W.B. Yeats and the Delegated Voice: The Words upon the Window-Pane and A Full Moon in March

This article uses the concept of phonography, defined as the representation of sonic events, to examine two of W.B. Yeats’s later plays, The Words upon the Window-Pane and A Full Moon in March. Each of these plays allegorizes its own genesis as a phonographic artwork, a sonic inscription designed to transmit the author’s voice. By asking whether text can serve as a conduit, they provide ample evidence of Yeats’s attachment to phonocentric thought. The Words anticipates Roland Barthes’s pronouncements on “the death of the author” by pessimistically deconstructing Yeats’s own phonocentric position. Its centrepiece is a corrupted séance that functions as a travesty of the play itself, enacting a mechanical medium through a spiritualist medium who seems to relay a recording of the voice of Jonathan Swift. While The Words registers a host of anxieties about mediation, social degeneration, and nullified authority, A Full Moon reconciles voice and inscription in the symbol of the singing severed head. This reconciliation is allegorized as a sacred marriage, a scripted ritual that involves an execution by beheading. The head’s song, which can be read as Yeats’s figure for the phonographic inscription, represents the magically immediate transmission of the poet’s voice to a posthumous audience.