledge which is pure and complete, ran from love, and abhored the desiring parts of our nature. Yeats, with Plato, grasps the tensions in our soul and yet urges us to embrace the necessarily unfinished love for another, and for wisdom, that is our birthright.
🙂